To Imagine a Nuevomexicano Theatre History

Brian Eugenio Herrera

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In 1598 conquistador Don Juan de Oñate, brandishing a hard-won contract from the King of Spain
to settle New Spain’s northernmost frontier, encountered indigenous people along the river now
known as the Rio Grande. What did Oñate and his men do to herald the Spanish crown’s triumphant
arrival? They put on a play.
That spring and summer, Oñate and his men announced Spain’s claims to the place that is now
New Mexico by staging an elaborate enactment of imperial glory, first at a site just south of
present-day El Paso and later at the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo, near present-day Española. The
fragmentary extant evidence has led to some disagreement among historians of Oñate (an enduringly
controversial figure in New Mexico’s colonial history) and of Spain’s formal settlement of the
region, but most agree that Oñate enacted his claim of conquest through performance. In the most
popularly accepted version of the story, widely told since at least the 1930s, Oñate’s men presented
an adaptation of a Spanish auto, a short didactic play popular in sixteenth-century Spain. Most
accounts have Oñate’s men presenting an adaptation of moros y cristianos, a narrative of Christian
warriors vanquishing an army of nonbelievers, in this case as an allegory of sorts for the Spanish
conquest of the indigenous population along the northern Rio Grande. More recently, some
historians have suggested that the auto presented was not moros y cristianos but an original piece,
authored by one of Oñate’s soldiers to enact an explanation of why the king’s men were claiming the
lands along the Rio Grande as part of New Spain. Still other historians dispute the idea that Oñate’s
men enacted either an adapted or original auto at all to instead argue that, rather than staging a play,
Oñate’s army simply exploited the spectacle of their horses, armor, and number to enact an
improvised pageant of strength, dominance, and power. Even so, whether the performance by
Oñate’s men was a restaging of a familiar didactic auto, a newly authored play articulating Spanish
pride of purpose, or simply a spectacular bit of showboating, most historians agree that this 1598
performance by Oñate’s men marks a pivotal turn in the history of European colonization of the
region now known as New Mexico.1
Few scholars of world theatre mark Oñate’s performance on the banks of the Rio Grande as a
comparably significant watershed moment in North American theatre history. New Mexico may well
be the first site that a European drama was enacted in North America; Oñate’s men might have
Copyright 2018. Southern Illinois University Press.

presented the first new play in US theatre history. Theatre appears to have functioned as an inceptive
vocabulary of intercultural exchange at a pivotal juncture in making what was to become the
American West. And such enactments of encounter—the play of performance at the moment when
those who were long here encountered those who just arrived—recur as constitutive gestures in the
making of New Mexico’s distinctive history and culture.
But why has “Oñate’s men perform on the banks of the Rio Grande” not been memorialized
among the watershed performances of world theatre history? Why doesn’t this moment stand
alongside, say, “Thespis steps from the chorus” or “Okuni dances in the riverbed”? Of course,
simply posing such a query prompts an array of ready answers. No “great” tradition of
theatre-making knowingly traces its roots to Oñate’s stagings on the remote, rural reaches of the
Spanish colonial frontier. No playscript survives. No noteworthy actors or playwrights participated.
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 No audience, at least not one of notable size or sophistication, witnessed these acts. No descriptive
reports from those gathered in either the audience or the ensemble entered the historical record. No
cogent consensus, either in scholarship or in legend, has emerged about the importance of Oñate’s
performance, or how these Rio Grande enactments square with the notorious brutality of Oñate’s
other dramatic, colonizing acts. Taken together, these many failures of historiographic significance
seem to ratify the relative obscurity of Oñate’s 1598 performance even as they also seem to confirm
that theatre in New Mexico matters little to either the history of world theatre or to the history of
New Mexico itself.
But what if we were to flip that historiographic script? What if we were to understand this
performance by Oñate’s men as a signal moment not only in New Mexican cultural life but also
within theatre’s global history? To do so would prompt a necessary series of historiographical
adjustments. To even comprehend New Mexico’s four centuries of theatre-making—to imagine a
nuevomexicano theatre history—is also to evince a critical understanding not only of the
long-standing historical significance of theatrical practice within New Mexico’s culture but also of
that history’s distinctive significance to the broader story of world theatre.
Yet few scholars of theatre in the United States or the Americas would point to New Mexico as
either a significant site or source of North American theatre activity. Even though theatre has been
one of the constitutive expressive modalities within New Mexico’s history for more than four
centuries, this uncommonly sustained history has rarely even been noted in the histories of world
theatre catalogued by the field’s most influential textbooks. As but one example, in what was widely
regarded as the first summary history of American theatre history, Theater in America 1700 to 1950,
author Glenn Hughes glosses the theatrical activity in the southwest prior to annexation by 1848’s
Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty as entirely derivative. “Our victories in the Mexican war had freed the
region from the domination of the Spanish, and in 1847 our soldiers took over the various Spanish
posts,” Hughes explains. “Until this time, the only dramatic performances in the region had been the
Roman Catholic Miracle plays presented at religious festivals. The first standard English play to be
presented in the acquired territory was Benjamin Webster’s domestic drama The Golden Farmer,
which was given at Sonoma, California, in an improvised theatre.”2
In this brief passage, with its unapologetically anglophilic aside, Hughes skips past New Mexico
entirely in a familiar press of westward expansion to California. He renders as invisible the complex
religious, political, and cultural syncretism of nuevomexicano theatricality. In so doing, Hughes also
rehearses what would become the dominant narrative boilerplate for American theatre history. His
disregard of community-based theatre, in tandem with his interest in “standard” English plays
presented in a recognizable playhouse, alongside his misrecognition of the Spanish colonial
theatrical legacy as exclusively a churchly one, reflects the defensive tendency among midcentury
scholars of “American” cultural history to use European (and especially English) referents in arguing
for the value of US literary and expressive culture. Likewise, Hughes’s rush to California, with its
concomitant disregard for the broader (and longer) history of Spanish colonial and indigenous
encounters in the Southwest, aligns with a conventional midcentury narrative of US history that
centered upon northeastern cities, with occasional forays to the plantation South, agrarian Midwest,
or the California coast, with little substantive attention to the regions or peoples inhabiting the
Rocky Mountain West and Southwest. Though historians of the last half century have sought
mightily to remedy these habits of omission, the histories of Spanish-speaking and indigenous
peoples of the American Southwest largely remain as addenda within the most widely rehearsed
narratives of both American history and American theatre.
By simply placing New Mexico at the center rather than the periphery of theatre history, an
entirely different narrative becomes clear. New Mexico’s expressive arts traditions—especially those
emerging from the collision of indigenous, European, and American migrations that over four
centuries have together configured the region’s distinctive nuevomexicano character—have long
engaged the very questions of form, function, and community formation that define theatre as a
global arts tradition. The performers, craftspeople, and audiences participating in nuevomexicano
theatre have long played a principal role within New Mexican culture. Theatrical performance and
presentation also provided a critical vocabulary of intercultural encounter and exchange during each

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 cycle of new migration in which those arriving to or passing through engaged with those already
residing in the region. Imagining a nuevomexicano theatre history reveals not only how
performance-making in New Mexico contributed to the long history of world theatre but also to the
long-standing processes of intercultural exchange defining New Mexico’s understanding of itself.3
A nuevomexicano theatre history is not necessarily an accounting of notable contributions to a
great Western tradition, nor is it a litany of watershed moments comprising the genealogy of shared
artistic practice. A nuevomexicano theatre history is not a sequential story, wherein one movement
or breakthrough supplants a previous one. Rather, it stands as an accretive story of a tradition
wherein each generation’s innovations become conventions within the subsequent generation’s
repertoire and in which deeply rooted traditions recur as instigations for ongoing creative
exploration. A nuevomexicano theatre history also narrates how local enactments of global
encounters calibrated the cultural balance of presence and power during periods of demographic
transition. Most emphatically, it reveals how theatrical performance in New Mexico has, for more
than four hundred years, stood as both a part of, yet also emphatically apart from, global theatre
history, ever and always a local elaboration of national and international performance traditions.
I submit the following periodization to track the main cycles of nuevomexicano theatrical
activity: (1) conquering processions; (2) colonial amalgams; (3) territorial destinations; (4) stately
institutions; and (5) translocal networks. Beginning in 1598, each cycle surges for about a century in
loosely overlapping chronology, with the contributions and innovations of each cycle recurring with
varying degrees of intensity in each subsequent one. Together, these cycles configure both the
historical trajectory and also the broad repertoire of presentation practices constituting how theatre
has mattered in New Mexican cultural life. Drawing from scattered references throughout a broad
range of sources, I offer the following broad-stroke summary history of these four hundred or so
years as a historiographic sketch of what a nuevomexicano theatre history might look like.4

Conquering Processions
Throughout the seventeenth century, Spain’s military (along with members of the Franciscan
missionary order) sought to wrangle both political and spiritual control of the region now known as
New Mexico, and practices of pageantry and procession proved central tactics of both occupation
and resistance. Like Oñate’s men on the banks of the Rio Grande, subsequent Spanish performances
of presence deployed didactic modes of dramatic enactment to rehearse hierarchies of power. In
these rituals of encounter, Spanish military and religious leaders prompted indigenous peoples to
adopt supplicant and subservient postures (and to repeat key words and phrases in Spanish) as
symbolic confirmation of their presumed acquiescence to the new Spanish order.
Though soldiers and friars alike celebrated such enactments as triumphs in reports to their
remote governing bodies, the meanings derived from these events by their indigenous participants
proved less clear. As early as 1599, indigenous resistance to Spanish incursions (especially at
Acoma) revealed the willingness of Oñate’s men to enact brutal spectacles of dominance, using
many of the same techniques of didactic enactment, albeit amplified by gruesome force and bloody
violence. In the subsequent century, and in the face of recurring resistance, Spanish soldiers and
friars continued their occupying processions, exploiting the performative impact of enactment to
rehearse indigenous acquiescence to the Spanish military and missionary occupation of the region.
Resistance persisted, however, culminating in 1680 with a revolt at Taos Pueblo that forcibly
compelled Spanish military and religious forces to abandon their new homes for points well south of
Oñate’s first Rio Grande performance. A dozen or so years later, however, Don Diego de Vargas led
Spanish military, religious, and civilian recolonization of Santa Fe. De Vargas confirmed the
reoccupation with a ceremonial procession and installation of a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary
(thenceforth known as La Conquistadora) on the grounds of what would become the Cathedral of
Santa Fe. Subsequent annual reenactments of La Conquistadora’s procession to the cathedral retold
the story of de Vargas’s reconquest of Santa Fe, sustaining La Conquistadora’s processional as one
of the most enduring performances in North America.5

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 Colonial Amalgams
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the abrupt deceleration of the Spanish crown’s
funding of its imperial endeavors, Spanish colonists inhabiting the furthest reaches of New Spain’s
northern frontier settled into the agrarian isolation that would come to define nuevomexicano life for
much of the next two centuries. Still, performance remained central to community life. In contrast to
Anglo-European settlements in New England of the same period, where enactment was generally
considered suspect or sinful, both New Mexico’s long-standing indigenous spiritual practices and its
more newly arrived iterations of Catholicism used performance not only to remember the past but
also to rehearse an embodied understanding of the faith’s cosmological order. Moreover, in most
iterations of Spanish colonial Catholicism and many traditions of indigenous spiritual practice,
enactment proved central to worship.
Among the many ritual folk dramas mounted by nuevomexicano settlers (many borrowed and
adapted from rich theatrical legacy of sixteenth-century Spanish drama), Los Matachines has
emerged within the scholarly consensus as perhaps the most exemplary of the colonial amalgam in
nuevomexicano theatre. To be sure, scores of other Hispano folk dance-dramas (notably Los
Comanches and Las Posadas) as well as Pueblo feast day celebrations share certain defining
qualities with Los Matachines. Most are guided and guarded by community tradition; most confirm
and critique mutual obligations and social hierarchies; and most are presented as per long-standing
calendrical rhythms in communally shared ritual spaces, like churches, plaza squares, town
thoroughfares, or interior courtyards.6
Yet Los Matachines (along with Los Comanches) stands as somewhat distinctive, at least in the
view of many scholars, as one of the few ritual folk dance-dramas to have been performed since the
seventeenth century by both Pueblo and Hispano communities. First enacted in the region a
generation or so after the performances by Oñate’s men, the nuevomexicano iterations of Los
Matachines—like the many variations of the danzas de los matachines that appear throughout the
hemisphere—typically take form as a large group dance. It depicts the taming of a rambunctious bull
or other entity to convey a narrative of contact, conquest, and resistance.
Within the long arc of nuevomexicano theatre, Los Matachines is notable not simply for its
complex longevity but also for its capacious syncretism. Some iterations suggest that the
dance-drama is a survival of a Nahautl or Aztec dialogue depicting Moctezuma’s resistance to
Cortez’s domination. Other enactments appear to articulate a more “Spanish” view of the same
encounter, tracing the origin of the narrative to medieval Spain, depicting Moctezuma’s submission
to Cortez, sometimes with the help of La Malinche (or Doña Marina). In most nuevomexicano
enactments, the spectacle attends to the dancing bulls, ogres, or other manifestations of men (or
gods) outraged by the conflict. In both its narrative and performance, Los Matachines rehearses an
encounter of resistance, enacting both indigenous resistance and Spanish domination as, together, a
defining dynamic within not only the performance but also the community performing the
dance-drama. As a community-generated performance guided by tradition rather than text, Los
Matachines confounds conventional historiographical measures of origin and authorship even as it
continues to evolve as one of the longest unbroken traditions of performance in North America.

Territorial Destinations
New Mexico’s territorial era began abruptly as Spain ceded domain over its northern frontier to
Mexico in 1820. Shortly thereafter, in 1821, a trading route (known widely as the Santa Fe Trail)
connected the historic Camino Real eastward to Missouri and established north-central New Mexico
as a critical crossroads for both travel and trade routes between Mexico’s northern frontier and the
eastern United States. A quarter century later, in 1848, US annexation of the territory after the
Mexican-American War pushed the US trading point of entry to El Paso, even as the rapid growth in
New Mexico’s emerging extractive industries (mining, lumber, irrigation) confirmed the region’s
importance to a web of anticipated rail routes. The railroad’s arrival in the early 1880s linked New

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 Mexico’s many mining towns to each other as they also delivered a new wave of American visitors
intrigued by the particular climactic and cultural resources of the region.7
Just as it had revolutionized the business of performing throughout North America, the railroad
also made New Mexico towns potential stopping points for the legions of trouping performers
willing to play any house where they might sell enough tickets to fund their way to their next stop.
Soon enterprising proprietors in rail-stop towns began erecting opera houses (typically multipurpose
venues, equipped with a simple playing space and movable chair or bench seating) and made these
new stages available not only to trouping performers but also for community events. Several New
Mexico–based itinerant companies dedicated to performing Spanish-language theatrical
entertainments toured the state between the 1880s and 1920s, with venues in the southernmost part
of the state hosting professional touring companies from Texas and Mexico by the first decades of
the twentieth century.8 Amateur dramatic clubs sprang up too, occasionally performing with
trouping companies but also presenting their own performances. In 1881 the Albuquerque Music
Association presented Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, possibly the first presentation of an
“English” production in the region. Generally Anglo affairs, the dramatic clubs only occasionally
included Hispano players (usually from wealthy families) with little legible participation by Indian
members of the community.9
Hispano and Indian participation proved more prominent in the territorial civic boosterist
performances of the early 1880s. A local iteration of the fad for “expositions” across the nation,
wherein a locality would perform its own distinctive contributions to the world, the nuevomexicano
civic celebration would, in time, arguably become New Mexico’s most enduring theatrical tradition.
In 1883 civic boosters in Santa Fe staged the Tertio-Millennial, which promised to celebrate the
city’s purported 333rd anniversary (though the city was founded in 1610, a mere 273 years prior)
over thirty-three days by featuring the industries, workers, and resources of the territory and
culminating in a three-day festival, dedicated in daily turn to the contributions of Indians, Hispanos,
and Anglos. The Tertio-Millennial’s planned thirty-three days ultimately shrank to only five but the
event did come to pass. The Tertio-Millennial also offered perhaps the first major articulation of
New Mexico’s “tricultural” fantasy heritage, wherein the successive presence of native, Spanish, and
Anglo cultures collectively configures New Mexico’s distinctiveness.10 The Tertio-Millennial’s
strategy of staging an elaborate festival to be enacted by local residents for the edification and
entertainment of visitors, whose potential expenditures promised to expand and enrich the regional
economy, would persist over subsequent decades as cultural tourism became a critical industry.11
As the century turned to New Mexico’s last decade as a territory, the importance of opera houses
diminished, especially as the scattered and scanty audiences of New Mexico’s “Silver Circuit”—or
the rail route connecting the mining districts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado—made it a
second-tier trouping route, ignored by most major acts. Some long-standing nuevomexicano
traditions, like Santa Fe’s La Conquistadora procession and the feast days celebrated at each of the
eight northern pueblos, gained prominence as sights to be seen by visitors, even while retaining their
primary purpose as enactments of communal and spiritual dedication. Others, like folk dramas
central to Hispano community life as well as the many closed rituals of the diverse tribes, remained
carefully sequestered from the Anglo-dominated mainstream of New Mexico’s territorial cultural
life.

Stately Institutions
Anglo-dominated community arts organizations and civic enactments continued to gain significance
in nuevomexicano life after New Mexico became the union’s forty-seventh state in 1912. New
Mexico’s entrance to statehood only intensified the developmental modernization begun in the
territorial era. While most of New Mexico’s political leaders turned their interests toward the
extractive or land-management industries that had long provided the region’s export wealth, other
entrepreneurs sought to exploit various modes of tourism to bring financial resources to the new
state. Gaming speculators scheduled a major bout that brought controversial world heavyweight

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 prizefighting champ Jack Johnson to Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the summer of 1912. Pioneering
early filmmakers like D. W. Griffith and Romaine Fielding shot two-reelers using the “local color”
of New Mexico’s people and landscape in every corner of the state in the 1910s. Painters, writers,
and other artists settled in the areas around Taos and Santa Fe, instigating a steady stream of artists
and their patrons throughout the region. As New Mexico became a destination for this eclectic mix
of cultural tourists and entertainment entrepreneurs, the theatrical traditions of civic spectacle begun
in the territorial era expanded as well with the establishment of enduring institutions aligned with
national performance movements, including civic pageantry, community-based amateur theatre, and
the professionalization of institutional and ensemble theatre-making.
The community pageant movement advocated by Percy MacKaye and others found
nuevomexicano iterations in both the Santa Fe and Taos fiestas. Both annual fiestas came into
formation in the 1910s and 1920s and involved many sectors of the community in the staging of an
elaborate series of public events that, together, presented a celebratory (re)vision of each city’s
founding story. These distinctively (and usually emphatically “tricultural”) nuevomexicano festivals
enacted the pageant movement’s guiding ethos—that amateur arts participation provided open
opportunity for community uplift, education, and refinement. The fiestas also gave community
boosters a seasonal, spectacular attraction that might draw tourists to the region. In quick time, the
invented tradition of fiesta became a focal point for a complex constellation of both planned and
unplanned performances, some of which—like Santa Fe’s Zozobra—became integrated into the
ostensibly “historical” narrative of fiesta itself. Zozobra—or the giant animated “Old Man Gloom”
puppet whose annual incineration burns away the troubles of the prior year—was not an
autochthonous, syncretic expression of Anglo, Hispano, and Indian cultural encounters in Santa Fe
but instead was the independent creation of William Howard Shuster, a Philadelphia-born painter
who moved to Santa Fe in 1920. Introduced in 1926 as an ancillary performance coincident with the
Santa Fe fiesta, the burning of Zozobra soon became one of the fiesta’s most iconic features, an
invented tradition not infrequently misapprehended by locals and tourists alike as a contemporary
survival of ancient indigenous ritual.12
A participatory ethic also informed noted author Mary Austin’s founding of the Santa Fe
Community Theater (SFCT) in the later 1910s. For Austin, the SFCT created a communal space “not
so much to perform plays as to give the people a chance to play.” Within a few years, Austin’s initial
vision for an emphatically community-oriented theatre (“call[ing] upon all classes of the
population”) gave way as the entity rechristened itself the Santa Fe Little Theater (SFLT) and
thereby joined what was, by the 1920s, a national “Little Theatre” movement toward an
anticommercial, “authentically” American, and community-based mode of quality playmaking.
Throughout the 1920s, the SFLT housed a remarkable regional surge in the writing of new
English-language plays, with the playhouse staging premieres of new works by nationally noted
local writers like Witter Bynner and Florence Bartlett. In 1930 the Albuquerque Little Theater
(ALT) began the successful series of itinerant productions of notable American and English plays
that, together, provided the momentum for, in 1936, the construction of a playhouse near
Albuquerque’s Old Town (built by W.P.A. labor and featuring a fresco painting commemorating
Oñate’s men’s 1598 presentation of moros y cristianos on the banks of the Rio Grande). Both SFTC
and ALT have remained in continuous operation, mostly presenting amateur productions of
contemporary and canonical work, since their founding.13
In the decades after World War II, New Mexico theatre-makers continued to participate in nearly
every national and international trend characterizing global theatre presentation. By the mid-1950s,
nearly every college in the state offered either curricular or extracurricular theatre programs, and
theatre activities in state public high schools soon followed suit. The internationally renowned Santa
Fe Opera opened in 1958. By the early 1960s, a new wave of community-based theatre organizations
began to form in storefronts, bars, and coffee shops, each defiantly dedicated to presenting modes of
performance far more “experimental” than the conventional plays staged at the areas schools and
Little Theatres. Both campus- and community-based activist groups delivered the first wave of
Chicano teatro in the early 1970s (usually adapting actos from El Teatro Campesino to
nuevomexicano contexts) and ultimately leading to the founding of notable troupes like Nita Luna’s

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 Teatro Aguacero and Roberto Archuleta’s El Teatro Norteño. In 1977, a classically trained Puerto
Rican actor, José Rafael Rodríguez, collaborated with local Hispanos and Chicanos to found La
Compañía de Teatro de Albuquerque. Over the next two decades, the semiprofessional La Compañía
would go on to become one of the region’s most influential and nationally known theatre companies.
In the 1980s two new repertory companies—New Mexico Repertory, which performed between
Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and American Southwest Theater Company, which planned to perform
between Las Cruces and El Paso—arose as New Mexico’s first professional nonprofit houses,
joining the Barn (a commercial dinner theatre franchise outlet located outside Albuquerque since
1968) as the state’s only Equity houses.
By the early 1990s, however, even as the region’s many amateur companies continued to present
works, the Barn had burned, the American Southwest Company had yet to fully launch, and New
Mexico Rep had abruptly ceased operations in 1994 after a decade of noteworthy seasons. In 1993,
anticipating what would become a national orientation toward ensemble-driven devised work,
Riverside Repertory Theatre (later to be reinvented as Tricklock Company) and Susan Pearson’s
enduringly influential Wrinkle Writing program (which brought the premise and practice of
ensemble theatre-making to public school classrooms) both launched.14

Translocal Networks
In the first weeks of the twenty-first century, the Albuquerque-based Tricklock Company hosted its
first annual Revolutions International Theatre Festival and, in so doing, heralded what appears to be
the next cycle in nuevomexicano theatre: an orientation to translocal networks through which New
Mexico–based artists, companies, and audiences connect and collaborate with their counterparts
around the region, nation, and world using professional, cultural, and other (often digitally mediated)
networks. Some such translocal networks, like those modeled by Tricklock’s Revolutions and,
before it, by the Festival Flamenco Internacional de Albuquerque (founded in the late 1980s),
cultivate international collaborations with artists across the globe; others, like the Albuquerque
Theater Guild (founded 2007), fortify local connections in the service of the region’s artistic
development; and still others, like the Colectivo Teatral Nuevo México (founded 2014), utilize
digital strategies to connect New Mexico theatre organizations to one another and to national
networks including Theatre Communications Group and the Latinx Theatre Commons. Though this
fifth cycle of nuevomexicano theatre history remains in its earliest phases, the notable emergence of
translocal networks within New Mexico’s theatre-making scene stands as both an innovation and as
an extension of the longer history of nuevomexicano theatre, wherein performance-making has
remained central to New Mexico’s understanding of itself and its distinctive place within the broader
story of world theatre.
With this brisk summary of four centuries of nuevomexicano theatre history, I submit that
theatrical performance has long stood at the nexus of the complex collision of indigenous, European,
and US migrations that have together configured the region’s distinctive nuevomexicano character.
From the inceptive encounter of Spanish liturgical drama and indigenous ritual practice in the
sixteenth century to the “Revolutions” of translocal networks in the early twenty-first century, I have
sought to present a distilled portrait of all that came in between. By so enumerating the complex
legacies of some of New Mexico’s most revered traditions, artists, companies, and venues, this
account of the region’s rich performance history consciously upturns the oft-told tale of world
theatre by choosing to place New Mexico at that story’s center rather than its periphery. To imagine
a nuevomexicano theatre history is not simply an exercise in resisting conventional and Eurocentric
hierarchies of theatrical priority; to imagine a nuevomexicano history is to envision an alternate,
experimental, and distinctively global historiography of world theatre and performance.

NOTES
1. Attentive historians have noted the likelihood that Oñate’s men presented an original auto near present-day El
Paso and a variation of moros y cristianos a few months later at Ohke Ohwingeh. As examples, see Jorge Huerta.
Chicano Drama: Themes and Forms (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1982), esp. 192; and David Richard Jones’s

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 “Introduction” to his edited volume New Mexico Plays (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), esp.
3–5. The popular collapse of the two incidents might be seen in the version of the story related by Albuquerque Little
Theatre cofounder Kathryn Kennedy O’Connor in her memoir Theatre in the Cow Country (South Bend, IN: Creative
Service for Publishers, 1966): 13–16. The most detailed examination of the plays presented by Oñate’s men is likely
that offered by Max Harris in “The Arrival of the Europeans: Folk Dramatizations of Conquest and Conversion in
New Mexico,” Comparative Drama 28, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 141–65. Notably, in what was long considered the most
authoritative scholarly account of Oñate’s campaigns, historian Marc Simmons emphasizes the pageantry but not the
dramaturgy of Oñate’s Rio Grande encounters in The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far
Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
2. Glenn Hughes, A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1900 (New York: Samuel French, 1951): 167.
3. I offered an earlier iteration of this premise in a column (“A Nuevomexicano World Theatre History”)
published in May 2012 at ASTR Online, the now defunct digital newsletter of the American Society for Theatre
Research.
4. As a brief aside on my sourcing for this essay, I might explain that developing this chronologically broad
survey of theatrical activities in New Mexico required that I draw upon a range of primary and secondary literatures in
an array of scholarly disciplines. For the folk drama traditions of the encounter and colonial periods (which, as Nicolás
Kanellos noted in 1990, has inspired “more scholarly studies . . . than any aspect of Hispanic theatre”; History of
Hispanic Theatre [1990]: 183), I have sought to distill the broad interpretive trends that have evolved in historical,
literary, and anthropological investigations, alongside those emerging in Latina/o, Chicana/o and performance studies.
For the relatively unstudied territorial entertainments, I have relied primarily upon a comparative assessment of
newspaper accounts alongside those narrated in community histories. For the broad range of activities proliferating
since statehood, I draw upon journalistic, scholarly, and memoiristic accounts of theatrical activities in the region,
while also contextualizing the many anecdotes and impressions gleaned from four decades of my own lived
experience as a nuevomexicano theater practitioner, teacher, and scholar. While the scattershot idiosyncrasy of my
method certainly leaves gaps to be filled and nuances to be explored, my intention here is to provide a preliminary
historiographical frame for both the stories and sources of nuevomexicano theater history that we know, as well as
those we have yet to evince.
5. Though somewhat controversial, the most authoritative scholarly accounts of the complexity of nuevomexicano
intercultural performance in the conquest era remain those offered by historian Ramón A. Gutiérrez. See especially his
pathbreaking essay “The Politics of Theatre in Colonial New Mexico: Drama and the Rhetoric of Conquest,” in
Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the United States , ed. María
Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993): 50–67; and his magisterial When Jesus Came the Corn
Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991). For more on La Conquistadora, see Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán, “The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue:
Fray Angélico Chávez’s La Conquistadora,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 45–72.
6. For a nuanced account of the distinctiveness of New Mexico’s matachines, see Max Harris, “The Return of
Moctezuma: Oaxaca’s ‘Danza de la Pluma’ and New Mexico’s ‘Danza de los Matachines,’” TDR (Spring 1997):
106–34. See also the online anthology of essays “Matachines!,” http://www.nmarts.org/matachines/essays.php,
accessed January 2, 2015.
7. Throughout this essay, my account of New Mexico’s history is informed by that presented by Joseph P.
Sánchez, Robert Spude, and Art Garcia in New Mexico: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013); for the
territorial and early statehood periods, I also drew upon David V. Holtby, Forty-Seventh Star: New Mexico’s Struggle
for Statehood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
8. Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States, Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1990): 183–85.
9. Jones, “Introduction,” 5–7.
10. Naomi Sandweiss, “Santa Fe’s Tertio-Millennial Celebration,” Legacy: The Quarterly Newsletter of the New
Mexico Jewish Historical Society 24, no. 3 (September 2010): 10–11. See also “Santa Fe’s Big Festival,” New York
Times, June 14, 1883.
11. For a summary overview on the long history of cultural tourism in New Mexico, see Marta Weigle, Alluring
New Mexico: Engineered Enchantment, 1821–2001 (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010); for a
specifically Latino assessment, see Andrew Leo Lovato, Santa Fe Hispanic Culture: Preserving Identity in a Tourist
Town (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
12. For more on the founding fictions of Santa Fe, see Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern
Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Sylvia Rodriguez is the authoritative
chronicler of Taos’s fiesta traditions, as in her essay, “Fiesta Time and Plaza Space: Resistance and Accommodation
in a Tourist Town,” Journal of American Folklore 111, no. 439 (Winter 1998): 39–56. For a history of Zozobra, see
relevant sections of Marta Weigle and Peter White, eds., The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2003), esp. 368–71.

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 13. Mary Austin, “Santa Fe’s Community Theatre,” El Palacio 4, no. 2 (January 18, 1919): 26–27. Dean
Rehberger develops a thorough accounting of dramatic activity in this period in “Visions of the New Mexican in
Public Pageants and Dramas of Santa Fe and Taos, 1918–1940,” Journal of the Southwest 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1995):
450–69. See also Jones, “Introduction,” 7–12, and O’Connor, Theatre in the Cow Country.
14. Marcos Martinez offers an overview of Chicano theater activities in New Mexico in the 1970s, including brief
mention of Nita Luna’s Teatro Aguacero, as part of his extended discussion of La Compañía in his essay “La
Compañía Del Teatro de Albuquerque: Community Development through an Actor-Centered Theater,” in Expressing
New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual, and Memory, ed. Felipe Gonzales (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2007), 87–114. Elizabeth C. Ramírez provides additional insight into the activities of La Compañía in
Chicanas/Latinas in American Theatre: A History of Performance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000),
147–48. For a brief discussion of El Teatro Norteño’s activities as part of La Raza Unida’s work in New Mexico, see
David R. Maciel and Juan José Peña’s “La Reconquista: The Chicano Movement in New Mexico,” in The Contested
Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico, ed. David R. Maciel and Erlinda Gonzales-Berry (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 282. For a summary overview of activity in this period, see Jones,
“Introduction,” 12–17. For Tricklock’s history, see David Richard Jones, “Billy the Kid Reappears in New Mexico,”
TheatreForum 26 (Winter/Spring 2005): 25–32; for Wrinkle Writing, refer to Susan Pearson, “Wrinkle Writing,” On
Common Ground: Partnerships and the Arts 5 (Fall 1995): http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/pubs/A18/pearson-davis.html,
accessed 2 January 2015.

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