Staging continuity: Theatre, performance, and the social imaginary in transitional California, 1836--1859

This work is a study of theatre and performance in mid-nineteenth-century California, as staged by both immigrant Anglo-Californians and native californios (Mexican-Californians). It is intended both as a long-overdue reevaluation of that performance in light of recent developments in the field of theatre studies, but also as an intervention into traditional California historiography, which posits the radical displacement of californio culture by Anglo-U.S. culture in the middle years of the nineteenth century, ignoring the signs of cultural continuity. In addition to conventional theatrical productions, a wide range of performance practices is considered, including society weddings, patriotic balls, parades, proclamations, and popular revolts. Those events are interpreted as embodied performances of the local social imaginary, here defined as a given society's collective understanding of how human interaction is or should be structured. That understanding is both evidenced and constituted by a society's dominant pattern of cultural circulation. Mexican California operated through a pre-capitalist gift-exchange pattern. Immigrant U.S.-Anglos introduced a capitalist market-exchange pattern to the region. As the two patterns of cultural circulation were integrated, a new social imaginary emerged, and with it a new society, equally Anglo and californio, both gift- and market-exchange in underlying structure. The present work traces that transitional process through the theatre and performance of the period. Historical sources include diaries, memoirs, recuerdos (oral histories dictated by californios to the assistants of California historian and archivist Hubert Howe Bancroft), playbills, and period newspapers. The records of performance events found in those archival sources are analyzed for what they reveal about the changing nature of the local social imaginary. Theoretical approaches and historical insights borrowed from performance studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, anthropology, Chicana/o studies, and political science are applied to a reevaluation of the historical record. The study reveals that California society during the transitional period was defined as much by social continuity as it was by a radical break with its past. The work also recuperates californio performance for a more balanced local theatre history.