| "Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Performance in San Antonio's Public Culture" examines the cultural performance of race and gender through the history of San Antonio's central public festival, Fiesta San Antonio. In this interdisciplinary study, the festival is a vehicle for expressing multiple, contradictory ideas about ethnic identity, womanhood, manhood and social class.; Fiesta San Antonio occupies an important place in the city's economy and its collective memory. As Fiesta developed, the festival embodied key social struggles of San Antonio's population over the twentieth century. Beginning only fourteen years after the railroad arrived in San Antonio, Fiesta explained this modernizing city to itself. Commemorating Texan independence and invigorating the local tourist industry, Fiesta shaped San Antonio's public memory. As the festival expanded, Fiesta's institutions were metaphors for larger social transformations as well, particularly between Anglos and Mexican Americans. At times the festival reinforced the most damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of the Jim Crow era, and after World War II Fiesta marked important alliances among an ethnically diverse middle class, as the Mexican American generation defined its place in the city's public life. The festival also represented elite women's concepts of history, linking Anglo women's ideas of cultural preservation to the invention of ethnic tourism.; The study focuses on the intersections of gendered analysis and ethnic studies, and the boundaries of regional studies, examining how San Antonio's cultural performances cross multiple borders of the U.S. South, the West, and Mexico. In my analysis, San Antonio is the center for re-imagining the relationships among national and transnational regions. Combining historical/archival research with interviews and participant observation, "Inventing the Fiesta City" gives voice to many social actors who organize and participate in Fiesta. Scholarship on memory, nostalgia and commemoration, work on gender in southern society, and Mexican Americans in the Southwest also inform the analysis. |
