ABSTRACT
At an international meeting in Montreal, Canada sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in June 2014, the internationally renowned Mexican playwright and theater artist, Jesusa Rodriguez and composer and singer Liliana Felipe, performed “Juana La Larga.” In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot asks what makes certain narratives powerful enough to pass as accepted history. Mestizaje emerged as a concept at the end of the 19th century and was institutionalized through the middle of the 20th century as a counter-argument to US and European ideologies of racial hierarchy and notions of degeneracy through racial mixing. Racial purity, for the US and Europe, served to protect white privilege and to stabilize the system of racial hierarchy and empire. The second important border dispute related to questions of national belonging began with US attempts to block Chinese immigration by hardening the US-Mexico border. It ended with Mexico’s expulsion of the Chinese in 1931.
