Abstract:

Since the 1980s, playwrights in the Mexican Northwest/US Southwest have responded to the steadily increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by dramatizing the fraught identity choices forced upon borderlanders by geopolitical forces beyond their control. In the US, the term "border play" is commonly used to describe such works. In this essay, I argue that the border play, as a regional form, has roots far deeper than the late twentieth century. I offer as an example Los Tejanos, a nuevomexicano secular drama dated to the 1840s, which tells the story of an invasion of the then Mexican department of New Mexico by the neigh-boring Republic of Texas. While the play's plot conveys an explicitly patriotic tale of New Mexican solidarity in the face of Anglo aggression, an analysis of its characters reveals that national, ethnic, and racial identities were far less settled at that time than the script suggests. I contend that the categorization of Los Tejanos as a border play reveals the form to be a deeply historical and regionally-specific artistic response to the ambiguous nature of borderland identities. Additionally, the appearance of a prominent Native American character in Los Tejanos speaks to the centrality of indigeneity to regional identity formation in the past, thus drawing attention to the relative lack of Indigenous presence in recent US border plays.

摘要：

自 20 世纪 80 年代以来，墨西哥西北部/美国西南部的剧作家通过戏剧化地描述了无法控制的地缘政治力量强加给边境居民的令人担忧的身份选择，以应对美墨边境日益军事化的情况。在美国，“边境游戏”一词通常用来形容此类作品。在这篇文章中，我认为边境游戏作为一种区域形式，其根源远比二十世纪末更深。我以《Los Tejanos》为例，这是一部1840 年代的新墨西哥世俗戏剧，讲述了邻近的德克萨斯共和国入侵当时的墨西哥省新墨西哥州的故事。虽然该剧的情节传达了新墨西哥人在面对盎格鲁侵略时团结一致的明确爱国故事，但对其人物的分析表明，当时的民族、民族和种族身份远没有剧本所暗示的那么确定。我认为，将《洛斯特哈诺斯》归类为边境戏剧表明，这种形式是对边境身份模糊性的一种深刻的历史和特定地区的艺术回应。此外， 《洛斯特哈诺斯》中一位著名的美洲原住民角色的出现说明了原住民在过去区域身份形成中的中心地位，从而引起了人们对最近美国边境戏剧中原住民存在相对缺乏的关注。