Los Tejanos as a Nineteenth-Century Border Play

Abstract

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.