Leah Driehorst
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Lorena Chambers
Research Mentor School/College/Department: History/American Culture / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 4 (1:40pm – 2:30pm)
Authors: Leah Driehorst, Lorena Chambers
Abstract
William “Buffalo Bill†Cody’s Wild West shows and Nate Salsbury’s Black America show of the late nineteenth century perpetuated a racialized and often negative image of Mexican Americans and African Americans to their audiences. Through historical research, I assisted in determining what these entrepreneurs depicted in these performances and the narratives of race and gender that emerged in popular culture and museum exhibits. To collect related primary archival and secondary published sources, I searched various databases including the University of Michigan’s Proquest newspaper database, reviewed over one hundred pages of an early 20th century scrapbook from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and identified supporting material artifacts from the collections of the Autry Museum of the American West. I compiled relevant sources into Zotero citation software in preparation for writing and publication. The research confirmed the astounding impact these shows and their publicity had on perceptions of Mexican Americans and African Americans beginning in the late nineteenth century. Cody and Salsbury displayed Mexican Americans and African Americans with the intention of demonstrating the “reality†of the lives of these groups, but the performances often depicted a one-dimensional, and sometimes degrading, view of the realities of these communities. By encouraging audiences to believe in such a limited view of the lives and characteristics of minority groups, these performances and portrayals ingrained a stagnant and ignorant perception of Mexican Americans and African Americans in the culture of the United States. By analyzing the origins of the current racist and stereotypical perceptions of these groups and revealing how and why they were racialized for public entertainment, this project seeks to alter modern perceptions of these populations and expand the knowledge about race and ethnicity in American history and popular culture.
