Bela Kellogg
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Lorena Chambers
Research Mentor School/College/Department: History/American Culture / LSA
Program:
Authors: Bela Kellogg, Lorena Chambers
Session: Session 5: 2:40 pm – 3:30 pm
Poster: 62
Abstract
As communities of Mexican Americans proliferated across U.S. borderlands at the end of the 19th century, the American entertainment industry capitalized on the rising popularity of the American Frontier. Buttressed by the ideals of expansionism, white supremacy, and conquest, productions of the “Wild West,” namely Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, produced a dichotomy between Mexican vaqueros and white cowboys that alienated Mexicans from definitions of what it meant to be “American.” At the height of live entertainment and tent shows in the 1890s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was not the only production of Mexican American identity that “othered” performers along racial and gendered lines. At World’s Fairs, particularly the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Mexican musicians wore what became an instantly recognizable uniform. Known as a charro suit, the outfit worn by these musicians included tall, wide-brimmed sombreros, short jackets, oversized heeled boots, silver spurs, crimson sashes, and fitted pants with silver buttons running down the side of each leg. In both of these cases, popular culture continually associated the charro suit with the feminized Mexican dandy during the apex of U.S. expansionism. The historical methods of researching newspaper databases like ProQuest, HathiTrust Library, and Newsbank reveal that the clothing, attire, and costumes — usually in the form of the charro suit — of Mexican performers provided the substrate onto which white Americans not only racialized but also continually feminized Mexican men. By documenting how the cultural productions of the 1880s-1900s precipitated the denial of first-class citizenship to Mexican Americans at the turn of the 20th century, this project anchors the discriminatory policies of the modern U.S.-Mexico border in a long history of prejudice and intolerance.
