Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico (review)
This is perhaps the most intellectually pithy account of Enlightenment culture in Latin America since John Tate Lanning's work on Guatemala's University of San Carlos. The Bourbon state and Enlightened elites strove to impose their new culture despotically, Viqueira Alb&n persuasively argues, and nowhere was this more evident than in campaigns to remove the marvelous, the wondrous, the magical from Mexico City's theater and boisterous streets in favor of a sober and skeptical bourgeois sangfroid. In the theater, the dramatic capsizings, the flashy special effects, the sensual dances, the audiences' rowdy commentaries all irked elite late eighteenthcentury reformers, who sought to impose neo-classical "realism" and to represent the now scientific and "universal" verities of human nature. They failed miserably, and here Viqueira Alban is at his best, looking beyond the elite-generated edicts and codes to document the audiences who continued to cackle uproariously, the actors who drew attention to the play as a construct through their reliance on prompters, the unceasing audience penchant for the most outlandish fights of fancy and wild effects. What Enlightened despotism could not change, however, the market could, and elite theater was purged of the vulgar as the more scabrous popular entertainments moved to their own venues after Independence.