ABSTRACT
In Bay of Quinte Mohawk writer Beth Brant’s article “The Good Red Road” she identifies native women’s “ancient, cultural consciousness” as formed by “the memory of history, of culture, of land, of Nation” and as “always present, like another being” (203-204). She argues that this indigenous consciousness is the springboard and framework for the realization of all creative work. Brant captures well this ontology. Her insight into native women and cultural memory mirrors that of many others, including my own physical and psychological sense of self as indigenous. Growing up in and out of both Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, indigenous fiestas and ceremonial traditions have always been part of my life. Indeed, memoried, geographic, and cultural spaces not only grow indigenous creators in particular ways, but such creators actively choose to recreate-to perform-in ways that vitally deepen ties to a living, breathing, and embodied ancestral history. (See Sonja Kuftinec’s “Staging the City with the Good People of New Haven” and Tamara Underiner, “Playing at Border Crossing in a Mexican Indigenous Community…Seriously”.)
My own theoretical filter of knowledge in performing indigeneity is revealed by reflection which is rooted in my own worldview and experiences of “being Indian” in New Mexico. I have formulated the concept of performing mestizaje due to my own curiousity about the impact of political, social, and cultural views related to how performing “Indianness” has been staged in the media in Latina/o culture. I articulate a transnational and transcultural theory of performing mestizaje that is situated in geographical space, activism, and indigenous performances. I formulate a theory for understanding how we peform mestizaje as grown from collective memories with folk dance/dramas and indigenous ceremonies and how this lies at the confluence of how the body performs myths, religious beliefs, colonization, captivity, chanting, songs, stories of puberty, womanhood, survival, persistence, and spiritual forces of indigenous traditional ceremonies.
