Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theatre of Rodolfo Santana

Tapping into the performative intricacies of tourist activity and showcasing the negotiations of performed ethnicity in the implicit contrasts between tourists and the people they travel to see, Latin American and U.S. Latino theatre artists use the tourist character or theme to investigate the cultural negotiations marking contemporary social life. This work parallels critical theory that investigates the tourist as an improvisatory player in trans-regional interactions and unpacks the tourist-“native” binary to revise conceptions of people and cultures that travel. As exemplified in two plays by Rodolfo Santana (Venezuela), artists deploy the tourist theme to critique culturalism, that is, to use the term coined by Arjun Appadurai, “identity politics at the level of the nation-state” (15). Santana’s plays Mirando al tendido (1992) and Influencia turistica en la inclinacion de la Torre de Pisa (1996) highlight the interaction of tourism with its designated other, the ethnic, to critique the concept of abolengo, or nation-based ancestry or blood-line, as the authenticating mechanism of a particular cultural practice or group. Santana’s work—along with that of his cohort—also proposes that staging tourism harbors insights into the everyday that might generate more salutary social arrangements. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss2/3 Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theatre of Rodolfo Santana Vicky Unruh University of Kansas In June 2002 while wandering through the city of Tarazona in the Spanish province of Zaragoza, I stumbled into a large octagonal bullring, whose graveled performance space was surrounded not by stands for aficionados but by what appeared to be multi-storied apartments. As an unschooled tourist, I was struck by the apparent metamorphosis of a site for the public spectacle of Spain’s proverbial fiesta nacional into a freshly painted structure with the aura of gentrified condos. While searching for markers of Spain’s hybrid cultural history in the town’s renowned Mudejar and Jewish sites, it was hard not to read this edifice as the sign of homogenizing forces of late twentieth century globalization. But I later learned that this 1792 structure had always housed apartments. It was financed by eight wealthy families whose dwellings faced into the ring, and the stands for those without access to the apartments leaned against the building’s walls. According to Carrie Douglass, the conception of the Spanish bullring as a “separate and exclusively civic public building” came at the turn of the nineteenth century (219), which was precisely the era when the Tarazona bullring was built. Thus the curious space that I had come across marked one moment in the gradual separation of the Spanish bullring from its spectators, the professionalizing of the bullfighter, and the creation of class hierarchies among the Spanish corrida de toros ‘bullfight’ audience. My 1 Unruh: Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theat Published by New Prairie Press 254 ST&TCL, Volume 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2008) brief stop in this ring pointed to complex histories of public spectacles, audiences, and nation building as well as to the de-centered spectatorship of tourists who impinge on sites of cultural performance, knowing or not what they see. These meditations continued in Havana in June 2003, where University of Kansas colleagues and I alternated roles as scholars conducting research with those of ordinary tourists led by an official guide. One morning we witnessed the show-and-tell performance of a Yoruba dance at one of the multiple venues for cultural tourism that arose in post-Soviet Cuba. At the end of the show the costumed dancer-actors invited the Kansas visitors to dance with them, while on the other side of the open-windowed doorway to the street, a growing gathering of young habaneros watched with undisguised amusement. As a child of the Caribbean who grew up dancing in Puerto Rico, I resisted this invitation to perform as a gringa tourist and revel in staged spontaneity. But the momentary discomfort advanced my musings on communal cultural spectacles, tourist practices, and the nostalgia for ethnic rootedness where they appeared to intersect. Beyond providing essential revenue in post-Soviet Cuba, what did this spectacle mean in its new context? Who was performing, who was watching, and how did shifts in perspective between the designated spectators inside the building and the impromptu audience watching from outside alter the cultural significance of the show? What were the impact and role of the tourists in whatever ephemeral community this staged event convened? Tourist studies of the past two decades have unpacked the timeworn binaries that, as Kjell Olsen points out, contrast the tourist, the modern, the copy, and disengagement on the one hand with ethnic authenticity, tradition, and communal intimacy on the other (176). By contrast, new critical work on tourism and travel investigates the potential agency of the tourist, conceives of tourism as a performance that includes the adoption of tourist roles and “stages” or sites of tourist activity (Edensor 60, 63), discredits the binary opposition between superficial, unthinking tourists and allegedly more sophisticated and serious travelers (Culler 157-58), and investigates the role of tourists and tourism spectacles in the potentially salutary making and remaking of cultural arrangements (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 221-23). Tapping into the performative intricacies of tourist activity 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 32, Iss. 2 [2008], Art. 3 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss2/3 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1677