Recovering La Carpa: The Dialogue of History and Memory in José Manuel Galván's 'Las Tandas de San Cuilmas - Los Carperos"

Abstract

In 1989, playwright José Manuel Galván-Leguízamo, a veteran of the theatrical arm of the Mexico City student movement, created a play based on his own oral history interviews with peformers from San Antonio who had been active in carpas (“tent shows”) before World War II. The resulting work, Las tandas de San Cuilmas—Los carperos enjoyed two successful runs at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots arts organization on San Antonio’s West Side. The play made an important contribution to the efforts of a politically liberal Chicana/o middle class to make a place for itself in San Antonio by publicly celebrating the memory of the carpas and their aesthetic. Perhaps inevitably, this larger project has partly mythologized its object and sometimes papered over the divisions of class and status that fractured San Antonio’s ethnic Mexican community during the early twentieth century. Although Galván’s play participated in this mythologizing process to a degree, it also highlighted the contradictions of public history and public memory in ways that invited more searching reflection on those topics and on San Antonio’s rich and conflictive history.