Information: Olga Najera-Ramirez, author of folklorico dance.

Olga is an author of "Social and political dimensions of folklorico dance: the binational dialectic of residual and emergent culture," in Western folklore, 48:1 (Jan 1989), p. 15-32. (398.305 C128 V.48 1989 PCL).

Academia dismisses grupos folkloricos as "sheer folklorismus, i.e., commercialized folklore for tourist consumption."

Mexican Dance History

• Indigenous dances: For ritual, festive, and secular purposes.
• Colonial: Spanish dance forms and merged dance forms.
• Porfiriato Period: Popular Europe ballroom dances influenced Mestizo and Norteño dances.
• Romantic Nationalism: Folklore evidences a primitive state, but founds a unique identity while acknowledging diversity.
• S.E.P.: Dances stereotyped, simplified, out of context, for schools.
• El Ballet Folklorico de Mexico of Amalia Hernandez, 1952: Founded to promote Mexican identity abroad; now a tourist attraction. Served to inspire other ballets folkloricos with similar goals. A continuum: public spectacle to preservation of expressive forms of Mexican culture. Not mutually exclusive, but support goes to spectacle because it promotes tourism.

In the United States

• 1930 to 1950 – "cookbooks:" Johnson, Schwendener, Mooney, Sedillo: "Stereotypes of Mexicans as happy, colorful but poor and backward people" – p. 25.
• "By the 1960s and 1970s folklorico groups had become part of the Mexican tradition – albeit a tradition that had been reconstructed in the nationalist period of post-Revolutionary Mexico." – p. 27.
• "Although the intention was to get these actual roots of folk dance, Chicanos primarily had access to the folklorico tradition in Mexico rather than the original folk dances." p. 28.

Analysis

• In Mexico, government sponsored for national unity and to recognize diversity, then for the tourist dollar. In the United States, as a resistance to acculturation.

Conclusion

• Scholarship of Mexican folk and folklorico dance is poor, although they play a vital role in United States-Mexico relations.