In the wake of Hurricane Katrinas dramatic demographic changes, scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed Mexican migration to New Orleans as a new phenomenon and an unwelcome threat to the citys social order, rich culture, and tourist economy. This dissertation challenges these ideas and demonstrates some of the myriad ways Mexican migrants have historically helped shape New Orleansdistinct culture and its economy. In order to understand the precarious and ever-changing position of what it has meant to be Mexican in New Orleans, this dissertation asks how Mexican migrants went from being socially excluded and racialized as non-white “others†throughout most of the nineteenth-century to gaining a degree of acceptance as socially and culturally white at the century’s end despite the city’s intensifying race relations. To answer this question, this dissertation examines Mexico’s relationship to New Orleans in the nineteenth-century, the stakes involved for both Mexico and New Orleans at the 1884 World’s Fair, the popularity of Mexico’s Eighth Cavalry Band at the Fair, and the lives the band’s musicians created for themselves in the city after the Fair closed its doors. It reveals that Mexico and New Orleans were connected through the circulation of goods, people, and ideas throughout most of the nineteenth-century, and beginning with the 1884 World’s Fair, Mexican diplomats and white New Orleanian leaders intentionally used cultural exchange and a “rhetoric of friendship†to reconcile past tensions between them and foster friendly relations as a strategy for advancing their own economic interests in the pursuit of modernity. The unintended result was the development of New Orleans’ relatively small, but culturally significant community that helped shaped the city’s distinct music culture and inadvertently helped forge a rigid color line in a city that had once been known for its racial fluidity. The project unfolds in a specific place and occurs at a particular historical moment – the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans – and argues that it fundamentally changed the relationship between New Orleans and Mexico and created new opportunities for Mexican musicians in the process. Both white New Orleanian and Mexican leaders utilized the fair as an international stage where they could showcase their ability to be leaders in modernity in a quickly expanding world economy. While the fair was ultimately a financial failure and has largely been overlooked by scholars, Mexico’s Eighth Cavalry Band became its most enduring cultural legacy. The band’s musicians had been sent as cultural brokers who used music to translate cultural differences and language barriers, giving a cultural sound to the fair’s rhetoric. They emphasized a modern Mexicanidad and Mexican music as culturally modern and therefore “white†but foreign and “exotic†enough to appeal to white New Orleanian desires to experience a different culture while still allowing them to maintain their distance from the music’s blackness since it was performed by representatives of the “sister republic.†The band set off a popular craze for Mexican music and bolstered an intense local curiosity about Mexico and its people. Through examining this untold story, this project demonstrates how New Orleans and Mexico were intimately linked through the circulation of capital, culture, and actors in the late nineteenth-century, exposing the Crescent City as an unexamined U.S. – Mexican borderland.

Last modified

• 11/19/2019

Creator

• Valeria Priscilla Jimanez

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-npks-7h58

Subject

• History

Keyword

• Cultural Brokers
• Borderlands
• Music
• Mexico
• New Orleans

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright