Bullfighting in Revolutionary Mexico
This is a new project on the history of bullfighting in modern Mexico and its relationship to Mexico’s Revolution and one-party Institutional Revolutionary regime (1910-2000). This will be the first English-language history of Mexican bullfighting, a 500-year old form often discussed from polemical standpoints (tradition, barbarism). My project combines political, cultural, agrarian, and natural history, creating a 3D history of the bullfight as an agribusiness rooted in specific forms of land tenure and animal histories, a money-making spectacle facilitating urbanization, and a ritual legitimating revolutionary rule. The first step is to survey key state/private archival collections in Texas, Mexico City, and Tlaxcala. I also intend to interview key actors in Mexico’s government, press, and taurine industry, at a time when bullfighting’s future (or otherwise) is a topic of heated national media, political, and judicial debate. Pedagogic: eventually I also aim to teach new signature or Plan II course on history of tauromachy in Europe and Latin America (including pre-1865 Texas).
