Staging Spain, Staging America: Representations ofSpain in U.S. Hispanic and Anglo Theatre, 1931- 1939

Staged representations of the Spanish Civil War illuminate how Spain, as an imagined geography, was used to map competing national ideologies in Anglo and Hispanic populations in the United States. Through the Spanish Civil War, Anglo and Hispanic theatre and dance artists invented not only versions of Spain, but versions of the United States and of themselves in relation to both countries. Simultaneously, theatre, performance and dance about the Spanish Civil War resurrected, invented and reconfigured mytho-historical relationships between Spain and the United States, and between Spain, the United States and Caribbean countries.
In this dissertation, I examine Spanish language theatre productions of immigrant and exile Cuban, Puerto Rican and Spanish communities in New York, San Juan and Tampa alongside English language radio plays, stage plays and dance pieces in Tampa and New York. I contextualize the theatre pieces with performance events such as the People's Olympics of 1936, the Asturian miners' revolt of 1934 and the Ponce Massacre of 1937. I propose that theatre, performances and dances about the Spanish Civil War materialized multiple anxieties circulating throughout the United States. Contingently, the Spanish Civil War was used to configure national identities in terms of Spain-U.S.-Caribbean domestic and international relations.