| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity. By Linda A. Curcio-Nagy (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. xiv + 363 pp.).
Reflecting growing scholarly interest in the civic and religious rituals that bolstered colonial rule in the Americas, this book examines five major festivals celebrated in Mexico City during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Linda Curcio-Nagy focuses on the city's most prominent events: the civic viceregal entrance, ceremony of allegiance to the king, the Royal Banner ceremony, and the religious festivals of Corpus Christi and the Virgin of Remedies. These festivals, she argues, represented through performance the ideal principles of good government in the colony; but they also revealed political disagreements over such principles over time.	1
Curcio-Nagy provides wonderful details of these spectacles: the Native Americans dressed "as ancient warriors" who "positioned their canoes along the causeways and bowed in deference to the new governor;" Afro-Mexican women dancing in accompaniment to a presentation of paintings portraying the viceroy as a phoenix rising to rule over them; a triumphal arch constructed by the silversmiths' guild covered in 102 silver panels illuminated by 400 votive candles placed on 40 chandeliers. She also examines counter discourses within and surrounding the festivals, directly (in the case of satirical floats created by university students) and indirectly (in the various meanings Native Americans in particular may have attached to their participation).	. . .

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