Performing Spain from Colonial California: Astucias por heredar

Speakers): Professor Pedro Garcia-Caro (University of Oregon)

Professor Garcia- Caro will Talk about a satirical play banned from the Mexican stage in 1790 made it to the early secular settlements of Alta California where a troupe of soldiers and possibly other colonists performed it. The play, Astucias por heredar: un sobrino a su tío survived in the Bancroft library collection and this talk will present the context of its provenance, its author, Fermín de Reygadas, as well as the ways in which the play performed an unsanctioned narrative about the metropolis in the northern border of Spain's last colonial advance. 
 
Pedro García-Caro obtained his doctorate in American Studies at the University of London in 2004 and has taught Spanish and Latin American literatures at the universities of Oxford, MIT and Oregon. He is the author of After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014) and of the critical edition Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío, de Fermiín de Reygadas. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Forthcoming (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2017).