In Christmas pageants staged throughout the Spanish Empire, the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd) asked rude and impertinent questions, making Christian doctrine comprehensible to the humblest audiences. The bobo’s comic confusion—Will he or won’t he see the light of Christ?—was danced with obscene gambols and cacophonous footwork, manifesting the perilous invisible stain of impure blood. Yet these sharp-tongued dramatizations of redemption simultaneously undermined the determinative dogma of blood purity which governed Spanish society. Aristocrats thus asserted their status, enacting the post-epiphany bobo by refining transgressive gambols into virtuosic caprioles. Ironically, eighteenth-century Spaniards adopted the imaginary Gitano—an outlaw Other which inherits the bobo’s dramatic narrative of redemption—as a national symbol. Spain’s identification with this figure, often described euphemistically as a proto-romantic “orientalization,” is in fact a racialized downgrade. With the advent of the fandango, Spain, reduced to performing itself for tourists, came to dance Blackness for Europe.
Storytelling of the Haggis. Construction, Narration and Negotiation of a Scottish National Symbol
