Empathy and Performance advances a study of spectators and audiences by examining works from Latin American and Latinx underrepresented author-actors. SÁndez studies the dramatized dilemma of cultural understanding in “Our America,” a term that refers to a collective political identity shared by Spanish-speaking Americans and their current struggles in the contemporary United States. SÁndez argues that to conceptualize empathy one needs to understand how subjects organize, classify, and limit themselves, not only as agents, but also as interpreters. What sort of affiliations do these performances promote? How do they break, reinforce, or queer societal expectations about the Latinx body, the white body, or simply, the staged body? To survey different answers to these queries, SÁndez analyzes performances such as “Indigurrito” (Nao Bustamante), “Dominicanish” (Josefina Baez), ¡Bienvenidos Blancos! or Welcome White People! (Alex Torra), and the apology delivered by the group Veterans Stand with Standing Rock on the Dakota Pipeline protest. In these artistic enactments, which range from 1992 to 2014, the, historical construct of boundaries and bodies becomes evident. Following recent work on empathy (Lanzoni, Maibom, Bloom, Hogan, among others), SÁndez examines the establishment of identity categories through performance and their ability to spur elaborative empathy from audiences.
