Whilst the pervasiveness of Spanish peninsular theatre in Latin America is somewhat of a commonplace, the very extent of its influence right up to the present day has made it difficult to produce a satisfactory cultural history. Most Latin-American theatre histories distinguish the development of separate traditions by virtue of any divergences from this unquestionably dominant model, yet there has been comparatively little attention within peninsular histories to the heterogeneous effects of the long history of theatrical activities by Spanish dramatists, actors, scenographers, directors and companies in the Americas. Despite recognition that the ‘steady traffic of texts, theatre troupes, and even playwrights, ensured that the dramatic fashions of the Motherland held sway in her overseas possessions’, the theatrical voyages undertaken to and from Spain and Latin America are often little more than a footnote in accounts of the careers of particular dramatists, practitioners, genres or periods.

As far as any critical judgement on impact is concerned, the tendency has generally been to remark on the excessive conservatism of colonial theatrical culture; the continuing presence of Spanish theatre models after Independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is often condemned by association. So, for instance, Frank Dauster laments the overwhelming dominance of peninsular Spanish forms on the nineteenth-century Mexican stage, whilst Sandra Cypess declares with confidence of early twentieth-century Latin-American theatre that: