Teatro

The Spanish word “teatro” usefully incorporates the complexities of approaching the topic of US Latino/a theater, as it references not only the literary and performance genre itself, but also the structures – artistic, architectural, institutional, and communal – that facilitate its dissemination. These structures vary in size, scope, scale, and intention, as do the individually written and collaboratively created works themselves, and it is crucial to keep these material conditions of production in mind when critically analyzing the work. The contextual information gleaned from the cultural and aesthetic function, intended audience(s), and specific location of production radically impacts the way teatro is both conceived and received. While the need for understanding context extends to all literary forms, the collaborative processes of dramatic creation and realization through the action of specific bodies heighten the importance of these elements. And, these contextual elements are often explicitly thematized and examined within traditions of minoritized cultural production. Most accounts of US Latino/a theater focus attention on the period from 1965 to

the present, dividing the work into geographic and cultural subgroups (Chicanos/as in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago, and Cuban-Americans in Miami), charting changes based on either chronological developments loosely attached to decades or models of influence based on creative generations as ways of marking the transformation of aesthetic values. This interconnected model is an effective way of thinking about teatro, helpfully connecting shared thematic and political investments across a range of Latino/a identities and reflecting political and cultural shifts in identification and practice for playwrights. While identity is a central concern of Latino/a theater, this investment reflects a

larger turn in US theater and performance since the early 1970s, a focus on identity concurrent with feminist and ethnic rights movements in which the personal, lived and embodied, becomes the political. This turn increased attention on the visibility and treatment of bodies in conceptual performance art and highlighted the power of theater to explore individual and collective identity. However, the pressures of market liberalization and postmodernism that gained strength from the early 1970s through the 1980s tended to move these models of identity toward postmodern conceptions of multiple, fragmented selves, an internal complexity best understood through critical models of hybridity, transculturation, and mestizaje used to describe

both Latino/a identity and cultural production (Ramos-García 2002; SandovalSánchez and Saporta Sternbach 2001). These concepts have become central to much of the contemporary critical discourse around teatro, which is still invested in both the negotiation of identity and the recuperation and representation of specific culturally inflected histories. In most accounts of Latino/a theater, the 1960s are characterized by collective

creation in community-based settings; the 1970s chart the beginnings of institutionalization and the emergence of a first generation of individual playwrights; under the influence of broader non-profit funding; the 1980s result in increased professionalization and a second generation of playwrights; the 1990s bring greater diversity of subject matter, clear lineages of development and training, institutionalization of the concept of Latino/a theater and a third generation of playwrights who begin to question the burden of representation of Latino/a identity itself; and the 2000s reflect broader national visibility with the award of a Pulitzer Prize, an increasing range of artists working at various levels – local, regional, and national – and a fourth generation of playwrights. But it is important to remember that none of these decadal markings is fully

accurate, and that collective creation continues in the present day even as professional companies doing Spanish-language theater existed long before 1965, which is typically charted as the moment of emergence for contemporary Latino/a theater. It is crucial to respect the complex heterogeneity of Latino/a theater – what Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez has described as an “An Octopus with Many Legs” (1999: 103) – and to recognize that while the interrelated questions of agency and identity are at the center of much of the critical response to Latino/a theater, the teatro itself is constantly interrogating both concepts. And, while the period from 1965 to the present has received the greatest critical attention, teatro has existed in what is today the United States since the sixteenth century. The first recorded instance of theater in what is today the United States was a

performance of Los Moros y Cristianos staged by Spanish conquistadores in 1598 in present-day New Mexico. Eventually performed by indigenous peoples as well, this event echoed an ongoing practice of using various public spectacles and Spanish religious drama, auto sacramentales, to instill Christian ideological values in indigenous populations (Gutiérrez 1993b). And, importantly, this practice foreshadows Latino/a theater’s investment in specific cultural and religious identities and its use as a political, pedagogical tool in the service of building community, albeit here in a problematic colonial project. While the immediate descendants of this practice are the pastorela plays that

continue in New Mexico and the Southwest announcing the birth of Jesus Christ to shepherds in the fields and following the peregrination to his birthplace, until the 1970s these productions were the subject of anthropological and folkloric investigation as opposed to being considered a part of the Latino/a theatrical tradition (Flores 1995). Scholars and artists have increasingly recognized the existence of cultural resistance and commentary in these traditional practices that continue today not only in Southwest rural communities as a means of generating a communal experience, such as El Teatro Campesino’s biannual La Pastorela staged for the community in the mission church in San Juan Bautista, California, but also as a strategy to

directly comment on the lived realities of Latinos/as in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and other cities, where the yearly productions often reflect contemporary political concerns such as immigration legislation. In the nineteenth century, Spanish-language theater, primarily directed toward

Spanish-speaking communities in the Southwest, New York City, and South Florida, provided recreation, entertainment, and community pride, though a significant number of performers were international Latin American performers rather than members of their local communities. Scholarly accounts of this work in the first half of the twentieth century provide an overview of newspaper accounts and historical records of performance that attest to their frequency and variety (Kanellos 1990). To some extent these theaters, like many ethnic theaters in the US, served immigrant and displaced communities with a means of cultural pedagogy and of connection (Seller 1983). Perhaps the only Latino/a playwright working in the first half of the twentieth

century who has garnered significant critical attention is Josefina Niggli, through her Mexican folk plays and theatrical accounts of the Mexican revolution. Niggli’s plays, such as The Cry of Dolores (1936) and This is Villa! (1938) provide accounts of nineteenth-century Mexican history and the Mexican revolution (Orchard and Padilla 2007). Though it is important to provide a history for teatro, this extended history can

only be anachronistically labeled Latino/a theater, as the term really did not come into wide practice until the mid-1990s. The initial resurgence of teatro in the mid1960s gains umbrella identity under the label Hispanic or Hispanic-American in the 1980s, concurrent with increased funding opportunities, and comes into its self-reflexive own as a broadly recognized category in the mid to late 1990s. The emergence in the mid-1960s can be traced to shifts in civil rights and immigration legislation as well as to broadening educational opportunities post-World War II that not only promoted theater as a means of social change, but also provided a broader communal, and eventually regional and national, infrastructure to explore the cultural imaginary of Latinos/as through the genre of theater. The 1965 birth of El Teatro Campesino (ETC) as the cultural arm of the United

Farm Workers (UFW) in support of their activism on behalf of farmworkers is often referred to as the birth of Chicano theater. The gradual emergence of collective teatros, followed the model of Luis Valdez’s adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s call for theater by, for, about, and near the people it serves. The primary genre, acto, a collectively created form, was codified in Valdez’s writing (Valdez 1990). As Yolanda Broyles-González (1994) and other scholars have explored, the roots of ETC’s stylized aesthetic was influenced by the Mexican carpa [tent] tradition of comedy as well as the intersection of Brecht and Cantinflas (a comedic Mexican actor famous for his word play and manipulation of underdog status). The acto’s primary goal was to make visible a social problem and consciously and explicitly pose a solution to the problem. The lack of resources led to what Tomás Ybarra-Frausto has called the “rasquachi aesthetic” in Chicano theater (in Huerta 2000: 183), making do with available materials as well as using the semiotic flexibility of the stage space, the ability to transform objects into other objects, to advance broader political claims. Actos such as Los Vendidos (1967), in which a salesman of used Mexicans attempts to

provide a brown face for Governor Reagan’s California, and Vietnam Campesino (1970), which draws direct parallels between the plight of farmworkers in the US and in Vietnam, demonstrated the political range of the actos as ETC separated from the UFW. During the 1970s, the teatro structure spread into various community and insti-

tutional spaces in California, the Southwest, and the Midwest with groups such as Teatro de la Esperanza in Santa Barbara, Su Teatro in Denver, and Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo in Gary, Indiana. This burgeoning network was supported and fostered by the work of the umbrella organization, TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), intended to enhance creative development through sharing scripts, networking, and festivals. TENAZ festivals were powerful events for development and training as well as collectively negotiating Chicano theater as a movement. Contestations emerged powerfully in the 1974 Festival del Quinto Sol in Teotihuacán just outside of Mexico City where Luis Valdez and ETC were critiqued by some of their fellow Chicano and Latin American artists for their deployment of religious symbolism and mythology in La Gran Carpa de los Rasquachis. Critics claimed ETC had shifted away from the social analysis of the original acto structure toward more spiritually oriented projects, such as the mito, which was intended to acknowledge Chicano reality as spiritual and mythical as well as material. Valdez’s critics considered this a sellout while Valdez believed that the Chicano teatros needed to develop their own specific and organic language for revolution (Martínez 2006). Despite these and other controversies, TENAZ continued to provide a support network into the early 1980s. The late 1960s and 1970s also saw the creation of a number of theaters in New

York City: International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR) in 1966, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre (PRTT) in 1967 and Repertorio Español in 1968. This wave was followed by a second surge of theaters in the late 1970s on a broader scale, including Teatro Avante in Miami in 1979 and Pregones Theater in the Bronx in 1979. These theaters increasingly adapted to the demand for Hispanic-American plays, though often thinking broadly about transnational Latino cultural production as a means of generating and sustaining audiences. This tension continues to exist within the space of Latino/a theater festival programming, where the local is often perceived as less compelling or financially viable than the international companies from Latin America. This tension between the local and the global heightens the political necessity of the category US Latinos/as, a problematic distinction that preserves the specific legacies of political and racial discrimination within the US while ostensibly restricting the understanding of migratory transnational flows that shape cultural production. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a different model of teatros developed, many emerging from the work of professional artists combining their investment in the community with interest in a professionalized institutional homemore closely mirroring the practices of regional theaters. The urban Puerto Rican in New York was first dramatically analyzed on the island

in the traditional language of theatrical realism by René Marqués. His play, La Carreta (1953), traces the gradual urbanization of the jíbaro (rustic peasant) figure, moving from rural Puerto Rico to San Juan, and from there to New York City, where at each migratory turn his life decreases in value – a pessimistic account of the

destructive forces of mechanization and urbanization on classical Puerto Rican culture. Miriam Colón and the PRTT’s bilingual production of La Carreta/The OxCart traveled throughout the Bronx in the summer of 1967 and clearly demonstrated the importance of representing both the inherent bilinguality of New York Puerto Rican life and the meaningful possibilities of community formation (Antush 1994). As the politicized identity formations of the late 1960 and 1970s led to more aggressive articulations of the uniqueness of Puerto Rican identity, manifest through the Young Lords, the idea of the Nuyorican, of the inventive poetic language of the streets, emerged as a means of thinking critically about what it meant to be a Puerto Rican in New York City. The first New York Puerto Rican (Nuyorican) play to receive national attention

was Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes (1974), which began under the auspices of Marvin Félix Camillo’s ensemble of former inmates, The Family, and won the 1974 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Set in the day room of a house of detention, Short Eyes employs the neo-Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action to chart the disruption and deadly expulsion of a white pederast introduced into the delicate balance of a multi-racial prison space with its own program of behavior. Piñero’s successful focus on an urban underclass and its life and behavior was influential not only on subsequent Nuyorican writing for the theater, but also on the broader acceptance of a literary movement attached to the everyday urban rhythms of spoken word. One figure often elided in accounts of Latino/a theater in the 1970s is Maria Irene

Fornes. In many senses the best-known and most prolific Latina playwright (she herself would use the term Hispanic to talk about the shared playwriting aesthetic she is considered to have fostered), her status as a Latina playwright is contested because only her early work and her work after the mid-1980s reflects the “for” and “about” elements of Valdez’s manifesto. Her best-known play of the 1970s, Fefu and Her Friends (1977), is often considered a feminist play as it recounts a day in the life of several women in 1930s New England, but there is no explicit Latina sensibility. Consequently, many critics hesitate to label her a Latina playwright until the 1980s, through her powerful influence as the director and teacher of the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights Lab where she taught a generation of Latino/a playwrights, including Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Oliver Mayer, and others to listen to their own voices. Her plays from the mid-and late 1980s increasingly engage with Cuban subject matter and broader Latin American and Latino/a concerns, including the 1984 musical drama Sarita, the oft-anthologized The Conduct of Life (1985) about the impact of torture on everyday lives, and the later Letters from Cuba (2000). Her dramatic output precociously and pragmatically puts into question the ease with which the label Latino/a theater can be assumed based on subject matter, and her biography, as a Cuban-born woman whose first love was visual art and who developed into a theater artist in the midst of 1960s New York experimental work, is a productive reminder of the multiple possibilities for teatro artists. As a central force in the Off-off Broadway spaces of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, it is crucial to think about her work in its entirety, anticipating questions at the turn of the twenty-first century from Latino/a playwrights, many of them her students, expanding their concerns beyond the bounds of those traditionally recognized as Latino/a. Other

important Cuban exilic and Cuban-American playwrights include figures such as Dolores Prida, with plays such as Beautiful Señoritas (1977) and Botánica (1991), and Matías Montes Huidobro. The other fundamental production of the 1970s is Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1978),

the most successful Chicano play of all time (and, as of 2011, touring Latin America in Spanish translation after a successful production in Mexico City). The play, based on the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots in 1940s Los Angeles, is a musical exploration shaped by interchanges between Hank Reyna and his alter ego, El Pachuco. Employing period dance, music, and costumes, the work not only highlights two crucial discriminatory moments in Los Angeles history, but also explores the possibility of individual and collective agency through the dramaturgical control manifest by El Pachuco. Broyles-González (1994) provides a detailed analysis of the massive reception of this work in Los Angeles, which subsequently moved to the Wintergarden Theater on Broadway where it had limited success. Regardless, this piece is seen as a watershed moment in a narrative of Chicano theater in which there is a shift from collective, more community-based work, to an explicit engagement with the expectations and institutions of mainstream theater (Huerta 2000). In the 1980s, increased support from the National Endowment for the Arts helped

push some teatros toward an increasingly professionalized structure, but lack of sustained investment sometimes set these groups adrift, stuck between their initial location within the community and external and internal desires to broaden their audience base. With increased interest in the national discourse of multiculturalism, increased funding from non-profit foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, regional theaters began receiving support to bring in Latino/a playwrights to write and produce work. Newsweek and Coors considered the 1980s the “Decade of the Hispanic,” a label that both effectively raised the national visibility of Latinos/as and pre-emptively shaped regional audience expectations. While thematic investments during the 1970s were about establishing a cultural space for the voices of Latinos/as, cultural openings enabled by the influence of multicultural politics in the 1980s placed playwrights in a double bind of representation, satisfying regional audiences with recognizable cultural materials, while simultaneously questioning the assumptions grounding these expectations (Rossini 2008). In 1981, INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights Lab began to develop young writers, and

in 1986, South Coast Repertory Hispanic Playwright’s project emerged to help develop Hispanic playwrights, investments that fostered training and opportunities for Latino/a playwrights. While some publication of plays occurred in journals and in Chicano/a publishing spaces from the early 1970s, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a relative flowering for the publication of Latino/a plays, an increasing number of single author collections and anthologies by Bilingual Review Press and, most importantly, Arte Público Press, which published collections by Estela Portillo Trambley, Carlos Morton, Miguel Piñero, Dolores Prida, Luis Valdez, and others. In 1987, Theatre Communications Group published On New Ground: Con-

temporary Hispanic-American Plays (Osborn 1987). This “mainstream publication” brought together the work of Fornes, Lynne Alvarez, John Jesurun (sometimes characterized more as an experimental media artist than a playwright), Eduardo

Machado, José Rivera, and Milcha Sánchez-Scott. Sánchez-Scott’s Roosters was “the first play about Chicana/os to be published in American Theatre magazine, which accounts for its broad visibility” (Huerta 2000: 113). Her use of magical realism was not inconsequential in creating an audience expectation for this aesthetic in “Hispanic” drama. José Rivera’s The House of Ramón Iglesia (1983) is a realist drama that engages the generational anxiety about Puerto Rican migration from the island. Rivera’s work evolved, as did many of his contemporaries, into employing aesthetics that opened up the category of realism through poetic language and concept while simultaneously sustaining a social consciousness about poverty and homelessness in works such as Each Day Dies With Sleep (1990) and Marisol (1992). Marisol’s exploration of poverty, homelessness, and identity in an apocalyptic New York has received the most critical attention and Rivera’s more recent works range from the quasi-historical The School of the Americas (2006), describing the final days of Che Guevara, to the conceptual Sonnets for an Old Century (2000), in which the characters are allowed to speak their piece at some moment between life and death. His Boleros for the Disenchanted (2008) returns to a more personal subject, moving from Puerto Rico in the first act to Alabama 40 years later to show the beginning and the end of a love story. This work reflects the continued investment of Puerto Rican playwrights, such as Carmen Rivera, in the complex relationship to Puerto Rico as a homeland and place for return. Eduardo Machado’s work also received initial national attention with this pub-

lication. Broken Eggs (1984) is chronologically the fourth in his Floating Islands plays, which were produced as a group at the Mark Taper in 1994 and follow a family through pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and exilic Cuban history. Machado’s influence also stems from his stint as the director of INTAR and teaching playwriting at Columbia University. More recent plays, such as The Cook (2003) and Kissing Fidel (2005), explore the misunderstandings, cultural conflicts and emotional investments that continue to haunt Cubans in the US, which become increasingly complex as the possibility of temporarily returning to Cuba to visit becomes a reality during the special period (the economic changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union) and beyond. These latter works are a part of a shift in Cuban-American playwriting, exemplified by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, in which questions of racial identification are increasingly troubled (echoed in Chicano theater in the work of Oliver Mayer) along with a more complex historical understanding of the dynamics of the Cuban-American experience and Latin American politics more broadly. The anthology Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women (Feyder 1992) con-

tinued a process begun in the late 1970s by the group Women in Teatro to acknowledge the contribution of Chicana and Latina playwrights. Plays by Caridad Svich, Cherríe Moraga, Migdalia Cruz, and Josefina López, all students of Fornes, joined plays by Diana Sáenz and Edit Villarreal in this collection. These playwrights have taken central roles through the 1990s and beyond, with the growth of Latina theater serving as a central catalyst for artistic and critical development throughout the 1990s. While shifts in border policy and the signing of NAFTA led to increased attention on the US-Mexico border and the special period in Cuba, the 1990s were also a period of increasing heterogeneity within Latino/a theater.