ABSTRACT
At an international meeting in Montréal, Canada sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in June 2014, the internationally renowned Mexican playwright and theater artist, Jesusa Rodriguez and composer and singer Liliana Felipe, performed “Juana La Larga.” Rodriguez did a two-minute performance of a Japanese doctor in yellowface, complete with squinted eyes, protruding buck teeth, and a stereotypical “Asiatic” accent, inflection, and speech pattern. 1 This racial representation, along with a representation of a transgender subject, caused tremendous uproar among conference participants, and two separate meetings would follow to address these issues with the artists. In those discussions, Rodriguez expressed surprise at hearing that her performance of the Japanese doctor was offensive and racist, and she suggested that the performance was purely for comic relief. She had not heard the term “yellowface” before and suggested that a Mexican audience would have no objections to such a characterization. Enacting this kind of racial stereotype was not perceived as an issue, in her view (Siu, 2016).
