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Mission
| History | Current Initiatives | |
U.S. Polyglot Latino Theatre and
its Link to the Americas1
by Caridad Svich
‘Political upheaval and emigration are
cornerstones of our
experience.
Our identities are constantly examined
because we exist as
‘the other’ in the U.S.2
In the U.S. the Latino population
(which is comprised of Latinos, Latin Americans, immigrants, exiles, refugees,
border peoples, and rafters) is the “largest minority”, and yet
many are working below the poverty level without health benefits, and often at
great personal risk, especially in jobs that require hard labor. Latino/a
voices are heard most consistently by and large under the cultural
“radar”, rather than above it, except for in the fields of music,
fiction, visual arts, and film, where the high-octane pop quotient of Latino
work has become a veritable brand. The contemporary forcefield
of the ruling culture moreover continues to determine the Latino as a racialized Other whose ethnicity is superficially marked by
language, fashion, and cuisine, and whose best use is toward the
advancement of a market-driven economy. The unstable ontological space
characterized by double-ness that is endemic of U.S. Latino/a movement and
text-based work is glossed over in favor of surface readings of texts by
audiences and producers habituated to presenting the work, if at all, within
the confines of Other-ness. Unequal control over the media and its
disseminating systems of symbols, thus, perpetuates the problematic status of
Latino writing for the theatre in particular, save for rare cases.
Practitioners have little say as to how their work will be marketed for an
audience, and ultimately how the work will be represented historically, regardless
of whether it is deemed as belonging inside or outside the canon. If during the
first height of Latino theatrical consciousness in the U.S., the era of Luis
Valdez’ Zoot Suit (1978) and Miguel Piñero’s Short
Eyes (1974), the possibility of fair representation seemed within reach,
today that possibility is elusive at best, despite accepted cultural signs that
point to the contrary. For, in truth, U.S. Latino drama, which is every day not
only more and more polyethnic but polyglot in nature,
is at a significant crossroads in its development, presentation, and
dissemination.
Although the second Latino cultural
“boom” of the 1980s and early 1990s has ostensibly resurfaced in
the new third “boom” predicted to occur after Nilo
Cruz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for Anna in the Tropics, producers at arts venues across the U.S. have
continued to exercise caution in their programming selections. U.S. stages do
not represent the depth and scope of the work made by U.S. Latino theatre
practitioners in spite of the fact that the work is remarkably diverse in form
and content, geographic, and regional specificity, and in its bodily embrace of
sexuality and difference. Culturally dominant venues (and thus those covered
most visibly by the mainstream press, and later codified by the academic press)
slot a Latino play irregularly at best, and then often in the most patronizing
circumstances. Thus, despite good intentions, Latino work is still viewed and
received primarily as “alien.” This has enabled many alternative
theatre and performance practitioners to use the term “alien” (with
its accrued cultural, political, psychological, spatial, and sexual
definitions) to create work that is alternately playful and passionate in
opposition to the delegation of their beings to either the Anglophone curio
cabinet or a status of statelessness.
Recuperating tropicalist stereotypes of the
erotic Latin body, and marking their territory in rebellion to the power
dynamics that designate what belongs in the center and what fits in the margin
of global culture, alternative Latino theatre practitioners, particularly those
who refuse to participate in the marketing of their work to fit a neatly
pre-prescribed sociological agenda, are engaged in the active restructuring of
not only the form and content of their work, but also its place in culture as a
whole. Nevertheless the troubling fact remains that to either be alien or alienated are still the politically operative
choices for U.S. Latinos in theatre.
Much of this has to do with the
changing map of Anglo to Latino consciousness in the U.S. and its growing
disaffection generation to generation from its neighbors across the border and
the Americas. The fact that we are living in one hemisphere is politically
obscured by the harsh reality of immigration controls, the tightening of asylum
requirements, and motions to now complete the border fence between California
and Mexico. It is also enforced by a pervasive sense of divisiveness
complicated by both the left and right’s political machines, whose
tormented co-dependent relationship ever since the Cold War has exacerbated the
willful use of power north and south of the border. If the American voice (and
by American I mean in this instance, the U.S. voice) is a “mask,”
as sociologist Constance Rourke so eloquently
remarked in her early landmark study of the U.S. national character American Humour,
then it is a mask adept at hiding not only the local colours
of its voice but also its face.[i]
This mask has served the U.S. for good and ill ever since pioneer days, and it
has been instrumental in its march toward progress. In fact, part of the act of
assimilation and its performance is attributed to how well the émigré adopts
the U.S. “deadpan” mask. This poker face, which hides vengeance,
violence, and greed, also hides warmth, tenderness, and compassion. The
survivalist face, thus, is one that erases its emotive properties and can even
in extreme circumstances erase its ethnicity.
Latino theatre practitioners and
especially those in performance have used this mask, to use Rourke’s
phrase, as a “portable heirloom.” Whether they are children or
grandchildren of émigrés who evince strong cultural ties to Latin America, or
are multiple-hybrid citizens moving freely among various cultures, the inheritance
that is shared and commented upon in their work continually spins on the axis
of how they have made use of this affective legacy. Unframing
the discussion of their work from anthropological terms, these practitioners
who are born into two if not three languages, and swear themselves as artists
into another, find connections in the intermingling, in the creolization,
of immediate, oral, idiomatic forms and centrist, impersonal, technocratic ones
as well as the intermingling of bodies on stage and in their texts. Putting on
the heirloom and taking it off is only one part of the act; the other is
showing what’s present behind the heirloom, and even how the heirloom has
traveled and been adopted or discarded from country to country. But nationalist,
and more particularly, nativist sentiments have
interrupted this artistic passage. As international visa controls have become
more strict, and a U.S. Latino culture has begun to shape itself along
exceptional, unique lines in order to be heard midst the impossibility of a
true democratic oasis, Americanness has been co-opted
as a singularly U.S. term that excludes Canada, Mexico, and the rest of the
Americas that stretch to the South Pole.
Cultural exchange has diminished,
thus, especially over the last twenty years or so for myriad political,
cultural, and economic reasons, making the U.S.’ link to its neighbors
and compadres
in Central and South America more fragile than it should be. Ironically,
however, the illegal, profit-making exchange of cocaine, for instance, the
precious “white stuff” that trails across Latin America from the
valleys of Peru to the poorest sections of Rio de Janeiro, has increased
threefold causing significant environmental damage to our sister countries, who
are ravaged by political instability and a mutually beneficial
government-to-drug trader illegal economy fueled by a violent, rogue mentality.
The U.S.’ demand for cocaine, and it is in the US where the demand is the
greatest according to studies released early in 2005, grows exponentially while
the demand for listening and witnessing the voices of native, displaced, or
hyphenated American artists from Latino and transnational neighborhoods across
the U.S., Central, South America, and the Caribbean grows less.
“Make sure your play has lots of magic,
cause that’s what a Latino play is,” a theatre producer said to me
not long ago. As writers born into our Latinidad or
of Latino heritage, we all have inherited somehow the peculiar dilemma of
having to answer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ magic realism. Instead of serving as imaginative
models of liberation, Marquez’ work and that of other master storytellers
have been used to limit Latino writers in their range of expression. The devil
of censorship is less markedly visible here than in our sister countries, but
it does exist and indeed plays a role in not only the way U.S. Latino stories
are perceived, but how they are written and revived.
In the last
four years alone, notable U.S. programs devoted to the development and showcasing
of the Latino/a theatrical voice have been cut: South Coast Repertory
Theatre’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, and Mark Taper Forum’s
Latino Theatre Initiative (as well as all its other programs of
diversity). The Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Los
Angeles, which was created with the sole purpose of presenting Latino work, has
shut down. Longstanding theatre company INTAR in New York City is undergoing
not only a change in leadership but also a significant financial crisis. On
television, news stories from Latin America and about U.S. Latinos is 14% of
all coverage in both cable and network programming, even though population
demographic figures assert that one in seven residents of the U.S. is Latino.
Budget cuts
and increasing right-centred conservatism may be to
blame for the lack of crucial support of Latino programming in the media at a
level commensurate with the population growth and the rise in Spanish and Spanglish as second languages in the U.S., but an unspoken
restriction placed upon the content and form of Latino writing is more at issue
here. The complex, neo-baroque nature of Latino work and playwriting
specifically goes against the lesspluralistic view of
pictorial, emotional, and verbal languages preferred in U.S. Anglophone
narratives. The fusion of Iberian, African, and indigenous origins shared by
tens of millions reflected in Latino theatre’s transformative template is
misunderstood and islabeled by U.S. critics and
audiences. Latino writing, for example, is at its best African, Taino, Mayan, Mapache, Aztec, Guarani, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as
Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Nuyorican,
and Aboriginal; yet in a country where Native American stories are treated as
“foreign,” how can Latino linguistic and political experiences
north and south of the border as represented in the theatre and other genres be
fully or partially recognized by those who witness them? If the U.S. national
character seeks the deadpan as its most idealized mask, its most American face,
how can it accommodate the stories told through a necessarily syncretic lens, one that refuses the erasure at the heart
of the making of such a character? Retrieval and recovery becomes the
predominant methodology for Latino artists in the telling and shaping of their
stories. Bricolage is the modus operandi on the page
as well as in the structuring of the urban neighborhood, as artists and
citizens use largely recycled materials from different sides of the borders to
reclaim and proclaim their identities. Thus, local histories and performance
traditions are recuperated midst polycultural and polylingual theatrical mash-ups, which speak directly to
the ongoing project of what America means.
Unmapping corners of the national psyche, Latino drama in
the U.S. insists upon portraying its citizens outside the comfort of their own
commonwealth, or at very least stranded in its limitations. Sometimes the
stories move on a straight line and sometimes they zigzag and turn cartwheels
in time and space. Comfortably plural in their disposition toward language,
culture and identity, formally diverse writers such as Oliver Mayer, Naomi Iizuka, Jose Rivera and Alejandro Morales, for example, are
engaged in a deep understanding and explication of the fact that Latinos love
and perform in more than one language or nation. Latino dramatists have learned
from Calderon de la Barca and Lope de Vega, as well
as from Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard,
Miguel Piñero, Luis Valdez, and Maria Irene Fornes. There is no reducible essence to Latinidad.
U.S. Latino theatre is due for a major
revival, one that will inform the younger generation of what came before so
they will continue the evolution of the theatre. Where is the allstar revival of Short
Eyes, for instance, now that there have been revivals of A Raisin in the Sun, Twelve Angry Men, and several recent re-stagings of A Glass
Menagerie, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Streetcar Named Desire? Where are the starry revivals of Zoot Suit, Abingdon Square, Promenade,
and Roosters, for that matter, so we
can better understand where Eduardo Machado, Jose Rivera, Oliver Mayer, Nilo Cruz, Migdalia Cruz, Octavio Solis, Anne Garcia-Romero, Bernardo Solano, Naomi Iizuka, Ricardo Bracho, Jorge
Ignacio Cortiñas, Luis Alfaro, and Cherrie Moraga (to
name only a few of many talented writers)?
Latino playwrights are eternally on
the border, straddling boundaries, and wondering if they fit in, if they want
to fit in, and if so, why, and what can be gained by doing so beyond a little
more significant cash in their pockets at the end of the day. Moreover, who is
it that they are writing for? In effect, who is their audience?
This last question seems to be
the most crucial if Latino theatre is to be truly re-mapped in the United
States. For a long time, fellow practitioners have been the audience, not the
secular folk out there who buy tickets. The other audience for Latino work has
been primarily comprised of producers and funders,
who graciously and patiently have viewed the works as eternally
“in-progress” and/or as beautiful freaks that need to be watched
over carefully lest they cause too much havoc. In between, there has existed a
floating audience of arts patrons, Anglo Latinophiles,
academics, and curious spectators willing to gamble on Latino playwriting
talent to see what will come of it. But now, even with multiple stagings of Anna in
the Tropics at regional theatres across the U.S., Latino dramatists are
still writers in search of an audience. And unless they move into the more
precarious and potentially rewarding worlds of film, pop music, hip-hop and/or rock en español,
the subterranean culture of theatrical invisibility will continue.
Bridging the divide, if not
eliminating the divide altogether, is the common goal. Yet no clear-cut
strategies are in place to help the writers do so beyond the haven offered by
the academy in terms of research and production, and the humble reward of the
printed page where these voices have the possibility of living longer than on
the U.S. or even the world stage. Two generations of dramatists have already
spent years creating and producing work. In so doing, they have carved out an
idiosyncratic place for it to live in the fractured and continually fractious
U.S. landscape that is marked by a stubbornly binary public cultural discourse.
These American dramatists have been poised time and again for mainstream glory
with all the ostensible goodies such glory would afford. They have taken their
work uptown and downtown and even back to the streets, while the climate of
privatization has encroached upon the arts ever so steadily. As we look now at
the magnificent map they have already made, it is time to realign and redraw
the coordinates of their visions, so that their work is not taken out of their
hands through censorship, the demands of living as part of the peasant class,
or spirit-sucking enterprises that disable their ability to dream.
If as Latino theatre
practitioners, as hemispheric artists, we take the step toward reconfiguring
who we are now and who we want to be (and not who we want to be like), we will
be able to fight the racism against dreaming that permeates U.S. culture, and
offer the full measure of who we are as artists, thinkers, and citizens in
this, our baby America.