Before the middle of the twentieth century, the spaces of performance culture and performance practice that could be termed “Latino theatre” in the United States operated primarily in isolation from one another, and in modes that were highly idiosyncratic to those locations and their unique political, social, and cultural histories. From the middle of the nineteenth through to the early and mid-twentieth centuries, such theatrical and performance communities originated and developed in mostly heterogeneous and uneven ways in population centers as dissimilar, variegated, and far-flung as Mexican California (from Monterey, eventually to both Los Angeles and San Francisco), Arizona (Tucson) and Texas (San Antonio) to primarily Cuban and Puerto Rican locations on the East Coast (from Cuban Tampa to a more pan-Caribbean New York City). Over these many decades, the pre-history of what would eventually become a more consolidated, national Latino theatrical and performance cultural movement was characterized by a number of important struggles and challenges: these included negotiating language usage (that is, the shift in dominant or majority usage of Spanish to the same in English), transitioning from more characteristically immigrant practices retaining direct and living connections to countries and cultures of origin to practices more fully inscribed within (and assimilated into) dominant North American modes and contexts, choosing among a wide variety of available forms and genres (including “minor” forms such as revistas, zarzuelas, and actos, as well as the conventional “major” form of the obra, or play, including the musical play), operating across all the available modes of (in-)formality and (non-)professionalism, and, finally, emerging out of primarily localized and heterogeneous contexts of practice, into something even loosely resembling a singular national formation that, as recently as the early twenty-first century, refuses to let go entirely of its roots in local cultures and trans- and subnational practices, values, themes, interests, and movements.
By the 1950s and certainly into the 1960s, the seeds of what would become recognizable by century’s end as a national Latino theatrical and performance culture, and perhaps even a theatrical and performance project, were already becoming evident in the form of a number of important if apparently unrelated events with highly different yet equally relevant connections to the signature social and cultural movements of the times. For example, the arrival in New York City in 1953 of the young (and eventually legendary) Puerto Rican actress Miriam Colón, coinciding with the first production in the same city of Puerto Rican playwright René Márques’s play La Carreta, set an early stage for what would in the decades to come emerge as a vital and growing mainland Puerto Rican (or Nuyorican) influence on New York’s theatrical culture, on-, off- and off-off-Broadway, and in ways that would, thanks to New York City’s centrality to U.S. theatre, shine a national spotlight on many performers, writers, and other theatrical figures of Puerto Rican descent. Such a cultural history would both parallel and interact with the political history of Puerto Rico’s complicated colonial relationship with the United States, a history with a very direct impact upon the formation of a mainland Puerto Rican identity and the sociopolitical movement that would make significant contributions to the U.S. civil rights movement unfolding across the same decades. As the 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of performers like Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno as major stars of both theatre and film, they also saw the continuing interest in both Spanish- and English-language productions of La Carreta, arguably the first play to represent the Puerto Rican experience as simultaneously encompassing life both on and off the island. The establishment in 1967 by Colón and Roberto Rodríguez of The Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre saw the arrival of an influential New York City-based cultural institution that still operates successfully well into the twenty-first century.
Over the same decades, American theatrical culture would also begin to feel the impact and influence of another, quite distinct artist of Hispanic-Latina descent, the Cuban-born avant-garde playwright and director, María Irene Fornés. In 1957, Fornés returned to New York City after living for years in Paris, inspired by continental artistic and intellectual cultures, and especially by her encounter with the work of Samuel Beckett, to contribute her own unique, experimental innovations to (and radical deconstructions of) conventional theatrical practice and playwriting, which, by the 1965 appearance of pieces like The Successful Life of 3 and Promenade, commanded the attention of off-Broadway audiences and began her long streak of winning Obie Awards. Readers looking for explicitly legible Latino social or political themes in Fornés work might be frustrated by her highly abstract, strategically antirealist pieces, but across her career Fornés devoted a great deal of sustained attention to the explosively patriarchal gender politics of canonical theatre and cinema, producing some of the most inventive and subversive representations of women’s experiences and capacities in the North American theatrical tradition, highlighted in particular by her 1977 masterwork, Fefu and Her Friends. In addition, Fornés secured her theatrical legacy for future generations by teaching and mentoring some of the more prominent and influential Latina/o writers and artists to follow her into the world of U.S. theatre, and well beyond the confines of off-Broadway and New York; they include such notable artists as Eduardo Machado, Cherríe Moraga, Carmelita Tropicana, and Nilo Cruz. And while Machado, Tropicana, and Cruz, all artists (like Fornés) of Cuban descent, have produced considerable and important work that more accessibly explores what readers will recognize as a more conventional account of “Cuban-American” experience, Fornés’s own work, and the impressive narratives of her career and her life, are suggestive of the larger possibilities open to imaginative expression that refuses literal conformity to the admittedly compelling, and urgent, representational logics of American immigrant art and politics.
The 1960s and 1970s also saw a polar formation, on the opposite coast of the United States, and in a rural rather than an urban setting, and with a quite distinct relationship to the emerging politics of immigrant- and racial-minority themed movements for civil rights: the theatre-based cultural “arm” of César Chávez’s California-based, and primarily Mexican American or Chicano, United Farm Worker movement. Over the same years that Colón and her collaborators were enlivening Puerto Rican theatre in New York, and that Fornés was helping to recast and expand the reaches of dramatic and theatrical art from the same urban base, the Mexican American playwright and director Luis Valdez was beginning to realize a version of the Brechtian dream of a radically political theatre through his collaborations with Chávez, and in the service of educating, inspiring, and mobilizing the recently organized populations of Chicana/o seasonal and migrant farm workers laboring in the fields of California’s Central Valley. Himself the child of migrant farm workers, Valdez eventually attended San Jose State College (later San Jose State University), majoring in English and composing his earliest dramatic works, from one-acts to his first full-length play. By 1965, Valdez had returned to the valley of his youth, and committed himself to working with Chávez, by writing and producing mostly shorter pieces in the mode of agitprop, a highly political form of theatrical practice with roots in communist Russia and a long history of influence in both Europe and the United States through the mid-twentieth century. In the following years, Valdez and his collaborators would establish El Teatro Campesino, perhaps the most politically and historically influential Latina/o theatrical project of the latter twentieth century. That project would both extend and develop from Valdez’s early one-act, agitprop work to produce longer and eventually full-length dramatic pieces that covered an even wider scope of Mexican-American and Chicana/o life and culture, and at the same time serve as a template for the numerous local Chicana/o theater companies that would sprout and often thrive across the United States from the 1965 onward (including Seattle’s Teatro del Piojo, El Paso’s Teatro de los Pobres, Denver’s Su Teatro, and eventually Teatro Nacional de Aztlán, or TENAZ). Valdez can also be credited with articulating the vision shaping both his own career and the larger movement he helped to inaugurate, in his influential 1970 essay, “Notes on Chicano Theatre.” While Valdez’s career would eventually take him away from the valley where Teatro Campesino would establish its permanent and lasting home base, he would maintain direct ties with it even into the twenty-first century, returning often to both it and the central California region where his career began.
Regardless of all of his admittedly important impact across the long and (in 2017) ongoing course of his career, Luis Valdez’s primary contribution to the history of Latina/o theatre in the United States remains his extraordinary semi-musical, semi-mytho-graphic, pseudo-epic, documentary-historical play, Zoot Suit, which enjoyed its first and signature production at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum in 1978. The 1970s had, however, already seen the rise to public prominence of theatre artists like the Nuyorican playwright Miguel Piñero, whose play Short Eyes (1974) began its life in a prison drama workshop before the productions at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and eventually Broadway would command national and international attention. Valdez’s chief contributions through Zoot Suit were multiple, but they include: wrenching the focus of the U.S. theatrical consciousness away from New York City and to the West Coast; composing a piece whose ambitious use of music and dance to analyze critically the class- and racial-political causes of urban youth gangs and their criminalization responds directly to and corrects Broadway’s own canonical attempt at a similar depiction in West Side Story; and (among other techniques) basing his own narrative so closely on the actual historical details of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder and Zoot Suit Riots (which had occurred in the Los Angeles of the early 1940s) that audiences could not help but experience the kind of productively alienating, consciousness-raising shocks to their established worldviews that Bertolt Brecht (among others) demanded of the most politically engaged kind of theatre. Although the first New York production of Zoot Suit failed to reproduce the critical and commercial success of the debut run in Los Angeles, the 1981 film adaptation (also written and directed by Valdez) stands as a vivid testament to the inherent strengths of the piece, and the success of the Los Angeles run served as a watershed moment for the future proliferation of a Chicana/o and Latina/o-based theatrical culture in California’s largest city. In the course of the following two decades, metropolitan Los Angeles would see the emergence of a robust infrastructure to cultivate local Chicana/o and Latina/o theatrical and performance projects, supporting artists as varied in their practices as the performance troupe Culture Clash, the solo performance artist and all-around theatre impresario Luis Alfaro, the playwright and producer Josefina López, and the actor and performance artist Marissa Chibás; these artists and many others would enjoy a rich variety of popular and institutional support from community projects and professional spaces like the Mark Taper Forum, the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Hispanic Playwrights Project at the South Coast Repertory, Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights, and the Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.
If Valdez’s accomplishments from the 1960s into the 1980s can stand, even in 2015, as a kind of inaugural moment for a larger national Latina/o theatre movement that would no longer need to rely on the influence and authority of the New York “scene” to determine what could succeed and thrive beyond New York, much was also occurring from within to complicate the tenor and character of that scene over the same period. It would be difficult to imagine a more distinct trajectory of struggle and accomplishment to the one modeled by Valdez than the one that marks the career of Nuyorican playwright, poet, and actor Miguel Piñero. Having moved as a child from Puerto Rico to Manhattan in the early 1950s, Piñero spent much of his adolescence and early adult life fighting extreme poverty and the kind of profound social precarity that understandably leads to substance abuse and other forms of criminal behavior. It was actually while incarcerated for theft in the early 1970s that Piñero composed the first draft of what would become his one major play, the explosive prison drama Short Eyes (also adapted into a fine film by Robert Young in 1977). As the title suggests, the narrative focuses primarily on the fate of one prisoner whose charge of pedophilia marks him as the inevitable target of violence for all of his fellow inmates; but it also exploits that central conceit to explore the more extreme facets of raced, gendered, and classed power by making that pedophile character (like most of the guards) white, and by making most of the other prisoners either Latino or African American. Set as it is in the confines of a single setting, and populated as it is by a single-sex cast of characters, Short Eyes plays in spite of its brutal realism more like one of Fornés’s inventions of theatrical abstraction than like Valdez’s more directly representational and accessible modes of treating the politics of culture and identity. But, in many ways, the aesthetic commitments and strategic deployments of these three major figures, so foundational of the Latina/o theatrical world that would follow them, do neatly position them on a spectrum that begins with the more uncompromisingly formal interventions that we find in Fornés’s work from the early 1960s onward, through Piñero’s attempts to push at those modes of formal abstraction at least toward something more legibly allegorical, and finally toward the more variegated, full-bodied, and politically committed modes of theatrical and dramatic practice found in Zoot Suit and much of Valdez’s later work, especially but not only in film. Piñero, like Valdez, also had a hand in establishing an important cultural institution (the Nuyorican Poets Café, in 1973) supporting his particular community, and, also like Valdez, took serious advantage of the surrounding culture-industry infrastructure to pursue (in his case) a career in television acting. But Piñero finally could not overcome the tendencies toward self-destruction that haunted him much of his life; in 1988, he died of cirrhosis in New York City at the age of 41. As a legacy, however, Miguel Piñero has also left behind him both the play and film adaptation of Short Eyes, a collection of striking verse pieces in his inimitably poetic voice, some unfinished dramatic work, the inspiration for Piñero, a fine 2001 film by Leon Ichaso, and the ongoing life of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, where succeeding generations of writers, artists, performers, and poets continue to find a space for their work, and audiences for their voices.
As the progressive and left-wing civil rights, labor, and third-world nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s gave way in the 1980s to the late–Cold War age of Ronald Reagan and the national conservative political and cultural backlash he embodied, the heart of the Latina/o theatrical and performance cultures in the United States of the same period also shifted, expanded and variegated in response to, and sometimes even helping to drive, the changes emerging over that differently turbulent decade. Admittedly, while figures like Fornés, Piñero, and Valdez all in their own ways resisted as much as they flirted with the canonical modes of formal and professional theatre, the fact that all of their reputations rest in some part on works of theirs that enjoyed considerable success in those formal, professional circles, suggests that work remained to be done to forge modes of theatre and performance practice that could more effectively subvert and even explode the structures of hierarchy and exclusion that kept so many artists, especially those from the most excluded and vulnerable populations, from finding audiences for their work, and from securing the resources, and spaces, for the very production of that work. The 1980s figure, therefore, as the decade when previous modes of alternative, underground and avant-garde theatrical practice began to coalesce more visibly around a mode of practice that came to be known as performance art, and which in turn provoked the formation of a new scholarly and critical discipline that could produce a viable alternative knowledge about such practices, a discipline that eventually came to call itself performance studies. Performance art originates in and covers a bracingly wide array of modes of expressive practice, with as viable roots in, and links to, stand-up comedy, folk ritual, cabaret, drag, highly abstract modes of body- and gesture-oriented conceptual and installation art (bleeding more than occasionally into modes of experimental dance), as in and to all the conceivable modes of complex multimedia platforming (including film, television, and digital media) that the most inventive performer or performance group can throw onto whatever space can serve as a stage and for whatever grouping of gathered bodies can serve as an audience.
From the 1980s onward, performance art by Latina/o-identified practitioners and/or engaging Latina/o themes has taken root across the U.S. cultural landscape, including but not only in those metropolitan spaces that also serve as centers of more conventional theatrical practice as New York and Los Angeles. As represented by artists and collectives as varied as Harry Gamboa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gómez, Carmelita Tropicana, Vaginal Davis, Mónica Palacios, Culture Clash, El Vez, Coco Fusco, Adelina Anthony, and the Butchlalis de Panochtitlán, the post-1980 Latina/o American performance art project has for almost four decades now explored and exploded, rethought and un-thought, recovered and invented anew, all of the salient conditions and challenges of Latina/o experience as they shifted and evolved over that period, from the politics of gender and sexuality, to the failure of U.S. immigration policy (and its impact both for undocumented immigrants and for everyone else living in “border spaces” that far exceed the literal U.S.–Mexican political border), to the crisis of AIDS in all the U.S. queer and ethnic minority communities it ravaged, to the ongoing and increasingly pervasive Latina/o-ization of North American cultural, social, and political life in general. If the career of a performer like John Leguizamo can stand as perhaps the most spectacular example of someone’s rise from roots in this performance culture to the kind of “mainstream” success to which his three decades of work in film, television, and theatre can attest, we should also be mindful that often quite successful lifelong careers in theatre and performance do not rise as manifestly to popular consciousness. Luis Alfaro, for example, who has been working with consistent success as long as Leguizamo has, may not enjoy his peer’s public celebrity, but he has over the course of a thirty-plus-year career developed a body of work, from early solo performances coming right out of his experiences as a queer Chicano man living in an AIDS-ravaged community to differently ambitious theatrical projects, like the Latina/o-izing adaptations of Aeschylus’ Electra (Electricidad), Sophocles’ Oedipus (Oedipus el Rey) and Euripides’ Medea (Mojada) he developed in the early 2010s, that can stand on its own as a transformative contribution to U.S. theatre.
By the beginning of the 1990s, much of the infrastructural, foundational work that had characterized Latina/o theatre and performance practice in preceding decades began to coalesce in powerful ways. Alongside those developments in living culture, scholarly practices began at the same moment to both catch up with and parallel what was happening on the nation’s stages and performance spaces; major studies of both the long pre-history and exciting contemporary unfolding of Latina/o theatre and performance started to appear, in book form, in scholarly collections in major journals, as well as in a series of important, influential standalone articles by a growing population of scholars specializing in the fields in question. From Nicolás Kanellos’s A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (1990), to David Román’s Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (1998), to Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez’s José, Can You See: Latinos On and Off Broadway (1999), to José Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), to Jorge Huerta’s Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, Myth (2000), to Alicia Arrizón and Lillian Manzor-Coats’s Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory (2000), and to Arrizón’s own Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (1999), the 1990s proved to be as much a watershed moment for Latino theatre and performance studies as the 1970s and 1980s had been for Latina/o theatre and performance practice. Three exemplary threads proceeding from this larger process of cultural proliferation can together take the measure of the importance of the last decade of the twentieth century for setting the stage for what would happen after the turn to the twenty-first. These include: the proliferation of a new generation of twenty-first century Latina/o playwrights and theatre artists like the Pulitzer Prize-winners Nilo Cruz (in 2003, for Anna in the Tropics) and Quiara Alegría Hudes (in 2012, for Water by the Spoonful), but also counterparts of theirs like the Washington, DC-based Karen Zacarías, Ricardo Abreu Bracho (based in California and New York), Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas (New York) and Melinda Lopez (Boston), as well as solo performance artists like Quique Avilés (Washington, DC) and Adelina Anthony (San Antonio); the unprecedented critical and commercial success of the “Nuyorican” Broadway impresario Lin Manuel Miranda, especially thanks to his two major theatrical projects, the hip-hop inflected musical plays, In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015); and the ongoing infrastructural, institutional work of projects like INTAR in New York City and the Latino Theater Company in Los Angeles.
The historical “turn” into the twenty-first century saw U.S. Latino life, and U.S. Latino theatre practice, dominated by a handful of compelling themes. Following the Immigration Reform and Control Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, and through the series of aggressive anti-immigrant ballot propositions in California in the 1990s, and through the conversion of the Immigration and Naturalization Service into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the establishment of a new Department of Homeland Security (which houses ICE), through to the controversy surrounding (among others) Arizona’s own anti-immigrant SB 1070 legislation of 2010 and finally to DACA, Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the dynamics of both federal and state-specific forms of immigrant legislation, and immigration policy more generally, have directly and indirectly conditioned most Latinos’ sense of legitimate political and cultural belonging to U.S. life, and this without any single necessary relationship to any given family’s or individual’s actual legal status in the United States. By the run-up to the presidential elections of 2016, the national discourse around immigration tends to conflate not only “immigrant” with “illegal,” but also “immigrant” with “Latino”; for this reason, a large majority of U.S. Latinos support comprehensive immigration reform with a path toward citizenship for the many millions of people living in the United States without proper documentation, and this without any direct reference to their own legal status. In addition, early twenty-first century U.S. Latinos also face in their own unique ways many of the other economic, social, and political challenges that have colored life in the United States in that volatile era, encompassing: the 2001 terrorist attacks and the ensuing “Wars,” on Terror, on Drugs, and in Afghanistan and Iraq; the financial, cultural, and community damage inflicted by the economic meltdown of 2008 and 2009 and the increases in income and opportunity inequality that followed; the violently negative and disproportional impacts of both mass incarceration and mass deportation on Latino communities and families across the United States; the ongoing harm of persistent structural and institutional biases regarding race, class, gender, and gender expression, sexuality and physical ability that disproportionally impact the most vulnerable members of society; and, at the same time, a measure of positive social, political, and economic mobility for those Latinos fortunate enough to be able to seize upon opportunities, especially but not exclusively through higher education, to access forms of material and symbolic “capital” that can lead to greater political enfranchisement, and increasing cultural influence.
One significant indication of this increasing cultural influence can be found in the two Pulitzer Prize–winning theatrical works written by Latina/o playwrights and spanning the near-decade between 2003 and 2012. It would be difficult to imagine two more dissimilar plays than Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics (2003) and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful (2012), but together these two remarkable pieces suggest everything about the rich complexity of Latino life in the United States, and far beyond the quality of that life in the decade (and even century) of their appearance. Of the two, Anna in the Tropics might seem superficially to be the more conservative or perhaps more conventional. Like its predecessors Short Eyes (by Miguel Piñero) and Real Women Have Curves (by Josefina López), Cruz’s Anna also benefits from the effect of dramatic compression that can come from setting almost all of the play’s action in one space, here a 1920s cigar factory in Tampa, Florida’s, Ybor City, and over a brief span of time. Unlike its predecessors, however, Anna in the Tropics features characters of both genders, and indeed makes gender and sexuality politics one prominent thematic axis, the other being the combustion of cultural and material politics as they play out in the larger context of the U.S. immigrant narrative. By setting his play as distantly in the past as the Roaring Twenties and the ensuing Great Depression, and by devoting much of its action to a debate between tradition and modernity in the conduct of both a business’s manufacture of its product (cigars) and the cultural practices overlaying that manufacture (the Cuban use of “lectores,” or readers, to entertain and inform workers as they rolled those cigars), Cruz can be charged with indulging a certain degree of uncritical nostalgia for a romanticized past that might predictably appeal to a “mainstream” theatre audience’s predilection for an exoticized and sentimentalized latinidad. Cruz, however, clearly has other concerns in mind as his story and his stagecraft unfold. Setting his tale well before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, for example, Cruz can sidestep any direct reference to or engagement with the defining political tension in post-revolution and post-exile Cuban American life, at the same time that his play is deeply concerned with the spiritual and ethical demands, as well as the spiritual and ethical costs, of sacrificing everything to the brutal materialism of capitalist ambition in its most nakedly greedy mode. At the same time, the performance-within-the-performance of the “lector” character Juan Julián’s reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the factory workers, and the corollary depiction of the workers’ readerly consumption of Tolstoy’s story, replete with their attempts to make sense of their own modest but complicated lives in terms of those of Anna’s tragic Russian aristocrats, tells us that we are in the hands of a playwright who knows how to exploit the impressive resources of postmodern literary inter-textuality in the handling of artistic material. Layer over this the almost didactic passages where characters inform one another, and the play’s audience, of the deep indigenous ritual powers of cigar-smoking, and Cruz fully rehearses in the complexity of his own stagecraft the contemporary tensions between (post)modernity and tradition, tensions that analogously drive the conflicts between characters, and the dialectic of themes, coursing through Anna’s story.
A decade later, the Philadelphia-born, Puerto Rican-descended playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes opened for her audience a new world of alternative imaginative possibilities by setting a significant amount of the “action” in 2012’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Water by the Spoonful in cyberspace, namely in a sobriety chat room managed by one of her characters and inhabited by several others. If Cruz’s play finds its home in the tension between cultural tradition and capitalist modernity, Hudes’s play lands squarely in the vexed space of its own contemporaneity. The second installment in a masterful trilogy of plays centering on the character of Elliot Ortiz (a Philadelphia-born, Puerto Rican-descended Iraq War vet and aspiring actor loosely based on one of Hudes’s own relatives), Water by the Spoonful tackles by turns and through effective strategies of dramatic synthesis issues as alive in the second decade of the twenty-first century as: the massive harm, and possible recovery and survival, from substance abuse and addiction experienced by all sectors of U.S. society; the negative legacies of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the service members, many of them working-class young people of color, who fought them and returned to suffer afterward, often from both physical and psychological injury; and the stakes and wages of identity, certainly for traditional immigrant communities with ambiguous and often precarious relationships with more stable and official forms of political and cultural citizenship, but also for anyone who has ever ventured online into spaces where virtual anonymity and virtual play allow for an infinite variety of opportunities for self-reinvention and alternative social interaction, and in settings where that interaction can include participants scattered over the entire globe even as they “meet” in virtual spaces like Recovertogether.com. While one of Water’s narrative axes involves a set of familial tensions that set the character Elliot, his cousin Yazmin, and their mothers Ginny and Odessa on a course to come to terms with the tragic fallout of Odessa’s crack addiction, a difficult process of forgiveness and near-redemption that will require the two cousins coming to a moment of crisis and breakthrough on the island, the other axis hovers in cyberspace, and because of that can reach beyond Philadelphia, where the recovering Odessa manages her sobriety chatroom using the alias “haikumom,” and can include members as far-flung and anonymous as “chutes&ladders” (an African-American man who works for the IRS in San Diego) and “orangutan” (a young Japanese-American woman searching for her birth mother in Japan). All three plays in what is called the “Elliot Trilogy” can stand alone as independent pieces, and across them Hudes manages to employ quite startlingly different kinds of narrative structure and to explore a vast range of thematic obsessions, but they also work together to form one of the more ambitious projects of dramatic storytelling on the part of a Latina/o artist since the Cuban-American playwright Eduardo Machado’s quartet of Floating Island Plays from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A similarly “monumental” ambition can be found in the career projects of two additional prize-winning Latina/o theatre artists who have arguably hit their stride or indeed just come into prominence in the early decades of the twenty-first century: the MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipients Luis Alfaro (1997) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (2015). Roughly a generation apart in age, Alfaro (born 1963) and Miranda (born 1980) together can help us appreciate the challenge and the necessary complexity of approach that confront any attempt to summarize Latina/o theatre practice in the United States in the mid 2010s as anything coalescing toward a coherent national project. While Alfaro’s roots in theatre practice go back to the 1980s and remain more or less anchored on the West Coast, primarily in Los Angeles, the queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and theatre impresario has forged an important career primarily by fusing his creative enterprise with an activist practice that both turns to local communities of color across the country to find inspiration and to serve as laboratories for his work, and takes the opportunity of his collaborations with established theatre companies across the country to connect them more directly with their own local communities of color. This can be seen most starkly in the development of Alfaro’s monumental trilogy of Chicano-themed theatre pieces based on some of the most canonical tragedies of Greek antiquity: Electricidad (2004, based on Aeschylus’ Electra), Oedipus el Rey (2010, based on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King), and Mojada (2015, based on Euripides’ Medea). In each of these pieces, Alfaro demonstrates how the primal human urgency driving such challenging issues in contemporary Latino life as gang violence, mass incarceration, and undocumented immigration can find compelling translation in the terms of ancient, equally primal, equally violent, equally human tragedy. In Oedipus el Rey, for example, Alfaro alternates his narrative between the gang-dominated neighborhoods of East Los Angeles and the state prison in California’s Central Valley that houses many male inmates from the kin and gang networks of the civilian characters in Los Angeles. Struggles for power, declarations and betrayals of family and gang loyalty, and the twists of narrative and existential fate that befall the piece’s main characters all propel Alfaro’s rendition toward the same tragic, bloody outcomes that befell the more famous characters in Sophocles’ work. Transposing onto the brutal contemporary realism of Alfaro’s depictions of gang and prison life some of the formal elements of classical tragedy, especially, for example, the use of a chorus of tattooed and uniformed male prisoners who recite verse lines in a hypnotic, staccato rhythm, and the dispensation of historically realistic stage settings at times in favor of more abstract, hallucinatory uses of stage design, costuming, and props, Oedipus el Rey fuses the present and the past, reality and myth, stereotype and archetype, in ways that contribute directly to the piece’s overall effect on its audience, an effect that refuses any easy dissociation of the chaotic force of contemporary violence from the anything-but-chaotic, ritual, ceremonial and even stylized, aesthetic intensity of lives so materially, erotically, and spiritually constrained.
More than a decade into the twenty-first century, Latino theatrical practice and Latino theatrical culture in the United States have made important strides toward at least establishing a more prominent national status thanks to the contribution of artists as dispersed and mobile on the national scene as Cruz, Hudes, and Alfaro, as well as many of their contemporaries. If these creative, cultural, and institutional practices have yet to coalesce meaningfully into anything one might want to characterize as a focused, coherent, and organized national project, signs at least exist into 2017 that U.S. Latino theatre’s best days lie ahead of it. Perhaps the most prominent example of such hope-inspiring work looms in the successful Broadway-based career of the actor, singer, composer, and all-around theatrical impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose two major productions, the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning In the Heights (2008, with a book by Hudes) and the explosively successful and transformational Hamilton (2015) have not only made their mark thanks to unprecedented critical and commercial success, but have done so while adhering uncompromisingly (each in its own way) to a vision of U.S. political, social, and cultural life within which Latinos and other people of color figure not just prominently but centrally. Miranda’s achievements, already well documented but still mostly unfolding in the early stages of what promises to be a long and storied career, open the door to whatever comes next in the process of forging a robust and inclusive theatrical culture in the United States. That future U.S. theatrical culture, thanks to the contributions of the many figures cited in the present and now closing discussion, will undoubtedly embrace an American life, and an American world, where Spanish will sound as familiar as English, where hip-hop and salsa will orchestrate a musical score as legitimately as pop and swing, and where performers, writers, and all other workers in theatre will find their rightful place, onstage or backstage, thanks to their talent, their vision, their ganas and their commitment to political, social, and cultural change.