Fifty Key Figures in LatinX and Latin American Theatre

Paola S. Hernández, Analola Santana, Paola S. Hernández, Analola Santana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000522495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre is a critical introduction to the most influential and innovative theatre practitioners in the Americas, all of whom have been pioneers in changing the field.

The chosen artists work through political, racial, gender, class, and geographical divides to expand our understanding of Latin American and Latinx theatre while at the same time offering a space to discuss contested nationalities and histories. Each entry considers the artist's or collective's body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context and provides a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. The volume covers artists from the present day to the 1960s—the emergence of a modern theatre that was concerned with Latinx and Latin American themes distancing themselves from an European approach.

A deep and enriching resource for the classroom and individual study, this is the first book that any student of Latinx and Latin American theatre should read.

Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144700-2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144700-2

Carmen Aguirre (Santiago, Chile/Vancouver, Canada, 1967–)

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1967, Carmen Aguirre and her family fled to Canada when she was only six years old, a result of the 1973 coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet against socialist President Salvador Allende. Her family resettled in Vancouver as refugees, but only five years later, her mother and stepfather took her and her younger sister back to South America, moving constantly between Perú, Bolivia, and Argentina, as part of the underground resistance against Pinochet’s regime. Thus, Aguirre’s teenage years were divided between an underground life in South America and, with her father, a life in the Vancouver refugee community. For four years she was part of the resistance, dedicated to flying planes and smuggling goods across the Chilean border. In 1989, after elections were held in Chile for the first time since the coup and the resistance dissolved, Aguirre returned to Vancouver to train as a theatre artist at Studio 58.

When Aguirre began her career, the Latinx theatre scene in Vancouver was small, to say the least. Yet in 1994 she founded the Latino Theatre Group (LTG) with non-actors from her local community, generating a space for representation and storytelling. They collectively developed plays around a pan-Latinx immigrant experience in Canada, most notably ¿Qué pasa with la raza, eh? (1999) and created over twenty-five forum theatre pieces in the span of eight years.

Her work after LTG has been primarily autobiographical, a genre she has expanded as both playwright and performer. Most of her texts deal with her life experiences as well as the larger testimonies of her community, often told from the perspective of a young girl. Chile con Carne (1995), a one-woman show, captures the experience of Manuelita—a recurring character in Aguirre’s plays—an eight-year-old Chilean refugee in Vancouver during the mid-1970s, doing her best to fit in. The Trigger (2005) is based on Aguirre’s own experience as a rape survivor at the age of thirteen, a story of resilience and sisterhood, to be performed by five women, with the same performer playing the role of Carmen and the rapist. In The Refugee Hotel (2009), set in a downtown hotel in Vancouver in 1974, we see Manuelita as the leading voice, joined by many others who inhabited the world of displacement: her family, those who greeted them in Canada, and those who were exiled with them. Anywhere but Here (2020), a story of long travel and family dynamics set in 1979, shows us a Chilean family’s road trip from Vancouver to Chile, relying on the tropes of magic realism while exploring the Latinx-Canadian experience at the US–Mexico border. Delving into different theatrical forms and highlighting diverse perspectives, Aguirre’s plays recreate worlds of nostalgia, both in time and space, where loss and trauma co-exist with her dark humor and a child’s innocence, sometimes from the perspective of the individual’s inner struggles, other times, speaking through the collective.

In sophisticated ways, Aguirre’s work as a performer explores the relationship between audience and autobiography by using the body as a living archive. She experiments with the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of transmuting personal history into a very physical encounter with her audience. In her solo play, Blue-Box (2012), the power of the body of the performer is foregrounded. As she speaks of her body as a site of pleasure and a site of trauma, she gets close to her spectators, makes eye contact, singles out audience members, and uses their bodies to stage her memories. Years later, Aguirre took this a step further, incorporating the audiences’ bodies as much as her own in her dance-lesson/performance titled Broken Tailbone (2019). During this “dance lesson,” the audience shares in her vulnerability, calling attention to the self-consciousness of performing personal history through the body moving to the beats and sways of salsa music. Broken Tailbone is a fascinating example of how Aguirre, a well-known public figure in Vancouver, has crafted her public persona around the real-life value of her autobiographical experience.

Through her work, Aguirre expands Canadian history by generating public acts of remembrance that incorporate the Chilean refugee experience, as well as other less visible migration stories that intersect with hers through different forms of allyship. Thus, Aguirre interweaves her personal journey, be it in her coming-of-age stories or her struggles as a Latinx actress, with a global history of oppression. Her award-winning memoirs, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (winner of the Canada Reads Award, 2011), and Mexican Hooker #1: And Other Roles Since the Revolution (2016), have given her international visibility, amplifying even further the presence of Latinx culture in Canada’s mainstream society. In addition to her published plays, an invaluable contribution to Latinx theatre artists everywhere, she adds over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits and is Core Artist at Vancouver’s Electric Theatre Company.

Aguirre’s style as a playwright and performer has evolved hand in hand with her theatre activism. Famously in 2003, Aguirre withdrew her play, The Refugee Hotel, from being produced at a high-profile theatre when the director failed to cast the play with non-white actors. In a 2020 keynote address at the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition event “Coyuntura,” Aguirre reflected:

I’ve spent my entire adult life putting my storytelling skills at the service of stories that are rarely told on our stages. Performed by actors of color with people of color at the helm. Important in terms of representation, and equally important in terms of labor. Of actually giving people of color work.¹

Co-founder of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (2020), Aguirre continues to be vocal on the ways in which Latinx culture is represented and materially supported, engaging critically with different movements toward inclusion and the larger public discourse through the arts.

Martha Herrera-Lasso González

Note

1. Coyuntura Keynote Address, April 24, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE9ShQ3f2tc&ab_channel=CanadianLatinxTheatreArtistCoalition

Major works

• Anywhere but Here, 2020.
• Broken Tailbone, 2019.
• Blue Box, 2012.
• The Refugee Hotel, 2009.
• The Trigger, 2005.
• ¿Qué pasa with la raza, eh?, 1999.
• Chile con Carne, 1995.
• In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, 1995.

Published works

• Anywhere but Here. Toronto: Talonbooks, 2021.
• Chile con Carne & Other Early Works. Toronto: Talonbooks, 2019.
• Blue Box. Toronto: Talonbooks, 2012.
• The Refugee Hotel. Toronto: Talonbooks, 2010.
• The Trigger. Toronto: Talonbooks, 2008.

Further reading

• Aguirre, Carmen. “What is the Purpose of Art in the Face of Human Suffering?” In Canadian Association for Theatre Research/Association Canadienne de la Recherche Théâtrale Conference. Brock University, vol. 26. 2014.
• Etcheverry, Gabrielle. “Carmen Aguirre, The Refugee Hotel.” In Fronteras Vivientes, ed. Natalie Alvarez. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013. 274–278.
• Habell-Pallan, Michelle. “‘Don’t Call Us Hispanic:’ Popular Latino Theater in Vancouver.” In Latina/o Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 174–189.
• Herrera-Lasso González, Martha. “Of Bodies, Cunts and Revolutions: Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box.” Alt Theatre Journal, 10.1 (2012): 21–24.
• Rabillard, Sheila. “Carmen Aguirre’s The Refugee Hotel and the Space Between Limited and Unlimited Hospitality.” Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada, 36.2 (2015): 216–237.
• Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. “Moving from Realism to Hip-Hop Real: Transnational Aesthetics in Canadian Latina/o Performance.” In Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance, ed. Natalie Alvarez. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013. 133–150.
• Verdecchia, Guillermo. “Hasta La Victoria Siempre! The Persistent Memory of Revolutionary Politics in the Plays of Carmen Aguirre.” In Latina/o Canadian Theatre and
• Performance, ed. Natalie Alvarez. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013. 179–199.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144700-3

Luis Alfaro (Los Angeles, California, 1963–)

Luis Alfaro is a multi-faceted queer Chicanx theatre artist whose impact has been both on and behind the stage. He’s a playwright, performer, and director, whose works have been staged in major regional theatres across the United States, garnering critical acclaim. But he’s also a dramaturge, producer, and teacher, who has, behind the scenes, influenced an entire generation of new playwrights, and whose commitment to community-building has helped establish a national Latinx theatre network.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Alfaro emerged on the scene in the late 1980s as part of the multiculturalism movement brought on by new voices and new genres. Alfaro’s first solo performance piece, Downtown (1990), combined spoken word, video, and movement to address growing up queer and brown in Los Angeles. The solo piece became one of the era’s central examples of new queer performance. Alfaro’s charismatic stage persona combined with his incantatory poetry, introduced audiences to the emerging new field of solo performances based on identity politics and cultural critique. Downtown put Alfaro on the map, so to speak. He performed the piece in alternative venues in Los Angeles, including community centers, schools, and galleries, and at benefits for Latinx and LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS causes before touring throughout the United States in the alternative performance venues that were existent throughout the 1980s and 1990s. During the late twentieth century, audiences were more open to issues of multiculturalism and, thus, were drawn to performances by artists addressing the intersections of race, sexuality, and class, among other identity markers. Alfaro’s autobiographical writings as a queer Chicanx working-class individual were especially well received in this context. In fact, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship early in his career (1997) for his innovative and socially engaged creativity. Alfaro emerged from the Los Angeles poetry and performance communities, and most of his work addresses contemporary life in Los Angeles, especially the lives of those living in East Los Angeles, the historically working-class Mexican American neighborhood, or in the Pico Union district, another Latinx immigrant community near downtown Los Angeles.

Along with Monica Palacios and Alberto “Beto” Ariaza, Alfaro was one of the founding directors in 1993 of Teatro Viva! a queer and Latinx HIV/AIDS theatre group committed to HIV educational outreach efforts to underserved populations throughout Southern California. The trio performed bilingual skits in the tradition of Teatro Campesino that combined humor, music, and improvisation in non-traditional settings outside of the theatre to reach a demographic often neglected by traditional HIV/AIDS groups and standard HIV prevention strategies. Alfaro has been central to both community-based projects such as Teatro Viva! and mainstream theatre venues such as the Mark Taper Forum, the most prestigious regional theatre in Los Angeles. He worked as co-director of the Latino Theatre Initiative with Diane Rodriguez at the Mark Taper Forum from 1995 to 2003, and then as director of New Playwright Development from 2003 to 2005. At the Mark Taper he commissioned countless new plays by Latinx playwrights and performers, serving as literary dramaturge for many of these playwrights, and creating a community of Latinx playwrights, directors, actors, and designers who traditionally had been left out of the Mark Taper’s networks.

In the 1990s, Alfaro produced works that departed from the autobiographical tenor of his solo performances. In plays such as Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner (2003), Bitter Homes and Gardens (1993), and Straight as a Line (1998), Alfaro wrote about family and domestic issues that featured characters from a multiplicity of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, defying the expectations that his work be limited exclusively to Latinx themes. In Straight as a Line, the play’s two characters are Asian-British, living in New York City and Las Vegas. While the play is about HIV/AIDS, it’s an acerbic comedy. Formally, it’s divided into seventeen short sketches featuring a mother/son relationship that ends in the son’s death from AIDS.

Alfaro explores different dramatic forms and representational content to address contemporary political and cultural pressure points. In all of his work, he is committed to representation and the importance of speaking your voice. In Black Butterfly, Jaguar Girl, Piñata Woman and other Superhero Girls, Like Me (1998), for example, Alfaro created a ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Alphabetical list of contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre