US Latina/o Theatre From the 60s to the 21st Century: We've Come a Long Way, Baby!

FALL 2009 3 US Latina/o Theatre From the 60s to the 21st Century: We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! Jorge Huerta I would like to thank Stuart Day for honoring me with the opportunity to edit this special issue of the LATR. Initially, Stuart asked me if I was interested in focusing on Chicana and Chicano theatre and performance. I thought for an instant and responded that it should include research on as many US Latinas and Latinos as possible, because we now have so many scholars and theatre artists from our various Latina/o communities involved in theatre across the country and abroad. So the Call went out in the Fall of 2008 and by June of this year (2009) I had received dozens of articles and interviews. Submissions came from across the country and represented a wide range of scholarship, aesthetics and topics. But before I introduce these articles let me go back in time, the prerogative of Special Editors. When I started researching and writing about Chicano theater in 1970 there were no plays by or about Chicana/os or Mexican-Americans written by members of that community in print. In terms of scholarly research, there were several articles and newspaper accounts about the Teatro Campesino but few references to other Teatros Chicanos. On the East Coast, similar lacunae existed in English although there were certainly articles and plays about the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities both on and off those respective islands, en español. But as this volume demonstrates (along with the many anthologies of plays and critical essays that have been published to date), we’ve come a long way, baby! As many of our readers know, the Chicana/o/Mexican-American is the largest of the US Latino groups, followed by the (mainland) Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans. All three of these groups now have two or three generations of theatre artists actively expressing their realities (and fantasies) on stage and on the page since the 1960s. Dominicans and Colombians have 4 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW begun to express themselves in theatre and many of our community-based and professional theatres employ artists from across the Latino and Latin American spectrum. What I find very interesting is the fact that the majority of articles and interviews in this issue are by junior scholars. Indeed, some of the contributors were not yet born in 1970. The topics vary, as they should, and hopefully will add to the discourse and analysis of US Latina/o dramatic literature and performance. We begin somewhat historically with Zack Whitman Gil’s article on the early Teatro Campesino and Luis Valdez’s anti-Vietnam War actos and plays, “Whose Country to Defend?: The Chicano Soldier on Stage.” Unfortunately , these dramatic statements are just as relevant today as they were 40 years ago and thus merit our attention and concern, as Gil asserts. This is followed by Caroline Caballero’s intriguing account of a recent play by a Cuban-born playwright, “Una cubana in the Borderlands: Teresa Dovalpage’s La hija de La Llorona.” Here we have a unique triad of Latina cultures represented in a family drama set in New Mexico: the Cuban daughter-in-law, her Puerto Rican best friend and her Mexican-American mother-in-law in a re-telling of the Llorona myth. I know of no other play to tackle these “culture clashes” in this manner. The third article in this issue is Jon Rossini’s apt analysis (“José Rivera, Neoliberalism, and the Outside of Politics”) on School of the Americas, a play by one of our leading Puerto Rican playwrights. From this critical analysis of Rivera’s play about the last days of Che Guevara we go to Patricia Tomé’s discussion of Cuban-born Coco Fusco and Chicana Nao Bustameante’s creative collaboration in “Performing el cuerpo femenino como menú gastronómico: Stuff de Fusco y Bustamente.” Here again, we have two Latina cultures represented and analyzed in a fascinating deconstruction. This is followed by our senior scholar, David William Foster, and his intriguing discussion of place in a play by Chilean-born Guillermo Reyes, in “Phoenix in Guillermo Reyes’ “Places...