TYA Playwriting in the New Latino South: Multilingual, Multimodal Cultural Improvisation in the I-85 Corridor

Mamá Goose, a collaboratively written multilingual play for young audiences, emerged in the Interstate 85 corridor in the southeastern United States, from Virginia to Alabama. The script is adapted from a published collection of traditional Latino nursery rhymes. This essay argues that diverse New Latino South narratives shaped the work’s creation, production/tour, and response as deeply as the anchor text, lending insight into the nexus of cultural commerce at play in the identity-soaked layers of place. Interstate 85 threads by old cotton plantations and emerging metropolitan areas, skirts beneath the Trail of Tears, passes sites of race riots and sit-ins, swerves around historically desegregated and quietly resegregated school systems, and begins to speak in hybrid tongues with bilingual billboards vying for the attention of new communities: “La Vaquita! El Flea Market Mass Grande de Georgia! / Pendergrass Flea Market: Come and get it folks!”

On April 17, 2006, the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (SB529) became law, requiring citizenship verification for individuals using Georgia’s public services to ensure their eligibility for such benefits. This legislation required citizenship verification of state employees and employers with state contracts and subcontracts; that businesses compensating undocumented employees more than $600 a year not claim wages as an allowable business expense; a 6 percent withholding tax for all nonresident aliens; and provided law enforcement with increased training in the enforcement of federal immigration, among other things. Summarizing the legislation in 2006 via the Georgia.gov website, Governor Sonny Perdue explained, “This bill makes it clear that Georgia is a welcoming state that wants to treat our guests with Southern hospitality. But we cannot tolerate activity that distracts us from our ability to embrace those who come here legally.”¹ Five years later, Georgia’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011 (HB 87) became law, allowing authorities to demand documentation during traffic stops and to create purposeful barriers for individuals without specific identification to access state facilities and services.²

Up and down the interstate, similar legislation has passed or has been introduced in the legislature. Each bill or law infuses mythic southern hospitality with a selective welcome. The influx of Latino immigrants in the I-85 corridor, ballooning between 1990 and 2000, continues unabated, with many counties experiencing more than a 500 percent increase in the Latin American immigrant population—in some cases beginning from very small numbers.³ Within the transformed social geography of the New Latino South, such anti-immigration legislation is increasingly problematic. Highway signage signals “Welcome! ¡Bienvenido!” but the subtext is far more complex.

Most children in our play’s target age range (3 to 8 years old) are not monitoring their state legislature and its influence on their emerging identities. However, the impact is real, affecting every aspect of life across the diverse, culturally contested borderlands of I-85.

It was in the contested social geography of I-85 that the 2013 Charlotte, North Carolina, production of Mamá Goose—a children’s play loosely adapted from Mamá Goose: A Latino Nursery Treasury/Un tesoro de rimas infantiles—opened as four actors frolicked to the lyric: “Cantamos! Jugemos! Cantamos y jugemos! Let’s sing! Let’s play! Let’s sing and play!”⁴ Forty-five minutes later—after a series of escapades revolving around the actors’ discovery of an extraordinary egg, and each child’s desire to keep it, the children and Abuela (Grandmother) are still singing, having come to the conclusion that the egg—and their childhood world—wasn’t one person’s, but everyone’s. “Compartimos. We share. It’s ours. Es nuestro.” The story is told with a particular attention to multimodality, employing song, dance/movement, and American Sign Language among its many active vocabularies.⁵ The play itself—on a certain level—was intended as a space for rethinking transnational identity in a complex immigration legislation era through interwoven sets of semiotic systems playfully problematizing habitual binary, language-based positions. This multimodal dynamic in a show for monolingual and...