How to Read a Latinx Play in the Twenty-first Century: Learning from Quiara Hudes

I write this essay with a seemingly simple question: How does one read a Latinx play? Or, perhaps more specifically, how does one teach someone else to read a Latinx play in the twenty-first century? The title of this essay, of course, is an allusion to Gayatri Spivak's "How to Read a 'Culturally Different' Book," a 1991 essay that took on the challenge of teaching global literature under the aegis of newly formed multicultural curricula in US universities. Some twenty-five years later I revisit her concerns in relation to the still present challenge of inspiring readings of Latinx plays and performances that honor their cultural and aesthetic complexity inside of the classroom and outside of it. In the midst of a new set of initiatives to diversify the academy, many of the same problems faced during the 1990s still persist, despite a seemingly widespread shift in the visibility of Latinx cultures in the United States. Meaning that, for many readers, even for those with access to Latinx cultures, there may be the temptation to read these plays ethnographically: as texts that reveal an unmediated truth about Latinx life. Or perhaps more generally, in a desire to know Latinx culture, readers look to Latinx plays primarily for content, without giving much attention to form.

This type of reading is perhaps most common in theatre or drama courses where one or a couple of Latinx plays are chosen to represent the whole, or within communities in which a theatre supports a season of work that includes one play by an artist of color, thus structurally setting a play apart as a cultural experience in the theatre in which one learns to know the other.¹ Mainstream reviewers of American theatre, who generally lack cultural competence in Latinx cultures, replicate the instrumentalism without the pedagogy, judging these plays by their difference in content and theme from those that convey middle-class Anglo concerns.² Under this rubric Latinx plays are evaluated solely by their success or failure to instantiate loosely defined Aristotelian principles; or alternately, read as representative of one of two broadly and poorly defined "Latinx" genres: magical realism or the telenovela.³ Both of these Latin American forms are in fact potentially relevant to Latinx drama because they are often being parodied or modified consciously by Latinx playwrights.⁴ In popular parlance, however, these labels often function as a shorthand that frames Latinx drama within reified categories of analysis that compartmentalize generic and formal innovation rather than illuminating them as modes of understanding cosmology (so-called magical realism) or affect (so-called telenovela). More politically minded thinkers look to these works for commentary on the legacies of colonialism, racism, and migration, mining them for their resistant potential as cultural texts without a deep knowledge of theatre and theatrical methodologies.⁵

In this essay I advocate for a mode of reading Latinx plays that always links content to aesthetics and political critique to form. I emphasize movement and spatiality within the stage space because of the deep histories of migration, diasporic movement, and displacement within many Latinx cultures that find residence there. My emphasis is not new. Scholars since the mid-1990s have considered space, home, and displacement in Latinx plays, often around issues of borders and (un)belonging.⁶ For scholars not primarily concerned with Latinx theatre, José Rivera's groundbreaking Marisol, that reimagined New York City in the 1980s and '90s in a way consonant with, but more radically than Tony's Kushner's Angels in America, opened up a way to think differently about space in theatre more generally.⁷ Given the changing migration patterns and the continued violence of neoliberalism and impact of two Gulf wars, both of which recruited many Latinx soldiers, my emphasis in this essay is on a more recent set of plays of Quiara Hudes's "Elliot trilogy"—Elliot: A Soldier's Fugue (2007), the Pulitzer Prize–winning Water by the Spoonful (2012), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2013)—to demonstrate this critical strategy. I chose this trilogy for...