Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Ricardo Bracho

69 Ricardo Bracho orn July 18, 1969, in Mexico City, Ricardo Bracho was swiftly transplanted to Los Angeles—the city where he would grow up, come into his Chicano sensibility, and become a successful playwright. Raised in the multi-classed and multiracial West L.A. of the 1970s, with highly educated Marxist-Leninist parents (his mother hailed from Nogales, Sonora, near the Arizona border, and his father from Mexico City), Bracho both came out and came into his writing. His gay Latino artistic sensibility was fine-tuned while an undergraduate at Berkeley and later at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco under the aegis of Cherríe Moraga. Bracho’s commitment is both to art and to the community; he co-founded the organization called Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida especially targeting Latino lesbians and gays in San Francisco , worked on AIDS research and prevention in San Quentin Prison, and is working currently on the Blunt Project in New York. His plays, such as The Sweetest Hangover, Fed Up, Tone Memory, Sissy, Querido, and A to B variously use monologue, nonlinear narrative form, and creative juxtapositions of dialogue and music to explore intersections of race and sexuality. Always seeking new forms to tell his stories, Bracho has extended his dramatic reach in his recent plays. Mexican Psychotic, employs a nonverbal, avant-garde form to chronicle the life of Mexicano artist Martin Ramirez, who came to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, worked the rails, suffered from a cultural collapse, and after fifteen years of being homeless was put in a mental institution. Bracho is now at work on two interconnected one-acts, one entitled Horror Movie—a horrorcomedy about racial profiling—and the other entitled The Dweller—a drama stylized as a fifties teleplay that follows the life of a writer in New York. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Brava Theater Center, Theatre Rhinoceros) and New York (INTAR Theatre), and have been read nationally at venues including the Mark Taper Forum, Intersection for the Arts, Pregones, the Ricardo Montalban Theater, and the Exploratorium Museum . He has received two commissions from the Latino Theater Initiative of the Mark Taper Forum and one from the Magic Theater. Bracho has been a participant in the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Residency Program for Playwrights and the Mabou Mines’ Suite Residency, and he has received the Creative Work Fund Award. Frederick Luis Aldama: Why playwriting and drama? Ricardo Bracho: Throughout my schooling in L.A.’s unified public school districts, I had done theater, but it wasn’t until I took Cherríe Moraga’s Chicano teatro class as an undergrad at Berkeley that I began to think of it as a career. Her attention to my writing—“There’s the poem. That may be the monologue. You really are a writer”—helped kick off my sense of self as a creative artist/playwright. Off campus she asked me to be assistant director to a gay/lesbian youth of color drama program, Drama Divas, she had at Brava [Theater Center] in the Mission District. I did that for six years. This is where I did my old-world/old-school apprenticeship in theater, learning lighting and sound design and operation, and the writing of scenes. This led to my applying for the Creative Work Fund with Brava, which landed me my first grant to write my very first play, The Sweetest Hangover. It was after this play closed that I felt like, oh, maybe I am a playwright. F.L.A.: What was the process of conceiving, then transforming and developing The Sweetest Hangover into a stage production? R.B.: Acting as dramaturg, Cherríe helped me with this process, identifying scenes and monologues that worked, developing main characters, and sculpting and trimming narrative threads to shape this story of an underground house club with its many denizens. After the production of The Sweetest Hangover, I continued my work with Cherríe at Brava, writing another play called July 19, 1979: The Tide 70 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Ricardo Bracho 71 Is High—I just changed the name to Sissy—that ended up being one of my orphan plays, in that it has had many readings and workshops but has not yet been produced. It was while writing this play that my interest in drama—in dialogue, the real...