Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity

7. Cherríe Moraga and the Wrighting of Community

7 Cherríe Moraga and the Wrighting of Community Days later, George Bush comes to San Francisco. . . . There is a protest. We, my camarada and I, get off the subway. I can already hear the voices chanting from a distance. We can’t make out what they are saying, but they are Latinos and my heart races, seeing so many brown faces. They hold up a banner. The words are still unclear but as I come closer closer to the circle of my people, I am stunned. “¡Viva la paz en Nicaragua!” it states. “¡Viva George Bush! ¡Viva UNO!” And my heart drops. Across the street the “resistance” has congregated—less organized, white, middle-class students. ¿Dónde ’stá mi pueblo? —Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation The objects of desire may be multiple, but the propelling force is the need to transform personal and cultural betrayal into more inclusive forms of community. —Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, The Wounded Heart In her essay “Art in América con Acento,” originally presented as a talk written “on the one-week anniversary of the death of the Nicaraguan Revolution” in 1990, Cherríe Moraga expresses frustration with a world in which the revolutionary dreams of the 1960s have disappeared in the face of middle-class integration.1 Moraga’s rhetorical gesture here is not only to critique but also to remind her audience of the fantasy of cultural solidarity that obscures the real heterogeneity of Latino identity. Her account of brown faces in support of George Bush and the politics of U.S. imperialism shifts conventional academic wisdom about people 176 176 of color in the United States that blithely assumes a democratic, liberal political practice based on a presumed working-class position. In pointing to an absence, however, Moraga is not capitulating to this reality but rather asking a real question: Where are my people? Her choice of the word pueblo is crucial because it denotes both people and space, unlike the more often cited term of unification, la raza, used to indicate the people or the race. Thus, her question functions as a cry for both a people and a place absent from the setting of this anecdote, where shared culture, color, and language do not reflect a shared politics. Moraga does not condemn those who have made an oppositional political choice by supporting U.S. imperialism. Instead, she moves forward, searching for her own people, for a group that shares both her political beliefs and cultural position, crucially recognizing that her people need a space in which to manifest themselves. This anecdote points toward her acts of wrighting for the theater that imagine a political community, a pueblo, linked by shared values, not imposed expectations. In her California plays Heroes and Saints, Watsonville, and A Circle in the Dirt, Moraga creates complex, multicultural, and multilingual communities of performance that strive to bring the audience into the performance space. These plays illuminate key contemporary political and cultural issues while charting the labor involved in creating a space in which the articulation of successful resistance becomes possible. Moraga wrights committed dramas that address specific, local issues without reducing the practice of politics to the politics of identity. Addressing the complexity and diversity of Latino and Mexican/Xicana identity, Moraga refuses the easy equation of ethnicity and politics without erasing the specificity and importance of a Mechicano culture .2 In her fictionalized conceptions of real California spaces, she links the spiritual and the political through a relationship to land that respects the history of the place while offering the possibility of a new understanding of space. Understanding that community emerges out of shared cultural geography as well as literal space, her plays offer the possibility of a transformation into “some place not here,” the subtitle of Watsonville. By making the land sacred again and by acknowledging the traces of history, Moraga demonstrates a pragmatically utopian conception of transformative theater that wrights the possibility of a new form of inclusive community conscious of its specific historical position within a California landscape shaped by the cultural and political realities of the mid 1990s. cherríe moraga and the wrighting of community 177 These plays parallel Moraga’s project to reconceptualize the nation as a space for solidarity and community through rewriting the Chicano cultural nationalist space of Aztlán into a Queer Aztlán. Her project imagines a...