Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity

5. Wrighting the Borders in the 1990s

113 5 Wrighting the Borders in the 1990s SEDICIO: Our Mexican friends are embarrassed by Tijuana. MICHAEL: Not real Mexico, they say. SEDICIO: Does that mean San Diego is not real USA? Think about it. . . . SEDICIO: Let’s go before they think we’re committing shocking, immoral acts that will destroy Western Civilization. MICHAEL: Like sodomy? SEDICIO: No, immigrating! —Guillermo Reyes, Deporting the Divas OFFICER: Well, one sure for sure: I don’t much see the difference between Messican and Merican now. Alla you look like wetbacks to me. LUPE: Dat ess what we are. Mojados. Eliens. Whatefer border wi cross. —Octavio Solis, El Otro The art of interpreting the literal border today involves the simultaneous analysis of the theater and its symbolic dimensions as well as the actual violence. One should not reduce one to the other, not become so constructivist as not to notice that people are being killed, not look so closely at the violence as not to notice its symbolic dimensions. Holding seeming opposites together is easy to say, but hard to do in practice. —Renato Rosaldo, “Foreword” wrighting the borders in the 1990s 114 Writing the Real and Metaphorical Border The U.S.-Mexican border is a site of national, political, and economic contestation that has been used increasingly as a conceptual paradigm for explicating new forms of identity, culture, and information that incorporate the in-between or liminal nature of border space. The contemporary border with Mexico is a result of U.S. aggression during the Mexican-American War and the subsequent territorial division and essentially forced sale of Mexican territory, a historical reality that grounds Rodolfo Acuña’s seminal history of Chicano culture, Occupied America, and the Chicano claim that “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Despite this history, mainstream culture often assumes that Chicano and Latino identity indicates a history of immigration rather than colonization or conquest. This construction of ethnicity rests on the transformational process of border crossing. On one side of the border, people are read in national terms, while the act of crossing confers on them an identity structured by ethnicity. The tension between the real and the metaphorical implications of this crossing provides a rich space in which to wright ethnicity in the theater. Theatrical space is important for understanding borders not only because the theater can function as border space but also because the border itself is often understood as a theater. Thinking of the border as a theater provides a site-specific frame for understanding theatricality as a spatial practice and explicating the relationship between space and the framing of ethnicity. Although the border as theater is a metaphor, the political importance of the border helps focus attention on all the activity that takes place at its site, paralleling the semiotic intensity of theatrical space. In the act of crossing, people play out scripted roles, asking and answering questions and behaving within a restricted range of acceptable physical gestures and emotional states. The space of the border demands specific constructions of identity—guest worker, resident, tourist, citizen, and agent. In the context of this paradigm the space of performance, specifically the space of the stage, becomes a physical reflection of the shifting geographies that are possible within a consciously structured intersection of topography and identity. While theater and identity at the border clearly are connected, the richness and contested nature of this connection emerges from tension between the metaphorical and the material conceptions of this space. Placing theater and the border in dialogue helps shift the increasing conflicts between studies that use the border as metaphor and those that attend to the materiality of the literal border. This dialogue creates wrighting the borders in the 1990s 115 new ways of thinking about ethnicity as a border identity. Theater is useful in this regard because it literally takes place, occupying space and often demanding a three-dimensional representation of a place. Borders operate both metaphorically and literally in stage space: the sign systems of theatrical representation are predicated on the establishment and manipulation of conventional frames that function spatially as boundaries. The abstraction of the material stage enables radical spatial transformation; one location can become another and multiple locations can indicate the palimpsest of history materialized on one common ground. The frames that separate the stage from everyday life enable this fungibility. Theater’s physical manifestations...