Editorial Comment: On Attributions, Appropriations, Misinterpretations, and Latin American Theatre Studies

Readers may recall the tempest raised last year when Australian actor-comedian Barry Humphries—in the Vanity Fair column he writes as his best-known character, Dame Edna Everage—answered a reader's question regarding which second language to learn:

Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named García Lorca, but I'd leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you . . . . Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you're American, try English.¹

US Latino/as and Latin Americanists reacted in force, and, as Beatriz González-Stephan notes, among those calling for a retraction were "not leaf blowers, but architects, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, writers, moviemakers, painters, journalists, governors, and bankers."² The magazine's editors made a hasty apology for the backfiring of what they called Dame Edna's "patently absurd comments." Perhaps more telling of the difficulty of successful satire and the remarkable power of a well-organized e-mail campaign (conducted by a Latina management consultant) than of Anglocentrist attitude, Dame Edna's gaffe nevertheless provides an opportunity for reflection on the constitution of Latin America and its theatre as objects of study in the contemporary academy.

It merits noting that Dame Edna's two cultural references from the Spanish language are, well, Spanish. No Spanish American text or author is mentioned, and Spain (mediated by the US musical) reigns as the source of all things "Spanish." Such a language-to-country equation brings to mind the comment a Republican congresswoman attributed in 1989 to Dan Quayle, quoting the then vice president as saying he was sorry he hadn't studied Latin harder in school so he might have been able to converse with Latin Americans during his earlier tour. From Quayle's alleged linguistic confusion to Dame Edna's unnecessarily limited list of cultural references, from university job descriptions wedging Latin American theatre into the category of the "non-Western" to the 2000 US Census listing Spanish/Hispanic/Latino as a single "self-designated classification," it's apparent that much of the English-speaking world remains unclear as to what or who is "Spanish," "Hispanic," "Latin," and "Latino/a" and the consequences of these confusions, limitations, assumptions, and designations.

Perhaps a preliminary look at terminology is in order. No single expression adequately captures the myriad cultures that make up what we might deem Latin American: "Hispanic" places an emphasis on the peninsular and privileges Spain over the Spanish-speaking Americas, thus asserting "a white and prestigious origin (twice imperial, in Rome and Castile) for the variety of scattered Hispanisms that deviated from the metropolitan model."³ "Latin," while less language specific and more culturally inclusive of such non-Spanish-speaking regions as Brazil and the Francophone Antilles, nevertheless reinforces the bias toward the Americas' (only partially) Mediterranean roots. "Latino," although generally understood to refer to specific and diverse ethnic groups within the United States, still appears in contemporary English-language dictionaries as a noun denoting both "a person of Latin American origin living in the US" and "a native or inhabitant of Latin America."⁴ Thus, even if we arrive at "Latin" as a compromise term, we still risk subsuming a diversity of experiences into "one undifferentiated, homogeneous historic and cultural entity."⁵ "Latin American" is an insufficient and infelicitous attempt at encompassing the cultural production of some twenty countries (where actors perform not only in Spanish and Portuguese but also in Yiddish, in local dialects that combine multiple languages, and in numerous indigenous languages); and while the dual category "Latino/a" attempts to counter the masculinism implicit in the Spanish...