Comment

This is a special issue in several ways. In spotlighting “Latino Performance,” the issue brings together new scholarship in this area in order to provide Theatre Journal readers the latest developments in the field and showcase the scholars who work on this topic. “Latino Performance” follows the pattern established by previous editors of Theatre Journal who have organized “special issues” on topics of interest to the readership. Rather than rely on the journal’s general submissions, special issues are selected in advance by the editor. Review editors also participate by soliciting contributions specific to the topic. As you shall see, both review sections in this issue begin with a cluster on Latino works. Taken together, these reviews add immeasurably to our sense of the field by pointing to the diversity of Latino culture and Latino studies.

“Latino Performance” is a particularly compelling area to me for a number of reasons. First, it is a topic that has been historically underrepresented in the journal. This issue sets out to redress this concern by opening up the journal to new critical voices, each of whom is publishing in TJ for the first time. Second, there is a new wave of scholarship on Latino theatre that is beginning to match the energy of the creative work by Latino playwrights and performers. I want to call attention to both the new creative work on the stage and the new critical work undertaken by our colleagues throughout the profession. Third, the focus on Latino theatre allows us to rethink how we discuss and critique so-called identity-based theatre and performance. TJ has historically been a place where scholars have explored the complicated relationship between performance and identity, that is, how communities from different cultural backgrounds, historical moments, and ideological positions express and negotiate these attributes through theatre and performance. This special issue is meant to converse with this tradition and build upon it.

The first two essays revisit the archives of some of the most significant figures in Chicano and Latino performance and introduce new means of understanding the historical, ideological, and aesthetic interventions these artists have achieved. Both essays position their case studies within larger cultural movements and trends. In the “Aural Border,” Josh Kun points out how the music and sound of the US-Mexico border make possible not simply new cultural art forms, “rock en español,” for example, but new ways of understanding the US-Mexican border itself. Kun brings us back to the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña so that we can begin to hear the cultural encodings and embodied histories of border struggle in his work. Likewise, Alicia Arrizón returns us to the rich archives of Chicana feminist cultural production in the visual and the performing arts. How are we to understand the dynamic performance of Aztlán for Chicanas these past thirty years? Arrizón tracks the ways in which Chicanas have reconfigured the foundational politics of the Chicano movement through art and performance in order to bring forward the concerns of Chicanas, Latinas, and the indigenous women of the Americas. Both Kun and Arrizón take on two of the staples of Chicano and Latino studies—the border and Aztlán—and invigorate these areas with interdisciplinary moves.

The next two essays introduce us to two important Latino playwrights whose work has never before been fully addressed in a critical essay. Tiffany Ana Lopez’s essay on the Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz begins with an overview of Cruz’s career including her work under Irene Fornes, the Cuban-born playwright who mentored various playwrights at the Hispanic Playwrights Lab in New York City. Lopez is interested in thinking through both the major themes and concerns of Cruz’s impressive body of work and the formal and aesthetic innovations of Cruz’s dramaturgy, particularly those plays that address the subject of violence against children. Lopez pays special attention to the reception of Cruz’s innovative work given that Cruz so often traffics in controversial images and tragic themes. José Muñoz’s essay on the young Latino playwright Ricardo Bracho’s exciting dramaturgy shows us how the cultural interventions by...