Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays (review)

The past decade has seen a resurgence in the number of theater troupes organized specifically to explore the Latina experience. Companies such as Teatro Luna in Chicago, Breath of Fire in Santa Ana, and The Women's Collective Theater in San Francisco aim to use performance as a means from which to challenge mainstream representations of Latina women, both in pop culture and the news media, and to educate their audiences about social and political issues facing Latina women. In doing so, they follow in the footsteps of Teatro de las Chicanas, a women's collective of students and community organizers who began using theater as a tool for social change in 1971. Although the role of theater as an organizing strategy in the Chicano rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s has been well documented by scholars such as Jorge Huerta, very little attention has been paid to the theater work of Chicana activists, many of whom sought not only to educate their audiences about social injustices, but to challenge the sexism within the Chicano rights movement as well. Teatro Chicana aims to fill this gap by documenting the work of Teatro de la Chicana in an extensive collection of personal memoirs, performance scripts, and ephemera ranging from photographs to the company's organizing manifesto. The result is an invaluable social archive, one that brings the work of these teatristas into much needed focus.

Teatro Chicana is divided into two sections. The first, a collection of seventeen personal narratives from women who were involved in the company over the course of ten years, is rich with social detail and offers important insight into the political economy that shaped these women's path to their work as community organizers. Here, the impact of sexism, racism, and economic injustice on individual lives is made abundantly clear, in ways that have a painfully contemporary resonance. From one woman's childhood encounter with an Anglo teacher who fails to tell the difference between the three Margaritas in her classroom, to another's poetic analysis of the impact of childhood sexual abuse, many of these stories feel as if they could have been written today. At the same time, they provide nuanced documentation of a specific historical period, and provide important context for the work of Teatro de las Chicanas, detailing the urgency many of these women felt to organize for social change. The book provides an archive of individual experience that provides insight into the Chicano rights movement from an early feminist point of view, one that is particularly attentive to class and race. As Yolanda Broyles-González notes in her foreword to the book, the Chicana feminism documented here is one that draws on complex origins and "multiple sources of inspiration and power," from German philosophers to the women of the Mexican revolution to black feminism to "the sorrows and lessons of poverty" (xix).

Not only does the use of personal narrative in Teatro Chicana provide historical and social context, but it also serves as a guide to the company's process. The individual memoirs describe how performance pieces were developed, document audience response, and work to disrupt any singular history or narrative surrounding the company's work. In doing so, this section of the book enacts some of the very principles guiding Teatro de las Chicanas: First, that personal experience is, for many, the path to political action; that performing theater based on real life experiences and problems might spur others to become involved in community organizing or, at the very least, to feel less alone in their struggle. Second, that the act of performing works to model coalition building and social change. Significantly, although the women speak of each other with affection and stress the need for solidarity among women, they do not attempt to ignore differences or conflicts. The result is an insightful and honest look at group process, in...