Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (review)

Jorge Huerta's Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth, is part of his ongoing project to chronicle developments and trends in Chicana/o theatre. This volume picks up where his last, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (1982), left off—roughly with the Broadway production of Zoot Suit in 1979, although he re-covers some familiar territory from the earlier book in order to provide historical and biographical context for the present focus on plays and playwrights of the 1980s and 1990s. This ambitious work seeks to explore thematic links among text-based performances of drama by, for, and about Chicana/os (U.S.-born Mexican Americans sensitive to an oppressive history) and, to a lesser degree, "Mechicana/os" (those born in Mexico but resident in the United States). As such, it is a very useful addition to the scholarship in an under-represented field. Combining literary analysis and performance theory—with emphasis on the former—it attempts to locate a "Chicana/o mythos" rooted in "a Mexico of indigenous symbols, of pyramids and poetry: flor y canto, flower and song" (183).

It is impossible to discuss Huerta's methodological framework without acknowledging Yolanda Broyles-González's critique of scholarship on Chicano Theatre (particularly in her 1994 El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement) where she assesses the published work on the Teatro as uniformly chronological, text-centered, and male-centered. This assertion implicated Huerta's earlier work. His more recent reflections do, however, take into account his critics as well as his admirers, and he seems genuinely open to re-imagination of his subject. In this volume, then, there is more discourse on Chicana dramatists and politics. Huerta avoids the trap and temptation of an evolutionary model, moving in multiple directions as themes seem to morph and reappear in a distinctively non-linear fashion. The work is certainly text-based, however (although some of the texts are as yet unpublished), and is focused on Chicana/o theatre "on the map." This is not to say that the examples are mainstream, but rather that Huerta privileges those manifestations of theatre that reproduce the model of playwright as center, director as second in command, and actors as fluctuating variables, and that leaves behind a reproducible artifact—a playtext. This focus is rooted in Huerta's own desire to seek professionalism in Chicana/o theatre and his belief that "[w]ith the move away from collectives and collectively created pieces, the playwrights became the hope of a new era" in such theatre (13). This new era is something about which Huerta is cautiously optimistic; if these plays promise a new visibility to the Chicana/o experience, they still must contend with a more general situation in which "the entire community of Mechicana/os has been and continues to be damned by virtue of its invisibility" (192). For Huerta, the growing corpus of Chicana/o dramatic literature is a legacy that compels a wider recognition, and his set of textual and performance analyses constitutes an important contribution toward that recognition.

Huerta begins his attempt to articulate a distinctively Chicana/o dramatic mythos with the early work of playwrights Estela Portillo-Trambley and Luis Valdez. Here he draws on Native American (specifically Mayan and Aztec) cultural topographies in order to illuminate the bass notes of the plays under discussion, which sought to re-construct a ruptured connection to an indigenous pulse. Indigenous goddesses and gods are inextricable from this work, whether acknowledged or not, and whether they appear onstage or are visible only in the text. Likewise, the two playwrights are, in Huerta's view, primary and motivating forces for subsequent Chicana/o drama.

He then discusses how notions of mystery and miracle (not in the medieval sense of the terms) function in the work of Valdez, Cherríe Moraga, Edit Villareal, and...