Wild Tongues: Transnational Mexican Popular Culture by Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz, and: La Voz Latina: Contemporary Plays and Performance Pieces by Latinas ed. Elizabeth C. Ramírez and Catherine Casiano (review)

Until the 1990s, the contributions of Latinas to the American theatre had received little focused attention from publishers of play anthologies or from scholars. Plays by Latinas had been included singly in anthologies, and discussed piecemeal in scholarship about Latino theatre generally; what was missing were entire books, either of plays or of scholarship, devoted solely to Latinas. Several anthologies of Latina plays—including Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women (1993) and Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (1999)—and monographs devoted wholly to Latina theatre-makers, such as those by Alicia Arrizón, Elizabeth Ramírez, and Alberto Sandoval- Sánchez and Nancy Saporta-Sternbach, appeared around the turn of the millennium, giving educators, readers, and theatre-makers a much greater sense of the richness of Latinas’ contribution to US theatre.

This trend in publishing books of Latina plays and theatrical scholarship has continued at a respectable pace up to the present moment, and it bears tracking, particularly in light of the cancellation in recent decades of multiple Latina/o play-development series and programs at major theatres like the Mark Taper Forum. Scholars cannot support playwrights in the same ways that producers and theatre companies can, but publication does make new scripts available for production and documents performances that might otherwise fall out of the historical record. Increasingly, with gender at the forefront of analysis of Latina/o theatre, we have gained extensive documentation of the presence of Latinas in theatre, their influence on their male counterparts, and a deeper sense of the richness of their contributions to popular culture. Exemplary of these trends, two recent books, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz’s monograph Wild Tongues: Transnational Mexican Popular Culture and Elizabeth Ramírez and Catherine Casiano’s edited collection La Voz Latina: Contemporary Plays and Performance Pieces by Latinas, resuscitate potentially forgotten or ignored performances by Latinas while highlighting the complexity of Latina identity in a transnational context.

Urquijo-Ruiz engages in a comparative gender study and adds a much-needed dimension to the study of both Chicana/o and Mexican theatre and popular culture. Wild Tongues examines the stock characters of the Mexican peladito and the Chicano pachuco in literature, carpa (a form of tent theatre seen in both Mexico and the southwestern United States), film, and music. The book also tracks the feminine versions of these characters, the peladita and the pachuca, and how the women who portrayed them onstage used comedy as a form of activism. Finally, Urquijo-Ruiz analyzes Dan Guerrero’s one-man play ¡Gaytino! as an act of resistance against homophobia and the racism endured by Chicana/os.

Urquijo-Ruiz adds to the substantial scholarship on the peladito and pachuco by analyzing them across a variety of cultural forms, and by paying serious attention to the female versions of these characters. The figure of the Mexican peladito, most famously portrayed by the great comedian Cantiflas, represents a poor, long-suffering though pertinacious laborer. A stock character in Mexican literature, film, and theatre, the peladito employs much slapstick humor and bilingual wordplay. He often attempts to emigrate from Mexico to the United States and ends up engaged in hard labor whether or not he escapes deportation. His female counterpart, the peladita, suffers similar predicaments and is far less celebrated in scholarly and popular writings. Urquijo-Ruiz examines an iconic representation of the peladito in Mexican Daniel Venegas’s 1928 novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed) and as a stock character in carpa performances on both sides of the Mexican–US border. She analyzes the peladita as portrayed by two great comediennes—Amelia Wilhelmy...