Building Latinidad, Silencing Queerness: Culture Clash's Nuyorican Stories

In 2016 Culture Clash celebrated its thirty-second anniversary as a theatre troupe, a benchmark that distinguishes it as a pivotal and enduring voice in contemporary American theatre. Drawing on the Chicano teatro movement of the 1960s, the Mexican carpas or traveling circuses, and vaudeville performers and comedians such as Cantinflas, the Marx Brothers, and Charlie Chaplin, Culture Clash uses a variety of performance practices and traditions to comment on social inequalities, oppression, racism, and class biases. Its signature works have been commissioned by various theatre companies in Miami, San Diego, Washington, D.C., New York, Houston, Boston, and San Francisco to create performance pieces specifically for and about these cities. Notably, Culture Clash's site-specific, interview-based documentary dramas spotlight the histories and existing tensions around citizenship, immigration, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as to advocate for social justice for minoritarian subjects.¹

While many critics have extensively analyzed the social significance and impact of Culture Clash's work, Nuyorican Stories: Culture Clash in the City (1999) is one of its few understudied documentary dramas.² Nuyorican Stories memorializes a politically charged period in which Latinxs—namely, Nuyoricans and Chicanxs—were social agents powerfully inspiring and mobilizing their respective communities.³ This is the first theatre production that solely focuses on the Nuyorican movement and incorporates the words of living people to make sense of a crucial moment in Latinx history. As Ric Salinas, one of the members of Culture Clash, describes: "[Nuyorican Stories is] a valentine's day card, really—an homage to those who are no longer around as well as those who are still with us" (qtd. in Manus and Lefkowitz n.p.). As such, this docudrama plays a key role in remembering and enriching our understanding of the Nuyorican movement, a history that often remains in the periphery of the American imaginary.

Precisely because documentary theatre has potential beyond the mere telling of history, this essay pays cautious attention to how Culture Clash performs Nuyorican history. The body—namely, the tattooed, dancing, and diseased body—emerges as a site that complicates how the public understands Nuyorican history and Latinidad. Given the peripheral status of Latinx theatre coupled with the general lack of documentation of the Nuyorican community, the role of documentary theatre is urgently vital and contentious. A deeper analysis of the embodiment of Latinidad brings to the surface the challenges that come with reading documentary theatre, especially when it renders queerness invisible. Even as Nuyorican Stories appears to be performing heritage, culture, and community, it is replete with dissonance, fragmentation, and irresolution. Similar to many political movements of the time, including civil rights, Black Arts, and women's rights, the Nuyorican movement promoted social justice while also practicing heteropatriarchy. In the same vain, Nuyorican Stories does not comment on the pervasive heteropatriarchy that existed during the Nuyorican movement and ends up normalizing heteropatriarcy and eliding the queer community that participated as essential partners in this cultural movement. Nuyorican Stories brings to the surface crucial questions about the complex nature of documentary theatre and its impact, as it straddles factual, fictional, and semi-real representations of history. Culture Clash makes visible the presence, participation, and contribution of Nuyoricans, while also rendering the queer Nuyorican community illegible to the American public.

Performing Nuyorican History: Between the Factual and Representational

With a grant from the National Theatre Residency Program, New York City's International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR) commissioned Culture Clash to work on a New York City–based work. The troupe embarked on a six-month residency in the fall of 1998 in search of a focus and theme for this site-specific piece. Inspired by Miguel Algarín's anecdotes, cofounder of the legendary Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, Culture Clash decided to focus on community icons from the Nuyorican movement and developed Nuyorican Stories, which premiered at INTAR on September 22, 1999.⁴ Nuyorican Stories captures the vibrancy of the Nuyorican movement, a time of immense cultural, artistic, and political awakening that was led by second-generation Puerto Rican poets, visual artists, musicians, and dancers living...