Feeling Brown Like You: Creación Colectiva and Latinx Affect in Fornés's Cap-a-Pie

In this essay, I historicize the theater movement creación colectiva as a movement of sophisticated postmodern cultural production that reconfigured communities of affect across the hemisphere. I focus on the 1975 off-Broadway production of Cap-a-Pie, scripted and directed by María Irene Fornés, as an exceptional example of the wide reach of this Latin American movement. This key case study shows how creación colectiva staged a forum where Latin American and Latinx people renegotiated latinidad at a key moment in the emergence of US-based Latinx identities. I focus on how the production staged latinidad through the transmission of nationally defined affect across difference in a transnational, pan-ethnic context. Cap-a-Pie exemplifies how avant-garde practices break down borders and binaries, disrupting commonsense notions of identity. Fornés's dramaturgy juxtaposes and montages a diverse group of Latin American immigrant and US Latinx experiences, dislocating these experiences from a fixed sense of nationality. By displacing structures of feeling associated with Puerto Rican, Colombian, or Cuban national belonging from their ordinary context of reception, the aesthetics evoke a space of arrival where untethered affects converge and come to hold new meaning. In this regard, Cap-a-Pie is an exploration and an exercise in what I define as Latinx affect.