Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism by Patricia Ybarra (review)

History takes time, according to Patricia A. Ybarra. By Ybarra’s own admission (though one suspects her preoccupation with these issues stretches back much further), her latest monograph, Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism, is the result of twelve years of wrestling with the difficulties of “stag(ing) the destruction and denigration caused by savage capitalism” (ix). Though the project has been percolating for much longer than the word “Latinx” has been in use, its examination of performance-as-resistance is as timely as ever.

Ybarra’s book recalls the work of Latin Americanists such as Noe Montez and Jean Graham-Jones, but the author actually draws less from other scholars of performance than from adjacent fields such as cultural, literary, and subaltern studies to contextualize her study of U.S. Latinx performance-making. Favoring works that “refuse to privilege realism as an aesthetic strategy” (17), Ybarra focuses on the means employed by transnational “halfie” playwrights to “critique contemporary geopolitics by making theatre that reveals neoliberal violence as a systemic condition that is visibly, audibly, and tangibly comprehensible in its variations” (x).

In her critical introduction, Ybarra informs readers of the effects of neoliberalism on Latinx communities and explains that her goal is to “consider how a remarkable group of playwrights theorize the world rather than change it” (10, emphasis added). Though Chapter 1, “‘Never Any Other Time but This Time No World but This World,’ or Staging Indigeneity in Neoliberal Times,” focuses mainly on playwright Cherríe Moraga, it is actually the widest in scope. Peppered with looks at recent work by El Teatro Campesino and points of departure (2005) by Michael John Garcés, this chapter gauges theatrical reactions to political shifts stemming from the fall of socialism and other radical leftist movements across the hemisphere.

Subsequent chapters narrow in their thematic attention to interrogate responses to specific issues. Chapter 2 looks at works created in the aftermath of the 1994 Balseros Crisis, including María Irene Fornés’ Manual for a Desperate Crossing (Balseros) and Nilo Cruz’s A Bicycle Country, both of which she terms “travelogue(s) of limited mobility” (80). Ybarra’s argument is perhaps most nuanced in this chapter, as she differentiates that limited mobility with the “affective properties of inhibited motion” (102) in the Travelogues of Eduardo Machado and Sleepwalkers by Jorge Cortiñas, connecting the plays to the struggles of many Latinx migrants. Chapter 3 explores theatrical responses to the femicide epidemic in the Americas, especially in Juárez, Mexico, while Chapter 4 looks at the legacy of drug trafficking. Other playwrights whose work is examined include Caridad Svich, Octavio Solís, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Tanya Saracho.

In a brief conclusion, “So Go the Ghosts of...” Ybarra acknowledges that, though the impulse to theorize and not provide solutions is what makes this work meaningful, that impulse is also largely to blame for its relative obscurity. Contrasting these plays to the monolithic Hamilton, which leaves the violence of capitalism largely unexplored, Ybarra ends with an impassioned reminder that “an understanding of the recent past in the Americas is crucial to thinking our way out of our current situation” (199). Ybarra’s thoroughgoing monograph makes a vital contribution to that understanding.