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estela portillo trambley’s Day of the Swallows, first published in 1972, and Luis Valdez’s Mummified Deer, first produced in the year 2000 and published in 2005, are two plays that frame the evolution of a Chicano dramaturgy that shows a fascination with and respect for the Chicanos’ Indigenous roots. Further, these two plays affirm the Chicano as Native American. Indeed, the Indio (Native American) has been an almost constant presence in the plays of many of the Chicana and Chicano playwrights who have followed in Valdez’s and Portillo Trambley’s pioneering footsteps. Best known as the founder of the Teatro Campesino (the Farm Workers’ Theater) in 1965, Valdez has also been called the “Father of Chicano Theater.” If Valdez is the “Father,” Portillo Trambley is certainly the “Mother of Chicana playwrights.” As well as being Portillo Trambley’s first play, Day of the Swallows is, significantly, also the first play by a Chicana to be published. I credit these two individuals with breaking the ground for an entire generation of theater artists who are writing plays about the Chicana/o experience today. In this essay I hope to show the distinctions and similarities between Valdez’s and Portillo Trambley’s visions of the Chicana/o’s Indigenous roots. Although not all Chicana/o playwrights employ Indigenous symbols or themes, many do. As descendants of a Mexico that extended through much of the western United States (including Texas and California), the Chicanos often write about themselves as “foreigners in their own land,” a people with a fractured, postmodern identity that is more Mexican than Anglo and more Indio than Spanish. In fact, Mexico is always seen as a mestizo (mixed) nation—Indio rather than Spanish—in the Chicana/o’s visions of herself/himself. Sometimes Indigenous characters physically chapter 11 Feathers, Flutes, and Drums Images of the Indigenous Americans in Chicano Drama Jorge Huerta Images of the Indigenous Americans in Chicano Drama 183 appear, but at other times the Indio is imagined through the use of Indigenous music, flutes and drums that provide a background or undercurrent to the action of the play. In some instances the Indio is offstage, as in Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost (1982), in which the male Indio character figures prominently in the narrative although we never see him.1 In Edit Villareal’s contemporary adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, retitled The Language of Flowers (1991), the action takes place on the Mexican Day of the Dead, an Indigenous custom that is practiced to this day.2 Likewise, Octavio Solís’s Man of the Flesh (1988), an adaptation of the Don Juan plays, takes place on the Day of the Dead and again invokes Indigenous mythologies.3 An example of a play that takes place in both the present and the colonial past is Josefina Lopez’s Unconquered Spirits (1997). In this play Lopez compares a contemporary Chicana’s struggles with those of an Indian woman during the conquest.4 These are but a few examples of plays that remind the audience of the Chicanos’ Indigenous heritage. In Estela Portillo Trambley’s Day of the Swallows the Indio appears as the “noble savage,” a masculine figure that she contrasts with the superfeminine central character whose connection with her Indigenous roots is through images that only she can see and feel. In Valdez’s Mummified Deer, the Indio appears as an eighty-four-year-old Yaqui woman and as various Yaqui characters, in a separate reality that only she and the audience see. In this paper I investigate these two plays as distinct, yet similar, representations of the Indio in Chicano drama. Portillo Trambley’s play offers a female vision of Indio nobility set in a nineteenth-century realm, while Valdez’s play provides a male, twenty-first-century image of the Indio as metaphor for the Chicana/o’s erased history in the United States. Together, the plays demonstrate both a thematic and an aesthetic evolution from poetic realism to poetic fantasy. Valdez and Portillo Trambley are U.S.-born Chicanos of the same generation. She was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1936, and he was born in Delano, California, in 1940. The Southwestern desert is always present in Portillo Trambley’s writings, while Valdez’s plays either reflect the fecundity of California’s Central Valley or take place in an urban setting. Both playwrights share the belief that Native Americans reflect a oneness with and an understanding...

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