A Pan-American Perspective: An Interview with Carlos Morton

FALL 2009 151 A Pan-American Perspective: An Interview with Carlos Morton Andrew Gibb Carlos Morton’s professional playwriting credits include the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Denver Center Theatre, La Compañía Nacional de México, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and theArizona Theatre Company. Morton’s most recent book is Children of the Sun: Scenes and Monologues For Latino Youth (2008, Players Press). In 2006-2007 he was named Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer to Poland. He is currently Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This interview was conducted via email in May 2009, when Dr. Morton was in residence at the University of California Washington Center in Washington, D.C.1 You are the child of a military family, and grew up in many different places. How do you think this lack of a “homeland” (so to speak) has affected your writing about the Latina/o experience? The nucleus of the family was always Latino. My father was born in Chicago of Mexican immigrants who arrived in 1917 and my mother was born in SanAntonio, Texas of a Mexican/Cuban couple who met in Detroit in the 1920s. We spoke Spanish at home and English in the public arena, so the “homeland” was the family. I’ve come back to that in my writing. As a child we lived in Panama (five years) and Ecuador (one year) so you never forget that. Being a Latino has always been a factor: after I got married to Azalea Marín López and had our sons, we lived in Mexico City, San José de Costa Rica, and Poland. In the 1980s I wrote La Malinche about the relationship between Hernán Cortés and the woman who helped him conquer Mexico. In the 1990s I wrote Dreaming on a Sunday in the Alameda about Diego Rivera’s mural in the Alameda Park in Mexico City. The Savior, which is the story of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador, was translated into Spanish and 152 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW adapted by Teatro la Fragua of Honduras whose director, Jack Warner, S.J., studied at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago. “Meso-America” has always been a part of my history. My wife is from the Itsmo de Tehuantepec, and we go there a lot to visit friends and family. We named our youngest son “Xuncu” which means “el más pequeño” in Zapotec. For me, growing up, it was either cold, hard Chicago where everything was white and black and laid out on a grid with State and Madison as the cardinal points of reference, or the warm humid Caribbean waters with monkeys in the trees and crabs on the land. During the early years of the Chicano Movement, you were living in a lot of places (Chicago, New York, El Paso) that were a long way away from the strikes in the grape fields or the shows on the backs of farm trucks. How did this distance shape your perspective on the Movement and the art that came out of it? Well, it made me see things from afar, so I could maintain a certain distance. For example, I personally witnessed the 1968 Democratic Convention and the subsequent riots and demonstrations. I was working on a camera crew for ABC’s Peter Jennings and was tear-gassed in Lincoln Park. Afterwards, I was so upset I “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out” of society . Before that, I was trying to be very middle-class, wearing button-down collared shirts, penny loafers, and driving a British sports car. Growing up I lived in the outskirts of Chicago. You spent some time in New York City in the mid-seventies. What was the Latina/o theatre scene like in New York at that time? The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was an exciting place to be in the midseventies , a gathering place for writers, players and hustlers on the “Loisaida” or Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was in a rough neighborhood, so there was always a certain risk involved. I lived in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer who wrote a number...