Drama What Is the Art Form of Latino Latina Theater
Literary Theory and Criticism
Hispanic Drama
The history of Hispanic drama in what is at present the United States begins in 1598 in present-day New Mexico with a theatrical recreation of Cortés'south conquest of Mexico staged by Juan Oñate and his followers entitled Los Moros y los cristianos. This early apply of theater was also accompanied by a tradition of staging pastorelas, pastoral dramas that explore the lives of humorous shepherds in relationship to the birth of Christ, primarily staged in New Mexico and Texas. This tradition of folk drama, which continues to the present twenty-four hour period, emerged from various forms of religious drama including the Spanish auto sacramentales of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The first documented professional person drama performed in Spanish in California may take taken place as early as 1789. Still, information technology was not until the center of the 19th century that Spanish-language, professional theater was significantly documented in California. These works past Castilian authors were primarily melodramas with broad audition appeal. Performances centered in Los Angeles, although there are records of performances in San Francisco and in Tucson. The development of Castilian-linguistic communication theater in Texas occurred somewhat later, and there was significant growth in the last ii decades of the 19th century, primarily in San Antonio and Laredo. In addition to the performances of melodramas and other plays in established theater buildings or marketplaces, there are also records of carpas (tent shows) and other forms of popular Spanish-language performance that would influence some of the acting styles of the later Chicano theater.
The belatedly 19th and 20th centuries saw a tremendous growth in Hispanic theater in Los Angeles, New York, San Antonio, and Tampa. Much of the piece of work was in the tradition of the Spanish zarzuela (comic operetta) and was in many means an expression of both customs ideals and community formation within the immigrant and ethnic Spanish-speaking populations in these cities. Like other forms of ethnic theater during this period, the appeal tended to be relatively insular since they were monolingual performances.
The history of contemporary Hispanic drama reflects a shift from Mexican, Cuban, and Spanish traditions (such as performance of the zarzuela) to a greater investment in the experiences of Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans in New York). The plays reflecting this shift articulate the realities of an indigenous being lived in an emerging space between cultures. The first examples of this work addressed the socioeconomic and cultural difficulties of adjusting to life in the mainland Us for those who had recently arrived and too documented and combated the racial and economic discrimination that continued to plague groups that had been present here for generations. As these conflicts became more than focused on the interpersonal, the attention oftentimes shifted to the realities of linguistic codeswitching (moving back and forth between English and Spanish) and other negotiations of Hispanic identity in the United States.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the most visible Hispanic drama was Chicano drama. The word Chicano is used in this context to refer to individuals of Mexican descent in the United States who acknowledge their indigenous roots that emerged out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. In 1965, in conjunction with the Delano, California, grape strikes and the organizing piece of work of Cesar Chavez, El Teatro Campesino (the Farmworkers' Theater) was born. Under the organizational leadership of Luis Valdéz, this collaborative ensemble equanimous of migrant farm workers began staging curt political agitprop skits they labeled actos. Drawing upon Mexican popular operation traditions and the acting experience of some of the workers, likewise as Valdéz's experience with the Bread and Puppet Theater of New York, they developed a style of acting and functioning related to Italian commedia dell'arte also as the carpa tradition. Popular actos include works similar Los Vendidos (The sellouts, or Those who are sold [1967]), which explore contemporary Chicano stereotypes, likewise as pieces that explore more explicitly the lived realities of the hit farm workers. The agreement of Chicano theater aesthetics during the 1960s and early 1970s was that it should be by, for, and near Chicanos. There was no sense that the work was a part of mainstream culture, and Chicano artists positioned themselves in opposition to mainstream values.
El Teatro Campesino, along with the Chicano motion itself, led to the formation of a number of collaborative troupes based on this model, such as Teatro de la Esperanza (founded in Santa Barbara, California, in 1971). These teatros performed highly politicized works following the aesthetics of Chicano nationalism, which argued symbolically for a new Chicano nation, Aztlán, to separate from the The states. The growth of teatros during the early 1970s led to the formation of TENAZ, El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán (The National Theater of Aztlán), an umbrella arrangement for Chicano theater. Along with Luis Valdéz, important early playwrights include Estela Portillo-Trambley, whose 24-hour interval of the Swallows (1971) is the outset published play by a Chicana (the female person counterpart of Chicano), and Carlos Morton, who has transformed myths and biblical accounts into comedies with a Chicano sensibility. Morton's all-time play, The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales (1977), is a docudrama that recounts the attempted cover-upwards of the murder of a Chicano by a Texas sheriff.
From 50.: Jeanine Stonemason, Demián Bichir, Matías Ponce, Daniel Valdez and Rose Portillo in Zoot Suit at the Taper/Craig Schwartz
The most famous Chicano play, Luis Valdéz'south Zoot Arrange (1978), centers on the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial in 1940s Los Angeles and serves an important historical function inside the history of Chicano theater. Zoot Suit is notable not only for its success in Los Angeles but also for the fact that it was the first Chicano play on Broadway. In this production, El Teatro Campesino used professional actors (rather than migrant workers and other amateurs) for the first time, marking a clear shift toward professionalization. Since this watershed moment, focus in Chicano drama has shifted from the teatro to the individual playwright and from the barrio audience to more mainstream regional venues.
Cherríe Moraga is the most prominent representative of a 2nd generation of Chicana and Chicano playwrights and a leader in the emergence of drama by Hispanic women in the mid-1980s. Moraga'southward numerous plays deal non only with economic and political issues just also with questions of sexual identity. Her kickoff play, Giving Upwards the Ghost (1986), uses two manifestations of the protagonist to dramatize the negotiations of coming to understand a lesbian identity. Heroes and Saints (1992), her virtually celebrated work, returns to many issues raised by El Teatro Campesino in exploring the difficult lives of agricultural workers in California. Other important Chicana playwrights include Edit Villareal, Josefina López, Elaine Romero, and Evelina Fernandez.
In Cuban theater in the United States, a distinction is often made between Cuban-American drama and Cuban exilic drama. Cuban exilic drama is produced past those artists who left after the 1959 revolution, who focus on isle experiences, and who empathize themselves equally participating in a specifically Cuban aesthetic. For some scholars, this group includes playwrights such as René Ariza, Matías Montes Huidobro, and Leopoldo Hernandez. Cuban-American drama, on the other hand, may bargain with the realities of the state of affairs in Republic of cuba just likewise address issues of existence Cuban in America. The most prominent Cuban-American playwrights include Maria Irene Fornés, Eduardo Machado, and Dolores Prida. Fornés'southward early on piece of work demonstrated an investment in the advanced, but her mentoring and teaching of new Hispanic playwrights during the 1980s at INTAR (International Arts Relations) Hispanic American Arts Middle in New York Urban center has led to an increased focus on Hispanic subjects and themes. In Sarita (1984) and The Conduct of Life (1985), she addresses the problems of masculine power within Hispanic civilisation. Dolores Prida'due south bilingual and Spanish works, such as Beautiful Señoritas (1977) and Botánica (1990), address questions of the representation of Hispanic women, the gentrification of neighborhood communities, and generational negotiation. Eduardo Machado, who was himself influenced by working with Fornés, is best known for The Floating Island Plays (1991), a quartet that spans the lives of two Cuban families from their 1920s existence on the island to a wedding in exile in the 1980s. As a instructor, he has also worked with emerging playwrights such as Rogelio Martinez, whose work, Illuminating Veronica (1999), nearly a bourgeois woman who stays behind when the residue of her family leaves Cuba after the revolution, critiques the residual gender bias of a supposedly transformed revolutionary lodge. Another important CubanAmerican playwright is Nilo Cruz, whose play Night Train to Bolina (1994), well-nigh the experiences of two young Latin American runaways, explores the ability of the imagination and the difficulty of youthful intimacy. In 2003, Cruz's Anna in the Torrid zone (2002), set up in 1929 in a Spanish-Cuban section of Tampa, Florida, became the first play by a Hispanic dramatist to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Puerto Rican theater on the island and Puerto Rican theater in the mainland United States are two very dissimilar things. The near important transition in sensibility—the gap that somewhen led to the evolution of the termNuyorican—is exemplified by René Marqués'due south play, La Carreta (The ox-cart [1953]), which emerged out of his awareness of the realities of the Puerto Rican experience in New York, an awareness gained during his 1940 stay in New York to study playwriting. La Carreta recounts the journey of i family unit from rural Puerto Rico to the urban space of San Juan and eventually to New York Urban center in the hopes of economic improvement. They eventually return to San Juan after the father is killed. This play so effectively captured the hard transitions in Puerto Rican migration that, co-ordinate to John Antush (an important scholar of Puerto Rican theater in New York), "Miriam Colón and others founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) primarily to bring this play, free of charge, to the people of New York" (Nuestro xiii). Miguel Piñero'south work follows up on this transition by articulating the realities of life on the streets. Emerging out of his experiences on the street and in prison, Piñero's plays provide commentary on the position of Puerto Ricans in New York also as explore the difficulties of expressing masculinity in diverse communities. His most famous piece of work, Brusk Eyes (1974), provides a glimpse into the power dynamics and the difficulties of retaining any sense of selfintegrity in prison house. Celebrated for its gritty realism and accurate portrayal of prison house life, Short Optics was produced on Broadway and was eventually filmed. Reynaldo Povod'due south Cuba and His Teddy Bear (1986) was also successfully produced on Broadway, though many attribute its success more to the choice of celebrity actors (such equally Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio) than to the play itself. Edward Gallardo, in plays such equally Simpson Street (1979), shifts the conflicts from the streets to the family and demonstrates to some critics a shift away from a nostalgic privileging of Puerto Rico and toward a focus on life in New York. Other of import contemporary Puerto Rican playwrights in the Us include Cándido Tirado, Juan Shamsul Alám, and Edwin Sánchez.
Hispanic drama'due south transition from the 1980s to the 1990s is marked past a shift from very localized concerns with issues of Hispanic identity to broader concerns about negotiating identity in a diversity of spaces. This transition can be clearly seen in the work of two Puerto Rican–American playwrights: Migdalia Cruz and José Rivera. Migdalia Cruz, whose before pieces, such as The Have-Petty (1991) and Miriam'due south Flowers (1990), give accounts of growing up amid the commonplace violence of the Bronx, moves subsequently to works such as Fur (1995), in which divergence and the ability to love, two of her crucial themes, are explored in a dearest triangle experienced in the futurity on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Her most recent work is Grito: A Cry for the Bronx (2008). Beginning in the 1980s with works such as The House of Ramon Iglesia (1983) and The Hope (1988), set in domestic Puerto Rican spaces in New York, Rivera has moved into much more expansive plays of ideas, such as Marisol (1992), which explores the entire space of New York City, and Sonnets for an Old Century (2000), which takes place in limbo. Rivera was nominated for an Oscar for his 2004 screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries.
Every bit the 1990s progressed into the 21st century, several playwrights began testing the limits of Hispanic drama, acknowledging the expanding heterogeneity of Hispanic and Latino identity in the Us (a number of playwrights adopt the term Latino to Hispanic because they meet the latter equally a term created by regime as opposed to a cocky-selected identity; many individuals also distinguish betwixt these terms based on political affiliation). This expanding heterogeneity is characterized by more explicit references to issues of sexuality and by recognition of "new" forms of identity (Colombian American, Chilean American, and and then on). In his powerful play Deporting the Divas (1996), Guillermo Reyes explores the identity crisis of a bisexual Mexican-American INS agent and includes new Latino characters, such as a blonde Argentinian of German descent. Luis Alfaro goes even further in Straight as a Line (1997), which has neither the expected themes nor characters of Hispanic drama, focusing instead on a British mother and son dealing with the realities of the physical devastation of AIDS while living in Las Vegas, forcing critics and audiences to rethink the definition of Hispanic drama. Other important playwrights include Oliver Mayer, best known for Blade to the Heat (1994), about a young boxer defendant of being homosexual; Octavio Solis, all-time known for Santos and Santos (1993), about the burdens of family responsibility and ethics; and Caridad Svich, a prolific writer also heavily engaged in thinking near Hispanic drama.
Another development in the 1990s was the emergence of comedic performance, blending stand up-up comedy and theater, past a range of groups, such every bit Civilization Clash and Latins Bearding, and individuals, such as Marga Gomez, Monica Palacios, Luis Alfaro, and Carmelita Tropicana. The most widely recognized mainstream instance of this is John Leguizamo, whose one-man shows such as Mambo Mouth (1990) and Freak (1997) have been both published and televised.
The 21st century has seen a substantial change in the mainstream attending given to Hispanic drama. Following Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize, his works, such as Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, Lorca in a Green Dress, Beauty of the Father, and many others, have been widely produced, and other playwrights have seen increasingly broad broadcasting of their work, including Luis Alfaro'southward Electricidad (2004), a retelling of Electra, and Eduardo Machado'southward The Cook (2003). Octavio Solis's Lydia (2008), well-nigh a family in the 1970s negotiating personal loss and secrets, has attracted wide critical attention. While writers similar José Rivera and Eduardo Machado proceed to create important piece of work for the theater, new playwrights have emerged onto the scene, including Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and Karen Zacarías. Perhaps the most successful immature writer is Quiara Alegria Hudes, whose Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (2006), most the Republic of iraq war, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She also wrote the book for the musical In the Heights most the primarily Dominican-American Washington Heights neighborhood, which received the 2008 Tony Award for All-time Musical. The transformations of Hispanic theater from a politically specific collaborative aesthetic in the 1960s to a broader place in mainstream culture during the 1980s to its increasing proliferation and diversity in the 1990s and into the 21st century, serve every bit evidence that this important area of American drama volition proceed to grow and develop while still exploring politically of import ideas that reflect the variety of American civilization.
Bibliography
Antush, John V., ed. Recent Puerto Rican Theater: V Plays from New York. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1991. ———, ed. Nuestro New York: An Album of Puerto Rican Plays. New York: Mentor, 1994. Arrizón, Alicia. Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ———, and Lillian Manzor, eds. Latinas on Stage. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 2000. Broyles-González, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Motility. Austin: Academy of Texas Press, 1994. Cortina, Rodolfo J., ed. Cuban American Theater. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1991. Culture Clash. Culture Clash: Life, Expiry and Revolutionary Comedy. New York: Theatre Communications Grouping, 1998. Feyder, Linda, ed. Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Printing, 1992. Flores, Richard. Los Pastores: History and Functioning in the Mexican Shepherd'due south Play of South Texas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Establishment Press, 1995. González-Cruz, Luiz F., and Francesca One thousand. Colecchia, eds. Cuban Theater in the United States: A Disquisitional Anthology. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Printing/Editorial Bilingüe, 1992. Huerta, Jorge. Chicano Drama: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Printing, 1982. ———. Chicano Drama: Performance, Gild, and Myth. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———, ed. Necessary Theater: 6 Plays about the Chicano Feel. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1989. ———, and Nicolás Kanellos, eds. Nuevos Pasos: Chicano and Puerto Rican Drama. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1989. Kanellos, Nicolás. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the U.s.: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———, ed. Mexican American Theatre: So and Now. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1989. ———, ed. Mexican American Theatre: Legacy and Reality. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Latin American Literary Review Printing, 1987. Latino Plays from South Coast Repertory: Hispanic Playwrights Projection Anthology. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2000. Osborn, M. Elizabeth, ed. On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Printing, 1994. Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theater in the United States and Puerto Rico. New York: Ford Foundation, 1988. Ramos-García, Luis A. The State of Latino Theater in the Us: Hybridity, Transculturation and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2002. Rossini, Jon D. Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto. José Can You Run across? Latinos On and Off Broadway. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. ———, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Stages of Life: Transcultural Functioning and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. ———, eds. Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology. Tucson: Academy of Arizona Press, 2000. Svich, Caridad, and Marma Teresa Marrero, eds. Out of the Fringe: Gimmicky Latina/Latino Theatre and Operation. New York: Theatre Communications Grouping, 2000.
Source: Publishing, I., 2010. The Facts On File Companion to American Drama. New York: Infobase Pub.
Categories: American Literature, Drama Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature, Theatre Studies
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