Conversations About the (Un)said: the Latine immigrant discourse as a construction of belonging in the North American stage

Abstract

This work is an attempt to share experiences and reflections from the subjectivity of my personal theatrical work with the Latine immigrant community in California in the last three decades, with emphasis on my latest dramaturgical works, A Long Way Home / Un largo camino a casa with the Salvadoran composer David Molina, and the first staging of the performative series Identidades Migratorias: Cuerpos en tránsito / Poéticas del desplazamiento by my collaborator, the Mexican performance artist Violeta Luna, focusing on the reality of immigrant women in California, USA, and refugee women in Mexico.

Few sectors of the community are as excluded from spaces where they can articulate their reality in first person as that of immigrant workers. Following directions proposed by writings by Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, and others, as well as my performance practice, I interrogate the notion of roots as fixated on the place of origin, or in the theatrical text. I embrace a view that encompasses the notion of the scenic (and aesthetic) experience as fundamentally independent of the play, as a bridge, a place not only of crossing, but of congregation. The theatrical/performative space as border/interstitial, manufactured as a site of belonging, from which to construct a subjectivity and subvert the violent narratives of the “monstrous other” of the American sociopolitical (or nationalist/nativist) milieu. A stage discourse, fundamentally experiential, and as such, deeply relational, always an in-between, from where one can talk about what one always must keep silent about.