Book Reviews

Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latina/o America

El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement

¡Teatro Hispano! Three Major New York Companies

El Teatro Campersino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994; pp. xviii + 286. $37.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

¡Teatro Hispano! Three Major New York Companies. Elisa de la Roche. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1995; pp. ix + 211. $57.00 cloth.

This being a time ripe for politics, hybridity, and performativity (in theory and in practice), it comes as no surprise that Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez, Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, and Elisa de la Roche should find forums to offer their perspectives on a broad range of issues which alternately refer to Chicano, Latina/o, and Hispanic performative and theatrical activities. Much has been said about hybrid identities in contemporary cultural politics and theory, in so-called celebrations of the dynamics of inter- and intra-cultural politics that implicate the interstices of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and language. The flip side is that "multiculturalism" sweeps the marketplace and the academy, where it has become fashionable to color theories of (post)modernity with uninterrogated ethnographic fantasies of racial hybridity. But as activists and critical theorists have so relentlessly insisted, the politics of representation eclipses academic fancy.

Diana Taylor and Juan Villega's collection of essays Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latina/o America offers a bold forum to survey the range of political and cultural activities currently practiced by Latina/os, a broadly defined term which includes Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puertoriqueses academic fancy.

e it has become fashionable to color theories od Argentinos. The volume emerges from a group residency of U.S.-based theatre scholars at U.C. Irvine, who respond to the recognition that "identity politics had failed, the politics of location was not working, coalition politics functioned in a few places, and the politics of invitation, at least at the outset, seemed unthinkable" (4). The Negotiating Performance collection weaves together the critical cultural work of "Latina/o America" which might otherwise remain in separate disciplinary camps. What the seventeen authors in this collection share is a rejection of the traditional norms of theatre and culture practices, and an investment in the performative as a method for interrogating both theory and practice. Taylor argues against the tendency to understand Latin America as a homogenous whole, but for considering a Latina/o horizon in which a shared "history of opposition to colonial powers" (9) and negotiations of performance, theatre, culture and politics reach beyond academic and national boundaries. The project does not claim to unite the many distinct positionalities except to thread together a critical consciousness of displacement, rooted in the historical connections between empire and language.

Cherríe Moraga's "Art in América con Acento" links the Nicaraguan Revolution with Chicano activism and her writing activities; whereas Sue-Ellen Case's "Seduced and Abandoned: Chicanas and Latinas in Representation" asks for intra-racial coalitions; María Teresa Marrero's "Public Art, Performance Art, and the Politics of Site" discusses the brilliant performative work of visual artist Daniel J. Martínez; and Jorge Salesi and Patrick O'Connor's "For Carnival, Clinic, and Camera: Argentina's Turn-of-the-Century Drag Culture Performs 'Woman'" theorizes historical ambiguities
in gender performativities. Taylor and Villegas claim distinct projects, demonstrating contemporary [End Page 387] tensions between the discourses of performance and theatre as critical tools: while Taylor explains "performance has claimed its autonomy both from the dramatic text and its representations to constitute itself in anti-theatrical forms--among them performance art, public art, and what we might call public performance" (11); Villegas instead refers to theatricality, teatricalidad, for analyzing theatre conventions, as a specific system of representation.

Negotiating Performance expands the possibilities of a very necessary field: Latina/o Performance Studies. What I find lacking in this otherwise terrific volume is a more concerted effort to historicize and refer to the Latina/o political and academic movements which the volume presumes. Thanks to the U.S. Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, and in particular the labor and cultural Chicano movements, Chicano and Latino Studies are "new" academic disciplines, suggesting invigorating critique and historiography in the areas of labor and law as well as theatre and performance. Increased popular and academic attention to the cultural work of Latina/o America has only begun to excavate the critical value of those political histories which otherwise go unnarrated.

Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez offers an excellent work in Chicano historiography and performativity. Broyles-Gonzalez opens and closes El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement with a refreshing ethic of inclusivity, first acknowledging "the work of many" and finally inviting readers to develop more work out of the grounds that the book establishes. With the first page photograph dubbed "UFW struggles to ban child labor," Broyles-Gonzalez establishes the continuing political objectives of theatre in relation to the renowned Chicano labor movement--the United Farmworkers Union (the first ever union to organize agricultural labor in the U.S.)--first led by César Chavéz and now by Arturo Rodriguez. Published a year after his death, Broyles-Gonzalez dedicates this work to Cesar and Linda Chavez; one wonders why Dolores Huerta is not included in that dedication. The book's political allegiances, especially with regards to gender, are nonetheless problematized; this is not simply a celebration of the mythologized Raza movement or its corollary Teatro. As a result Broyles-Gonzalez signals that the founding director of the Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez, "provided healthy opposition" to her work: on the one hand allowing her access to the Teatro's archives in San Juan Bautista, California, and on the other vying to approve the manuscript before it went to press.

Clearly something is at stake. Broyles-Gonzalez does not merely intend to de-mythologize the Valdez-centered cultural history of the Teatro; more importantly, she begins to explore a specific period and scope of a collective performance practice in the Teatro. With the first chapter "El Teatro Campesino and the Mexican Popular Performance Tradition" Broyles-Gonzalez positions her scholarly study of the Teatro's collective activities in light of the Chicano working class tradition of oral culture and performativity, as opposed to a standard academic text-centered, chronological history narrative. Oral culture and performativity constitute an important and innovative part of Chicano Studies, as seen in the work of Jose Lim traditía Herrera Sculture and performativity, as opposed to a standard academic text-centered, chronological history narrative. Oral culture and performativity constitute an important and innovative part of Chicano Studies, as seen in the work of Jose Lim tradithe genre's form, but also its use; in discussing the collective organization in the second chapter, "Theatre of the Sphere: Toward the formulation of a Native Performance Theory and Practice," Broyles-Gonzalez researches a practice whose sacred tradition she does not wish to betray. To those pursuing the political performativity of witness, the chapter offers useful references as well as a sound historiographic model.

The second half of the book steers readers to the better known alternative historiographies of the Teatro Campesino. "Toward a Re-Vision of Chicana/o Theatre History: The Roles of Women in El Teatro Campesino" critiques the Teatro's sexist ramifications in macho scripts and artistic vision, while insisting that "male resistance to female self-determination within the Chicano movement, however, should not be personalized or considered a special problem of this or that man or group. In truth, it is not unique to El Teatro Campesino" (144). Several women who were a part of creating the Teatro interview about their struggles with Valdez's patriarchal organization, naming particularly his preference for casting lighter-skinned women; their subsequent decisions to leave the Teatro for alternative creative and political spaces, expressing Anzaldúa's renowned "new mestiza consciousness," come as no surprise. The narrative of Socorro Valdez, younger sister of Luis Valdez, is especially compelling: frustrated with roles which cast women as either girls, wives, grandmothers, or putas, Socorro pushed her acting repertoire by playing male roles and creating non-gendered characters, most notably as Huesos (bones) in the mythological Fin del Mundo which toured Europe in 1980. More discussion on the ironies of that European tour would have added to an already rich reading of the Teatro's performance politics. [End Page 388]

The last chapter "From Alternative Theatre to Mainstream" finally evaluates the change of artistic vision and activities of the Teatro. From picketline Actos to Broadway, El Teatro Campesino has moved from a collective organization to a mainstream production company. By the 1980s El Teatro had split from the radical platforms of Teatro Nacional de Aztlan (TENAZ), abandoning its materialist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of an artistic emphasis on Chicano spiritual and mythological "origins" that, it may be argued, opened more challenging roles for women in the Teatro. Must radical politics time and again come at the expense of womanist, feminist, and collectivist objectives? Broyles-Gonzalez notes the successes attendant upon the Teatro's failure, concluding that "the artistic power and inspirational force of the Teatro Campesino material created collectively by the ensemble (and published as the 'early works of Luis Valdez') have not been matched in the post-1980 period . . . It is to be hoped that the celebrations of the Teatro Campesino will in time lead to a rediscovery of those elements from its legacy with which we can construct a better future" (239).

Focusing on the East rather than the West Coast Latinidad, Elisa de la Roche's ¡Teatro Hispano! Three Major New York Companies gives readers the opportunity to mark distinct Latina/o migrational patterns and cultural politics in the late twentieth century; while traditionally Mexicans and Latin Americans have settled in the West, on the East Coast Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Caribbeans have made Latina/o history. Unfortunately, de la Roche offers little in the way of critical theatre historiography for the scarcely documented East Coast Hispanic Theatre Movement, and is content instead to survey INTAR (International Arts Relations, Inc.), the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and the Repertorio Espa little in the way of critical theatre historiography for the scarcely documented East Coast Hispanic Theatre Movement, and is content instead to survey INTAR (International Arts Relations,e present. The introductory chapter suggests a "History of the Hispanic Theatre Movement: 1920s-1960s," but suffers by too superficially dating Hispanic theatre traditions from the Greeks and the Columbus 1492 arrival, and so thoroughly relies on the work of theatre historian Nicolás Kanellos and other secondary sources, that it rather subverts the volume's otherwise straightforward intent: to make available information about three theatres which should indeed receive critical attention in the arts and the academy.

In ¡Teatro Hispano! the question of what precisely constitutes the movement and what it suggests for cultural politics in performance is never adequately articulated. What does "Hispanic" mean to these three theatres, and how have these negotiations transpired? Too like the Ford Foundation reports such as Joanna Pottlitzer's 1988 Hispanic Theatre in the United States and Puerto Rico, de la Roche resorts to a writing model which professionals of all fields are complicating in favor of more complex historiography. Another writing of the New York Hispanic Theatres might find a way to subvert the standard individual-driven chronology with more historically networked narratives, and, generate greater discussion about the variety of forces which continue to make the East Coast Hispanic Theatre Movement important to the ever-growing Hispanic community in New York City, and to the broader Latina/o Performance and Theatre community. De la Roche might further ask, for example, how Caribbean forms, and, an increasingly Mexican presence in New York affects the East Coast Theatre: its seasonal repertoires, staffing, outreach programs, and artistic vision.

As a reference source, the volume offers in detail the yearly accomplishments of the three Hispanic New York theatres which "stood out among the rest . . . they represented the longest lived, had the largest operating budgets, included the greatest variety of programs such as playwrighting workshops and classes, and appeared to be the most permanent" (viii). INTAR has supported and promoted the work of such important playwrights as: García Lorca, Lope de Vega, Eugene Ionesco, Maria Irene Fornes, Dolores Prida, Migdalia Cruz, Luis Santeiro, and Cherríe Moraga; the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre: Piri Thomas, Fernando Arrabal, Pedro Pietri, Ana Lydia Vega, Ariel Dorfman; and the Repertorio Espaorca, Lope de Vega, Eugene Ionesco, Maria Irene Fornes, Dolores PriMachado, Rosario Castellanos, Manuel Puig, Enrique Buenaventura, and Josephina Lopez. De la Roche's appendices list all the theatre productions for each group, and the chapters read a corresponding chronological narrative of each theatre's activities which provide a start for those wishing to consider East Coast Latina/o performance more rigorously.

Lara D. Nielsen
New York University

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