Patricia Ybarra

Havana Isn’t Waiting: Staging Travel During Cuba’s Special Period

Theories of the borderlands first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s after the publication of Gloria Anzaldua’s influential Borderlands/La Frontera, which describes the border as a herida abierta (open wound).1 In her work and others’, the borderlands were defined primarily as areas around the US-Mexico border. Conceptualizing much of the US southwest area as the borderlands was an attempt to undo a historiography that saw the area, and Chicano/a cultural production about it, solely within the paradigm of US “minority” or “multicultural” literature.2 Borderlands theory’s most successful texts, such as Jose Saldivar’s Border Matters, “strategically take issue with the scholarly melting pot or ‘immigration as acculturation’ narratives by underscoring the migratory nature of the social and cultural flows among Mexico, Central America and the US.”3 This is especially crucial because, as Carl Gutierrez -Jones suggests, particular attention must be paid to the contradictory rhetoric and policy around (il)legal immigration, which attempts to criminalize immigrants while incorporating their labor into the US economy. Within the US academy, the attention to the borderlands was an attempt to place Chicano/a literature within a larger, international frame, which revealed the dependency between the northern and southern hemispheres and made an argument for Chicano literature as transnational .4

The Open Forum of ATHE

• What are the greatest challenges you are facing in your own institutions? How are you meeting those challenges? • What realities are you facing in terms of funding and institutional support? • How are you supporting students? How are students reacting to the present moment in your classrooms and in their academic and creative work? • How might ATHE support you in your work in the future? How would you like to continue discussions in future conferences and meetings?

The Administrator as Activist

I wonder if I should be writing this essay. My activist activity has not often been as a leader: I have often been a follower or a orchestrator of others activities; I sign petitions, I protest, I present political art, I teach about theatre and activism, but I have never run an activist organization, led a protest or been arrested, despite having had some words with the police over the years (and we can guess why that is).

How to Read a Latinx Play in the Twenty-first Century: Learning from Quiara Hudes

I write this essay with a seemingly simple question: How does one read a Latinx play? Or, perhaps more specifically, how does one teach someone else to read a Latinx play in the twentyfirst century? The title of this essay, of course, is an allusion to Gayatri Spivak’s “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book,” a 1991 essay that took on the challenge of teaching global literature under the aegis of newly formed multicultural curricula in US universities. Some twenty-five years later I revisit her concerns in relation to the still present challenge of inspiring readings of Latinx plays and performances that honor their cultural and aesthetic complexity inside of the classroom and outside of it. In the midst of a new set of initiatives to diversify the academy, many of the same problems faced during the 1990s still persist, despite a seemingly widespread shift in the visibility of Latinx cultures in the United States. Meaning that, for many readers, even for those with access to Latinx cultures, there may be the temptation to read these plays ethnographically: as texts that reveal an unmediated truth about Latinx life. Or perhaps more generally, in a desire to know Latinx culture, readers look to Latinx plays primarily for content, without giving much attention to form.

Latino/a Dramaturgy as Historiography

Poised at the end of the world, and perhaps at the beginning of a new one, Victor Cazares’s Ramses Contra Los Monstruos (2011) chronicles a love affair between Ramses, a man who makes his living dissolving the bodies of those killed in the business of narcotrafficking, and Tito/Titus, a young, United States-born Mexican who became obsessed with him after a hookup. We enter the action with Ramses in crisis. Cursed by his cousin, who destroys the effectiveness of his recipe, the bodies he is charged with disappearing are no longer dissolving, and his job security and his life are in danger. Tito/Titus takes Ramses to a long-shuttered movie theatre to hide out. There, in the midst of eleventh-hour revelations about HIV status and criminal activity, the couple reencounters the 1980s, whose legacy persists in the stale popcorn and broken glass on the theatre floor. As Tito/Titus explains: When I take the pill, I feel that I’m swallowing the 80s. I learned love from Enrique Iglesias songs. The ones that played at the beginning of telenovelas— telenovelas made in a Mexico made for export. Clear images of love. Clean images of blood. Never real. Never ending without resolution.

Young Jean Lee's Cruel Dramaturgy

“Young Jean Lee’s Cruel Optimism” argues that the Brown University production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men stages the tensions inherent in performing white masculinity under U.S. neo-liberal capitalism. The article performs a dramaturgical analysis of the production in relationship to Raymond Williams’s conception of liberal tragedy from Modern Tragedy (1966) and Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the impasse in Cruel Optimism (2011). This analysis reveals how the reconceptualization of liberal tragedy in the neo-liberal age asks that we reconsider the relationship between debt and aspiration so crucial to Williams’s conception of Ibsen’s dramaturgy. The theatricality of the play offers a new way to understand the affect and effects of living with the spectre of labour precarity and debt in the contemporary United States.

Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World

In late 2009, I received an email from Jay Winter, a professor of history at Yale University. He had read my book on theatre in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and wanted to talk to me about a project that he was working on in Tetlanohcan, Tlaxcala, and New Haven, CT. His larger project was about human rights, but his research involved a play. This play, which came to be called La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World, is an original work written by Daniel Carlton, a US theatre artist, and Soame Citlalime (Nahuatl translation: Precious Women of the Stars), a group of 25 women and one man from Tetlanohcan. La Casa Rosa had its premiere in August 2010 in New York City at the Wings Theatre, and was performed throughout the New York-New Haven corridor in September 2010.1 As the title of the play suggests, the drama is about the struggles in Tetlanohcan under Mexico’s neoliberal conditions.

Performance in the Borderlands Roundtable

In May 2009, Ramon H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young invited the Performance in the Borderlands contributors to participate in a multi-day writing retreat at Northwestern University, sponsored by the School of Communication and the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern. Patrick Anderson, Lowell Fiet, Ric Knowles, Eng-Beng Lim, Paige A. McGinley, Ana Elena Puga, Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, Patricia Ybarra, and Harvey Young spent two days sharing early drafts of their Borderlands chapters in both open and closed sessions. The retreat closed with a roundtable discussion in which authors reflected on the ways that the border, as both a concept and a material reality, has evolved since 1999. They also used the occasion to engage with each other’s writings on performance in the borderlands.