 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Amritha Ramanan and I'm the director of literary management and dramaturgy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and I'm so excited and so thrilled to be here this afternoon. I first of all wanted to share that we all and many of you I know came from Mohada and are still in many ways just emotionally processing that performance and I just wanted to give a shout out to the amazing Luis Alfaro for the beautiful work that you've done. Congratulations, congratulations. Yes, yes. So with this discussion, soil when geography identity and artistry collide, when talking about you know the vision for you know the Latinx playwright project this year with Christopher Sibo, Luis Alfaro, Stephanie Castro. We were talking so much about you know this really interesting concept of a global Latin identity and what it means to really harmonize where we come from, where we travel to, a sense of migration with you know personal artistry and identity and how that really fuels the work and I am so grateful to say that you know with this amazing group over here so much of that is just so resonant in all of the work that you do that we'll get to explore more and as Hector actually said yesterday during our dinner there's literally one degree of separation within this group but also an expanse in terms of geography, work in community and work in terms of scholarship, writing, theater you know it just it goes through the gamut so we only have an hour and a half so we'll see how far we go today but I did at least want to start by saying we're going to have an introduction and then I have some questions and then we will open it up to all of you for any questions that you have and then we also have our friends at HowlRoundTV live streaming this and so we will also take some questions from our virtual audience as well so I'm going to turn it over first to Hector to please you know to start with an introduction and I asked everyone here to in their introduction talk a little bit about what they are currently passionate about and working on so feel free to take it from there. Hello everybody I want to say thank you to OSF for inviting me and the rest of the panel we've been coming here my family and I as theater goers for about 10 years it's been our family vacation I'm now part of a theater family because my son who saw a fellow here at 10 and had that incredible production wake up his artistic soul is going to start college in the fall at NYU Tisch studying theater thanks to OSF thank you for the art that you all give and you create and you spark in so many people so I am Hector Tobar I am the son of watermelon immigrants born and raised in Los Angeles I began my writing career as a journalist I wrote for the LA Times for 20 years one of my favorite stories was that I wrote about Luis Alfada when he won the MacArthur genius grant I got to interview him for that later I got an MFA in creative writing and became a novelist I have now written two novels and two works of narrative nonfiction my most recent book was about the Chilean minors it was called deep down dark these guys who were trapped in the mine and it later became a movie called the 33 starting starting Antonio Vanderas and currently I'm at work on a novel I also write for the New York Times sometimes in the New Yorker but right now I work on a novel uh that's about a Midwestern family that finds itself caught up in the war in El Salvador in the 1980s beautiful excellent thank you so much that's Jose Luis oh my name is José Luis Valenzuela and I'm from Mexico and I'm a distinguished professor at UCLA yeah yeah yeah I must say the only reason I always say 29 of us in UCLA are of 3,300 professors so it's I feel very honored to be one anyway so I'm the artistic director of the Latino Theater Company and the Los Angeles Theater Center what I'm working on right now I'm working on an Encuentro de las Américas which is a theater festival so we're bringing six companies including Carmen uh six companies from Latino America Latino companies from Latino America and six Latino companies from the United States and they'll spend three weeks uh not only presenting their work to to the audience but also discussing why do we do what we do and how do we do it which is very important that that's my real passion how to change the narrative of Latino theater in the United States and only through discussions like that I think maybe possible to move it forward beautiful well thank you so much for having me thank you my name is Carmen Aguirre I am based in Vancouver Canada I am from Chile from Santiago Chile I am the daughter of Chilean refugees who arrived in Canada in the 1970s I've written cool written 25 plays and I've written two memoirs okay I'll brag just like you did they're both number one national bestsellers in Canada one of them is called something fierce and it's about my experience as resistance worker in the 1980s when I was a teenager when I went back to Chile and joined the underground the second one is called Mexican Hooker number one and it's about healing from post-traumatic stress disorder um due to what I experienced in the resistance but also to a very high profile rape that I was a victim of when I was 13 years old in Canada very high profile because he was a serial child rapist who's the most infamous serial child rapist in Canada and currently I am working on a new book this one will actually be a novel it's called Three Virgins and it takes place during the 20th century in Chile and it's offering a point of view of the right wing um I am left wing in case you hadn't already guessed that I'm also working on a brand new play called Anywhere But Here which actually takes place at the US Mexico border and that's going to get produced soon and I've got I know Shad the word Shad means nothing to you but Shad who is the number one rapper in Canada he's like Drake he's doing he's composing all the rap in my play because there's a lot of rap in it and the play that I'm taking to the Encuentro is my newest one-woman show which is called Broken Tailbone and in that play I teach the audience how to dance salsa for about 80 minutes while I weave five stories through the lesson um the stories are the history of Latinx dance halls in Canada the first Latinx dance hall ever in Canada was actually created by my parents at the Ukrainian Hall in Chinatown in Vancouver and um geopolitical history of Latin America and then my own personal stories of the Latinx dance halls so I'll leave it at that beautiful thank you oh well thank you for having me as well I'm Trevor Buffoni from New Orleans now I'm a Texan I'm saying it I'm claiming it in Houston and I just want to say that I'm a little nervous to be following Mojada so thank you Luis no no pressure uh but um yeah so I am a professor at the University of Houston I teach Spanish and women's gender and sexuality studies uh in my research primarily is on Latinx theater mostly Texas and California specifically Boyle Heights and Los Angeles uh so that's kind of how I entered this uh place but I also run the 50 Playwrights Project which I'll talk about later uh and I work with the Latinx Theater Commons the co-champion of Cafe Onda which is the online journal through HowlRound so you've all read something I've touched you know edited at some point and I've edited probably a third of the room I feel like and if I haven't I will um I feel like that's what I do did I miss something yeah absolutely there you go yeah well thank you all so much I mean it's uh it's so incredible just in each of your introductions to hear about the richness and the intersectionality of your work and I mean just how it travels and so with that I wanted to ask each of you whoever wants to you know respond um what you know I really always am so curious in terms of thinking about a starting point of inspiration and desire and um would really just on a very base level like to start with what inspires you to do what you do and um what are some of the you know the context in terms of geography or philosophy or something personal that has really just manifested in your work what inspired me in my work I actually I actually do theater for political reasons I always start as an activist I I when I came to the United States I didn't know I was Mexican and I figure out that Mexicans had a certain thing about who they supposed to be which I was not I was coming from Mexico City and it made it my life and my mission to change that perspective so inspires me and and checks me to continue I've been doing this for 40 years and and I feel like every day we experience something as the other that I feel that I need to talk about it or expose it or have a conversation with you guys as an audience too about whatever is that moment that had happened oh god oh um yes um well what inspires me is um I was raised in a socialist family um and I was in being raised in a socialist family I was taught from the time I was born that any skill set that you acquire you have to put it at the service of the community so when I started theater school and I learned that I was a person of color in theater school and I was taken aside um in my first few weeks at theater school by a faculty and told to quit because I would only ever get cast as a hooker and a maid and that's when I decided that I would start writing the stories of the Chilean community in exile because nobody else would and also to create work for myself um so I've been doing that ever since and um I feel kind of like what you just said that there is no end to it that just when we think we're getting somewhere something happens um where we are we realize that the work has only just begun yeah um yeah I would sort of echo um what you've both said um for me writing is a sort of three um the third generation in this three generation journey in which writing has been a form of self-defense of expressing our humanity um my uh grandmother was um mom Wadamal and Mayan Indian who never learned to read and write and my father uh came to the United States when he was about 20 21 years old with a fourth or fifth grade education and went to community college and the first thing he bought me when my sort of first really expensive gift was an American Heritage Dictionary of the English language and so this man whose mother could not read a single word in any language gave his son all the words in English and I think that's how I became a writer I think that's why I became a writer even though I didn't know it was a profession and as soon as I sort of came of age and realized that yeah writing was a political act you know especially when you're a representative of a group that doesn't perceive itself or isn't perceived to have an intellectual life that if I was going to assert myself intellectually would have to be in response to empire imperialism and so for me the sort of uh really sort of dominant truth of my early life as a writer was that I was from Los Angeles and Los Angeles was an imperial city a city filled with refugees and working people uh from the so-called underdeveloped world and and then I was one of those citizens I was a product of this city of contradictions the city that Luis is displayed in his in his beautiful play the emotional and political contradictions of living in that city made me into a writer and made me want to create art well I would say in terms of context I have a few I wrote some notes down scholar and me but for me geography has played a really important part in my journey I'm from New Orleans growing up I very much was in a theater family a theater going family but I'm talking very you know bye bye birdie Oklahoma and I love those shows but that was my kind of what I was exposed to for most of my life I my father's favorite movie is La Bamba I didn't quite realize what that was all about until you know 10 years ago but um and now New Orleans actually has a Latino theater company Arte Futuro productions Jose Torres-Tama but when I was growing up I wasn't exposed to really anything Latino in terms of theater music anything now looking back I'm like oh wow like that existed it just wasn't exposed to me so when I moved to Texas I was able to really immerse myself in Latino theater there's a really vast network of people across the state doing really interesting things and so that kind of opened my eyes but another kind of context for me was Spanish language right so I began this journey aside from theater through Spanish I studied Spanish I went to Latin America Spain studying abroad and I was interested in Latin American and Spanish theater nothing in the U.S. okay and then I you know I started reading more playwrights and reading more plays and I was working on Anna and the Tropics something on Anna and the Tropics by Nilo Cruz but in Spanish and I went and saw the play at Repertorio Española in New York and that was my first ever you know I saw in the Heights but that was my first time ever going to a Latino theater company and having that experience and it kind of woke me I ended up reading all of his plays and then I went through the canon right I read Luis's plays and all of the things that were published Che Moraga Luis Valdez so Spanish really I and I still go back to that I'm actually editing co-editing an anthology of plays in Spanish Latino plays in Spanish which will be the first ever anthology that of just plays in Spanish right there's been bilingual ones there's been plays with you know Spanish sprinkled in but never just Spanish so that's kind of an exciting thing that's happening and then philosophically I find a context that inspires me or that I always go back to is giving voice to others right using my positionality my privileges to really and understanding myself first so that I can help others and this is kind of something I teach to my students right understanding the internal before going to the external and so because of these different positions at university or in my community or as an ally just really finding ways to promote the Latino culture or Latino theater has really been kind of something that I always go back to but what inspires me is the personal connections right so just knowing and we'll talk about 50 playwrights project later but I have a personal connection with every one of those playwrights and I promote their work in a unique way for each person so for instance Luis Alfaro needs a different promotion than say someone who has never had a production right never had a reading and so I'm always looking for the ways I can push people's work you know in communities that are going to be receptive to their work right because not everyone's work is going to be received with open arms in every community so I try to find the the niches to really do that um so I'll actually I'll have one little thing uh so I the way of my analogy is that I am playing does anyone play the Sims or played the Sims back in the day in the 90s early 2000 the Sims so I think of myself as I'm playing a real-life version of the Sims and the playwrights are the Sims people right um and so I just pick them up and I put them here and then I introduce them to this person and that person um and whenever they get a production or they get a reading or someone's um writing about their play or whatever it might a retweet that's um I guess feeding the playwright I need to work on my Sims analogy a little more but that's kind of how I view it so that really inspires me right and so there's a few that I really work very closely with um and they very much they share their success with me in terms of you know texting me like hey like this just happened um what did you have to do with us and I'm like hey you know uh so that really inspires me this personal connection really having an investment in the actual person but people yes thank you thank you all for that Jose Luis I wanted to start with um with a question for you in thinking of this um uh with you know echoing so much of what we've heard around um you know exposure lifting up voices highlighting having a dialogue and conversation I remain so inspired by everything that you've created with the Latino theater company and the journey that you've had with Latino theater company and LATC and um I was wondering because I know there's some folks that are familiar with it but if you could share more about the journey of the creation of Latino theater company and then what has been the experience in terms of you know the decision of staying in LA and then also being part of LATC now and what that means with the work that you do yeah well like I said I started doing Chicano theater political theater and then like in 1970 1971 and it was really important work for me uh for Anton and then I met my wife and we got married I say come to live with me in Santa Barbara which I was part of Teatro de la Esperanza uh for a year and she said okay a year and then four years later we're still then she says okay I'm leaving you know I'm going back to LA either you come with me or you can't stay so I moved to LA and interesting because I never I in in in politics in our theater companies we never auditioned we never you know it's a company an ensemble so I went to LA and I decided possible to do an ensemble company in a regional theater and I started working at the Los Angeles Theater Center and I created an ensemble company called the Latino Theater Company now and but with the idea can we go out into the community and do research about the issues and create plays about us an ensemble now they call it device theater but we used to call it the collective creation in the 70s and so so we created this company at Los Angeles Theater Center and we did nine plays on the main stage which was really important meaning and we we brought culture class we turned latin synonymous luke's perform on his remember that was great luke's I remember with your uh how do you say i'm patines anyway the roller skates uh and within you know and we created many many plays uh august 29 it was an idea of creating this latino movement and then in 91 that company declared bankruptcy so Gordon Davidson come to us and say move to the mart taper as a company and we created uh the latino what was the name of the tenacity latino tenacity which was became a part of it too and uh we did uh widows carpa clash bandido flooring islands and that and the maiden have to understand we did five plays in two years at the mart taper forum which was amazing during that time because it was amazing so it was always the idea and then we left and I became a professor and and and and I love the LATC because the LATC gave the company the opportunity to to really uh produce and create for for for the five years and we you know we did José Rivera Eduardo Machado means we commissioned sherry moragas heroes and saints I mean it was really kind of great time Octavio we were he was working in Santos in Santos so it was a great time for us and I felt like it was such an important place that when I came back came back to to the LATC we came back to do a play called dementia and it was uh that city had been doing this theater they were managing the theater and and the and the theater was in enough of condition so somebody told me what do you think why don't we take it over why don't you take it over and and run this play and it was really as a Latino theater company I felt we have done a lot of what our mission was in that place was give us the opportunity to bring all the communities together by this mean to be a real multicultural theater with real you know giving voice to people in Los Angeles who usually don't get produced and and and and it's being kind of a great journey and the companies still together mean uh Lupin Tiberos died and and Silva died Trini Silva who was a member of the company died but the five remain and we still so we've been together for 30 years the same actors 30 years oh my god 30 years so beautiful beautiful and Luis maybe we should bring that performance of yours back I want to see that Carmen I wanted to also ask you in this um in this conversation around um place and community in space you spoke so beautifully about um your journey from Chile to Canada and how so much of your personal experiences have become the manifestation of your work um what has been your experience finding community in Canada through your work and how much of um how would you consider the cross-cultural nature of your work in terms of how it is received in your community is that challenging is that embraced what's what's the feeling of that now what do you see my community do you mean the theater community or do you mean the Latino community in Canada oh that's interesting I was thinking theater community but I'm actually curious about both yeah well I mean um the theater community is quite challenging um uh Canadian Actors Equity Association our actors union did a census a couple of years ago and for the first time in its history asked questions like what ways do you identify us what kind of roles do you get and the findings for those of us who are of color were completely obvious but for everybody else it was shocking where that 3.7 percent of the people that we see on Canadian professional stages only 3.7 percent are women of color and of that 3.7 percent almost none in lead roles and this is a major urban centers where more than 50 percent of the population is of non-European descent like Vancouver Toronto etc so we have a lot of work to do um I don't know I mean my my um conclusion is that mainstream Canadian culture is a little bit more polite than American mainstream Canadian American mainstream culture so what that means is that people like me who speak up are considered kind of rude and um you know uh difficult even even though uh my point of view has nothing to do with how I behave in their rehearsal hall which is very professional uh so it's been very hard it's been very very hard I was telling uh the cast and the director of um the reading tomorrow at my play the refugee hotel that it was to receive its world premiere in 2004 so a long time ago at the factory theater in Toronto which is a major theater company in Canada and that I pulled it um a few months before uh the world premiere because they had cast an all-white cast in a play which features eight Chilean characters um and that uh was considered um um a very extreme move on my part um which obviously it was but um I was considered an extremist for even uh doing that or even bringing that up um and things have gone a little bit forward in Canada since then for sure thanks to those of us of color who are willing to stand up and speak um uh but we still have a lot of challenges right so for example in Vancouver right now we're fighting the fight because Vancouver opera is about to do a fellow with a white man playing a fellow and it's 2017 um so you know again oh god okay now we have to have another panel and another panel and another okay here we go again right and it it gets quite exhausting um as for the nothing next community and then there's driving to have their stories uh seen on stage so you know I have received nothing but support from the nothing next community yeah thank you for sharing all that I remember when we were even talking yesterday about you pulling the production of refugee hotel which you know we'll get to see the reading of I I was just the courage that it takes to do that but to be able to actually really stand by the integrity of the work and so I really applaud you for that and honor you for that yeah beautiful yeah absolutely um and then also I wanted to ask um as you were sharing you know you um there's such you know amazing richness in terms of you know you have one woman shows that you perform and write you have plays you're working on novels um was it or shall I say was it a choice to actually want to go into each of those or was it more of a discovery in terms of how you would you know be an actor be a writer be a novelist and go through all of those disciplines as part of your work well it really comes down to creating work for myself because of the numbers that I just gave right um it's still very very difficult in Canada for a woman of color um to get work you know and I'm a classically trained actor um so uh a lot of it just had to do with creating work for myself but also in in seeing that most of the stories that were being told on Canadian stages were about the individual crises of the white middle class um uh in again in cities where more than 50 percent of the population is of non-European descent and where a large percentage of the population is not middle class but poor um and those stories are still quite invisible on Canadian stages so I really felt that in terms of my skillset that's what I wanted to do to tell those stories beautiful beautiful yeah the power of body and voice and representation and what that means and its fullness so beautiful thank you for that um heckler I also wanted to ask kind of in in alignment with that you know I've been um I've been so moved by the combination of seeing um the articles that you've written the novels that you've written even today um on New York's time you know on New York Times you have this incredible article about South Side LA you know after the you know 25 years after the Rodney King riots and the work that you have also has such a global context in terms of voices from the communities so with your work how um was there intentionality in terms of the places and spaces that you would travel to or did that become a discovery and then what has been your experience in you know the responsibility as a novelist and journalist to share and lift up voices from many different communities well um you know when I started off as a writer I was a professional listener so I really couldn't I didn't make up stories I just told stories that other people told me and so I went to places that other people in the newsroom didn't want to go to or were scared to go to so I went you know to a lot of homeless camps in the center of LA I went to South LA a lot which I really got to know really well South LA then was becoming a Latino and Black mixed community um and so um you know to me that that's how I got started as an artist was that I'd spend two hours interviewing a guy a day laborer and I'd be able to put two or three paragraphs of his story into the newspaper and I thought well I have so much more to say about this person as a human being about his history about the context in which he's living let me go get an MFA and I can write novels which I later learned was like a license to go wait tables but uh and so I gave up my career as a journalist temporarily uh for a couple of years wrote my first novel and I have just followed I'm always looking for a story that does something it's aversive for me you know something that turns upside down the perception of my community something that makes me feel powerful I like to tell I teach writing at the University of Oregon and I like to tell my students that when you when you do narrative writing and you do it well you are God and yeah it has to be your ambition is to become God you makes you burn cities and you make them rise from the ashes you know you get inside the head of the of the single mother you are everywhere you're omniscient and that's what you what I've tried to do as a reporter first was to be this person who is really selfless in in the gathering information you know just of gathering stories but then I write the story that has my name on it makes me feel makes me feel very special and so then now as a novelist it's the same thing as who else can I become you know I my last novel I wrote a novel from the point of view of two women and you know you're supposed to write what you know I believe that you should know what you write you know and that you can know anything and so it's been I go to you know I was very fortunate after I had written my second novel my third book this gig came up to do the book of the Chilean minors these guys who were trapped in a mine in Chile and I jumped at the chance they were looking for a novelist who had been a journalist who was also someone who spoke Spanish and wrote in English and had lived in South America and that's only me and maybe Francisco Goldman yes but I was represented by the William Morris endeavor agency so I got the gig and so I went down there and I talked to these guys and it was a room just like this one is a restaurant with a little sort of stage and there's 24 of the 33 minors and I told them senores you just lived you're the modern heroes of our age you just lived through the odyssey of our time you were buried in a hole and you had this journey to come up and escape and come out into the sunshine and you had to fight the monsters and everything and so my job is to tell your story in a way that it will be remembered for hundreds of years you are like Odysseus and I am your Homer and I got a lot of blank stares from the guys but you know and so I think I think there is this aspect too that I like to teach my students of just wanting to be a bad asset writing you know I mean that's part of it you know we represent our communities yes we're here to stand for our communities but we also want to be bad assets as artists and we want to you know study our craft and lift it up and it took me many many years decades of a journey to be able to even call myself an artist you know because in my very practical watermelon family that's putting on airs and today in fact we have lots of kids who in our schools who have this desire they feel this desire to create something and yet they feel oh no my mother wants me to be a nurse or you know study engineering and so part of my art job I think is just to be an example you know just and the job of so many people here too is to be that example that shows the fullness the life of an artist the power of it you know the power to create and reflect back of the world that we live in. Beautiful beautiful yeah yeah I remember well a couple things I wanted to say I remember last night actually when we were at dinner we discovered that one of the minors you interviewed is Carmen's uncle so like that in itself was such a beautiful kind of moment of discovery and connection and then to what you speak to I mean I do think there's there's something so interesting about you know within our conversations the political context of the work and the value of social justice but also what does the art really mean to and how do we you know in ourselves actually as artists we're part of a social movement in that way right like there's such value in that you know and being the badass in the art that you do well yeah the one you want to say about that is that I started off as a total lefty you know and I still am you know I mean I was a teenage trotskist but I left the movement because I didn't want to give up my sense of humor and that was required and so but then you know it's like I started to create art and it was like I realized that it had to work as art you know and that that was another because I don't have this emotional intelligence that most of the people in this room have so I'd be married 20 years and have three kids to sort of finally have this emotional intelligence to be able to be an artist but yes and you know it's it's been a really wonderful journey beautiful you know I was gonna say about that because it's interesting but because in order for for for me to even become a professor at UCLA which is a complicated hired for UCLA to do I actually have to direct in Europe a lot for people in the United States to even think of me as a director you know what I mean so over there I can direct anything than Shakespeare and Ibsen and Chekhov you know and it's no question because I don't I don't have to deal with my identity which is part of who I am in the United States and I'm not I am a Latino director and I love to direct Latino work but the real my real acceptance into the United States mainstream was my work in Europe yeah yeah which which it's not about you know I just did Perguin in in in Norway in Norwegian with Norwegian actors and it was fantastic you know what I mean but it's one of the last one I did but nobody would ask me to come and direct Perguin in the United States it wouldn't even cross their mind you know so which is meaning it's another battle so even that is a political statement in a way it seems like we have to travel far away from home to get validated yeah that's yeah yeah and I also um yes definitely and with that too I also wanted um Trevor we were talking a little bit about um about the 50th Playwrights Project um which I wanted to give you know just a little bit more context and space for you to share about um especially because I was reading an interview of of you where you had this brilliant quote where you talked about how um your introduction to Latinx theater decolonized your mind and how with the 50th Playwrights Project there was very much this desire to create awareness and really celebrate voice and so can you speak more to the creation of that project for sure well um so 50th Playwrights Project is uh my passion project but it's kind of taking over my life in a very good way and I started this last year early last year but basically what happened was when I was doing my PhD I frequently used Adam Simcoeitz's website he's a playwright who has interviewed and I cannot keep up with him as of today I think it is 929 Playwrights um and some of them are in this room uh but most mostly I was noticing that um after I got to Elaine Romero and Octavio Solis Luis Alfaro there was a very startling um absence of diverse voices right and especially the voices I was I knew and I was interested in studying and reading their work and so I wanted to create this kind of steal like an artist right uh project that really used his model but created something that was more specific to a certain community right I had no time I was doing my PhD I was talking to Olga Sanchez earlier about how when you do a PhD you have zero time and when you do theater you have zero time as well so I finally I finished my my work and I um had a chance meeting with a playwright Josh Inocencio who is a emerging playwright from Houston he moved back to Texas after he finished his master's degree and so we met for coffee and he became my first Sim's playwright and um basically I I baited him right I used him um well I didn't use him what I used him right I bounced the idea off of him and he was also in a place in his life where he was kind of ready to be baited uh and so I kind of bounced the ideas off of him he uh was like yeah this is really great I got it in an uh unofficial advisory board uh people in like Latinx theater comments and friends of mine in Houston um such as like Abigail Vega and those types of people and really um crafted what I what this was going to become and so I thought my original idea 50 playwrights project this will take me many years to do because I'm not going to have that many interviews it'll be hard to find people people are not going to want to do it I don't want to be too ambitious I like the number 50 um it's my brother my brother's football number I don't know so uh back in the day and so that's kind of where it began so I started this website which you can all visit um on your phones or at home 50playwrights.org 50playwrights.org and we have Twitter 50 playwrights Instagram all of the social medias um and this really kind of spiraled out of control in a very very good way and so as of today I've interviewed 54 uh Latinx playwrights now I'll go back when this first started um I met many people some very prominent um no one in theater but Latinx writers right nationally famous we've all read them who immediately told me they're not 50 playwrights they're not 50 Latinx playwrights like where are you gonna find these people and I I mean it really it took no time to make I have this Google uh Google sheet with hundreds of names right and on the website there's um different resources you can see if you got resources playwrights and there's 350 or so some have been deceased but um for the most part still producing work at varying stages so the numbers are undeniable right uh that these playwrights are out there doing the work um but I have in the beginning I had that resistance um so basically it's been very actually easy for me to keep this going because of the support from the community right um in terms of online and in person right and I've seen the actual connections happen where people are meeting um generationally and also in their own communities right like oh my gosh there's another Latinx playwright in Oregon or in um Portland right and they're they get together for coffee all of a sudden they're trading drafts and community is building right and it's through the work that I'm doing online um so if you go to the interviews they're very much accessible and you know introductory I wanted it to be something that professors would encourage their students to use which it has happened there are a number of professors who push it to their students but it's very much who are the who is the person where are they from how do they self identify and that's actually become one of the most interesting parts of the project I find and then what are they working on and also another thing that's interesting to me is the mentor part who have been your mentors and so there's really this interesting um thing happening where there's a and I need to kind of create some kind of visual if anyone does visuals talk to me after this um of really looking at the maps right we talk about uh one of the kind of myth mythological or myth myths um or actual stories from Latinx theater comments is that I think Tiffany Tiffany you did it actually where you had the visual mapping right or maybe it was Julia I don't know everyone Brian Herrera's book a narrative report will say what I'm trying to say better than me but um it was Luis Valdez and then Mcdallya Cruz was standing in for Irene Fornez right everyone touched basically their mentor and they created this map of mentors uh in Latinx theater making and so that's kind of what I'm trying to do in that section right who is who are connectors um who has gotten us where we are and where is that going so that's been a really interesting thing um some other things I it's very my methodology is very much a feminist methodology I'm not looking to be a gatekeeper I'm looking to have um as many voices um plurality of voices as I can um having emerging writers next to established writers so to me it's kind of a treat when you have a Pulitzer Prize winner or like Karrdatzvich obi obi award lifetime achievement award next to someone who has never had a single um anything they just graduated college their writing plays and they're next to each other right and so people come for I think the big names and then they stay for the the new writers right that they're learning about now I have had pushback um one of the most prominent Latino theater scholars when I put out a the list of um the 350 or so playwrights we all know who I'm talking about he um emailed me a very long email how are you vetting these people right how who says their playwrights um well not we love him uh but who you know have they been reviewed have they been produced uh etc etc so I wrote back a very long response and he said we'll talk about it when I see you in person um and then I saw him in person and he brought it up and I just kind of it was a generational divide right to me it's not my job to say oh you have not been produced at the Goodman you cannot be on this website I want you to be produced at the Goodman or wherever you want to be produced um and so then using my resources to kind of help that uh guide that along but um for the most part there's been very little criticism uh but that's just something interesting to me generationally um and so I'm going to try to cut this a little short um so it started out as interviews I recently in March dropped the 50 pp list which is the um best unproduced playlist I had a call a national or international call for unproduced Latinx plays I had about 70 submissions and I had a reading committee and we picked eight plays that we thought were the strongest um for a number of reasons and then two honorable mentions uh and this kind of blew up and so I've had these are the theater companies that have reached out who these are um who wanted to read these plays um that are not on say the new play exchange where it's easily accessible but American Repertory Theater Berkeley Rep Soul Project Fleet Theater the Alley Theater Company 1 Baltimore Center Stage OSF Next Generation Theater Company uh there's a company in Boise Idaho that was looking to do Deaf Latino plays and they found one of the playwrights Mercedes Floresis Las from UCR and they are interested in her work right just from this list so I think that's just what keeps me going um I'm going to have another you know call for plays later I'm trying to do all kinds of different things I'm working with the dramatist guild and new play exchange to grow the project I'm gonna have a reading series in the fall or the next season like an actual season and not just reading but new play development reading with the playwright in the room with the director kind of hashing through the script so that's kind of where it's all gone and going awesome great thank you um I wanted to open it up to questions and also um during one of our phone calls um Jose Luis had the great suggestion that uh perhaps um if there's interest in um questions from the panelists asking each other something from this that that's also part of it so feel free if you have questions and then we'll also start to roam around the audience as well for questions and Tara please keep us posted if there's anything coming up online that we can add so any questions yeah thoughts uh uh yes yeah I'm interested in your your list of playwrights and the rest of you also um what language are people using Ector I found you because I was looking I belong to Spanish book club and we were looking for writers and I saw your name and sounded Spanish so or how relevant to the recipe oh okay so anyway I'm just interested I noticed that you write in English you know your your latinx group do they write in English do they write in Spanish how are they being produced and when you have Spanish productions in this country who is your audience well I'll take that real quick in terms of 50 playwrights project I always give the playwright the option to do it bilingually or just in Spanish as of now I think only two or three are bilingual um but I would say and from what I've seen there are a number of when I did the call for the I talked about the Spanish play anthology yeah okay so I did the call for the Spanish play anthology and my co-editors were very nervous that there would not be any submissions and we actually got about 40 submissions um and we can only fit about six right uh but the work is out there it's very high quality work I find um online communities I work with cafe onto two and with how around tv um hashtag how around uh but we're always providing the option for Spanish right um my readership for my website is probably I would I don't know guesstimate 50 of them speak Spanish um but it's just not what the playwrights have chosen for whatever reason to write in I don't know well I'm writing in English but it's I would say it's 85% English and it's 10% Spanish and 5% Spanglish and you know what I've discovered over over the years and I think probably we all have is that I find the audience becoming more sophisticated about um language mixing you know the so so called code switching that Chicano art was uh sort of pioneered um I really find that people will go with me if I have untranslated Spanish in my prose um and so you know I think one of the you know I did a book that was made into a movie called the 33 and I think one of the reasons why that movie didn't do so great and I know that I'm being live streamed now sorry uh guys over there uh is that um they had this cast that was um incredibly international they had an Irish guy a French woman uh one or two Chileans uh Filipino, Mexicano uh they had uh you know a Spanish Iberian Spanish person and they were all playing Chileans and they had this sort of melange of accents and I know that to a lot of sophisticated you know to us as sophisticated viewers you know it was like it just didn't make any sense you know and I really remember saying that way on they weren't talking like that oh yeah it was it was a it was a mess it was yes they did say we've on every once in a while but mostly it was a mixture of the Bronx and East LA and Stockton and Madrid and you know and you know there was even Gabriel Byrne who's Irish you know doing uh you know Chilean and so I you know I think that you know we I really have an incredible high respect for my readership that they'll go with me I I believe that they are interested in they are capable of understanding a lot of the subtleties of language and speech you know in my last novel I wanted to I wanted to do something like Mark Twain did in the beginning of Huckleberry Finn I wanted to say and I should have done this and it's really one of the biggest regrets of my career is that I didn't say the reader of this novel should be aware that the characters are speaking in Los Angeles Chicano English Central American Spanish Mexican Mexico City Spanish and you know standard American English you know and not think that I'm incapable of understanding all of those I'm trying to master all of them and so you know I really think it's it's we have in our heads we have all these different languages you know and so we'd like to just pull out you know all these different sort of expressions and verbs and sayings and we of course just saw this in Louise's play which is so beautiful I'm you know even using indigenous words and so yeah I write in many languages yeah I'll add a quick story I earlier this semester I brought Josh in Oceño's solo show purple eyes to my campus and the show is probably 85 percent 90 percent English 9 percent Spanish 1 percent German but the Germans there and after so during the performance everything went well reaction was great in class the next day I had my students could not get past the Spanish even the Spanish speakers had issues with the Spanish and then after this conversation I'm trying to navigate and then someone says hey I haven't heard anyone complain about the German in the play I just noticed that everyone here is racializing Spanish and having an issue with Spanish whereas they're not even noticing German and across the board my students were like what there was German there was German in that play I mean there's an entire scene in German right right so there's German right and then they question me like oh well are you sure and I'm like I'm the dramaturg I know how much Spanish was in the play but there's this kind of mental hurdle right and then another one I used this semester was Adelaide Anthony's Las Oceanas which has more Spanish and I had a student email me and say I could not do our homework assignment because I couldn't understand anything in this play because I don't speak Spanish and so I got my memes my Juno Diaz has anyone seen the meme right I hope my parents are not watching motherfuckers will read a third of a novel in Elvish but one more in Spanish and you know they're done right sorry mom and dad but that's kind of the it's true right and they laughed when I showed them but it's something that I'm kind of constantly struggling with and so I've and I try not to give too much I try to prepare my students too much for what they're about to see I want them to really have a raw experience but sometimes they need that hey you're going to read Spanish if you don't know what it says google it skip it I don't know whatever you want to do but you're going to keep reading and you're going to get it right so yeah well I write even though I write for the Latinx community and about the Latinx community I write my play is almost 100% in English because the Latinx community in Canada is only about 40 years 40 years old so the first Latinx people to arrive on mass were us the Chilean refugees and you know the non-Latinx community gets very nervous when they hear a Spanish word in a play because they literally don't know what it means like like you know they have no clue and so it takes them out so that's what I've learned I want to keep them in and it takes them out there's one word in Spanish and then there's the entire thing because they keep trying to figure out what that word means and having said that my plays have been translated into Chilean Spanish because I've done them in Chile and also they've been done in Spanish in Toronto and oh no I'm in Vancouver as well right so those are obviously almost you know 100 Spanish speaking audiences but I'm still at the point where if I if I have too many Spanish words in a play the audience gets taken out just because our presence in the in the Canadian tapestry is so new that Spanish words are not part of the mainstream yet yeah unless it's una cerveza por favor that was something that was beautiful about mojada was the very beginning of the play was just in Spanish right and so I immediately started watching the audience like how are people reacting and I noticed the audience was there the entire time and so that was just so refreshing to me being in Oregon right seeing that and not in really Spanish speaking community to see audiences going places that I don't see audiences going in Houston Texas you know so bravo Ashland well I just had an experience about the Spanish in a I just did a play at the Goodman Theater called destiny of desire but in the play you have a we have one I probably put this song in Spanish in this play told in Spanish a mexican ranchera and it the place has quotes but the first time we did it at the arena as soon as the save began I mean I would sit in the middle of the audience to take notes somebody behind me was saying they know we don't understand Spanish why are not that singing in English I don't understand what's happening so I was the quote following the song that Karen Zacarias put in every smartly says Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking country in the world the United States is the second so it was really cool because it's true you know so it was it's a very important thing but I mean we usually do our plays by language mostly in English but you know we have a lot of chicanism in our play and and and it's it's it's Los Angeles so somehow Los Angeles I think has you know they kind of kind of get it or if it doesn't they don't question it but going out of Halle was surprised like going to Washington DC it's like hold all their animal this you know what I mean like they they really you know even to Chicago mean one person who worked at the Goodman told me I will never imagine a whole song in Spanish being said in a stage you know it's so emotional you know and you think wow wow that's amazing you know to think that they will never think that at the Goodman theater because as a Goodman somebody will sing a whole song in Spanish in the middle of that stage so it's it's different in the East Coast or in the you know that it is in in this part of the world for some reason thanks Nicole hi I'm really new to this world of theater and I feel like I'm even newer to the world of Latino theater Latinx theater and I want to know since I'm starting to gather that there's this long history of it really becoming prominent and becoming a world a market and an industry where people like you guys can make entire careers out of when you started seeing that or if you didn't see that and what you did to make that apparent for yourselves this year honestly it's the first time in the history of Latino theater we had three main stage plays in the united states running at the same time was mojada wassuf wassutsu at the taper and it was destiny at the Goodman this has never happened before it's the first time in the history which I think is really important there was a comment that was a little bit of pushback for not vetting the playwrights in the 50 playwrights and I'm sitting here and I'm thinking imagining it was 50 feminist playwrights and it was curated by a white man so I'm I'm wondering and for any of you to respond to that it just it strikes me as odd I'm happy for anybody who defends our culture I don't care what they look like art is art and thank you to those who have put energy into bringing Latino theater here most of the people who are doing that are not Latino you know helping they're helping out these incredible Latino artists so I'm grateful to anybody all the editors of my books have been white men or white women and they have helped me find my voice as a Latino writer so I'm grateful to Trevor for his work thank you I would um that's a great question I think um so a personal kind of a core philosophy for me is really speaking with the community so it's really important for me to anytime I'm writing about something to be interviewing to be talking with those people the playwright the director the actors so in my book I'm working on I do a lot of ethnography but also I find a lot of energy I get from working with the Latinx theater comments coming to these types of things and meeting the actual community right so I always speaking with not for hi I'm an indigenous playwright and there's been a great push with them indigenous theater to decolonize the the format so to speak to get to the essence of what the culture is and I want to ask you as you know playwrights of color as writers of color what what is that essence that you're trying to reach within your own culture trying to pass that on to within your work well I guess I can start to answer that one of the things that I was interested in exploring in my work which um I think is something that resonates with them at the next community in Canada which is mostly a community of political refugees who have suffered extreme political violence um was how to explore that violence on stage without it being uh shocking or gratuitous or um how do you say that titanating um I don't have the answer I'm still trying to find the answer so I try to explore that in my play the refugee hotel which is going that's reading here tomorrow and also in the play the trigger is how do you explore torture rape violence on stage um and you know I identify also as a feminist right um how do I do that right without reinforcing stereotypes without um victimizing our communities and um you know in the refugee hotel like the most violent scene is just a person speaking about what was done to them in a concentration camp but it took me you know it's it's um ironic how the most the simplest scene is the one that almost almost takes so long to write right it took me like two years to get to the point of oh that's the answer right of just having the actual person who it was down to just stand there and speak the fucking words you know as opposed to showing anything or having somebody else talk about it right and having the person speak the words to a complete stranger right because these are words that he will never speak to those closest to him right which is the reality certainly in the Chilean exile community and then the Guatemalan exile community in Vancouver etc etc is that most often the families don't know the stories because it's too painful to share them right so we just did the refugee hotel in Vancouver and then at the next community came out to see the full force ironically that wasn't almost all white production because it was at a theater school where we used the students that were handed to us and they did an incredible job right and they really did do a lot of research I like what you just said uh you know what you're right right they did a ton of research and and approach the work with huge respect but then at the next community came out in full force to see it and not just in the next community also the indigenous community and and the thing that they felt um one of the things that they felt uh strongest about was that I didn't shy away from the violence in the play and that they're in that it was treated with respect and so anyway I'm not I'm not sure if I'm answering your question but one of the things that I'm interested in in exploring in the essence of the work that I do is the part that's the hardest to talk about the part that our communities have yet to hear and um um you know are still traumatized from and have not talked about yet yeah and and that's the thing that I wanted to say about that uh one was if you remember I say when I get to this country I figured out that I was Mexican and I needed to work and what that meant so I love beautiful things and and I think we are beautiful people and it's part of trying to find the way to change the image of who we are to the world and to ourselves you know it's really important for me that's part of the part of the job you know we dignity is not something that is easy to show but it's so important that we I can be a farm worker but I have a lot of dignity and how do I show you know what I mean being poor doesn't mean you're not an honorable man or an honorable human being you're just economically disadvantaged so that's part of what I have to do so I I love beautiful things and also I want to say I always tell my students Silvia is one of my students that you know in in English this is great work called a gift a gift if you're talented if you're talented you say you're gifted that means you have a gift but gifts are to be given then not for yourself so when you think of the work that you're going to create and that way you deal with less issues of this guy because you understand that this is a gift that you're going to give to the people that you're going to expose your work to you know yeah I you know I think it's beautiful and and just to riff off of that I I think that my own ambition and I know this is you know unreachable for me personally but it's what I'm trying to do is that I am trying to do the kind of work that you described but I want it to change the way this country understands itself you know my ambition is to write a novel that I'm working on now that changes the way Americans think about their history so that they realize that Latin so-called Latin American history United States history are really the same thing that they're intertwined and and that's a really I think you know I think that we can change our work that we you know we do these battles to win these spaces within mainstream or you know American culture those battles change the country and I believe that's really subversive and we bring the best of ourselves our understanding of what beauty is and we change this country that's what I'm trying to do first of all I want to say thank you to all of the next artists in here that have paved the path to make it easier for young artists like ourselves sitting here um my question for you for is um it's it's difficult even with the path that you lived and I can't imagine how it was when you didn't have that how do you do how do you deal how do you how do you handle it how do you stay tough and strong and keep fighting the fight um you know I think that you could realize you can only do one thing at a time so for me I'm working on one sentence or one paragraph at a time and that's my battle every day I need to win the sentence today I won the sentence this morning yay hurrah you know and you work on a book and now I know from experience that books take three four years that's a thousand days a thousand wins of a thousand sentences ta-da it's a book you know um and so you know I think that uh also the most important school I think for me and I think maybe for most a lot of us is failure and allowing yourself to fail and not being afraid you know failure has taught me so much the one novel I wrote that I spent two I spent three years on it didn't sell taught me more than all the other novels put together you know but I think that just you know uh belief in craft respect of the crafts you know you're surrounded here by people who've spent decade you know hundreds of years you know together not just you I mean if you add all of them together collectively 50 a century here so you know you add up all that that's a lot of work you know and uh and studying the craft and trying to sort of respect it and learn from it and just one battle out of time I tell my writing students they're 19 20 years old just finish something you know finish something and go to the next one you know that's my own advice I would say what he said and also um don't don't try to get people to like you yeah like like I also teach I mean I direct and I teach and um when I teach I mean one of the first things I say to my students is I don't give a shit if you like me I'm here to teach you and you can hate me or like me I don't care right and in the Canadian theater uh landscape um where I'm considered a very controversial person I just I just always remember who my friends are colleagues does not equal friends right and I can work very well with my colleagues and have very you know great experiences with them but when it comes right down to it who are my actual friends and most of them are not in the theater community and they're not artists at all um so it's also about don't worry about who likes you and um don't take anything personally that's that has helped me and um I know that I value the most which is I'm a single I'm a so parent of a 10 year old boy that is the most important thing to me right as opposed to my career or anything like that he is the most important thing to me so a lot of it is just life experience and um I guess it has to do with failure right not everybody's gonna like you and that's okay yeah I I don't believe that there's difficulty in my world they say you want an actor to complain hire him okay to complain hire him or her no then no I always think it's what I'm saying think about look at look at where we are put in this beautiful town with this beautiful day all sitting down over here talking about theater we're so blessed we're so privileged to have to think about people and the other side of the world that fling their homes think about people who's been deported today that's difficult we don't have it hard we have it easy yeah and but sometimes we don't think about that you know so it's what for me is never difficult uh come on look at how lucky I am well how blessed I am how privileged I am you know what I mean so it because I hear my students like I I don't let my students tell me that I don't care I I if I'm gonna have a class with you you're gonna be prepared you're gonna do your work I'm doing my job I don't care if you whatever you you have to do your work and you have to do it at a great level you can't come in here say no I'm sorry you know I have to go home because I didn't have a car I don't care you you you mean it's a lot of complaining going on out of nothing when you when you're in a major university and you have a dorm and you have food to eat that's that's not that's not that and also in the theater I hear people oh it's so hard that's not that hard it's really not come on we play you know that's not that hard so that's what we have to get out of it is the idea that we have to complain about things we're privileged come on we are so that's my thing about so if you think about how privileged you are even if you have 10 cents in the in your pocket it's 10 cents there are people who don't have 10 cents in their pocket that's the way we get out of this and the word that that's why we do what it's so beautiful what we do just think about yeah I would just no I was just gonna add to what Carmen was saying build community and find your community that might be in person it could be digital right with social media some of my closest people I go to first are people I've never met or I've met one time at something like this and we're buddies on Twitter and I you know I saw the a picture of the I walked by the scene or no the costume shop and I took a picture and sent it to one of my costume or friends who have met one time like I've talked to in person for 10 minutes right but it's someone that I go to we trust each other we message on Twitter so find your community in whatever way you know it needs to be right to best you know and it also might not even be a theater community we have time for one more question so we'll take this right over here I want to thank you all for all the work that you've done for the community for the Latinx community and I'm just wondering what where do you like what's your utopia where do you want to see it what is what is the bar for success or does that even exist or just present future that's the best closeout question we could have asked for right where you planted is you know an audience plant I think I'm gonna steal this from black and brown theater in Detroit which is Sam White and Emilio Rodriguez but their mission of their theater company is to not exist to not have to exist and so I would love I mean I'd love to keep doing what I'm doing but I'd love to not feel like I have to do it right where I can open it up to a bigger thing right but at the moment I feel like I it still needs to exist the way it does to serve the community so my utopia is a world where you go to X Lord a theater and they're doing all of these diverse inclusive works just like osf is doing right where osf's model is being replicated all over the country all over you know the continent that's kind of my utopia yeah I agree mine is that sometime like 20 30 years in the future I'll be looking at some magazine I don't know like the New York or New York Times or some future thing that exists and people will be talking about the barrio Renaissance you know of the of the first two decades of the 21st century you know and they'll be comparing it to the Harlem Renaissance and how there was this flowering of theater and literature that was finally recognized by mainstream culture and you know I just I really I my fantasy is that we're all sort of part of this and that we get a little bit more you know sort of recognition back from the larger culture that we get now just because it would be more comfortable you know but I think that's what I foresee I want to be part of of passing on what I've been taught and see what flowers from it you know what what grows from what I've been taught and can share with others it's kind of utopia for myself or for those those well this is I mean I'm going to retire very soon I think but retire means I'm trying to figure out how I buy this part of an island in Mexico no just honestly honestly and and really create an artist compound and I know I know the island and I know and there's nothing by fishermen so I can do invite friends to come and create and I can create theater with the people in that village only don't have to charge for tickets or think about fundraising or grants or asking people for money you know it's so complicated that's the utopia for me that we can create and create with the community and we don't have to worry about any of these other things that we all have to think about every day in the middle of this you know but that's really my utopia and I'm gonna make it happen I actually I actually going to do the bungalows and invite people to come and oh no I can't think of anything to add to that but that's amazing thank you yes same beautiful beautiful well Hector Jose Luis Carmen and Trevor thank you so much for the work that you do the people that you are and for sharing your full selves with us today for this conversation so very grateful and thank you all for being part of it and looking forward to seeing more of you this weekend thank you