 We started just a couple housekeeping things. First off, we are filming up to the top and we're going to be streaming at a later date so that anybody who's not presently here with us can join in the conversation. We do welcome you to continue tweeting and to base looking about this event. If you do tweet, please use hashtag one of these things or all of them. In Cointreau 2014, hashtag Cointreauunda or hashtag HowromTV. Okay? Oh, we are live. Never mind. We're live, you guys. How's it going? These events are all being produced by Latino Theater Commons and not the shows, these events. And the Latino Theater Commons is a group of artists, activists, scholars, administrators from all over the country. Most of our work is on the phone and online. We're working to advocate with Latino Theater in the United States. So if we have any Syracan members here in the room, can we just have them stand? Just have them stand really fast. This is awesome. All right, please leave your cell phones on between the vibrate. And with that, I give you Dr. Chantola Rodriguez. Hi. Rodriguez I'm the programming director for the Latino Theater Company and we're the operators of the LATC. So thank you so much for being here with us. I was really excited to propose this dertulia to our dertulia committee. And also sort of in conversation with Jose Luis Valenzuela, our artistic director, we started talking about how interesting it was that we had several shows in this festival that were adapted from pieces of literature, from books, from poems, things like that. And we're noticing a major trend in the American theater where films are being translated into Broadway musicals and coming onto the stage in different ways. But we really wanted to look at the connection between literature and theater and really see sort of what makes that so special and unique and how can we sort of work together to preserve that. And so I'm really excited for this panel today. I wanted to give you a little bit of an introduction for our honored guests who are here with us today. Many of you just saw Enrique's journey, which was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario, who's here with us today. We spent more than 20 years recording and writing about large social issues in the US, including hunger, drug addiction, and immigration, most recently as Projects Reporter for the LA Times. And she's won numerous awards for her journalism. And Enrique's journey came up from her work that she was doing on the cases of Central American immigration. And then it became a novel. So we're really excited to explore that with her today, as well as her theatrical collaborator, Tony Garcia, who's the, he adapted the piece into the play. He also directed the play. Tony has been the executive artistic director of El Centro, Su Teatro in Denver since 1989, and has been a member of Su Teatro since 1972. And so he is a cornerstone of the Chicano Teatro in this country, and we're really thrilled to have him with us. So we're really excited that we're celebrating the work of female playwrights and female authors today, because we thought it was really great that for Teatro Pregones, their piece, Dancing and My Cockroach Killers, is based and adapted from the work of Magdalena Gomez and her collected book of poetry, Shameless Woman. And so I'm really excited to introduce Miss Magdalena Gomez, who's an award-winning performance poet, playwright, and performer. She's received play development awards from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and she was also the co-founder and artistic director of Teatro Vida, the first Latina Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. So let's give her a big hand. We're really thrilled to have Rosalba Rolón with us from Pregones Theater in New York. She adapted Shameless Woman into the musical and is also the director of the play. She's an actor, director, writer, and dramaturg. She is the founder and artistic director of Pregones Theater in the South Bronx. This 1979 she's shared responsibility for building a distinct Latino musical theater repertory with more than 15 premier works. And so Rosalba's on another corner, so in particular on the East Coast, for the Latino theater movement, and we're thrilled to have her with us. I'm really excited to begin this conversation, and I really want to involve the audience, but first I just wanted to take advantage of having these distinguished panelists with us today. And I wanted to ask each author specifically, sort of, if you could tell us a bit about your book, how it came about, what was the process and impetus for your book, and maybe we can start with Sonia telling us about Enrique's journey and your process in bringing these stories into your work. Well, it's kind of a long story. In 1997, we think of this issue of unaccompanied children. It's been very much in the news this summer, and in fact I went back to Honduras in June to record a piece for the New York Times, but this has been an issue for a long time. In 1997, I was having a conversation with a woman, Carmen, who would clean my house a couple of times a month here in LA, and she was trying to figure out what was wrong with me because I had been married seven years, Latina, no babies. And to Carmen, I seemed like a very nice person, but all of this added up to that there was some horrific monster lurking within, so she was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. And that morning in my kitchen, she popped the question, you know, me si sonia, cuando va tener un baby? And I didn't want to answer, so I redirected to her and said, what about you, Carmen? Are you gonna have more than this one son that I know about? And she started crying. She explained to me that she'd left four children behind in Guatemala. Single mother, husband had left her, and she said that she could feed them once, sometimes twice, but that always her children would start crying with hunger at night, and she had nothing to give them. But she showed me in my kitchen that morning how she would coax them to roll over and bed at night until her children sleep face down so that your stomach doesn't growl so much. A year later, her son came up on his own to come and find her. He said he came up on a series of buses, but that there were lots of kids coming to find their mothers on this odyssey on top of freight trains, and that they faced bandits and gangsters and corrupt cops, and many of them lost their lives and their limbs to this journey. And I just thought it was an incredible story. And honestly, when my house cleaner told me this story, I was quite judgmental towards her. I remember thinking to myself, what kind of a crappy mother leaves their children? But when I went to Honduras to report this, I saw that the women who stayed in Honduras, their children often worked in this terrible dump, and I would see kids as young as six years old working in this dump to try to be able to eat. And so I came to really understand her decision a lot better, but what I saw reporting this was that there are millions of women who had come here from Mexico, Central America, left their children behind. And when I started reporting this story actually in 2000, there was probably an army of children coming north without a parent in entering the US unlawfully, about 48,000, and today it's hundreds of thousands of children coming in this way. So we've seen about a 10-fold increase just in the last three years of these children coming north. And the reasons why they're coming, unfortunately, have changed quite dramatically before they were coming. They wouldn't, like Enrique would not see their mothers for five or 10 years and despair and set off on their own to come find their moms. Today, when he came, it was largely family reunification to work and in many cases to flee abusive situations in their home countries, in countries that really don't have very functioning child welfare systems. Going back, I went back in June to Enrique's home in Honduras and I spent a week living in his grandmother's home and saw a huge change in what's sparking this exodus of the Narcos cartels have really Mexican cartels have moved massively into Central America. We've spent $8 billion the US to disrupt the flow of cocaine up the Caribbean corridor from Colombia, but the Narcos has simply rerouted inland to Central America. And they are trying to control this turf and the children are their foot soldiers. So they are recruiting children in these elementary schools at eight, 10 years old demanding that they use marijuana crack, get them hooked, and then have them work as lookouts, selling drugs in these neighborhoods and ultimately as sicarios as killers for the cartels. So I saw in many of these countries, Honduras now has the number one homicide rate in the world. It's second only in daily body count to Syria. And I was glad to get out of there alive after one week. I wasn't sure I was going to make it. So very drastic changes. And as a journalist, I was trained not to be an advocate and lived for 25 years not being an advocate. And in recent months, have become very vocal. Speaking before the Senate, the UN in many media outlets, perhaps more important than the Senate and the UN on John Stuart's daily show. So I'm really saying how these children really are very different from economic migrants. They are refugees who in many cases are running for their lives and have governments that cannot really protect them. So I've become very vocal in advocating for these children. Collaborators, since we're on that same topic, and then we'll shift to talk about shameless women. So let me ask you, Tony, as a collaborator, sort of how did you come to find out about this work? And what was it about the work that drew you to specifically create a piece of theater around it? And what do you think theater can bring to this story that television and film could not, or some other kind of medium, cannot express? It's a weird kind of story, actually. I got a call in April of 2011. And it was a friend of mine from the theater department. She said, have you heard of the biggest journey? Sadly to say I had not. And she said, well, I'm working with a college in Southern Colorado. And the author, Sonia Nassario, is coming in. And it's this incredible story. And they want to do an adaptation. And I think you're the guy you should be prepared to do it. And so I asked him to send me the book. Well, I got a copy of the book. And I read it. And then we set up a phone call. And they said, well, we'd like you to do it. But here's the thing. You have 45 days to get it done. And so Sonia and I had a conference call kind of thing. And it was interesting with the collaborators who were non-Latinos in the Southern Colorado. They were very nice people. But I think there was something that hit between Sonia and I. I was able to ask her questions about what I thought was at some of the courts because of her relationship with these guys. First of all, I thought she was crazy. Because after she met Enrique on the border, she then went and traveled the train and met all these people. The whole drama scene was based on, you got hit with the branch, right? I almost swiped out. I almost swiped out. And it was like, man, she's the bravest or the craziest person I ever met in my life, right? Or ever talked to. And so I said, yeah, I want to do it. Let's do it. And it was like, but the best thing about it for me is that as I read through it, is that I took, there's a lot of Sonia's dialogue in the piece. You can almost open the book any place and go, oh, that's that scene. Oh, that's that scene. And as I was watching it this time, I was going, did I make that up? Or was that in the book? And I was at, is that mine? Or is that, and so when I read it, what I found was this was a really good, good writer. Cause I'm a writer. If you're a writer out there, you like good writing, right? And when you read it, you go, you know what it is, right? And for me, it was a question of honoring that and following that story. It, I don't want to say it was easy, but there wasn't this thing that I felt like I had to kind of try a different direction. She had already set the direction and my job was to just kind of follow what was already laid out for that and then put it on stage. I would say the only difference is some things that I twistedly find funny in this, you know, where the boy is at a funeral and he's crying for his father and his uncle and he meets, he meets a girl and he hits on her immediately, right? That's a, I can understand that thing, but I don't think it's kind of funny and kind of weird. And those were the things that I think broke it up for us. One of the biggest things that we can do in terms of the stage is that we can, when you put those realities on stage and then you just take a look at them and you have some perspective, then the full picture kind of opens itself up. Yeah, that was a beautiful moment and I was very struck by the urgency of life in that place, right? How that he's only 17, forget, right? He's grown up so quickly, but this urgency to continue life and to continue making connection and relationships and we see her get pregnant and sort of about, you know, life is gonna continue, but they have so little time to do it, so I thought it was a beautiful moment and there was some really nice levity that you brought to the piece, so I congratulate you on that for sure. But actually it's in the book, it just doesn't always come out that way. No, you definitely brought it out. I think that's a good thing because it can be a very, you know, it goes from bad to worse, to really bad and so I think that helps. Great, so for those of you who are not aware, so the Encuentro we've had, or it's a month-long festival and we're right back in the middle of it now, so we're blessed to have a Pregonas Theater and Tantai Theater from Puerto Rico, they both arrived yesterday. So Pregonas Theater, their show, Dianthi and My Cockroach Killers will open this coming week and they'll have a two-week run. So you haven't had a chance to see it, but now after today you're gonna run and buy tickets. So I wanted to ask Magdalen, at first if she could tell us a little bit about shameless women, give us sort of a background about what is this collection about and then I'll ask Rosalba how she sort of was drawn to it and adapted it into a musical. So can you tell us a little bit about shameless women? Yes, I write in response to tyranny, violence against women. I write in response to the despair that we're all feeling underneath and not quite knowing how to handle us, the world around us has a nervous breakdown and it's something I've been doing since I was a young girl. I believe, like yourselves, in the interplay of humor and horror because the things that are surrounding us are so horrific and the stories that you have so eloquently written about, they are horrific and thank you for bringing the humor to that because it is relentless what we have to face on a daily basis and what I personally face as a young girl growing up in a climate of violence, in my home, in my community and in my world and so my writing began as an act of self-defense and then my writing turned into an act of defense against others who were being oppressed, subjected to tyranny or violence and so this book, it is the interplay of humor and horror and it is a book where love and rage have found a safe place to meet and my poetry has a lot of humor. I wrote this book, this particular collection spans the 1970s. I started being a performance poet in 1971. I write poetry, I write plays. Why I work more with poetry, it is accessible to everyone. Poetry goes across class, it's accessible and you can take it anywhere. I don't have to worry about whether it's going to be staged or not staged, although now I'm very fortunate that it is being staged. Poetry has always been a tool of resistance if we think of the great poets, revolutionary poets like Otto René Castillo, for example, Roque Dalton, there are many. So for me, this book covers issues of family, of war, but not only the big wars, the little wars of the everyday, those little indecencies that we as human beings commit against each other on a daily basis that are so nuanced and that we really do not really pay attention to. I like to put a little magnifying glass on those little moments of indecencies, those little moments of despacios. All those little things that add up into that big picture that erases and begins to erase empathy, human empathy. I think it's an emergency right now that we recover our empathy and that those of us who work with young people talk about empathy, model empathy. And so I believe that Breones has done a beautiful, beautiful job in creating a balance of the humor and the horror in the staging of this work and the performance of this work. I have always written poetry for the stage. It has always been my intention that my poetry be performed. And I performed it myself for years because no one else would. And I have been told all of my life many, many times by many directors, I love your work, but I don't know where to place it in the season. So I say, it's time for a new season. So I'm saying Rosalba Jolón and people like Miriam Colón and people like Daniel Jaquez who have fearlessly taken on my work. That work that I have been told will scare audiences in this country. This work that cannot fit anywhere. This work that is, you know, scary to direct, scary to produce, will the audiences come? Well, Rosalba, Miriam Colón, Daniel Jaquez, they have proven that yes, my work speaks to a diversity of people and the audiences do come. And I am one very, very grateful woman for these people in my life. So to ask Rosalba, sort of how you can tell us about your history with Marmelana and how you came to this piece and what was it about this book of poems that you felt really had to be translated onto the stage? And I'd love to hear about the title as well, the title of the musical. Well, we have, I've known Marmelana's work for many, many years to the point that when we wanted to select in our master artist project our master artist for 2012, I think it was for the 11 or 12, we thought, immediately our team said it needs to be Marmelana Gomez. Every year we select an artist, a writer or a performer or a musician, a composer. And we honor that person with a very modest fellowship. But the one gift that we give them is the possibility to showcase the work to the audience. And so in our case, when we're working with a writer, we offer them, if they want, to either bring their own piece already staged or for our ensembles, sitting right here and over there, to perform their work. And more often than not, they say we love for Brevones to do it. And that's the big gift in terms of what we bring to the table. We have been adapting projects that works from non-dramatic texts and from poetry since we began 35 years ago. And a lot of our work are collection pieces. I am in love with short stories that can be put together like a necklace, you know? And that together create an art of a larger story. I also love Siebel's story plays. Of course we have them, we have those. But those are somehow, as I've started, we continue to do that. Now, let me give a little bit perhaps of the background because this, that's what my cockroach killers did not come out specifically from this publication. In fact, when I told Magdalena, I said, Magdalena, you're the master artist for us this year and we're gonna work. And would you, would it be okay if we stage your, some of your poetry? And we began the back and forth of how do you, I mean, because by now I know that it needs to be about 12 stories for poetry, so monologues, depending on the writing. And I get this wealth of material from her monologues. I think close to six poems perhaps, at first. And how do you do it? So we begin the process to read it in the group to sort of manage the process thematically so that it makes sense that you can basically, you know, throw a sort of a dart through all of them and say, okay, this group of poets, you know, belong here and this group belongs here. It's a massive work and Magdalena has been extremely generous because once we chose the final pieces and out of those, seven are included in this publication. So, then I want to say because we do music theater, a musical place that our composer and musical director is very much a part of that conversation that's Maria Guevara was right here. And so there are two years for the voice of the adapter and director for the voice of the composer that will comment and will make his own commentary on the piece. So, and I know that Tony also, to the other uses, there are none other than, none other than the musicians and our composers are not just folks, they're not just the duevos seguida while the actors does the big thing. They have to go through, it's a lot of respect that we believe the company for the role of the composer and the musicians as a core member of the ensemble. So, put it together all these, but then she makes it easy because her work has such rhythm that we're able to just dive right in. So, that was the process. We chose the poems, 12 pieces and it's a combination of poems and onologues and some of them are very complex, very different from each other, but to give you an idea of sort of the level of connection that you need to have with the author because otherwise it would not be possible, is first of all the trust of placing on both authors to say to us, here it is, oh my God, I'm going to do it, I think you're okay. And to have the content to go back to her, I say, you know, Magdalena, this particular poem, A Day of Awakening, it says it goes like this, for you and then it's a series, it's dedicated to the people of Egypt and we turn it into this universal piece and it's talking to them. And when we were doing it on stage, I called her, I said, Magdalena, would you mind if we say for us, instead of for you? She said, of course, it is for us. And we, you know, we're together, but we needed to have that connection and that draws us to our reasons for doing that. And conversely, she would say to me, you know what, I'm noticing this and that and only if you want to, she's always been very, very, very cautious, she would give some solid ideas on how to approach the piece. And then there's the role of our ensemble. I mean, you have second part, you know, and in there they must manage and then knead the masa so that it finally gets done. So it's been a very active process of communication between Magdalena and I and the ensemble and the composer and to make this happen and to make this work well. Thank you. Something that Magdalena said about this really struck me is this emergency to recover empathy, right? And I feel theater as a medium can communicate empathy in a different way than film or television or some other kind of form. So I wanted to have Tony and Sonia since both of these shows have come from a run, right? You've just recently done a run in your local theaters in the hometowns. And if you could talk a little bit maybe about audience reaction to both the book and the show, and if you've noticed that it's creating a sense of empathy for both of these stories really resonate sort of this desire to create empathy. Can you speak a little bit to that for us? Yeah, I can definitely speak to the response to the book in terms of empathy. And Marieke's journey is, I mean, I would guess at this point it's probably the most read book about immigrants in the United States at this point. It's had 50 or more printings. And one great aspect of it is, and there's an updated version this year and there's a young adult version and new versions in Spanish, because his story continues and his story as it continues, it says a lot about massive deportations that are occurring now because he has faced recently being gratified board patrol and facing deportation away from his US war. Son, so separation in reverse. But one great aspect of this whole journey for me is that the book has really been embraced by educators and 71 universities have adopted it as a freshman or common read. Hundreds of high schools across the United States, now middle schools with the young adult version. And I think 12 cities have used it as a one city read like Denver and San Diego and other cities. And it produces different responses from different audiences. But it's been widely used in states and I probably give 60 or 80 speeches a year around the country. I have like three jobs, but one of them is speaking. And I go a lot, I was in Georgia twice in the last two weeks. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. I go to the places that have the greatest hostility towards because from 1990 to 2010 we have the largest wave of immigration in our nation's history. Migrants used to go to six states, including California. In those 20 years, they went everywhere and to places that had not seen immigrants in a long time. And certainly no one who looks like many of us. And so I think many educators, God bless them are trying to counter that hostility. And the response I get from many white students is I was raised racist and anti-immigrant. I was taught to hate all migrants. I didn't know any, but I was taught to hate them all. And they all tell me I was forced to read your book. And that's how they all start. I was forced to read your book. But and now this has taken me inside one immigrant family. And it's changed my perspective. I didn't understand that there was any other perspective other than what my parents taught me or what I saw in Fox News and this has completely changed it. And some of those students have gotten very involved. I mean, my personal opinion about immigration is we need to focus on what's happening in these three or four countries where people mostly come from. So most migrants can stay together as families where they prefer to be, where they're from. So many students have built water systems and schools and microloan programs and done amazing things. And some of them are the most previously racist towards immigrants. I had a student in Arizona of all places come up and say I was raised a white supremacist in South Africa, a skin-haired pet in Arizona. And this has changed my perspective. And I have border patrol agents who email me saying I treat migrants differently, women and children differently now that I've read your book. For many Latinos, it's a different response that I get. It's, this is my story. Why is it that in school I always have to read all these stories by white dead guys? Shakespeare's great, but there's a real power in seeing my story told and feeling that it too is important. And it's part of the fabric of this nation's history and story. African-American students, I had a girl in Chicago at a school say, my mother, we eat in separate parts of the high school, Latinos and African-Americans. But I read this and I was forced to read this. And I realized my grandmother came north as part of the great migration of millions of African-Americans who came out of the cell during Jim Crow. And she left my mother behind. And so this is really my family story and I understand these migrants better. So I think it has created, you don't want to overplay it's a book and we have a lot of racism and we live in a very segregated society. But among the millions who have now read the book, I think that it does take them inside one migrant family and many women who read it here in LA who maybe are upper middle class, it started that first conversation with the woman who takes care of my children and who cleans my home. So I think on many different levels I've seen enormous empathy and I'm very, very grateful for what I've seen. It's wonderful. And we do have a high school matinee program through a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District and particularly Enrique's journey has really affected these kids. And last week we had a Honduran student who said this is my story, I was deported seven times before I came through. So it's been very, it's had a major impact on students here as well. And I speak at LA high schools and I won with 2,000 students. And I said raise your hand if you know someone who's come up on the train because I didn't want to out anyone. And about a third of them raised their hand. So it's a very deeply known story here in LA, personal story and it's becoming more common as we've seen this surge in kids coming. I was just in Houston and actually in Austin, Texas and they had a high school with 70% Honduran recent arrival. So we will see more of these children in the coming years because the conditions in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, where they're coming from has not gotten any better. What's occurred, lowering the numbers in the last couple of months is that Mexico has been ordered by us to basically interdict these kids and send them back to often deadly fates. And so Mexico is deporting 10 times as many people now as they were at the beginning of the year. And there's all sorts of problems with what's happening politically with these kids right now, but. And McElani, can you talk a little bit about the reception of your work and how you felt that it has created a sense of empathy or identification with audiences, particularly women who are reading your work. And if you can just sort of share with us sort of how the impact that it's had on your readership. Yes, I basically have felt that my entire life. I find that people after they either hear me read my work or they say performance of my work or read my book, they feel very connected to me and intimate with me, but they also feel more connected to themselves. I have a lot of people which is interesting, men, women, Latinos, African American, Asian, no importa, across class, across ethnicity, across race. They read my work or they hear my work and they say that's my story. Because at its core is the human story and things that impact all of us. We are all the victims of tyranny whether we know it or not. And when people hear the work, especially when they see it alive and pre-honest. I'm going to defer to Rosalba on that one because she's been at every performance. I've been at many of them, I have to admit, I just adore what you guys are doing with the show. But maybe you could speak a little bit. Yeah, I mean it's what I love about it is we just had a run with Full House. It's waiting ladies, everything. First of all, that our audience is not only Latino, but it's also, at least pastoral, I would venture to say that maybe 30% of the house was African American and from other groups. You're very curious about it because what it does is it gives voice to people who just ordinarily wouldn't voice certain things of themselves, especially on the issue of identity. The time that you asked me for to tell about that's my coverage, you know, on my way here, and it is part of the audience's reaction. The last piece of the collection of the Sima Co-Chorus Killers, which at least does so beautifully, River of Recuerdos, points to 16 different types of women. And one of the most exciting comments I had, somebody came to me last Friday and said, I'm all 16, I'm one by eight in the morning, one at 10 in the morning, one at one o'clock, by nine o'clock at night, I'm number 16 and no one can come near me. And you know, it is a little bit of that, you know, that if I'm La Parejera, I'm La Paremanacha, I mean, this is a whole 16 women that we have there that are absolutely amazing. But also it forces us to confirm our own prejudices because a lot of the work in that Sima Co-Chorus Killers, which is one of the audience feels so empowered and gives rousing, rousing, standing relations, you know, in New York and I must say that this is very much our life there, you know, but it's actually more and more universal. It's because it's, it points to things that we have in our own community and it's not always pointing the finger out the outsider. Mirarro Malkele, me trata, me mira mal, or whatever because I am, it's about the fact that we do it to ourselves sometimes. So when we're staging that piece, we're confronting our own demands in many ways. Do I actually look, do I actually, when I notice that kind of woman coming my way, that other Puerto Rican woman coming my way and I really like, oh please, you know, it's like. That is, but then that person doesn't have a voice. That person has no way of telling the world who she really is, but here we are judging this person. There is a whole confrontation of class within our own community that there were goals and points at, you know, which I set to do. How we structure our class system in our own communities and how we need to address those things and the piece address all of those things. And I think the audience connects with all of these things that you have inside your mind when you never ever talk about it, unless you're in a very intimate setting and here we are doing it publicly. And it brings it very close to that sense. Do you want to speak to Tony about the audience reactions you've had in Denver? Yeah, we, the biggest, the best reactions, no offense adults, have been the high school students that we have in here. They are so amazing, they get it. They get it in so many ways. When we first did the first round of Jose, or Hoser, who does Enrique, they asked him in the newspaper, asked him, how would he compare this to modern literature? And he said, what literary piece would he compare to it? And he said, the Odyssey. And for me, I would, that's a smart answer kid. But it's true. When I read it, it was like, this is like Indiana Jones in a really kinda hyped up way, right? This kid, as soon as he thinks he gets to one point, some mouse, so to me, that was an adventure element of it. He's always in danger. He's always on the verge. For me, one of the most profound moments is when he climbs up to the top of the scaffolding after having that nightmare sequence and he starts to cry like a little boy. You know, to me, those are those moments that I think the kids in the audience get. They get, we had a conversation on last Thursday and the kids talked about the fire, about how they got the fire. I've had many adults come to me going, I'm at the fire thing, what was that about? Right? And it's about a boy. And I asked my grandson, what was, he's 14. And I said, what is Enrique's journey? Is it a geographical journey? And he goes, yeah, well, that too. But it's a journey to him being an adult. It's a journey. And it's a journey we all have to take. So the universal element is really, really evident in this piece. And I think that's what draws people in. One last quick story, I hope I can make it out quickly. I went to, when we first did it, we did it in Durango, which is in Southern Colorado. And it was at Fort Lewis College. And we were, I was a Latino coming in to a program that has a lot of Latinos and Native people in it, but doesn't really, hasn't really gotten a great job or been able to really get, connect with them. And so I said, I wanted to work with the community. Well, they don't know where the community is. So they dropped me off one night at this ESL class. And actually did. I said, where are they? Well, I think they're in that building. And I went in, and I went in by the thing. I'd go with you, but I have my, you know, I have to do something else after. So I went in and it was an ESL class. And so I'm conducting this thing in my Fortress Spanish and talking to them about what we're doing. Cause what I wanted them to do is I wanted them to come, but I also wanted them to engage and to be there. And I started to talk about the scene in the play where they run up and they throw, they think they're going to throw rocks out because that's what they've been doing. And this time instead, they throw, they throw food. And I said, does anybody, you know, who knows what they're throwing? And they said, this woman raised her hand and she said, some miracles. She said, I know this because this is my story. I'm from Nicaragua. And then she proceeded to tell her story about coming in on that train. And it was like 45 minutes of serious therapy. It was everybody, this was an ESL class, and everybody's hugging each other, telling their stories. And then, so it's like, you know what? You need to come and talk to my cast. So she came, her name was Gemila, and she came and she told the story. She told the story about being in a room and being, the man was coming back to rape her and her sister. And for some reason, somebody stepped in between them and it was just that window that they got out and they were able to get back on the train and they were able to come. And she said, when you go, she told the students this, and this is something we keep in our minds as a cast. She said, when you go, you need to go and tell the story because you are telling our story. We need you to be our voice out there. And so that was, for me, it was a moment where the art, you know, life takes over art and it melts together. And those kids carried that and we carried that. And so, if you're talking about empathy, it put us in a very, very different place because it was no longer just an imagine, it just became a reality. In this town, we never expected this to be. It was all around us, it was all around us. One last thing about her is that we asked her to come in and be a consultant because she didn't have papers. The university couldn't pay her. So it was, I mean, that was taken care of. We took care of it out of our own pockets to make sure that it was happening. But it was like clearly she was giving us this information that we needed, but still she was invisible was her own story. You know, I don't know if I can add, but I've had many similar experiences and I was in Watsonville, California for one city read and they handed out 600 copies in Spanish to the immigrant parents. You know, they say immigrant parents won't read, but they all read it alongside their high schoolers and 800 of them showed up one night for me to, for my talk and they stood in line for two hours and every single one of them, 85% of immigrants are separated from a parent in the process of coming here and every single one of them was crying in that line as I signed their books and telling me about their separations. One woman whose son she had brought from Mexico and he had been deported back by Border Patrol and she couldn't find him for two years because he had been lost in the child welfare system in Mexico. So I hear those stories every day from people and the other thing I wanted to say is, you know, it's been such a delightful experience with Tony because so black and white with my experience with Hollywood. You know, Hollywood just doesn't do brown people and my book was, it was, you know, it was blocked by HBO, the newspaper series that led to the book. They worked on it for two, three years as a six-part mini series. They've dropped many Latino projects that they've done similar work on. I think they do white people and black people but they don't do brown people and it's been picked up by many people since and now there's a famous Hollywood person who's supposedly interested. So it's been this whole roller coaster ride and I just came to not believe anymore and when Tony said he was gonna do a play, you know, I was like, okay, yeah, right. So I think I got, I interacted very little with you just assuming that this was not gonna happen but Tony has done it in Durango and in Denver and here and he's really seen it as an important story to tell and has done a wonderful job with it and I think we have to bring our own stories forward because other people won't do it for us. Tony and Sonia for that because that is, I was thinking about when you shared the story, Tony, I was thinking about validation and then the brown people think that we're thinking about something that wasn't recent and I were talking about today which is about, you know, this brown majority and that is us, you know. We buy one in four movie tickets. Exactly, exactly. And I was thinking how much time, unfortunately, we spend seeking validation from the dominant culture and not cultivating enough validation within our own selves and I think this is why we love doing this piece, Covert Killers, because it is about that validation that we need to have within ourselves and therefore we need to challenge our own predicaments and make sure that as we look ourselves in the mirror, we see the clear picture and our audiences have taught us that they see it when they see the show. They come back once and again and again and say, that is me or that was my father or that was my brother and one of the pieces that we show, we have, we call it affectionately run by run, it was written by Magdalena by her own dad and then Mother de Bomba which was written about her grandmother. The grandmother I invented because I never met one. And I thought it would be great if we have these two guys talk about their grandmother and I sort of shifted jetters around to make it work in a different way. So those are the gifts that we get from good writing. So I'd like to open it up to the audience. I'm sure you have lots of questions for our panelists that we can take about 10 or 15 minutes and entertain some questions or comments. Anyone who wants to pick us up? I have a question about, you were talking about empathy. I have a visual artist who I also work with and I've thought a lot about how there's often a sense of supposed sympathy and in a way it becomes a part of the visual attainment in society and I noticed this thing where people were parodying, being parodying on YouTube was like a charcoal execution. I was just wondering where did I do that? Great gallows and dark humor comes with the process. Notice that the process of maybe writing poetry or more of the investigation of the theater. Could you clarify the question for me because I think there are about seven questions in life. What is the specific question? Maybe that moment, what is that process in your moment? When I'm trying to cultivate empathy within the reader or the viewer, is that what you're asking me? So I know. Are we becoming immune to violence, right? Or is by creating examples of hyperviolence like Robert Rodriguez does, are we actually teaching somebody about violence? Is that kind of, am I helping with that? Well, yeah, I was just kind of speaking of what is that most fine line? I gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, when I talk about that interplay between humor and horror, I don't believe in mocking violence and I don't believe in satire to a certain extent, yes. There's a piece that Omar Perez does that's a very interesting piece about, how can I put it, when he met me, he was holding the script and he said, are you Magdalena Gomez? Yes. Did you write this? Yes. What's wrong with you? And it was a wonderful meeting. But the piece is very much outrageous and it is about a very profound bigotry against immigrants in the United States. But it is such an absurdity that it's almost like, do I laugh, do I not laugh? How do I feel? So I'm not giving anybody an easy out. I don't make fun of our people. I don't cartoon us. I don't give anybody permission to create mockery of ugliness. What I try to give them is a venue from which they can witness it and perhaps experience some self-understanding of how they perceive it. In the case of an offender, my hope is that they will have remorse. In the case of a victim, my hope is that they will feel they have power. So we have to be very intentional in how we choose our words and our placement because oftentimes we do self-colonizing work. And I have seen the colonial mind at work because we live in a plantation in this country. And so we must resist the plantation mentality where we assimilate to accommodate so that we can go into some idea of what we perceive as success or acceptance. I don't wish to be accepted. I wish to accept myself. And I hope that my work will inspire people to feel good about who they are and if they are not good people to feel remorse. That's shame because shame doesn't help anybody just like guilt doesn't. But to feel the true remorse that would make them, my God, that's me. I'll give you an example. In Teatro Vida, the young people created a piece based on the story that there was a little boy who was beaten by an older man with a golf club in our community. The students came to me and they said, oh my God, this horrible thing has happened. So we started to explore cycles of violence written from the perspective of the young people that I work with. So they found compassion for that man because what they did in this little news article that was about that big, they found the characters that you didn't read about like the officer who showed up at the scene, the doctor in the emergency room, the mother, the abuela, they came up with 25 characters. So from that one article, it generated all these stories. So I hate getting old, I'm losing my train of thought to easily use it. But my point is that they created a character of the mother of the man who beat the child. And they showed her abusing the child. But then they showed her in a factory and they showed the patron abusing her. A mother came up to the girl, she was 18 years old who played the mother in tears to her and she said, I wanna thank you for what you just showed me on that stage, I saw myself. And when I leave here, I am going to ask the forgiveness of my children. So not only do I choose to write in that manner, but I choose to train my students to write in that manner, in the way of compassion. And I don't separate things into the black people or the white people or the brown people or the Asian people or the people. Whiteness is a tumor that can afflict anyone at any time. I've been through all the cool festival, almost every show has this element of witness, right? And I think theater, the medium audience, literally is witnessing art, but also all of these things are sort of coming through this narrative of witnessing and what is our role. So I really appreciate you saying that. Other thoughts, comments for him. Well, speaking of the parodies of violence and the visual artists, there's a moment, a wonderful moment of visual display that you haven't seen it in the Germans here tonight, again. You saw in that day when you have a chat, a lot of the people running, this is just, you know, and those of us who live near the border, or the VA, or whatever, I don't know if that was your imagery, but that's how I saw it. You'll hurt the audience, but again, you're going to work with each of you to acquire it. Anybody who goes to a theater conference and not be tired of the raw news and the watcher, right? Or home. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, the enemy. That moment, you just didn't know that Tony's got a wonderful sense of humor, and I've seen this theater for way many years. And so that moment, you just didn't have a response of humor, that's something that's horrific. You know, these people trying to get across this and not be the raw news. Interesting, we don't get the same laugh in general. Because you're too far from the border, of course. Not at all. For those funny, but not funny moments. For real, I didn't really get this. Yeah, right up there. So, well, first of all, I just want to say thank you for the work you guys are doing. It's really inspiring. You know, first time I've been here, and my family did it, my whole family from Amida, so it's really resonated with me, because although this wasn't my dad, but this is my cousin, so this is everyone. And so I'm a performing artist, and also primarily a writer, and I just kind of wanted to ask some advice, you know, you have you guys here. In terms of, you have a story that's very specific to, you know, a boy from Honduras and everything, and this journey that, you know, somewhat maybe from Puerto Rico, my, you know, it might be from a totally different perspective. I lived in Miami, my best friends were Cuban, but then I also lived here. My best friends were from Mexico, so when I try to write, I think of like how to make something that's definitely relatable, but it's, you know, so it's universal, even though it's very specific to my culture or to the culture of my best friend. And so I was wondering if you could give some advice on how to make it so that it's just like this piece of music that I feel like it's, you know, you guys have mentioned that it's something that resonates with everyone, black, brown, white. For me, I do this because I want, you know, I'll play music, and I've been on stage, and stuff like that. I've never had the mad passion to be in front of people. Usually I try to fly out of the radar because I'm usually doing something wrong. But for me, the reason, the thing I like is I like being in the audience and having people have the same reaction to what I'm seeing. So what I'm getting at is that I dig theater, I dig those moments, I dig that stuff, and I want to create things that I like that evoke an emotion in me or stimulate me, or are stupid jokes that only Jorge and I would probably get, I suppose. You know, those are the things that I did. I first said that, a long time ago, I say I didn't, you know, I got into this thing really just to piss people off, to see how much. And then they started liking it, which really threw everything out of whack, right? And so now you're trying to kind of figure out, you know, what are, how can you, for me it's a lot of practical stuff. How do you do a set up? How do you do the punchline? We had a whole conversation about beats. Those kind of things so that people will get to that point of being in a position to absorb that kind of point that you're trying to make. And I think that's what makes the arts really what they are, is because it's the universality of shared feelings, shared emotions, and shared experiences. I mean, the whole concept, I think that a lot of us who are veteranos of the Chicano and Latino art, theater art stuff, I mean, that's been the argument that we made, long time ago. Our stories are just as universal as anybody else. I had the same experience with Shakespeare's. Like I would say, where is Jacked Up as anybody in Shakespeare? I mean, we stab each other in the back. We do all of those things, you know. I don't need to go to some place in England years ago. I can find that in my own backyard. So I think if you just go for what works for you and try to listen, listen, that's the other piece, is that for me, I just, I feel like I had it. I really kept thinking as I'm watching this, what did I do? What did I do with this? Because it's so in your story, and it's Enrique's life. And what I did, and thanks for the collaboration, Daniel Aldez and the music and stuff like that, it's like you're just kind of riding that train with everybody else in those moments. I think for me, some of the aside from the music that he wrote, those are great. It's a lullaby that becomes really, really dark, right? But also the parody of when you wish upon a star, because there was a, and that came from her because she says they were looking at, they look at the United States as this place where Disney landings, and if we couldn't come to Disneyland and make fun of Disney, I don't know what, you know, would there be something wrong with this place, right? Well, you know, and the thing is, in our case that I do, I hear what Tony's saying, totally agree with him, and the more specific you are, I mean, the more specific you are, the more you will be able to manage whatever it is you're writing, and believe me, there will be, I mean, there will be a universal connection to it. The problem when we try to be so universal, you know, when we start doing something that is not anchoring anything, that it's not being about anything, I mean, nothing, you know, so it's just that specificity. I might say specificity, it doesn't have to be an issue, or you know, I think that that's where we begin to, in my case, I just believe that the balance between content and form is so important that it's not only about content, it's important. It is how we're going to do, what we're going to say is important, and how we're going to say is just as important, and I think that's when you begin to make the connections beyond your own boundaries, or your own sort of frontier, not boundary, but your own frontier. We have, for example, La Plégon, exchanges with other companies from other cultures. We have a 21-year relationship with an Appalachian company, Roseye Theater. They're probably with New Orleans and Appalachian, and us for 10 years to travel together with a piece, and when we got together, we each had some horror stories to tell that we thought, my God, it's going to be like a triat over, it's going to be horrible. Then you know, in the Mineros, with the Suella in the mountains. We ended up doing this piece about love, and the meaning of love, and the many interpretations of love. Yeah, it became such a magnificent thing, and when we did the same thing with the companies of La Vakia and a company in Belgium, it was about bridal experiences in our hometowns, and women and rights and it was just look for that thing that is yours to tell, your story is yours to tell and you'll find that connection beyond your own fertility. I think for me it was, you know I really came into journalism as a result of living through parts of the dirty war in Argentina when my father died my mother took us back to Argentina where both my parents were from and I saw journalists being killed for trying to tell the truth about what was happening with the military taking power and killing 30, disappearing 30,000 people and lived many of those things, disappearances personally in my family. So I became very committed to writing about social issues, social justice issues and people who don't get written about enough in this country including Latinos. But for me I, within knowing, I mean I think for me the stories come from, you know, people throw around that word passion but what you care about and I, but within that I always look for 10 different elements in the stories that I choose to pick and I think 90% of the success of a story is picking the right story and one is that universal theme that anyone can understand whether it's greed or redemption or a boy willing to go through a hostile world to reach his mother, it's conflict in stories, you know, you have plenty of it in this story, you need a question that is the engine that drives the story, is he going to make it into his mother's arm? You need great characters that grow over time, you know, on these trains you have gangsters who wear rosaries to befriend migrants on top of the train and get to know where they're stashing their money and then when they're on top of the train they throw pregnant women down to the churning wheels below. I look for stories with a narrative arc with the beginning, middle and end, his mother leaves from a porch in Honduras and Enrique leaves from the same porch to go in search of her in North Carolina. So I always look for about 10 different elements. The number one element I look for is does the story move me on an emotional level? When Carmen told me her story, my house cleaner, about not seeing her children for 12 years, the hair went up as it does right now on my forearm, it moved me and if it moves me it might move you. So I always look for stories that move me and so I'm always looking for those elements that I know work but always within the context of I want to write about social justice and people who don't get written about it enough, women, children, the poor, and Latinos. Thank you. So we're going to the next part where you can have some face time with authors. We're going to move into a book signing in the lobby. So I just wanted to thank our panelists for being with us today. I'm a theater maker because theater is ephemeral and it changes every time and the author, I mean the audience changes every time but I'm really intrigued by literature where the text stays the same but the reader changes every time they read it. So I encourage you to pick up these books, come back to the theater, immerse yourself and have an encounter with the LATC. We're here all month, we're here for you, this is your home. So please join us in the lobby for the book signing and thank you so much for being here.