 Golden Thread Productions has been able to accomplish through the forum, and I've been honored to be a part of this process. So thank you, and of course we send our thanks to all of you for attending and participating. So without further ado, the last finale of the weekend with our very own Toran Giacchiazore, I'm sharing the last panel from War on Drugs to War on Terror Parallels in Chicano, Latino and Middle East American Performance, and I'll briefly introduce the panelists, and they will say more about themselves, I'm sure, or Toran Giacchiazore. So we have joining us Angela Barino, Roberto Varela, and Octavio Solis. So let's give them a welcoming round of applause. The background our various panelists picked came from. We at Golden Thread are very interested in the intersection of cultures. We define the Middle East inclusively and broadly, and we acknowledge and pay reverence to all the various cultures that are represented in the Middle East, that the Middle East has influenced and have influenced the Middle East. And one of them is very much the Latino culture. Obviously there is the shared history of Andemisia and the presence of Islam in Spain, which I think our panelists will speak about more. But in more recent history, when I first came to the US as a teenager in the aftermath of revolution in my own country, I was looking for other revolutionaries in the US, and the revolutionaries at the time were either from Central America and Latin America or Palestinians fighting for independence. So those two communities are the communities that really informed my sensibility in my early years in the US. And I was very struck by how people around me, my family, didn't really connect with what was happening in Central America and Latin America. And even then, as a teenager, it really seemed pretty obvious to me that if something like this can be done to one group of people, at some point it can also be done to your group of people, which is exactly what happened. In the 80s, the Reagan White House waged war on drugs. On Central America, basically, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, fighting communism in the guise of war on drugs. And a similar thing happened right after 9-11 under the umbrella of war on terror. So for me, there is a parallel there, as well as our two people's sort of common journey as immigrant populations in the US and how Chicano and Latino theater has been able to establish itself as a voice in American theater and how that can inform what Middle Eastern American playwrights are going through and what's ahead, maybe some strategies. So with that introduction, I'd like to hand it over to Angela Marina, who's a professor at UC Berkeley, Professor Heather. She's in the Theater and Dance Department, and you will say more about your own background and then go right into the presentation. Sure, I'm an assistant professor. I have the great honor of working with people like Heather. We have a terrific program at UC Berkeley. In addition to a number of classes that are dealing with issues that we've talked about, colonialism, decoloniality, race, empire, other kinds of courses that are offered to graduate programs and our undergraduate programs. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for being here. I appreciate you just kind of a conversation, because I do feel like it's kind of a conversation that brings a kind of staff to staff in a global war context. It's urgent that we start to think about what is going on in our lifetime present and the strategies that these different communities have had to engage in in order to survive really over centuries, and so I think we're also talking about a long history and also the trajectory of our future. So we're talking here at the time, obviously the stakes are really high. We have extremely large and diverse communities of people that we're talking about, and I think we're really working on just trying to find colonial equivalences here. What we do find that there are some shared experiences that can help us identify what we're dealing with, what is this, what generates these structures of power, or the way that wars have been perpetuated for so many years, particularly in women and men. So when you see what in this community is that people in this country rounded up in the same person, in the same detention centers, you see people held at the borders, you see people profiled at the insertions, and otherwise at least in unprecedented proportions in this country. So I'm going to ask if the slides can come on for one minute. I'll get to the play where this image here is taken from in the minutes. But I want to focus first on the idea of the state of crisis that we're finding ourselves in, and to think about the hope that we have in the theater to strategically expose what is at times these absurd but also very real underpinnings of racist ideology that we can see through economy, and that also exposed the ways that the economy institutions such as Homeland Security can have depended on and fall by. They need to show an enemy in order to substantiate their own existence as protectors and ultimately producers of what war morphos are going to mean to democracy. So I'm going to refer to this play a little later that I think does that work, called The Eleventh Entrance of Chaldeity by Christoph Dias. So the second slide. So close to the idea who prosecutors swore to lock up no matter what, and the what being torture, poetry, evidence, failure of any semblance of human rights, became this kind of repeating mirror of what Time Magazine called it, the sum of all fears. So the Time Magazine reporters should point out that what that meant was the Latino ex-gang member, ex-con, turned Muslim, who potentially hates the good people of the United States. I think what we missed from that report was the extent to which Pidea and his case reflected this, the construct itself, this extension of the centuries old match between good and evil, the so-called evil that led these crusades really to this hemisphere, to steal and hoard from its people here in this hemisphere, and ultimately what supports the 1.2 billion, sorry, trillion dollar industry of war that steals and hoards from us, the taxpayer. So, and I want to point out here, some of the audiences of my co-panel, Roberto Lovato was working in immigrant rights, and has really important me a lot in this thinking also to consider that immigration is a part of the Homeland Security as an institution. So we need to keep that in mind that immigration is directly at the core of these institutional frameworks. So, one of the shifts that we saw in Theresa's idea that I'm going to crusade is in the 1990s when there was a kind of military activism, where this idea that we had to go meet the enemy wherever they are, and again it's an extension of this missionary project. I want people that had to convert, you know, that there was the grand income from the conquest period. So, I think that we had plays, I think in the late 1990s, that was one of his millennial plays, and one that I want to show you is the poster image of Madi Sol, by Jose Fiededa. And in this play, it takes place in New York, and it's an apocalyptic upheaval where Madi Sol, who lives a young professional Latino working for a publishing firm, has to shape herself under this denial that the world is, in every sense, gone unwack. It's just, there's imbalance everywhere. So Madi Sol in the next two plays, I'm going to mention that he gives us a chance to see how these cultural reorganizations work for worldviews. And I think that might be one of the parallel moves that's going on with Latino plays, and also with some of the work that the professor was doing. Where in this case, the history and future imagination is altered by Madi Sol from this God in revelations that takes up arms to defend chosen believers against all others. In this play, Madi Sol joins a band of women and angels that fight to save the world by bringing back the moon, when it's the sun, this incessant sun that has symbolized empire and patriarchy and growing all the way back to Charlemagne, which I mentioned here in the last panel, where, and in this play, God has disappeared from the action altogether. So instead, we're left with a millennial kind of apocalyptic narrative of a very different sort than what we saw in invitations in personal training. And I think what's at stake in this play is really an answer to the so-called mythic clash of civilizations, where it actually finds that apocalypse is a self-fulfilling prophecy called an impression. It's not one that's necessarily, you know, propelled by this essential conflict between two decent people. Rather than, if there is a central conflict, it's because there's an unsustainable empire that's been afflicted by a disaster, capitalism, kind of uneven development, unfair management resources, and so on. So Madi Sol re-orients this from the center of apocalypses where the nation tells it, where God is this punitive reminder that some will sin and go to hell and others will come obey and save. To an altogether very different center in the idea of immunity and rebirth and renewal, and so it's all about trying to re-achieve balance and delivery. And so in this play, I think there's also a little tie with science together, we found that she's actually connecting to the global world. So these are belief systems to the Americas, indigenous belief systems that are a very, this is a strong center, I think from which Latino and Chicano playwrights are speaking from, is the combination of having to contend with the multiple ways that Catholicism has been imprinted, imposed, and sort of become a part of who we are. But at the same time, finding the sources and inspirations for our history and also our future in indigenous thoughts and belief systems and ways that we can express that for our plays. So in this next slide of the Popo Roo, you can see a room like the Altocana Sema which has decades of theater history work here in the larger Bay Area. And it's a beautiful play telling the story of the Popo Roo for most of Latino audiences in a public park setting. Satchuan Valtista, California is outdoors with giant puppet figures. These are coming out of the long practices of yesterday's traditions in the Americas. There are narrations in multiple languages including Napa, indigenous languages, and the staging of theater and the sphere, right? It's intergenerational and so forth. So in another example, there's an image of a poster for a play by one of the most theater companies. So I'm just going to give you a perspective of one play from South America here. And this is a theater company called India Sucano, which is a casual word, and it means I remember through you. And this play turns the story of Santiago Matamoros and Santiago Matamoros, so the Moors layer and the Indians layer, into one of memory and reversal. So where the patron of the fiesta, the character of the church, switch roles in this play. And they end up kind of upturning this whole conquest narrative. And it literally is just beating the horse. So I'm going to take you just a little bit through these because I think we're also going to have another reference to Santiago and the points of this symbol through where Progreso has been represented. So the next slide shows you these images of St. James, of Santiago, St. James. So this is the legend of the battle of Paladino in Spain in which the miraculous appearance of St. James in the battlefield terrified the most forces in the sky. So in some cases, I mean it's like the, just like a repeating mirror of Paella, we see this nearly identical story repeated in Cusco Peru. So in this case, Santiago is the killer of the Indians, so it becomes Matamoros, or the indigenous who are now the new target, but part of the same mechanism of this imperial domination. So there's Santiago in the horse, you can see in this play that he was kind of dipped by spinning the horse and kind of refusing to be either on the top or the bottom was a straggler, a way of questioning this entire mechanism of imperial domination. So next I want to get to what you promised at the beginning of this slide, which is this play, the 11th entrance of Charity. So this is a play by the young Puerto Rican Masada Miyakega who's coming out of the Bronx with a childhood-born passion for the wrestling ring. So he becomes Mace, working for the white producer as basically the Latino follow-up for this rigged match with the star of the show, African American Charity, until Mace teams up with this fast-talking East Indian kid from Brooklyn and the two of them devise the ultimate terror. So here they are, the chade, rebel, sapatista, poncho, media, border crossing, migrant, the Mexican planted next to the big Latin Brooklyn-born hip-hop fly guy. They figure out how to make the box as the ultimate threat. So you might guess the name of this Brooklyn friend is the fundamentalist and him the Mexican. And all of these different investments in either maintaining or tearing down this fantasy of the match that's increasingly built up intentions throughout this play. So I think in the next slide, I think what's interesting here is that Diaz doesn't shy away from complexity. So instead he's embracing complexity, the game he contents in all of us as children exposed to the play, at times building alternative imaginations inside of it, and we're also influenced into blindness and rationalizations of this game. Nevertheless, he suggests that there's a strength to be on the inside of it, there's a strength in his perspective as actors, as producers, inside of this spectacle of power. And so to seize operations in order to expose it and potentially turn it upside down. So another tactic worth noting in this play, and this will be my last point before summing up, is the staging of this entire apparatus of the spectacle in Chadeau. So it's a mass by these ladders and lights, the ring of the notch, the kinds that are reminded of this outside of the spectacle, the lights and the whistles that make it grow. And we're giving plenty of complex kind with the white producer that's willing to reverse the roles and spin each character onto the other just to keep the ratings high for this production of the wrestling match. And so that's what makes this, I think we're very fascinated as a metaphor for the media and industrial state complex as a spectacle of power. So in sum, a play like Marisol and Pablo, I think attempt to re-center a historiographic lineage of Chicago and Latin plays to culture identifications that have contested this world view of the clash of civilizations. And plays such as Uyash Kami's Santiago literally spin the entire course to suggest this popular dismantling of colonial domination. And popular is important there because it's a fiesta, so many people walk in that process. And then in the curve that plays in the US such as Diaz's elaborate entrance of Chaldeity bring this entire spectacle into view as a means to challenge the modern media battles of racist ideologies that play out in war and terror. And simultaneously on a racial and other so-called attractionist policies in the United States. Thank you, Angela. So our format is going to be each speaker will speak for 7 to 10 minutes and then we'll open it up to your questions. Because I think we want to, yes, 10 to 12 minutes. We are really interested in your participation in this conversation. So Roberto is a professor at University of San Francisco and a dear friend, if I may. And a lover of wine, which always is good. Which is all really important. Take it away. I'm not. So, well thank you. She's so nice. I am happy to be here today to share some thoughts with you. And I'm happy because at some point this conversation of a lover of wine, which ends up with a ranch. I guess we ran into it so much we forgot about it at his room. And, of course, also something that is pretty free, that is painfully relevant to what's going on today. A ranch perspective, my Latino performance class. And my Latino performance and culture course. The guys are known a lot. And it was really interesting to be able to see that as an important space. Where theater occupies both cultures. So, I am a rambling man, so I put some thoughts on paper. And just keep me. More of an introduction I think I'll talk a little bit about. So there's a personal dimension to this and that. Of course, as someone born, raised in Latin America, in the United States, embraced, mutually embraced, Latino, Chicano community here. The theater community in particular. Becoming a Latino. And although some of my, that's an important distinction. Some of you have questions about that. Maybe we can talk about that too. But I will focus on examples that relate a bit more to Chicano here, that you're not interested in. So, Los Moros y Los Morenos is the title, right? So, when pondering the question of this theater, similar to Chicano Latino Theater, the first image that came to mind to me was that of Juan de Oñate, the commander, the colonial force that moved from what is today's Mexican territory, to claim lands to the north for the Spanish crown. This was a rough campaign. There was a little server of gold that we found. We had to put down mutinies and other forms of discontent, primarily amongst those who objected to being discovered, like the Hopi, the Pueblo, other nations. In 1598, they celebrate, as fell of misfortune, after having crossed the Vioranga next to today's El Paso, on the town of Octavio, in Tecas, he states the pageant Los Moros y Los Cristianos. The Christians and the Moors, a play that glorified the Reconquista, or re-conquering of the land held for more than 700 years by the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. We'll say that Oñate cast local native people as the Moors, which may or may not have happened, but it is clear by the abundant colonial iconography that we saw before throughout the Americas, particularly in Latin America, that this actually took place in the Spanish active colonial imaginations. Santiago, N.K.A. St. James, the Christian patron saint, whose name became the battle cry going into battle with the Moors for the Spanish army. Change is known to get from Santiago Matamoros or the Moor Slayer to Santiago Matainos or the Indian Slayer. So images of Santiago took his voice voice, serenely trampling on the Moors were changed by thousands of the religious image of the Holy Gallant Jockey and his mount, something native people. The Moor for the soldier, saint slash conqueror, and duty to rule over the darker skinned other on the one hand, and the latter's death sentence as infidel determined by the true God on the other was thus cast in the Americas. A burden that in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War was taken up by the United States, a nation that synthesized the term America to be applied just itself as opposed to the Holy Continent and continued its own expansionism under the quasi-religious ideology of manifest destiny up to the put very long road, doctrine, America for the Americans in that context. I was born in Cordoba, Cordoba de la Nueva Andalusia, that is like New York City, you know, from the old York in New York, my hometown is Cordoba de la, of the New Andalusia, and a city that's also revered with the family memory was my grandfather, my grandfather, Vareha, who came from Andalusia, born very close to Cordoba in Spain. He's passed on this Vareha moreno, which moreno comes from war, and he, according to my mom, because I never met him, he died when my mom was young, was very proud to refrain with himself as an heir. There's some photos of my grandfather that actually, you know, I know, it's funny, we look at, for example, his Peña Chicavenian project that, if you put a somewhere on a list of persons, you know. Yeah, so that was the place with my grandfather. I am, as you can see, from the lighter side of the family, right, the skin side of the family. So Cordoba was Culuva, so it was the head of the Caliphate of Cordoba, and it's important to remember this, because at the time of the 10th, 11th century, it was not only the most populous city in the Western world, in Europe, but it was considered to be the most cultured people in the world. It was the largest library since Alexandria had been assembled in Cordoba, where hundreds of thousands of volumes and all sorts of things came from, and of course, if we, it's important to remember this to a degree, Spanish history did not cover much of that either, because the Moors were the bankers today, but for a degree, a revisionist look at colonial history in Latin America and Argentina, particularly where I studied, brought this to light, and of course, the military in 1976, when they went over everything and looking for subversive thought, they included Latin Americanism, or anything that spoke to a larger Latin American consciousness, censored all the references to the achievements of the Moors in Spain. And, you know, this is the town where Seneca was born, of course, it's a different from Rome, thanks to the poet Lucan, and of course, Averroes. How do you pronounce that? Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi. Are you familiar with this person? Yes. Because we owe... Ibn Roos? Yes. Ibn Arabi. Uh-huh. We say, ¿Habicenas for Averroes in Spanish? ¡Habicina! No, it's abicina. Yeah. Okay. And then... A philosopher, scientist, an incredible mind to whom we all really, to the Arab culture at the time, basically, that the keeping of the foundations of Western thought, because these were the people that were keeping all of us, Greek philosophers' ideas, recopying them, commenting them, and of course, Averroes' comments from Aristotelian philosophy are critical to understanding their thought. So... Let me see where I was at. Right. So, Latinos, by extension then, are the repository of so much Arab Muslim culture that its own rights to... I mean, that Spain's own rights to world super power following the defeat of the Moors, would have not happened without its influences in thought, science, and art. Our common words are referred to cultural factors like... like camisa, pantalón, zapato, anything that starts with al, like alfombra, almada, pillow, carpet, shoes, pants, shirts, all of this in Spanish language are Arab words. Granada to the Spanish armies in 1492, which, not by consonants, is the year that Columbus moved to Peru. So, the idea of the native as the Moor of Nueva España lays the grounds for the narrative of liberation via religious conversion that makes the genocidal brutality of the Spanish invasions so-called discovery or conquest a much better oil machinery. And, of course, the theater was at the heart of it. Los Moros, los Cristianos became the first European theatrical performance and what is today the land of the United States In Diana Taylor's words, a theater of oppression later to be confronted by the theater of the oppressed a term coined by Alusco Roal a fear applied in the larger sense a theater born out of the necessity to affirm our own culture, language, memory and experience to account a narrative without a hegemonic power. In other words, a narrative of resistance to vilification stereotyping and other violent forms of reductionism transforming to one of self-definition inquiry, examination and yes, celebration. We can trace an arc of for the direction of Chicano like in the theater by connecting a few dots allowed by time which is very tricky and asking for forgiveness for our conditions can tell you there, but but we know birth of Chicano theater will forever be connected with this by this. We see in the early actos of the Diatro Campesino a theater born fierce along the lines of oppositional as a prop blending not French farce as in the case of Al-Hakeem's War and Peace from the festival but Italian Commedia dell'Arche with brevity and lurch took it less in place of perhaps Manassas the letter is also indelible. The next landmark in our art moves us onto a more elaborate narrative of contestation and denunciation Diatro dell'Enuncia as is referred in Latin America with works such as Diatro dell'Esperanza the victim no sacco nada de la escuela I get nothing out of school seems present in this stage find interest in parallels with Middle Eastern theater as this work bring forth the first full formal use of bilinguality in Chicano theater right that I mean not only the issue bilinguality as part of the resistance to one language one thought machinery of assimilation but the aesthetic and expressive potential of Spanish clashing with English and of course the code-stretching of the borderings of language that are part of the Latino culture in the US Boring from Professor Davashi's presentation is that the mongrel form of expression mongrel's form of expression of the colloquial as well the calibanization of language just in caliban so the monstrous other of the tempest it is important here to acknowledge the connection between Latino Chicano theater and Latin American theater long engaged in anti-colonial cultural resistance projects that really blossomed in this time particularly through the tenacity movement which in the early 70s brought about meaningful dialogue and collaborations and with this engagement with the Latin American colleagues and the creative the collective creative process of being perfected in Latin America the people that would have been doing Colombia and so forth which of course influenced theater worldwide including very much the United States anti-war works are central to this period not only marked by the Vietnam War as the interesting kind of places we saw yesterday in Chicano classes like Dark Root at the Spring or Solgado Rastro that that is Valdez but by one of the most not only by the Vietnam War but by one of the most violent chapters in the United States relationship with so-called a term that refers to a good portion of the continent south the Rio Grande that even Barack Obama used to refer to Latin America this brings up another interesting parallel between Latin America and Middle East marked in the coming of age of the CIA the coup d'etat that brung down Mossade in 1953 to protect the Anglo-Persia whole company and other imperial holdings in the region was followed by the coup d'etat of President George Ford to protect primarily the United for good companies of seen hold on land and exceptional taxation in Guatemala the legacy of both of these simultaneously orchestrated CIA coups can be counted by in hundreds of thousands of them the official numbers for Guatemala alone are over 250,000 and we're talking about official numbers right and also countless displaced people who have safe pay the war on drugs conducted by the U.S. which has rippled from Peruvian and Bolivia in the 70s before it became monetarist to Colombia in the 80s and now in Mexico has left a violent pornographic proportion pornographic both in scope and in regard to the explicit staging of mutilated bodies in death that in Mexico alone in fewer than six years or again officially has already topped thousands deaths just as the campaign to pacify or democratize the Middle East Latin American war on drugs has much more to do has much more to do with who owns or controls the land and its resources than fighting the drug dealers as a war on drugs it has been an absolute failure but as a land and resources war it has been incredibly successful Chicano-Latino theater has been a failure continues to mature into more reflected processes of cultural expression and in doing so as Professor so eloquently put it it has also continued to dent and cheap away the bulletproof armor anglo heteronormativity this has occurred in a number of ways but I will mention a couple a more elaborate manifestation of its native roots and consciousness known as indigenismo which brings us full circle back processes of resistance to colonization and also by taking on controversial issues within the community such as domestic abuse rape homosexuality as in the work of Sheree Morari a shadow of a man used in saints and now more recently new fire which is ritual in form of course the inclusion of indigenous languages in the work the work of Risa Alfaro the performance art of Guillermo Gomez Peña we are talking about the Chicaregnian project you can look up online a good a good example of this way of Chicano drama blossoming in new words the master's taste language and complex story lines is my my co-panelist Octavio so it's this media a sort of high hanging fruit nurtured on the south of Chicano scenes and forms that ripens around the loaded paradigm metaphor of the border the border not just which is central where we're not not just as dividing online but but itself made strange and unsettling meeting place where cultural play, frictions and trespassings between US and Mexico which is also the border between the US and the rest of Latin America European and indeed the European and indigenous the documented and the undocumented the straight and the queer the many truths and many lies that we even tell ourselves very great performance ultimately the border as the most fertile ecosystem of creative expression of our consciousness rooted in difference and not in exceptionalism Thank you for gathering from Roberto's presentation he was instrumental in developing this panel and that conversation over wine I think really did its job so thank you so much for that and Octavio your playwright local Bay Area and Lydia I think Roberto has also introduced you do you want to just take it away Sure I'm a playwright and I've been working here in the Bay Area since 1989 and but I come as Roberto intimated from Opasso that's my pedigree that's where my parents moved to from Mexico that's where I was born and raised and that's where I whenever I arrive I always dream the landscape again and go back there again for the fertile stories of my imagination and it's funny that you mentioned Oniate in quite that detail because Opasso does have a very very complicated relationship with Oniate he is credited with naming the city itself of Opasso del Norte finding that passage through the mountains that leads for the north but he was also notorious he was a notorious man who instituted a policy of of subjugation against the native populations there by having the mail anyone who ran away anyone who rebelled against his forces the children, the male children and the male adults had their their foot cut off and so he went down in history as really one of the most brutal oppressors of of North America and yet there was a a statue that was commissioned of him and it curiously enough you showed these equestrian images of Santiago well it's they have erected a large the largest in fact in the world the largest equestrian statue of Oñate that is now situated at the airport in Opasso and it's part of a series of all the important figures in Opasso who are part of that very troubled history and there was a movement to even not even have that statue built at all but because it seemed to celebrate him it seemed to sort of honor him to ask everywhere about him all over wherever you go in Opasso because he sort of founded the first settlement there and that play that he put on is the first play that was ever performed in the continental U.S. and it's it's curious to me how and somehow appropriate that it would be the first Peter oppression that was performed so well said very well said but that's part of the complexity I think that I have to deal with whenever I go back to Opasso and I write about that area one of the very first plays that I wrote was called Santos and Santos it's very first performances were here in this very space and it was based on the Chagra Brothers of Opasso, Texas in the 70s who were very celebrated flamboyant legal family of Lebanese Lebanese in origin who were heroes in the community but somehow got mixed up with the narcotics trade and since then I have ever been very interested in how that narcotics trade how that border and how immigration have touched the lives of people in Opasso by extension the rest of America and I've come full circle the last couple of works I have been working on which two are commissions for EO Rev one is a commission for Magic Peter touch upon go back to those things and the one that I'm working now at the moment is a commission for EO Rev and it's a and it's called Cicario Cicario is a Spanish word for assassin and it's the first play that I'm writing that deals directly with the with the cartel violence the horrific brand renewal of violence that is overwhelming all in Mexico but really has completely buried the city of Juarez with so many violence and it's a tough work to write about because it's it is so brutal it is so horrific and it's so complex there are no simple answers there are no simple enemies to point at there's no like black and white kind of portrait you can sort of develop about that and on top of that I have to deal with the prism of being I see the play the prism of my being an American and right and now I'm writing about another country people in another country but it's Juarez is the city that I feel tremendous kinship to it's a city where my parents live it's a city where I still have relatives a city we visited often even a few years ago but it's a city that I can't go to anymore and my parents forbid me to enter there my brother who is a defense attorney in the class of Texas won't go there and says if you go you're coming back in a box it's really treacherous very dangerous city and yet in the city of 1 million there are people that have to live there day to day and conduct their lives normally but I have that prism as an American to deal with when I'm right there and I have and it's a little like that me, Fable we saw earlier that story about the elephant and how everyone had to purchase one part of it they find it according to what they know without one aspect without seeing the entire picture well we're just not even getting the entire picture of it right now it's just looked upon as a law enforcement issue a law enforcement problem but it's really, really much more complex than that it touches on so many social economic factors human factors spiritual factors and they all have to come into play in this work which at first I was thinking it's gotta be a tragedy it's gotta be some men's tragedy but the more I wrote the more research I did the more I found that it was turning into a farce it's just so ridiculous it's a laugh I said the only way I want to get to this is if I think of it as a kind of comedy because it's just the violence is so outrageous and so you write a pornographic it's the only way I could sort of imagine it is to write it as a kind of comedy and here's one example in the year 2010 there were over 3,000 deaths in Guadalcanal and that kind of comes to like 19 deaths per 100 100 people in the city in a year and 19 deaths per 100,000 per capita it's just it's unimaginable in the city of over a million people nothing like that has ever happened in the city in that scale is short of the Civil War except in the 10 years after its cessation from 1869 to 1870 in Louisiana we could see any kind of violence in that scale and yet El Paso at the same time in the year 2010 was voted by Fundenaz as the safest city in America the safest city in America there were 5 homicides that year over the entire year and why? why with the city with the river separating it where it has not the violence has why hasn't the violence filled over in this country when a lot of those narcotics are actually a lot of these cocktails are fighting to get across this nation across the river into this nation for their safety so I'm doing a lot of a lot of research on that and trying to find my way through and that's that's one of the works I'm working on another one that I'm writing for the Magic Theater it's called Sunset and it's about my neighborhood Sunset District in fact it's part of my mission to try to write a play about every major neighborhood in San Francisco I've got several already and this one is for the magic and it touches on that it's about the paranoia of the violence and how it sort of creeps into one's soul even if it doesn't happen even if it isn't directly there in the neighborhood I was touched by a story I read about editors who were being killed by Cicadius cartel members for writing negative stories about the cartels who were being assassinated on the street and told to not write about any violence at all and then I was also touched by the murder in K-Ran of Nida who achieved a kind of symbolic status after the murder and I kind of brought those two things together to tell a story in which an Iranian professor who has fled the country is now teaching here in San Francisco and has a manuscript by a young poet who is like Nida that he swore to her that he would translate and publish in his country but because he is afraid of some repercussion to him or his relatives back in Iran he won't do it he won't do it so he keeps it hidden and then they they inspire a baby sitter to watch the baby she's a Mexican saint and she's got an interesting story too she seems to feel that she's being followed and constantly wonders if their foam is bugged always looking over her shoulder makes him paranoid too because he's already had that sort of present and then they find out that she was actually correspondent for a newspaper in which her editor was murdered and there's a price on her head and she's hiding out in this country so the two of them are not and her presence in this house reminds him of his own responsibility to try to get the manuscript published even if it means trouble for him at the same time that she also feels a responsibility to try to get back or at least reveal herself and write the truth that she knows it about what's going on there so that's roughly what's going on there's a lot more of course but those are two of the works that I'm working on right now that touch on that there is something else there is a there's another dynamic at work too and it's a fantastical dynamic that I find really fascinating that it seems tailor made for the kind of work I do over the last couple over the last couple of decades the emergence of of two in Mexico of these two figures San Malverde and La Santa Muerte and they were they just arose as full religious icons for for drug dealers and people who work in the trade or even innocent people San Malverde is the patron saint of Narcos and people pray to him they set up altars Catholic Church doesn't sanction it at all they try to see people away from it but he's this gallon who can figure with the mustache that they pray to for a an expeditious assignment with successful transfer of goods without any bloodshed and then there is also the cult of La Santa Muerte which is reminded that we can well loop it as an icon of for a feminine icon to whom people wish to pray for the same thing for blessings to keep from being killed and so my play Sicario is going to have La Santa Muerte present as a factor to guide my Sicario through his assignment um so some of the things about I want to start by asking one question just as a in terms of creating a space for I don't know if you identify yourself as a Tupano playwright Tupano American playwright and being a playwright that is maybe um how have you benefited from the work of the pioneers who have established the Tupano theater in the U.S. and then how do you see that journey in terms of a community carving the space for itself in American states? Well I came to Tupano work late growing up ironically growing up in El Paso when I grew up I grew up going to in my undergraduate years of college there was absolutely no instruction in that I wasn't exposed to any of that material it wasn't until after I graduated then discovered the works of the Royal Tupano Air Force for instance a group of poets that did a lot of performance work that was anti-war and spoke eloquently about the issues I cared about and then later learned about Luis Valdes but it wasn't academic at least were not revealed to me academically those programs were just starting to begin and in private universities they never existed in theater programs I was alone I felt very much alone as a Chicano mostly white institution I felt like well if I was going to be an actor and that's where I wanted to be at the time I felt like well it seems to me I had to lose my accent I have to sound more Midwestern so I can do Shakespeare and acting in a check off place but that wasn't going to happen I could tell what was going to happen so I decided to start writing my own works so that I could sort of cast myself in but and that was a disaster because then everybody said those are interesting plays but you're acting I don't know so but but it's only later that I came to know about Luis Dato de la Esperanza and all those wonderful pioneers of the movement and I was very fortunate to work with Luis at his theater at the Debra Fence and the one who did Prospect out there he's been used in 1992 1992 1993 and developed a terrific relationship with him very close to him but it was part of my initial it's interesting sort of struck by the role of religion also in Latin America the first conversion to Christianity and then also the way W invoked images of the crusades as who sort of unleashed the troops on Iraq and Afghanistan and after the discussion I don't know it's just a really complex mix of how religion plays a role in the way we are I'll open it up to the audience questions please Mitch a question for I was following your argument step by fascinating step until the very end when you pointed out that the war on drugs is a failure but it's a success in terms of keeping the land and the structure together who is benefiting who is benefiting by the war in the United States down on that it's it's kind of complex as to what the ramifications of this is profiting from this it's mostly the old alliance between American corporate interests and the oligarchy the elites in Latin America countries that either by virtue of businesses associated with them or by virtue of their access and control of power in countries like Guatemala and South Carolina and Latin America basically the same 10 or 12 families have had power since the Spanish land and these are the people who are profited from basically selling out the land to American interests in exchange for perks to a degree a few of the prompts of there isn't a lot of money of course and access and validation and so forth their children and educated in Oxford and Yale and they come back to continue to enforce that elite so in that sense all over the world we think places like Colombia which are emblematic of the war on drugs where we also have the FARC which of course have their own issues and most often the campesinaos the peasants are caught in the crossfire but I would say with an understanding that the FARC are saying that they're also not as bad as they're being painted because to a degree a FARC presence allows the peasants to continue to control the land and work the land because when the paramilitary and the army walk in with the war on drugs as the main excuse basically they're taking this land away from the peasants they're passing it on to corporate control Monsanto and corporations like that are making tremendous profits and having access to enormous tracts of land that were that in being displaced by the war and Colombia is the country with the largest number of displaced people in the world so that's if you think of the Middle East as some of the most important conflicts are taking place and the displacement of people there or Somalia Colombia is being first so the displacement results in empty land that falls into the control of corporate interests so that's a tremendous success it's not a failure and I feel it's one of the reasons why there's still after this and of course there's no interest as in with immigration which is obviously deeply connected to all of this they never go after the corporate interests that hire the businesses that hire and documented immigrants they go after immigrants and in the war on drugs they also don't go into it's deeply addressing the issues that make the consumption of drugs the addict is the market and of course the area that's marketing in ways but instead of dealing with say, well there's going to continue to be the eradicated it from Bolivia and Peru it moved to Colombia and I mean eradicated in some ways of course there was a backlash for that and so forth but the production because the consumption the demand continues to be so there's no interest in going after that that's why there's no violence no violence in New York on the scale that we see in Mexico it's curious it seems to me how the the rise of all these cartels and all this violence in Mexico started to really explode at the time that NAFTA was signed when Bill didn't sign NAFTA at the law that changed everything and so many small farmers in Mexico lost their farms especially those who grow the basic crop mains as Supercorn keeps getting shipped into Mexico all these indigenous farmers are losing their crop and when they lose that they lose their livelihood and they leave these villages and turn them into ghost towns and flood toward the border towns or large cities to find work for which they're not equipped or at least to get across because they know that at least in the U.S. there might be opportunities and there the attraction to just make a quick I'm $70,000 in the day moving narcotics it's just too tempting it's so tempting so it's created this workforce for the narcos it wasn't there before it's so much more attractive to grow marijuana than it is to grow corn because corn has all come from the U.S. as well as other enterprises subsidized subsidized so much for free trade Angela do you want to add anything to this? there's it's a long list for this what you described what I think Columbia is exactly the effort from the activists there what this is not about drugs it's about land operation and the purpose of this my basis the establishment of U.S. interest corporate interest the displacement, violent displacement the exacting the proportionate move of those populations into cities are very well understood there and I think most activists very much agree with that and understand that where they're seeing money being routed into paramilitary interests in line with government interest in order to obtain huge trucks of land for the cattle industry for example so I think more people are documenting that in some ways talking about softwares kind of moving to different forms and suspecting that and hoping to see a lot more substantiation over the change in rights and we have to look at where's the United States invested in that area Columbia where else are there other places pushed out absolutely pushed out but where the United States is most to be invested are the very places where the allies right now of the U.S. and Latin America are the two places the legacy of this violence the violence also got really bad in Mexico when when that party in that party came to power it upset one of the almost unacknowledged big leadership for over 70 years and we sent the facts and started sending troops to fight the cartels under Felipe Calderón the next president it was even worse he actually declared more on organizations and that's when the violence got really really bad as they were fighting for more turf and and is it sort of upset a kind of structure that was already present in Mexico now the gree has just gotten back into power is it the new president Nietu yes thank you he's a new president with gree and they're hoping that the policy will change and the cartels so they can resume business and so it's a very complex situation there are members of the lower houses of congress have been indicted for their application with the narcos the head of the office of the federal police have been indicted for being involved in them so many officials in the government are implicated with a lot of these cartels how many of them are in our government are also implicated with them remains to be seen but I think that the that the reach is deep we see other questions jessica please project I want to thank you especially professor I would hope to get a copy of that if it's published and we're so this is incredibly inspiring and I'd like to steal it I'm sorry a copy of what? Roberto's incredible summation of all of history you are the greatest but I really appreciate the bringing in of history especially this time in which interest me was also a time when Jews and Muslims were somehow living together so I think I appreciate bringing you coming back to the theater how you always bring a kind of historical and academic but not dry academic tilt to this and to bringing back to the theater the stories that need to be told so we can have this incredible political historical discussion but then what gets put on the stage so one personal thing I want to say is that Kavya we were in a playwriting workshop in 1990 together at the Eureka theater when we were both 10 years old and it was like children's theater and but the one thing I remember so clearly about you as a playwright is your generosity is your incredible you taught me something amazing because I was working on a play about pirate women and you were amazed and you were incredibly generous with every single playwright in the room and I never forgot I taught me something about theater and what is what is actually necessary for us to create across cultures you with no real interest I'm sure in female pirates but you were incredibly invested in the ideas of others and it seemed to be a revolution of how theater changes the world so I just want to thank both of you for bringing your heart and your brain onto the stage and thank you both of you too for this wonderful and fascinating thank you we've been asked to wrap up so I want to thank my panelists for very informative and insightful presentation and conversation and this is our final panel for the Reorient Forum we have tonight a concert following this but I don't know about you but I feel like it's been two days of invigorating thought provoking conversation and I'm reminded with this conversation of the ties that bind us that are beyond borders and walls and nationalities and our shared history and how much richer the conversation would be if we moved in a reach out to what was that? where is the group affiliation where is the group affiliation if there's one thing we want to walk away this weekend we have some very informative speakers this weekend both yesterday and today and this morning Sara wrapped up yesterday's conversation so I just want to remind us of the conversations this morning about engaged performance and also mechanisms of protecting artists I do want to say that theater without borders and three dimensionals are program partners who Reorient Forum their logo on our website is or if it isn't they'll be linked to their website so that by just going to the Reorient page you can find your way to their website and all the amazing information and great work that those two organizations are doing as well as TCG and TBA and other program partners we're very grateful to their contribution and their social inspiration thank you again to the amazing Reorient team and all the people who made time and enjoy the concert and their healthism is an amazing musician I can't tell you how amazing he is and he's incredible and the work he's doing is incredible the way he's mixing jazz improvisation with classical Persian and Arabic music the risks he's taking is just inspired so I invite you to come back for the concert and there will be a reception and there will be actual food so hang out, share and celebrate with us the amazing work that we have all together done this past two days and three weeks from the festival thank you again for being here carry on