 conversations that address the concerns and challenges of our contemporary moment. All of these discussions, this one included, have been live-streamed on HowlRoundTV and will be archived there. This discussion, called Some Other Race, Exploring the Diversity in the Latino Experience, is presented in conjunction with three shows that Arts Emerson has staged to conclude their season. Teatro de Cinemas, Historia de Amor, A Cuban Revolutionary, and Evelina Fernandez's Premeditation. All stories told from different cultures within the Latino diaspora. So, before we jump into the conversation, let me introduce the wonderful panelists who will be discussing these topics today. I'll begin on my immediate left, your right. Evelina Fernandez is an award-winning actor and writer born and raised in East LA. Her professional acting career began in Luis Valdes's Zoot Suit as Della, the female lead in the original stage production at Mark Taper Forum. She's a founding member of the Latino Theatre Company and has acted in several productions at Los Angeles Theatre Center, including many that she wrote. She has also acted and written multiple films throughout her career, and as I just mentioned, she is the playwright and lead actress in premeditation, which is playing here at Arts Emerson currently. Lisa Borthes is a director, educator, and leader dedicated to expanding the circle of Americans reflected in 21st Century Theatre. A co-founder of the Latino Theatre Commons, Lisa has served as the artistic director of the LTC Carnival 2015, a festival of new Latino plays. Her work as a director has been seen at such theatres as Steppenwolf, The Goodman, Guthrie, and the Next Theatre. Upcoming projects include Disgrace to Buy I at Actar at Cincinnati Playhouse and Transit by Darren Kennedy at American Blues Theatre. Lisa is the recipient of the TCG Spark Leadership Fellowship and heads the MFA Directing Program at the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. And then at the far end of the stage, Abigail Vega is a Latina actor, writer, divisor, director, producer, and theatre maker who is a graduate of Emerson College and currently the producer of the Latina Latino Theatre Commons. Previously, she was director of the Artistic Collective and ensemble member of Theathra Luna, America's all Latina theatre company, with whom she performed in over 25 cities in four countries, including an appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, UK, and the 2014 Los Angeles Theatre Centre Encuentro. Her writing can be found in Mica Espinosa's monologues for Latino actors, and in 2014 she was named one of Latino Leaders' Magazine's Latino Leader of the Future. She currently lives between San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and everywhere in between. So, yes, you can give a hand to our panelists. So, I'm glad that we have a diversity of representation in terms of the Latino diaspora and in terms of the work that we all do as theatre artists. And I'd like to start off the conversation by thinking about the title of this discussion, Some Other Race. As context, the US Census asks people to identify their racial and ethnic identity by asking two questions. One, are you of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? And then two, what is your race? And then it lists several categories that can be broadly limited to white, black, Asian, Native American, or Pacific Islander. Consequently, Latino people often feel as though the censuses defined racial categories don't speak to their own backgrounds, and so we have to refer to ourselves as being what the census refers to as some other race. And so, I'd like this idea of some other race to initiate the thought for the first question. And I would ask our panelists if they conceive of their Latina identity as a race, and if so, where does their geographic or identity as a Tejana, Chicana, or Cubana fit into that construction of identity, and also how does that construction of identity inform the work that you all do as theatre makers? So, a lot of questions there. I do that a lot. I'll jump in because I just do that. So, I'm Cuban American. My father was born in Havana, but my mother has been in this country since her family, since like the 1600s. She was a U.S. Air Force brat. And so I'm already mixed ethnicity. And then within that, I always grapple with the question of race. I feel like my ethnicity is Cuban American. I feel like my race, I don't really know what it is. It's coming from, if I've got half of the family from Cuba, there's been an incredible amount of mixing amongst the kind of Spaniard conquistadors and the Afro Cubans over time who were brought over originally as slaves. Most of the indigenous population of Cuba died out, actually, so there's very little mixing there. But I don't actually know, you know what I mean? I think on one hand my mother's very much Caucasian. My father is probably a mix, so racially I don't... It's always a tricky question for me, like what's my race? I don't know. But my ethnicity is Cuban American. I haven't yet done my ancestry.com swab. But I plan to. You know, every time we fill out census forms, I do have an issue with that. In fact, I was commenting to Lisa and Abigail that in California now, there's a larger population of people who identify as Native American. And now, in the census, there's a huge Native American explosion. And it's not because there's so many Native Americans, but it's because Mexican Americans are identifying as Native American rather than identifying as white. So that's an interesting outcome of the latest census forms. I myself am Chicana. What is a Chicana? I identify as a Chicana. A Chicana is a Mexican American who is committed to social justice. I don't think you have to be a Mexican American to identify as a Chicana or a Chicano. We have so many Guatemala, Colombianos, Salvadoranos. So many people who identify as Chicano in California now because it's about making a commitment to social justice. And so that's why I identify as Chicana because I come from that movement, the Chicana movement in the 1970s and 80s. But I always like to tell people my story because when I meet people, I want to know their stories. So my story is that my grandparents left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. So they left the violence of Mexico and they landed up in a small town called Jerome, Arizona. My grandfather was a copper miner and they had five children there, five daughters. And so my mother is one of those daughters. So my mother is Mexican American. I'm a second generation and my children are third generation. And then we have fourth and we have fifth. So my family's been in the country for a hundred years. So I was raised primarily in Texas until I left to go to college here. And my family has been in Texas. My father's family has been in Texas in terms of records since the 1700s and probably since before. So they live in a part of Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, which is if you look at the bottom, it's right at the tip at the bottom. And a lot of towns there, they kind of use that phrase, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. So my grandfather, for instance, he was born in the same house as his older brother and younger sister. But he is an American citizen. He's now passed away. He was an American citizen and they were Mexican because it kept changing during the course of his lifetime. You know, sort of a luck of the draw situation. Back then it wasn't as relevant because they still weren't learning English in school. They still didn't have any of the privileges that went along with being American citizens because it actually sadly still is pretty neglected by the US government, that part of the country. And so, you know, race pulling into that is always kind of a weird thing because I have very light skin and I'm very aware that I have very light skin. My father has very dark skin and my mother is also Caucasian. My mother is from Kentucky. And so it's sort of a luck of the draw that I ended up looking the way that I look, right? It's just genetics because my father's family is about half and half really, really dark and very, very light. And there's really no rhyme or reason to that. And I think that growing up in a state, much like California, this minority majority in a city in San Antonio, which since I have lived there has always been at least 50% Latino, is now I think it's like 59% Mexican or Mexican American, Latino, Chicano, whatever, is interesting because you don't know that you're different until you leave. And I think that's an experience of a lot of people who live in communities where they are like everybody else, whether that's your white and you go to the big city, and all of a sudden you meet somebody of color for the first time. And in terms of, I guess, how it informs my work, which is, I guess... Yeah, and that's the question I'd like to hear all of you follow up a little bit more. So my parents don't look like each other and I've never knew anybody... I never saw that anywhere, right? Like I never saw people whose parents weren't... One friend was biracial, I remember being like six, and his dad was black and his mom was white, and that was about the only person I knew who was like me, whose parents did not look alike. And I never saw that, even growing up in the 90s, I never saw that on TV, I never saw that in movies, I never saw it in books. And so a lot of what I like, work I'm drawn to, is work that maybe doesn't necessarily talk about race, shows, or ethnicity or whatever, but shows truly what America looks like, or North America or the United States of America, depending on how you look at it. And that's the work that I'm invested in doing, in promoting and in seeing too. Because I just don't believe... That's not my personal experience, right? It's that people don't look alike, that people can love each other and not look alike. And so that's what I'm finding myself sort of drawn to as I get a little older. Oh, how does it affect my work? Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. I didn't know this about Abigail. So my mother is blonde with green eyes. My father is dark, fairly swarthy, fairly dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes. My brother and sister are blonde with green eyes. And so, and I'm the eldest. And I remember seeing a family picture of my grandparents on my mother's side, their 50th anniversary. And it is a sea, they had six children and many grandchildren. It's a sea of blonde and green eyes. And then down over here in the corner, it's like, oh, isn't it nice that they invited Juanita to the maid? Because I'm the only person who looks like me in that picture, including my own brother and sister. So I think much like Abigail, I'm drawn to work. I grew up between places in the Midwest and Latin America. So Colombia, Chile and Brazil. And then Lincoln, Nebraska, Madison, Wisconsin, Champaign, Urbana. My father is a professor and so he was doing the gamut. So we were always different than everybody else where we were growing up in the Midwest and then like everybody else, kind of except we were from the U.S., when we were in Latin America. So that experience of constantly confronting difference, I think is the seed of my work. It's the work that I'm drawn to, whether I'm working on Latino or Latina plays, whether I'm working on plays by Palestinian writers, Japanese American writers, my favorite Adriana Savada-Nichols Dominican Armenian writer. I tend to be drawn to work, new work, by writers who are, in which the cultural collision is actually happening in their bodies and in their families. So when I was planning questions out for this conversation far later than I should have been, one of the questions that I was thinking about is how did I come to understand what Latino-Latino theater was for myself? And so I thought about my time sort of self-teaching myself, Latino theater, in graduate school reading the books of Jorge Puerta, Nicholas Canelo, a few other folks. And a lot of that work was grounded on the Mexican-American or Chicano experience. And that closely enough mirrored my own Tejano experience. So I felt like I had a good grasp of Latino theater until I was asked to teach my first Latino theater course at Tufts. And suddenly my classroom was populated with New Yorkenios or Salvadorians, peoples who lived experience of theater-making. I hadn't taught myself through these narratives. And so I guess it's led me to consider, based on your own lived experiences, the work that you're doing, how do you see Latinos updating a sort of national narrative of what it means to be a Latino theater maker in a way that's reflective of how America's demographics are changing? It also seems as though we're at this moment where mainstream theaters, however you choose to define that, are also sort of waking up to this shifting narrative of emerging Latino identities. And I'm curious how you see that changing the conversation also. I think there's a lens that many of the regional theaters are comfortable seeing us through. There's a certain lens that... I think that there's so many... I mean we're so diverse as a community and so many of us are first generation, second, third, fourth. But I think in the mainstream theaters that they're comfortable seeing us through a certain lens and that's as newcomers, as immigration stories, those are the ones, those are the good ones, right? And us as a company, and when I talk about my work, I don't talk about my work as an individual, I talk about my work as the Latino theater company because we're a company that's worked together for 30 years. So everything I do has everything to do with all of them. All of us. Sal, Jeff, Jose Luis, Lucy, myself, Lupe, who passed away. So we tell the stories that we that are not told and that other people are not telling. And those are... somebody defined it as you write for the Chicano middle class, Evelina. So I'm like, okay, maybe that's what I do, but what I do is I write stories about people who, for example, if you see premeditation, for example, this is their Chicano characters, but this is about relationships. Or if you see how awesome I'm supposed to know I'm still alive, these are two women, but they're talking about a female friendship. So these are putting Chicano characters within a universal and American context. With the trilogy, I remember Marcus Garley went to see part two of the trilogy, which takes place during the Kennedy administration. And when he came out, he said, this is the first time I've ever seen a Latino play within an American context. To me that was wild, that was crazy, because we've lived in this country for so many years. We've experienced the exact same things that every other American that has lived here has experienced, but yet you don't see those stories and you certainly don't see those stories in the mainstream theaters on those main stages. So those are the stories that we perform and that we write and that we produce. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. I think Evelina's right that the lens with which we are seen is incredibly limited and very dated. It is true for some people that immigration story rings true for a lot of people, but it also rings true for a lot of people who aren't Latino. That's not like a distinctly sort of Central American, South American thing. And I think what you guys do is so special because for some strange reason, it is so weird for people to see Latinos as normal or as like them. It's very easy for me to go, oh, I've lived in this country forever long. I don't relate to your immigration story because I did it right, which is a thing that lots of people who've been here for a while say. So I'm going to kind of separate myself from your story and I love, I've seen premeditation like four times now and there's two things I really love. One is that everybody who's over 40 who comes out of that play is like, oh my God, that's my life. And the second thing is that most of the people who say that are not Latino. Like the Latinos, they say it and they feel it and they dig it, right? But for this glimpse, this moment, people are able to see similarities between each other and that's just like, you know, that's what we're supposed to be doing. That's what like, why we come to the theater and it doesn't happen because the American theater sees us as one specific thing and they cannot break out of their tiny shell to see it any differently. I just saw, I went and saw a preview for a friend of all of ours, David Lozano, his company Caramia Theater Company is in Dallas and they're doing a production with Dallas Theater Center in this really cool partnership where Dallas Theater Center basically said yes and signed the contract before they even had a single scene written. You know, that's a big risk to take with any artist and especially in a city like Dallas where the funding is just so inequitable. And still, I mean, that play was 90% in English. There is some Spanish in there. You don't have to speak a word of Spanish to know what's going on. You know, everything in Spanish is, they got a gun, they're in a train, we understand it, right? Dire situation. And yet still, somebody in the talk back asked that question about how did you decide what to put in Spanish and what to put in English? I was like, well, they're in Central America. Like, it happened in Spanish. There's no answer to that question. And the other side of that was a lot of that, the play has a lot of like legalese and a lot of like campaign-y language that I don't understand because I'm not a politician, but I never asked like, why did you choose to use the campaign language? You know, like, I was just able to go like, I don't understand that, but I get in the sentiment of the play. So there's something still there, right? There's some like, I have to believe that it's a very small percentage of audience members who still think that everything has to be for them. I think we're all advanced enough to go like, I don't have to understand everything you're saying to empathize, but we're still catering to that tiny group. I think what worries me is that I feel like we're, you know, I feel like TV's ahead of us a little bit. You know what I mean? I do feel like television because they know, hey, guess what? There's a lot of consumers out there that are buying stuff. We better put folks on TV that are just not, you know what I mean? And slowly, of course, slowly, there's still a lot of stereotypes on television. We all know that, you know, those of us in the Latino community. But there's also a lot of movement, you know what I mean? A lot of forward movement in the TV community. And I feel like in theater, still there's this kind of complex problem of one aesthetic, the idea that either it's going to be magical realism or it's going to be telenovela where everybody's sleeping. You know, I remember a producer hired my husband Carlos Murillo to write a play. And she's like, I hired him to write this play. And I thought he was going to do this, an immigrant story. But instead it's like Kafka. And I'm like, or like Borges, or like Bolaño, or like, do you know what I mean? I mean, the expectation on her part of what somebody who's named Carlos Murillo would write, and then what he actually wrote. You know, that kind of disjoint is always, I don't know, frustrating, right? And I think that what's wonderful about what Evelina said is I think there, you know, you said, somebody said you were writing plays for the Latino middle class. And I think there's many people in the country who don't know there's a Latino middle class. Or a Latino upper class. Or do you know what I mean? I mean, I think, you know, one of the boxes we go into is the kind of exoticization of, and believe me, I believe stories need to be told of the cycle of gang warfare, of tremendous poverty, of immigration, absolutely. But I think that for many theaters, that's all the story that they tell of Latinos or of African-Americans, yes. And so, the kind of, I think there's something incredibly political about just a bunch of regular people on stage living their lives and trying to figure out their marriage and trying to figure out what they're gonna do about their kids or whether they're gonna kill their husband or do you know what I mean? That's in itself very political because it expands the idea of what, expands the idea in the audience's mind of what a Latino or Latina person is. And guess what, you know, we have a lot of diversity of class, we have a lot of diversity of experience, we get married, we have kids, what we don't, do you know what I mean? So this last round of questions of answers has sort of grappled with this issue of what rings true or whether or not everything has to be for everyone as an audience member. And it leads me to ask, because you're conceptualizing and thinking through your own work, how do you navigate the tensions between staying true to things that are specific to your own personal histories and lived experiences? And how much thought do you give to sort of larger ability to communicate things to a wider audience of Latinos beyond those who show your lived experience and a wider audience of theater goers who wouldn't identify as Latino? I don't think about it. I don't try to appeal. I mean, I just write the stories. You know, human beings are human beings. There are people who are going through horrible tragedies and wars and poverty throughout the world. But guess what, they still have a husband, they still have a daughter, they still have to figure out how they're going to relate to those people. They can be in the middle of a war and your husband can be driving you fucking nuts, right? So it's like, or your daughter's a teenager and you're in the middle of a tragedy and you're still dealing with that. Those are human experiences and all I do is write those experiences with Chicano characters. You know, that's all we do. We call ourselves a Latino theater company. We should have called ourselves a Chicano theater company, but we wanted to be inclusive. And we are. I mean, anybody can, you know, be part of our... We have a Persian actor that works with us all the time. He plays Chicanos all the time. He plays them really well. So I don't think about that too much. But I have a very unique experience and that is that I work with a company and that is that I know that I'm going to write a play and that if the company likes it, it'll be produced in our theater. Not everybody has that luxury. Other playwrights, you know, they write a play and they have to shop it around and they have to hope that somebody's going to like it and they have to hope that somebody's going to produce it. So my experience is very unique and I'm very fortunate. So I don't have to worry about that. And another part of me is I've never really... I mean, I love that I'm here. We're here at Arts Emerson. What a blessing and how wonderful, you know. And, you know, thanks to Paulie and David, you know, that they saw our work and they liked it. But I've never really aspired or I don't, you know, that's not my thing. I'm like, I don't write to get, you know, like I want my play to be on Broadway or I want to be at the, you know, Goodman or I want to be here or there. That's just not what I do. That's not... But a lot of playwrights do, right? A lot of playwrights. That's their goal. It's their goal or it's how they're going to get their work done. I mean, I think you have an incredibly luxurious experience, which is hard won. I know hard won over time and hard won. Yeah, it wasn't easy. I mean, we've worked really hard. I know you built it. I think that, you know, there's something that when we first formed, I'm one of the co-founders along with Jose Luis who's in the audience and about seven other people of the Latino and Latina theater commons and Abigail, which Abigail is the producer and Evelina is a steering committee member. It's something that, you know, we talked a lot about and it's actually David Dower said when we were meeting first at Arena Stage, which is that if you are Latino, Latina, Latinx, you are already bicultural. You're at least bicultural. You're living, you look at the world through at least two lenses, if not three or four. And given the way this country is shifting demographically, that's actually the dramaturgy of the future. It's going to be rarer and rarer than anybody's looking at something as a cultural point of view. And so I have to believe that the, you know, the work that I'm doing, the work that we're doing, the work that Latinos and Latinx's are doing is, you know, I'm just waiting for everybody else to catch up, really. You know what I mean? Because I do think that, well, I'll just say that I'm waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. I think eventually, in terms of updating the American narrative, I think eventually the work that we're doing, the dramaturgy is that many of our writers are exploring where the theater makers are exploring are where the American narrative is going. I don't know that I've had a long enough career to start, like, gaming my work towards anything. But I actually find a side, or along with, maybe along with my latinidad, is my identity as a woman is, I think, and that's not a culture, but, you know, I think it's a culture, right? It's a different kind of culture. It's a, yeah. And I think that even, so I was with it with an all-female, all-women-of-color company for three and a half years, which is not a long time, but in the course of my career so far, it's a long time. And, you know, even after leaving that company, I've only done projects with women. I've only done projects with all-female casts by luck of the draw, both performing and directing. And I'm in a place where I can see, like, I'll talk to friends who are doing productions and the kind of cultural microaggressions that happen when you work with designers or directors or actors or producers who aren't culturally competent, and so it makes you go, oh, I would rather do that work with all Latino or all whatever. But I actually am more acutely aware of it, I think, when it comes to men in the room versus women in the room. It's a very, I think, specific distinction. It is a culture. It is a culture of how we work. And for me, it influences a lot of what I do and what I'm drawn, the kind of work that I'm drawn to. So then let me follow up on that if I may. And Abigail and Evelina, since you both have worked with companies so closely, you may be able to address this more specifically than Lisa, although all means feel free to weigh in. In your own companies and in your own collaborations, what sensitivities are needed from the co-artists who you work with, be they dramaturgs, actors, directors, whomever? What sort of cultural sensitivities do they need to bring into the work in order to facilitate a successful and meaningful collaboration with you? Well, we've been together for 30 years. You know, all they need to bring is themselves. You know, their love, support. I mean, so much of what, I mean, it says premeditation by Evelina Fernandez, but so much of it is Sal saying, you know what, what if Mauricio did this or said that, or Jeff's saying, you know, this doesn't make sense. Why would Fernandez do this or that? You know, it's, so for, like I say, I'm just, my situation is just so unique in the American theater, I think, that it's really hard. I wouldn't know how to work with anybody else, I guess. Well, there had to be, let me follow up a little bit. There had to be a little bit of a learning curve 30 years ago, at least, as you were learning to work with each other, how does that get navigated? Man, I can't remember what happened a month ago. So, I don't know. I mean, I think Jose Luis, our artistic director, was very good at creating an artistic family. And it's his artistic vision that created this company. And it's kind of like, he invited a lot of people to be part of this. And it kind of like narrowed down to those who stayed and those who wanted to do good work. And it's about love in our company. I mean, we all love and respect each other very much. But more importantly, it's about the work. It's about the work. It's all about the work and the pride that we take in our work. And, you know, we were very critical of ourselves. We're always trying to do good work. And the reason we do good work is we think that our community deserves that. Our community deserves to see their stories done very professionally, that their story should be on the main stage. We don't do any small productions. We only do main stage productions. And it's not, I mean, as Sal, because sometimes we do panels and he goes, you know, it's not all, we don't always get along. We fight with each other. And yes, we do. We argue with each other. We have different opinions with each other. Sometimes I drive Jeff Nuts and sometimes he drives Mina. And we complain about each other. But so I guess back then, it was all about Jose Luis's vision and him kind of creating a company of people who had the same vision, I guess. I mean, what do you guys think? It's really hard for me to talk about the company without them being up here. We're a cult. Fair enough. Abigail, Lisa? Well, so it's also important, something that Evelina has, which I don't have, is that she was there when the company was founded. So there's a founding vision that happens and it can change and shift and mold over time, but when you're part of that founding vision, you're very deeply sort of rooted in that, right? And the Ataluna, which is a company that still exists, existed long before I was involved and will continue to exist long after I am. And it has been several different companies in one and sort of different generations of ensembles and different iterations and how the mission was implemented, but the mission is very strong. The mission is to promote, originally was founded as a Latina company and now has shifted to women of color to promote the voices and talents of women of color in the American theater. So that can mean a lot of different things. And when it comes to talking about collaborators, that doesn't mean you cannot work with people who identify as men. That absolutely doesn't mean that. However, if your primary goal is, with the example of this company, to promote and advocate for women of color, and you cannot be involved with men who do not do that. And we're not 100% about that. And if you're in a space where the men or the male-identified folks who are there don't do that, then that's when you have to check yourself. And I think I'm not used to men telling me what to do. It's not something I'm used to anymore. I moved out. I'm not that only with my father anymore. And so I think that was rooted in the fact that, yes, so I was very lucky. I was very, very privileged to go to school here and to have such an awesome structure set up where I could learn to produce in 19 or whatever. And I didn't have anybody telling me what to do. And then I failed. And then I learned. And then immediately after graduating, I started working with this company that all of a sudden, that I was able to try all these new things. And so occasionally, I'll get myself in trouble. I'll get into companies where I'll work with awesome, wonderful men who are not aware, or who I'm not aware that I'm not used to the power structure because I haven't been in it in a while. And that's my own sort of like, okay, I have to check myself. Not because I'm a bad feminist, but because there's just power structures in the world that we sadly have to live inside of sometimes. And we can fight it, but we also just have to recognize it. Sometimes you just have to get the scene blocked. And I struggle with that actually when I talk about collaborators, right? Because sometimes you're just like, I just got to get it done. But if it's a problem that exists and continues to happen, you know, it's something to deal with. I think this question that you're asking, though, about kind of cultural fluency of collaborators, in some ways, as a freelance director, you know, and somebody who's not working with a regular group of people all the time. I was just kind of reflecting on the question. I was reflecting on people with whom I collaborate regularly. And what I realized is they're all a bunch of weirdos that are either bi-cultural or living in the kind of queer identity or trans identity culture. I mean, I feel like the people that I tend to work with are already culturally fluent, not because I was looking for that, but because those are also the people that were naturally attracted to the project and I had to them and the conversations happened very fluently. Fluidly, I want to say. And then I was thinking about, well, it isn't that interesting because if I were of one ethnicity and of one particular gender, I would also be looking for like-minded people. You know what I mean? I think one of the things that's interesting as Latinos and Asian-Americans and African-Americans and every hyphenated American, hopefully we'll just all be the new Americans, move forward is that I think that that thing that has been true in the American theater, that kind of hegemony is going to naturally shift because if you are like me, you're going to naturally start to work with people who are already thinking through multiple lenses as opposed to a singular lens, do you know what I mean? So I haven't had to confront issues very often because as a director, I can choose my team, you know? And I can fire anybody who I don't like. So I haven't had to confront it, but it was interesting thinking about it that I naturally gravitate towards people who already have a measure of a number of lenses through which they're looking at the work. And then what does that mean if I weren't that and the kind of people I would be choosing to work with because we speak the same language? Sure. So it sounds like to some degree you're all fortunate to work with people who have a cultural fluency that jives with your own artistic sensibilities and temperaments, but one of the realities of the American theater system is that there are certain power figures and power structures within the American theater that don't have that cultural fluency. I think about a lot of artistic directors at regional theaters. I think about critics at several papers across the country. I think about a number of theater scholars that I know. And so I guess I'd like you all to reflect on the sort of things that you all as individual artists can do, your companies can do, collectives like the Latino Theater Commons can do to help train these scholars, artists, artistic directors to understand that racial and ethnic difference and become more culturally fluent. And as a caveat, I know that as I'm asking this question that it's kind of a shady thing for me to put that onus on theater makers to sort of fight upstream against more sort of powerful and entrenched forces, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. Yeah, as I was saying, what I was saying about my collaborators, I was realizing where do I hit that kind of cultural lack of fluency? It tends to be in the producers, the artistic directors, the critics. That's where I hit the ceiling generally. And you get so spoiled. I've been so spoiled in the Latino Theater Commons where there's a kind of deep understanding or kind of basic understanding of where we're all coming from and acceptance, I would say. And there's not a kind of like, well, is that a Latino story? I think we know it is. I was going to then say, but no, it's not our responsibility to educate everybody else about how to understand different cultures. It's actually incumbent upon the entire country, really, to begin to understand how to live with difference, depending on how the selection goes. But I do think that one of the, you know, as somebody who knocked at the door for many years saying, why don't you understand me? You've got to understand me. I think one of the great tools that we found in the Latino Theater Commons was stop knocking. Just make your own stuff. It's what the Latino Theater Company does. It's what the Latino Theater Commons does. When we did the Carnival last year in Chicago, our motto was, we're throwing a party. Anybody can come. But we're throwing the party anyway. And we just began to pursue our own work from our own point of view. And then sure enough, people come knocking on your door. Wait a second. What do you guys know? How can we understand more? Can we see the plays? Do you know any other playwrights? Suddenly we... So it's interesting that shift in who's knocking. So I think my take away from that is you've got to throw your own party. Yeah, another important thing that happened at the Carnival, I think, is that I don't know if people are aware that there are several Latino theater companies like the Latino Theater Company that have been functioning for many, many years, there's the Latino Theater Company, there's the Teatro Campesino, there's Pregones in New York, there's Su Teatro in Denver. I mean, there's several. And so what we did at the Carnival is each company committed to produce one of the plays that was read at the Carnival, which means, okay, we're not going to be knocking on your door anymore, we're going to produce these plays ourselves. So that's the alternative that we've created because of just getting tired of being tired of knocking on the door and trying to... It's changing, and I think it's changing because they have to change. I mean, the demographics, it's just... The numbers are changing so drastically and so quickly that now people are scrambling. How do I diversify my programming, my board? It has to happen. I think the survival of the American theater depends on it. It depends on diversifying all of it. Of course, I think maybe there are... How many artistic directors of color, the big regional of the Lord theaters? I mean, a handful? Not even a handful? Yeah. And then that goes back to the board of directors, right? Who do they hire? So it goes on and on. And I think that one of the missions of the Latino Theater Commons is that we advocate for Latino, Latina, and Latinx theater as central to the health of the American theater. We want you to do our plays. The country is shifting and we believe in the work as central to the health of the overall American theater. Whether or not the American theater will survive. And again, I'll just say it again, it drives me crazy that TV is ahead of us. That TV is ahead of theater in terms of understanding the demographics of this country right now. I think something that Evelina said that really hit the nail in the head is alternative, is the word alternative. So the Latino theater Commons, that's the company because they're Commons, is a branch of howl round, right? Anybody, you all are in the Commons now that you're here and interested. You're all in. But there's a steering committee who sort of, you know, stewards or pushes the work forward, right? And that's a volunteer group of people where all on that. There's several of the folks in this room are on that. And there's a lot of really cool things. And yes, we are making events that are artist-centered, that are away from organizations that don't involve the institutions even, like they somehow now they're coming and we're like, yeah, no thanks, bye. Because we don't need to, we can make it happen ourselves. And it's all volunteer basis, which has its pitfalls, but also true to the law of unintended consequences, has now created a way for, let's say, younger or millennial or early career folks to get incredible training doing theater at a level that doesn't do it any other way. So, you know, we have this, the steering committee is just this really cool cross-section of people from like, and granted, not as diverse as it could be. We're definitely working on that. Don't get me wrong. But there is these sort of, if you're talking about, for instance, ages or years in the field, that's the nicer way of saying that. There's a distinctive group of folks who we would say, 25, 30 years plus, and they bring in a wealth of information, of history, of contacts usually, like to foundations or to artistic directors or to whatever, so valuable. And then you've got this kind of middle group who's been in it for like 10 to 25 years, and they've been in the trenches, right? So sometimes they might have the ins with the different people. And then you've got these folks, I'll use myself as an example, and we're hungry for the work. We're hungry to be the ones going like, you tell us what to do, and we're going to do it. And I don't know another structure that exists in a way that doesn't feel like interning or free labor, because we do have access to amazing folks, and we do have ways and everybody's on equal ground. And everybody's on equal ground, so that somebody who, let's say, is two years out of college, could go to Jose Luis and say like, hey, you know, I'd really love to help you do and there's already a common understanding there of like, oh, you're probably good people, okay, come on aboard, right? Or I just want to pick your brain about whatever. And I think what that does is circumvent some, I'll use that word correctly, goes around some of the very established power structures that exist in the American theater right now that tend to favor certain kind of person who looks a certain kind of way. Or has been in the field for so many years, or has won this or that prize? Yeah, and then they're kind of inaccessible, right? Because they have an assistant, and it's really hard to get a hold of them, and they're so busy, and they're really busy, that's legitimate. But this structure has provided a way for folks like me, who I hope are the next generation of leaders in the next 30 years, and that will have this excellent foundation of training that hasn't previously been available. I think to a certain extent, folks who came before us had to do the trudging, heavy work of being rejected, and being rejected, and being rejected, and you just kind of had to make it yourself. And the gift of being sort of a young person right now is that there's all these people we can go to and say, I just want to ask you some questions. There's a lot of value in that. And the structure is kind of in place to help both the people who have all the contacts, and have a lot of resources to give, and the people who have a lot of time to give, and the people who have a lot of energy to give. But none of them, like Lisa said, they're all kind of on... It's a horizontal structure as opposed to a vertical structure. But one of the things that I think you touched on, Abigail, that's interesting is the question of what's missing in the Latino Theater Commons, what's missing in the steering committee. And there's been a lot of talk about that recently on the Latino Theater Commons Facebook page in an interview that I think Ricardo Labracho did with the 50 Playwrights Project. And a conversation that Kevin Becerra and I were talking about as this panel was coming together was particularly attuned to the absence of Afro-Latino representation in the LTC, in the sort of mainstream conceptualizations of Latino Theater and the American Theater at large. You know, even within this panel we all, I think, read as fairly light-skinned Latinos. So, I guess we have this acknowledgement that something is missing. Right. Now, how do we, as Latino Theater Commons, as individual theater artists, as companies work to address those gaps and actually do something about them? I do want to point out, though, that absolutely I agree with you. I do want to point out that we're all women. Except you. I just want to point it out. You know, I mean, I've seen many, many panels where, you know, the opposite has been the case. Sure. And so there is a real equity in terms of, I think, gender. And I believe, but I think we're not as strong as we need to be, as Isaac Gomez pointed out to us, in terms of queer-identified theater artists. But absolutely, in terms of the Afro-Latino community in the United States, I think is underrepresented, not only in Latino and Latina Theater Commons, as you pointed out in the mainstream theater overall, I don't have an answer yet. So I'm going to think about it. Yeah. Well, first of all, does everybody here know what the Latino Theater Commons is? Is anybody? No. So we're talking about it a lot and we, I think maybe we should back up a little bit and kind of, why don't you? Very briefly. So howl around. We have a general idea that we're all here, right? We know what howl around is. So in 2012, I'll give it just this much history and then some context and then we'll go back, right? Okay. In 2012, there was a meeting that was hosted by Karen Zacarias. It happened at arena stage with the howl-round folks. They brought in eight, and I'm not even going to use the word leaders, Latino theater artists who worked in the United States to come together and have a conversation. There was no agenda set. It was just, let's talk. By the end of that conversation, you guys said, let's have a convening. Let's have a larger scope convening. So they planned a large event. It took place in this room. 2013. So three years ago on Halloween weekend. It'll be three years. And out of that group, I think there were 76 of us, that group, there came a desire to continue the movement forwards with a commons that was run or rather championed by a steering committee. So the Latino theater commons were sort of an amorphous entity of, and not even just Latinos. It's Latino capital L, T, capital T, right? People who do Latino theater, which could be Latinos or could be other people. It doesn't have to be just Latinos. And that's an important distinction to make, is that we can have a lot of allies working with us, and that's awesome, and we should. Who are interested in this group of people who are all over the world who are interested in promoting Latino theater. And up until recently, we've had states, and recently we've said, no, it needs to be in the world, in Canada, in Central America, and so on, and so on. So there's this Latino theater commons that exists, and it's still kind of figuring itself out, right? Because it's this large community, anybody can say they're in the commons, but there is a steering committee. So I have in my heart, I'm like, the commons I don't feel like is lacking in diversity because it is human in nature and it is so big. The steering committee is definitely lacking in diversity, and that is an issue because those are the people who are championing the progress, right? And so that group is self-selected. You know, if you said, hey, I want to be on the steering committee, I'd be like, awesome, first off, what's your name? And second off, like, let's figure out how to get you on a committee. It's really not that difficult, but we have to get that message out there. We have to make sure that people know that they're welcome, and that's a big part of, I think, why we've had issues with people saying, oh, this isn't a very diverse space, but it's welcoming, right, number one. And then when we talk about the idea of championing projects, whatever projects we decide to do, if the group of people who decides to do a certain project isn't diverse, there's a chance, not a guarantee, but a chance that those projects will not be diverse, right? Up until this point, the Latino Theater Commons has what we've produced five convenings, one here in Boston, like we said. We were in on the ground floor with the Latino Theater Companies in Guantor, 2014, which was a national Latino theater festival in Los Angeles. We did the Carnival 2015 in Chicago, and then we did two regional convenings, one in Dallas in November and one in Seattle a couple weeks ago. And then we're planning, you know, we're getting ready to unveil our next three years of events, which, again, could be slightly flexible. We could add stuff to it because we may realize that the things that that group of people who made up the steering committee in April of 2016, we may need to, you know, just be flexible in terms of who our community is, right? And how those events are planned. Is that clear? You know, my take on it is that not everybody's going to be happy ever, you know, with this structure that we've created which isn't really a structure, it's just a commons. And no matter what, somebody's going to be unhappy and somebody's going to feel excluded, no matter how hard we try, we need to try harder definitely. But even then, it's never going to be, you know, not everybody's going to be happy with it. But my concern is, as a commons, what's a commons? A commons is anybody can be part of this, right? So I guess the only thing we have to do as the Latino theater commons is let people know that you can be part of this. I don't think we can do much more than that because that's what it is, right? Well, except in as much as I would say that I'm not particularly versed in Afro-Latino theater as a theater maker, as a Latina theater maker, as a self-proclaimed Latina theater maker. So I have work to do, in terms of my own curiosity and engagement. You know, I just went to Latin America for three different festivals because I was curious what's going on down there. So I think there is outreach we can do beyond saying, come to our house. It's not even a house. Here's the commons. Get on our Facebook page and talk to us. So yes, there's the invitation, but then there's also where does our own curiosity lie and what do we as individuals need to do in order to cross whatever bridges may be there. And I think there is work to be done within the steering committee. That's my focus, right? That's what I have some semblance of control over because the commons is the commons and anybody can be in the commons. But it's creating space and making that space accessible for folks who kind of exist in the current structure of Latina theater on the fringe. So talking about including trans and queer voices. We have several steering committee members who identify as queer. I don't know that we have that many who identify as trans. Sorry, that's important. And if we want to claim that Latinx, we've got to make our space safe. That doesn't mean we need to radically change who we are. Again, I'm not advocating for scratching it all and starting over necessarily, but it's also growing pains. The Latino theater commons is not that old. And even in its current structure of having a steering committee the way it does, it's like two years old, two and a half years old. And so far, we have been very nimble. And I think that's also pretty cool is that we're able to sort of have that conversation about like, yeah, we're not this. So we want to get there, so how do we get there? But I kind of want to get back to this question. This question that you're asking right now, Noe, addresses the name of this panel of another race. And I think I'm excited to talk about the Latino theater commons. I've talked about the Latino theater commons a lot in my life, and I'm interested in this question that goes back to what is the diversity of Latinidad aesthetically, culturally and otherwise. And I guess I want to be mindful of letting the audience have opportunities to ask questions too. So as one of my last questions I'm wondering if we can go back to the communities that you all produce and create work in. They're not indigenous communities. Latinidad is represented in a lot of different ways. And I'm always interested in this question of community outreach or connectivity I guess is the sort of buzzword of the moment in the American theater. And I'm wondering if you can speak to the ways that your theater companies or theaters that you worked with are engaged with the Latino communities that surround their spaces? We do every year and it's kind of a tradition well it is a tradition, it's not kind of a tradition, but the Latino theater company for the last 13 years we do a holiday pageant and anybody in Los Angeles can be in it. If you want to be in La Virgen you can be in La Virgen and what it is is it's a story of the you guys have seen the virgin the indigenous virgin so what we do is we do what's called the four apparitions the story of her four apparitions but it's a very social and political play because it's about racism and so the story is that the indigenous people of Mexico were conquered by the Spaniards we all know that and so an indigenous man she appears to him and the Spanish Catholic church they don't believe him because he says she's dark skin and she speaks in my language my indigenous language and they don't believe him and then she appears to him four times so we do this story for our community and we tell so there's children in it we have senior citizens in it we have indigenous dancers we have musicians so that is kind of our holiday gift to Los Angeles our 13th year we do it in the big cathedral in Los Angeles and we perform indigenous dance on the altar everybody says how do you get away with that it's so subversive but we've been doing it for 13 years and and so that is really our annual holiday gift not only to our community to us because we do it it's as as an offering to our city we do it as an offering to our community and our families are very much a part of it our children are in it my mother's in it everybody who wants to be in it is in it and we've been doing that for 13 years and that's kind of how and the young people learn danza they learn how to be in a play they learn they something about their culture what? now what? the indigenous language so that's that's the way we offer our community can I be in it? yes absolutely anybody can be in it because I'm part of a university I'm not part of a theater so I'm not part of a theater that does outreach into the larger Chicago community I can say in Chicago there are a number of Latino Latina theater companies Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna Agijón, Urban Theater Company Halcyon and I can go back and back and back there's a tremendously vital Latino, Latina, Latinx theater community in Chicago and also an incredible number of very, very talented actors in Chicago, Latino, Latinx descent and I would say the tricky thing about Chicago is that it's a very segregated city and remains still it remains so there are a number of Latino theaters and there are a number of African-American theaters and I'm starting to call them I'm starting to think of white as its own ethnicity because there's white theaters and there's you know I go see a play about Hank Williams and I'm like that's a white theater I mean that's a white play and then I'm going to go see this play and then there's going to be Silk Road but it's very much siloed in Chicago which is as somebody again who is bicultural myself and who grew up with parents who look different I find very confusing in the city and I hope for the great American theater would be over time that we're just less siloed that we're all on stage together as mixed up and as confusing and as complicated as that might be but that's the future I long for and I'm trying to make trying to kind of push the football down the field in the short time that I have on this earth not yet I'm still about the 25-yard line I think so quick question if I may we'll call this a lightning round and try to keep the answers inside of about 90 seconds oh I hate that then you can talk longer I'm not going to hold a stopwatch to you you mentioned that this is the 30th anniversary of the Latino theater company I think the folks on this panel can attest to the sort of progress that has been made about making Latino theater visible across the country over the past 30 years so in the next 30 years what is your vision for the future of what Latino theater will be what opportunities lie ahead be as utopic as you dare well I just said mine I think in 30 years I would like to see a theater that reflects the full we and we the people and that also reflects the globe that we are all a part of the greater Americas that we are a part of in 30 years I would like to the siloing of theater makes me as much as I love claiming my Latino identity and I love the people with whom I'm working I also feel a kind of frustration with the fact that we're we have to band together in these tribes in order to get anything done and I love my tribe don't get me wrong I love my tribe but I would like to see the full we and we the people on stage I would like for there not to have to be a Latino theater company I would like for there to just us to be part of the American theater and not have to identify as that but just as part of the American theater just as Chicanos as Puerto Ricans as African Americans you know Chinese Americans Japanese Americans that's that I would like that to be the face of the American theater I want to say one more thing I would like to see a show that's on the scale of Hamilton and as successful but about a story that is not necessarily the story of the founding fathers of this nation I think I want the American theater to be a radical place again I think it's very much when you think about other sectors of art in this country I would say theater is far behind TV there's some really great TV out there and Lisa's right we're so far behind TV we are so far behind so many other forms I would love yes I would love for there not have to be a Latino theater company well no Latino theater comments I would love oh my god I just lost myself my job I would goodbye but I would love for the theater to be a place that everybody feels they can go to to be challenged I love seeing theater where everybody looks different everybody's of different ages and I love sitting next to people who are in their 90s who are crying at the end of it because they've been changed I love that they feel they have the capacity for that and so I would want that to be in every theater I want the it's so cliche to say I want the arts to be valued I want them to be treasured you know I want them to I want us to be in a place where we need it to be fed so everything that I do has to be towards that goal whatever that means and I think that might mean that I don't know we don't do Oklahoma anymore you know or maybe we do but like it's different so that's that's what I want is for the theater to be a radical and a welcoming place for everybody in the truest sense of the word also I would like for it not to be so hard to do theater I would like there to be support for the art form like there is support for other art forms and I would like for it not to be so hard to be a theater maker in this country it's very hard so now I'd like to open up the conversation for you all to participate if you have questions please come to one of the two mics at the far edges of the stage and make sure that you speak into the mics that you can be heard by everybody and that it gets picked up by the good folks over at HowlRoundTV back there that's a lot of pressure please come on up so my name is Penelope I'm a student right now at Emerson and my question was kind of it was touching upon you said earlier that I heard a snippet where you said that you had a Persian actor playing a Chicano character and it just like made me start thinking about like how do you guys think about sorry like what do you think about like characters that are supposed to be portrayed by people of color being played by people who do not identify as a person of color what do you think of even in film and television as like far ahead as they are they also they still do offer roles that should be for people of color about people of color to people who do not identify so I am curious like what do you where do we stand on that and within that even specific ethnicity so you know if a role is Latino you know is it okay for a Persian actor to play that role and have different answers right yeah I mean I assume I can sit of course I think I mean people of color should play roles that are written for people of color I believe that I mean you can get so specific you know I'm a Chicana but there are a lot of Cubans who play Chicanos you know there's I don't know if it goes the other way but I know there's a lot of Cubans that play Chicanos I know there's a lot of Puerto Ricans that play Chicanos you know sometimes that's an issue with my Chicano brothers and sisters absolutely but at least they're Latino right and there's you know but in Hollywood for example you know they have white people white people playing Latino roles and no I mean I think the person I mean I think that kind of role should go to a person of color absolutely I think professionally I try to stick within the overall ethnicity written by the writer I may not be I may not be able to get a Cuban American actor but I will get a Latino actor for this particular role in some way right I think professionally absolutely because it's not just the right thing to do it's also not just the respecting the writer it's also an economic issue it's making sure that people have work honestly that don't often get work or don't have as much access to work as other people let's say that I think I'm in an interesting position in an educational environment at the theater school at DePaul University because looking at the acting company so that's the juniors and seniors and they master as two students there's a casting pool of about 65 people within that I would say 10 or generally Latino at this point I think about 25 or African American and there's a couple of actors that identify as Asian American maybe one or two right now as a Latina director I want our seasons to include Latino and Latina work I want the students to be exposed to work by many different kinds of writers for many different ethnicities so then I have a choice I do electricity and I can't cast all Latino actors do I not do the play I would argue that in an educational environment with a director of the ethnicity of the writer who can be responsible to the portrayal of the characters and with some level of thoughtfulness about it it's useful to be able to have the freedom to cross cast also because I think often our actors of color are casting many different kinds of roles like Shakespeare they're going to play Chekhov and they might be playing August Wilson and they might be playing our white actors are not as stretched actually and again first of course consideration goes to the actors of the ethnicity but then as we begin to kind of look at other roles and other possibilities I think in educational environment it's important to be able to mix people up on stage to learn from one another and to learn deeper empathy actually in that environment but professionally I stick to the writer and the ethnicity of the writer specified at the TCG conference last year there was an African American woman we were talking about this and she said if you lose your keys in your room you know your keys are there and you're going to keep looking for those keys because you know they're there or if you lose your wallet in a certain place so she her point was that people get lazy I don't know how many times I've heard casting directors say there are no good Latino actors so we have to cast it this way or there are no good African American actors or there are no good Asian actors so we had to go this way and her point is you know there are good actors you know there are good actors of color you just have to look for them because you know they're there and once you know they're there you will find them I always remember her comment because now I use it all the time when people say we can't find a good Latino director we can't find a good Latino costume designer we can't find a good Latino sound designer well you know they're there you can find them you have to believe that they're there if you don't believe that they're there it's like your keys if I believe those keys are in my house I'm going to turn over every piece of furniture to get them I think intention is really important taking yourself out of the university environment which is really specific and every university is a little different it's all about intention and I think that like Evelina said most of the time those intentions aren't good and most of the time it's people being lazy it's a small town where you only have this many people in general and you don't have but you want to bring a story that isn't normally seen in that small town and sometimes you have to sometimes you have to kind of like what's the intention here which is stronger the intention to do the story or intention to do the play but in any even like medium sized market in this country it's a lazy excuse outside of the university setting I think it's an American play and crosscast it because I am the person in charge of the Latino or Latino play and I feel that I can be culturally responsible as the leader of that production but I would not do it with an Asian American play I wouldn't do it with an African American play but does that have to do with the idea of we're going back to this whole idea of race and is Latino a race and is that some other race is that if we say Latino is a culture or is an ethnicity or is a bunch of cultures and ethnicities and a diaspora maybe more accurate Asian and black people are a race it has to do with that I have no understanding I have no deep context of being Korean American Japanese American, Chinese American I'm not talking about Asian as a race I wouldn't do an Indian American piece I wouldn't do I mean I wouldn't question I mean I just has to do with whether or not I feel that I can be culturally fluent enough to navigate a person not of an ethnicity playing that ethnicity isn't it interesting that you would consider using say a non Latino to play a Latino role but you wouldn't consider a non Asian to play an Asian role or yeah because I don't feel that I can I myself can be as a leader responsible but why is it okay to to cast huh I'm talking about it in an educational environment I'm not talking about professionally but even in an educational environment you're saying you wouldn't do it in an educational environment I wouldn't direct an Asian American play and cross cast it but I have directed plays by Luis Alfaro or by Chiara Alegria-Judiz and have cast roles with actors that are not necessarily Latino because of the way we look right no because I think that it's important for the community to see the play okay that's interesting though I mean we could talk about that for a long time we could I would say that there are actors in the I don't think it's because of that yeah I think we have another question hi I'm Kevin I'm breaking my own rule by asking a question at an event that I produced but I came up with the title so I think it's a little bit related it's a question of like our responsibility for advocacy of other races but also of people that are of different experiences within the Latino umbrella so I think of in this room in 2013 in that Boston convening there was a moment when I think it was Magdalia Cruz pulled like a Puerto Rican flag literally out of nowhere and said there are too many damn Mexicans in this room there's an incredible picture of it where she's like draped in a Puerto Rican flag and that is a huge kind of turning point for me in my Latino identity because I grew up in Southern California where I mean everyone around me was Mexican in a giant Mexican family at a big Mexican school in a Mexican town Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, Latino and Mexican they meant the same thing and then I came to the East Coast and found out that they do not mean the same thing so my question is for those of you on stage who identify as having some kind of Mexican-American-ness in your ethnicity do you feel that there's a responsibility to kind of teach people in your community about other portions of Latino that or and what is our responsibility to kind of advocate for people outside of our experience and for people even in those other races that are more maybe clearly just defined I agree with you I never met a Puerto Rican until I went to college ever because there's no in Texas, in especially South Texas there is only Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that's it I have an interesting experience this is like kind of relates to when I was in California I would have people like I would say the kind of old school Chicanos come to me and they would say like I just don't understand why you guys call the Latino theater comments why doesn't the Chicano theater comments I had to explain to them that like you've left out an entire portion of the United States when you call it that um but that was like an interesting adjustment for me was to be able to be like even though like I am not Puerto Rican, I am not New York I don't Caribbean, nothing like that no I mean I haven't done that DNA test but I'm pretty sure I know there's nothing in there um at all I guess but I think it's kind of regional I don't know that it's I don't know, I don't know you guys were always wondering like is this show people are here gonna like on the East Coast because it's so Chicano, you know what I mean and I think that people like it because they're humans but I don't know if that answers your question I think that our company would be open to doing a play by a Puerto Rican or a Cuban or anybody absolutely now do we go out of our way or do we feel it's our responsibility to tell those stories probably not but we would produce them we would produce those stories absolutely, you know as a Cuban American I feel all kinds of complicated feelings, you know I think I have to always preface this by saying my father is not an alien holding Cuban he's progressive he's a Princeton, he's a sociologist I always have to preface with that because I feel like, you know I have such personal conflicts about the way in which Cubans can sometimes be trotted out as, you know see there's no immigration problem Cubans don't have an immigration problem, right they have citizenship upon two years of being here and I feel it's very important as somebody who identifies as Latina to articulate to people who are not Latina or Latina the differences in a good way but the differences between Cubans Puerto Ricans, not in a kind of like Puerto Ricans are like this and Puerto Ricans are like that but that there is a difference, that the Chicano experience is very different than the Caribbean experience and that the Puerto Rican experience is very different than the Cuban experience and that, you know, it's one of our jobs going back to, you know, some other race to articulate the diversity culturally and aesthetically within the moniker of Latinidad and I also will say going back to that original question when I did Electricidad and I had actors that were of many ethnicities and in the show they all came out and they said hi my name is Lauren Pizzi I'm Irish American Hi, my name is Gabriela Mayorga I'm Mexican, born in Mexico Hi, at the beginning of the show and they all stated who they were and what their ethnicity was so there was no idea of passing and then they said and we're here to tell you the story of Electricidad so it's, you know, I guess I want to kind of and that because I politically have a problem with the idea of passing do you know what I mean our son is directing thank you I'm on Los Angeles time here and in the tropics and at Cal State Fullerton and he sent me a text he said I cast it with all Latinos and African Americans which to me is great right, you know, they're all people of color you know guanos are African you know, it's I think that's a great thing now he takes pride in the fact that he was able to cast and in the tropics which could have been cast you know any other way, right but he cast it with all Latinos and African Americans which you know, I think is very smart, yeah my son and I would say that in the classroom most of my experience derives the work that I'm trying to do is to help people see themselves in the theater that they read and that they create so I mentioned earlier it was revelatory for me to get to Tufts and to see a group of Latino students in my Latino theater and film course who were not Tejano or Chicano or Mexican-American and that meant that I had to do the work of re-educating myself about theater makers were Puerto Rican or Salvadorian or Dominican so that I could help my students empower themselves and I guess I don't see any other folks at the mic and that's probably a good place there's a question I have about a million questions I can't take up all your time I think we may only have time for one final question so a couple things when you look at I'm a history teacher so I'm going to use some history here when you look at cases in California like Mendes versus Westminster I don't know if people know the case where segregation was legal, Mexican schools, white schools when you look at the Jim Crow era and the Cotton Club where the performers were black and the audience was white and when you look at Hamilton and the point of access for the people in the audience over around when it would be white the cast, people of color when you look right down the street color purples playing again a cast that's people of color the audience, the accessibility point is for people with money Hamilton tickets are 500 bucks a piece if that if you're lucky how do you make people to the communities in which you are you know, the performances are happening how do you get because you're tackling some topics that are real to people across the socioeconomic spectrum how are you making those your plays accessible to people who might not have the means to sit in the audience our ticket prices are so low I mean we have meetings on our staff all the time talking about ticket prices because it's tricky right because Vicente Fernandez is at the Staples and our people will pay 75 100 bucks to go see Vicente Fernandez so it's not like they don't have the money right but there's not a tradition of seeing our stories on stage I mean the music tradition goes way back to the Variedades you know many many years ago but the theater tradition of seeing our stories on stage and I think that so we go back and forth sometimes we say we never charge more than what no we charge ticket prices $20 but you know we sell tickets for 35 and then we give discounts and then we give group rates and all that so that's how we make it accessible to our community that's how we do it we because they don't it's not that many people can't afford it that's true many people just won't pay what they what they charge at the tapers $65 $75 our community won't pay that much to come to our theater so our average ticket price is $20 and that's how we do it I'm the artistic director of Chicago Playworks for Families and Young Audiences which is a theater for young audiences and it's through the DePaul University so we are very we have a big 1300 seat theater in the Roadhouse in downtown Chicago and our audiences primarily Chicago public school kids who are 75-80% of color and we're very lucky because it's subsidized by the university would that we had subsidies from our government but it's subsidized by the university that means that it doesn't matter to us really how many tickets we sell we're in that privileged position it doesn't matter what we sell but what are the Vincentian mission it's accessible so for us we do care about whether or not people are in the seats so I program for a contemporary urban and multi-ethnic audience and our ticket prices are $8 and the group rates are $4 a person but that's a tremendous luxury because it's subsidized by a university and what I want to say is the more universities and theaters can partner because universities have more funds honestly than universities but I think that we're not going to get subsidies from our government we're going to get them elsewhere and the other thing I would say is I have not yet been in a position to run a not-for-profit theater in the United States I hope I will be soon but I'm very interested in the idea of what is it the company of Minneapolis Radical Hospitality the kind of pay what you can across the board because especially as theaters are number one on the mission to make sure that the work is accessible and then convincing funders that they need to help I'm of two minds on this my first is that theater has to cost something because we have to instill that it is valuable on the other hand it does not need to cost something to everybody so for instance when I was with the Adler Luna we would tour a lot we toured a lot we went to a lot of colleges and universities because we're all female with color that's like two boxes on their diversity month it was awesome and so we would do a show and I think a really great example is when we first went on tour in 2013 our first show was the University of Texas of Pan-American which is now Rio Grande Valley in Edinburgh, Texas and it was so hot and it was so miserable and we did this show when we got paid to do it and it was great and then we drove we did a matinee on like a Wednesday we pulled out 300 people and then we drove down and did a show in San Benito, Texas later that night San Benito, Texas is an incredibly rural community it's where my grandfather my great grandfather used to own the grocery store there there was two people under the age of 45 there because that's who lives in the town we were in a converted farm house that has now become the community center because they installed an air conditioner they didn't have enough seats and what was interesting was that we made some money doing the UT Pan Am show they paid us a fee we were at a college and I love the people there I'm so glad we were there the students are awesome and then we went to this community that desperately needs the work they need something they need to see people on stage that look like them in work that's in English and in Spanish and fun we had like a past the hat moment if you can give something but you don't have to there was no time for the collection bowl it was more just like there's a guy back there you can give him your envelopes and then we got in the car and drove back that night because we didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel and for me it was life changing because my dad was there with me and he was the one collecting the envelopes and when we got back we counted the money and we had never made more money at a show but these are $5 bills these are $3 bills so what I'm trying to say here is that you have to give the free performances because you have to make sure that people know that it's valuable you have to make it accessible and if anything is not accessible to the board it's not a radical move but at the same time people will give money to something they think is valuable and that gesture of this like very small town that has we had to drive three towns away to find a radio shack because they didn't have the right audio cords this is like rural south Texas okay they were willing to give us that much money from their community because they just don't get this kind of work with such an amazing gesture and then on a personal what I tried to do over the past year and a half or so is that I am shameless I will take discounted tickets from white theaters all over the place I had a student ID to get a ticket this weekend and I have graduated five years ago but I will always pay full price at a theater of color so like I have willingly paid $35 to see a show at the LATC because to me A the work is probably going to be worth it anyway right B I can I have the privilege of having a job where I can pay that much money to see a show and C like that's okay I want them to have mine I would rather that and I'll give my $10 ticket thank you Abigail but I think that's what we should do right because if I'm got you right we have the $75 and we can blend it wherever so I'll use my $10 over here and I'll use my $30 well it's so interesting the point that you bring up because it's really about there's an idea it's about who is who is placing the value on the work and in the example that you give of the farmhouse the audience was placing the value it was in the audience's hands to place the value and they placed more value actually than the university well this has been a really generative conversation and as we wrap up I want to thank David Dower and Polly Carl ArtsEmerson for having us Kevin Becerra for curating the event my three panelists Evelina Fernandez Lisa Portes, Abigail Vega and also you for your willingness to engage and think through these important conversations with us and thank you Noah very much thanks Noah have a good night