In Phoenix, a computer nerd abandons his pregnant, compulsive-shopper wife and his virtual reality job, and heads south on a birdwatching trip to Chiapas. By the next morning, the rising wind of history will overturn all their lives. Emiliano Zapata, mexico's martyred revolutionary leader, steps onstage as an unquiet spirit who brings historical perspective to the events of 1994. Any similarities between characters and actual persons, living or dead, are hilariously exagerated. Building on work initiated the year before by Borderlands writers Paula Loera, Daniel Nugent, and Eva Tessler, principal SFMT playwright Joan Holden collaborated on a new script which culminated in a workshop production at Pima Community College, Tucson in April 1996.
Recent events underline the production's timeliness.
In chiapas, peasants have staged 1,700 land occupations since the initial uprising, and government troops still use force to evict them. In September, the Zapatistas withdrew from peace talks in the wake of uprisings by a new revolutionary group, citing the government's failure to negotiate seriously. Political assassinations have exposed wide cracks within Mexico's ruling party. We have a common history that nobody here knows about, but everyone there does. People pour in from there, they change life here, yet we know almost nothing about what they've left behind.