Teatro Chicano and the Seduction of Nostalgia

In Cherrie Moraga's first published play, Giving Up the Ghost, the character Amalia leaves her home in Los Angeles to visit Mexico in an attempt to renew her physical and spiritual energy. She muses: I thought ... maybe it was the American influence that causes the blood to be sucked dry from you so early. Nothing was wrong with me, really. My bones ached. I needed rest. Nothing Mexico couldn't cure. (24) She imagines Mexico, a short bus ride away, as a space of regeneration and identification that does not exist for her north of the border. Her effort as a Mexican-born, dark-skinned woman artist to succeed in a culture that neither values nor understands her is exhausting. But Amalia returns to the United States upon learning of her Mexican lover's death, resigns herself to a life as a Mexican-American whose home, conflicted though it may be, is Los Angeles. Amalia's realization that her home is not necessarily where her heart is, that she loves Mexico but belongs in the United States, is a theme common to most teatro Chicano. An American art form, teatro--like Chicano culture generally--depends on Mexico not only for its origins, but for its essential meaning as well. This dependence fosters a dual nostalgia for and resentment of the homeland as a territory of desire and impossibility, of exotic naturaleza (nature/nationality) and material poverty.(1) Chicanos' ancestors left Mexican territory for many of the same reasons European and Asian immigrants left their nations of origin: to provide a richer life for those to come. But Mexico exerts a different power for Chicanos than the homeland does for other ethnic minority groups, and it is this difference that finds expression in teatro. In the three plays I will discuss here--Moraga's Giving Up the Ghost (staged reading 1984; published 1986 and 1994), Luis Valdez's The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1968) and EL Centro Su Teatro's La Carpa Aztlan Presents "I Don't Speak English Only" (1994)--nostalgia shapes characterization, plot, and theme. Nostalgia also dictates more subtly the ways in which the plays' mixed audiences (Chicano and non-Chicano) perceive the realities of contemporary Chicano culture outside the theater. Moraga focuses on personal history, Valdez on the history of a people, and La Carpa Aztlan fuses the two concerns into a debate about cultural history's impact on individuals. All three plays stage the confrontation of Chicanos with Mexico as well as the confrontation of Chicanos with assimilated Mexican-Americans, representing these confrontations as a conflict of nostalgia. Nostalgia's temporal aspect, its relation to history, is as significant here as its spatial aspect. The three plays, representative of the decades in which they were written and first staged, offer contemporary readers and spectators an historical scope through which to imagine Chicano life and art. Valdez's work as a playwright grew out of his collaboration with actors and other artists, and while Pancho Villa was written by Valdez exclusively, its form and tone reflect the collective tenor of early teatro Chicano, as well as the ethnic pride that inaugurated the 1960s Chicano movement.(2) Nearly twenty years after Valdez, Moraga writes independently of any particular theater company and her play reflects the challenge to the Chicano movement mounted by women's and gay rights activists. And finally, La Carpa Aztlan, a collective piece whose authorship is not dominated by an individual, reflects the sense of retrenchment felt by most nationalist movements in the 1990s. Public sentiments imposing English Only laws, anti-immigrant policy, cutbacks in affirmative action and the resurgence of ethnic hostility are the play's dominant themes. The yearning represented in and by La Carpa Aztlan is as much for the optimism and pride of the Chicano movement--and the teatro so instrumental in representing that movement--of the 1960s and 1970s as it is for Mexico. …