Chicana Perspectives on the Politics of Public Mourning

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CHICANA PERSPECTIVES ON THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING

María J. Durán

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

María DeGuzmán

Shayne Legassie

Ashley Lucas

Michelle Robinson

Ariana Vigil

ABSTRACT

María J. Durán: Chicana Perspectives on the Politics of Public Mourning (Under the direction of María DeGuzmán)

Recent studies of late twentieth-century loss, grief, and mourning have turned to political theory to address mourning’s transformative, future-oriented vision for democratic society. My dissertation builds on this political theory discourse to argue that manifestations of public mourning in Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow (2009), Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and

Saints (1994), and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad: A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra (2003) give rise to a new formulation of political agency for Chicanas and advance a means for political dissent. These three Chicana/o plays reveal the ways structural forms of violence differentially impact marginalized and disenfranchised Chicana/o communities, including farmworkers in central California, working-class women in Ciudad Juárez, and chola/os in East Los Angeles.

Examining the loss resulting from different forms of violence that transpire in these plays, my project concludes that Chicanas become political agents who disrupt the disavowal of loss in

Chicana/o communities by dominant society; reject the privatization of mourning; expand notions of what mourning can look like in the public sphere; question whose losses “count” or carry forth social significance; defend the grievability of Chicana/o bodies; challenge the social invisibility of loss and social injury; urge public recognition for loss; and demand both responsibility and accountability from state authorities. In these ways, Chicanas’ public mourning positions them as leaders in their communities in the pursuit of social change. Though it might be argued that, within the context of grief, Chicanas are suffering subjects and/or

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relegated to a status of victimhood, my dissertation sheds light on how their acts of mourning are political affective responses to loss that actively move beyond victimhood, creating spaces for

Chicanas to move in defiance of oppressive institutions and to redefine their relationship to the world around them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Above all, I thank God for the opportunity to do the intellectual work that I do and for bringing people into my life who have helped me grow as a junior scholar.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Dr. María DeGuzmán, for her guidance, mentorship, and unwavering support. Over the years, she has encouraged me to chase footnotes, read widely, and make interdisciplinary connections. Her intellectual rigor is matched only by her wit and genuine humility. I am truly fortunate to have been one of her mentees and to have worked under her fearless leadership for the UNC Latina/o Studies Program, the first program of its kind in the Southeast. I hope one day I can be the kind of engaged-scholar she is: a luminary of Latina/o intellectual cultures, an advocate for Latina/o communities, and a champion for social justice.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my committee members, Drs. Laura Halperin,

Ashley Lucas, Ariana Vigil, Michelle Robinson, and Shayne Legassie, for the insightful suggestions and collegiality that each of them offered to me over the years. Special thanks to Dr.

Lucas, who has mentored me since before I started my graduate studies.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the financial support for my dissertation research and professional development from the UNC Graduate School, the Institute for the

Study of the Americas, and the Initiative for Minority Excellence (IME). I am also thankful to the Department of English and Comparative Literature for funding my travel to present at various conferences.

My heartfelt gratitude to my best friend, Monet Phillips, whose unrelenting support from afar has never let me forget that the voices of women of color in the academy matter. My mentor, esteemed colleague, and best friend, Gale Greenlee, always nurtured me in more ways than one.

Special thanks to IME’s co-directors, Kathy Wood and Maria Erb, who have provided countless opportunities for networking and professional development. But, in everything, they have reminded me to celebrate my accomplishments as a first-generation and working-class Latina, because traveling this road embodying these identities is not easy. Thanks to Yesenia Pedro

Vicente for her smiling and encouraging face, and for always having breakfast ready for IME’s

Writing Wednesdays. Thanks also to my IME family: Candace Buckner, Brionca Taylor,

Diamond Holloman, Sertanya Reddy, Joyce Rhoden, Yanica Faustin, and Don Holmes. Candace consistently reminded me that I could do this work and do it well.

The completion of my dissertation would not have been possible without the support of

Jen Boehm and Amy Reynolds, who worked with me all hours of the day and night—in-person and via video-conferencing. I so appreciate all of our moments of joy and panic, as well as the calm reassurances that everything was going to be okay. I appreciate Raquel Soto and Mariana

Ingram for being my prayer warriors, especially during the last months of my dissertation writing. I also cannot forget to thank Jorge Montañez, who always casually, but genuinely, asked me how my dissertation was going.

I also want to thank special friends and colleagues who supported me along this journey, with constructive criticism for my work and good wishes: Jane Lim, Rebecca Garonzik, Earl

Brooks, Erin Lodeesen, Susan Thananopavarn, Bethany Lam, Laurel Foote-Hudson, Eddie

Moore, Gabrielle Scronce, Natalie Gwishiri, Geovani Ramírez, Sarah Workman, and Pat Horn.

Gracias a mi familia. Aunque quizás no entiendan, precisamente, a lo que me dedíco, siempre me han demostrado su apoyo y cariño. Mi mamá siempre me preguntaba como me iba con mis clases y mis estudiantes, siempre bromeando que como es possible que me volví profesora. Karen always encouraged me and never let me down. I am so grateful to her.

Finalmente, le doy gracias a mi compañero y mi mejor amigo—a mi amado esposo,

Jonathan. I could not have finished this work without him. Le doy gracias por siempre creer en mi y por apoyarme, without hesitation, en absolutamente todo. I cannot wait to see what God has in store for the both of us.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING IN CHICANA/O THEATRE ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1

Public Mourning, Affect, and Performance ...... 6

Chicanidad and the History of Loss ...... 9

Review of Chicana/o Literature on Loss, Grief, and Mourning ...... 10

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches ...... 13

Mourning Becomes Pathology: The Influence of Freudian Psychoanalysis ...... 18

The Politics of Mourning in Political Theory ...... 22

CHAPTER 1: THE WAILING WOMAN, OR LA LLORONA: MATERNAL MOURNING AS RESISTANCE IN MARISELA TREVIÑO ORTA’S BRAIDED SORROW (2009) ...... 39

Introduction ...... 39

Ciudad Juárez and the Contexts for Femicide ...... 45

Representations of Femicide in Transborder Cultural Productions ...... 50

La Llorona Reimagined: From Tenochtitlan to the Borderlands ...... 56

La Llorona’s Grief: Public Expressions of Emotional and Physical Pain .62

Parental Grief: Freud Reexamined and the Metaphor of Amputation ...... 64

Grievability and The Concept of Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez ...... 66

Juárense Women Abandoned: The Problem of Criminal Impunity and Blaming the Victim ...... 69

Deprivatizing Loss, Politicizing Mourning ...... 75

Public Mourning: Acts of Resistance Against Femicide ...... 76

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CHAPTER 2: MOURNING SLOW VIOLENCE AND CONTESTING INVISIBILITY: MIGRANT FARMWORKERS IN CHERRÍE MORAGA’S HEROES AND SAINTS (1994) ...... 79

Introduction ...... 79

McLaughlin and The Subaltern Status of Farmworkers ...... 86

Re-defining What Constitutes Violence ...... 87

The Visceral Head of Cerezita ...... 91

Crucifixion in the Vineyards: A Haunting Act of Mourning ...... 93

Mapping Violence on Land ...... 99

Dying Children and Dead Dolls ...... 102

From McLaughlin to Sacramento: Challenging Invisibility ...... 107

Grieving Mothers of McLaughlin: Public Mourning and Dissent in Sacramento ...... 110

The Agenda of Protest and Activist Lineages ...... 116

El Pueblo’s Right to Life and Collective Action ...... 117

CHAPTER 3: PERFORMING VIOLENCE AND MOURNING: THE CHOLA/O AND PATRIARCHAL POWER IN LUIS ALFARO’S ELECTRICIDAD (2003) ...... 121

Introduction ...... 121

Electra Becomes Electricidad: An Overview of the Literature ...... 128

The Chola/o Subculture ...... 132

The Barrio’s History of Marginalization and the Interpellation of Violence ...... 134

Chicana Grief and The Female Desire to “Get Out” of the Barrio ...... 138

Another Chola/o Creation Story: War, Violence, and (the lack of) Female Resistance ...... 144

The Return of Orestes and the Imperative to Reclaim Patriarchal Power ...... 148

Are We Family?: Orestes Becomes a Cholo and the Murder of Clemencia ...... 153

Laughing to Keep from Crying: The Subversive Role of Humor in Electricidad ...... 155

Electricidad: A Performance of Public Mourning and Negotiating the Theatre Space ...... 160

CODA: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING FOR CHICANA/OS AND BEYOND ...... 166

Scholarly Contributions ...... 168

The Mo(u)rning after María: Making Loss Count in ¡Ay María! (2017) ...... 172

WORKS CITED ...... 179

INTRODUCTION: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING IN CHICANA/O THEATRE

Introduction

A universal and natural response to loss, grief is one of the most powerful of human emotions. As Gail Holst-Warhaft asserts in The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses

(2000), “[grief’s] emotional potential is inexhaustible” (9). To declare that grief has potential without limit suggests that it is much more than a passive and idle emotional state that limns how our lives have been injured and disrupted by loss. And yet, in a North American context, grief is often understood as a dis-ease,1 which transforms the natural reaction to loss to an ailment requiring psychological and medical intervention. Though transdisciplinary discourses, as well as social and cultural frames, shape the understanding of grief and its expression (mourning), the field of psychology has considerably influenced on how our modern society understands grief.2

In short, it has advanced the pathologization and medicalization of grief,3 defining grief as a

“debilitating emotional response” to loss that must be “worked through” quickly so as to reduce or altogether eliminate its encroachment on daily regular life (Granek 2010; 48).

1 Here, I signal the disruption of a state of “ease” that loss engenders.

2 In The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (1999), John Archer explains that grief emerged as an object of study in psychology in the early 20th century. It is important to note that Sigmund Freud published his influential essay on mourning in 1917, an essay which will be discussed later in this chapter.

3 According to psychologist Leeat Granek, this shift in understanding grief goes hand-in-hand with other cultural and historical movements, including the rise of modernism, which left individuals “bereft of meaning, community, and structure with which to manage grief” (2014; 106) due to the increased belief in science and the subsequent decline in religion; religion offered rituals and practices of mourning to (better) negotiate loss.

One need not only look to the widely popularized “stage model” of grieving, posited by

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in Death and Dying (1969),4 to learn how grief has been treated as a process that one must “work through.” Though Kübler-Ross clarifies that these stages are not necessarily linear (or may not be experienced at all), her framework for grief work includes a starting point and an endpoint; the latter is denoted with the “acceptance” stage, a vague construction that marks the resolution of grief. This elusive resolution might be interpreted in popular discourses as what Nancy Berns has called “closure”: a socially constructed “new emotion” that explains what is needed to manage and ultimately end grief (3).5 The emphasis on the need to end grief cannot be understated, insofar as the assumption is we cannot carry on with our daily lives if grief maintains its interference. This is all to say that there is a societal expectation for the person who has experienced loss to work through grief as quickly as possible in order to return to his/her functional and productive life, as if that life has not been shattered by the loss itself and any specter of “normalcy” still exists. If the person is not able to efficiently mourn and finish the labor of grief, then his/her grief gets labeled as abnormal; it is viewed as a pathology that must be evaluated, medically treated, and monitored.6

Accordingly, modern understandings of grief focus far too much on its supposed dysfunction, which has consequently produced an “erasure of how we used to think about grief as a holistic, necessary, human relational experience” (Granek 277). It would seem, then, that psychological constructs of grief and medical interventions based on its pathologization are the

4 The five stages of grief that Kübler-Ross presents are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

5 In Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us (2011), Berns explores the relationship between mourning and closure within a culture that is uncomfortable with grief. She further examines how politics and industries (i.e. media and a capitalist market) appropriate the idea of closure to profit on people’s pain.

6 For more on the pathology of grief, see Granek’s “Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present” (2010).

dysfunction and that “denying the normalcy, intensity, and duration of grief is [in fact] the pathology” (Granek 280). It is on this note I explore grief’s aforementioned unlimited “emotional potential” by considering a different set of questions: What do responses to loss look like when they are not inhibited or pathologized? Why do expressions of grief matter? What can mourning reveal about loss or about the person who grieves? What are grief’s possibilities and which discourses or theoretical frameworks illuminate them? Finally, what kind of work can mourning carry out? My dissertation investigates these questions in relation to Chicana/o communities, whose histories of resistance to cultural, social, and political oppression since 1848 frequently return to experiences of loss. I explore these experiences of loss in three distinct texts of

Chicana/o theatre, wherein loss is clearly wrought by structural forms of violence. Because mourning becomes entangled in systemic injustices, I consider how mourning becomes politicized, especially when it manifests in public forms.

Examining Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow (2009), Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad: A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra

(2003) as dramatic texts, the main contention of this dissertation is that Chicanas’ public-facing expressions of grief give rise to a new formulation of political agency and advance a means for dissent. Acts of public mourning by Chicanas engage in a negotiation of loss that carries forth a politics of mourning. These acts contest the invisibility of marginalized Chicana/o communities by strategically moving mourning from the private into the public sphere; demanding social recognition and responsibility of loss by calling out authority figures; and challenging discourses that render Chicana/os as disposable bodies or ungrievable by restoring human dignity. The selected plays are anchored in different geographical and geosocial spaces, or what I call, sites of loss. The sites of loss this dissertation treats are localized in Ciudad Juárez and the perilous US-

Mexico border, which has seen hundreds of cases of femicide; a migrant farmworker community in Central California whose denizens, young and old, are plagued with the effects of a toxic living and working environment; and East Los Angeles, where the formation of gangs has created a distinctive culture and advanced extra-legal measures for justice involving violence. In these various sites of loss, Chicanas’ acts of public mourning maintain a capacity for political resistance, and they serve as reminders of how there is agency to be found even in the midst of bereavement for Chicana/o communities; in many ways, they echo the idea that the dead and that which has been lost are still alive and politically relevant.7

Though it might be argued that, within the context of loss and grief, Chicanas are suffering subjects and/or relegated to a status of victimhood, my dissertation sheds light on how their acts of mourning are political affective responses8 to loss that actively move beyond victimhood. I argue that mourning operates under the premise that “pain opens up new perceptions of the relationship between one’s body and the world around it and creates new ways of moving through the world” (Bost 31). I read acts of public mourning by Chicanas as acts of transformation that create necessary spaces for Chicanas to move in defiance of patriarchal, misogynist, and otherwise oppressive institutions and where they consequently redefine their relationship to the world around them. While these acts most immediately concern the agency

7 In American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (2017), political theorist Simon Stow begins with a bold claim: “The dead are alive in the American polity” (1), and thus he makes note of the political participation of the dead as he also critically meditates on the relationship between the dead, mourning, and democracy.

8 Here, I take direction from Laura Halperin’s study of works by Latina writers in Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance (2015), which expands what constitutes resistance. Halperin notes that, though the subject matter of harm “risks positioning Latinas as vulnerable victims rather than strong and proud women” (9), “survival in the face of adversity” and the critique of hegemony in contemporary Latina texts is political; she argues that these texts do not deviate from a resistant politics of 1960s, but that they in fact stand “as successors to resistant 1960s Latino literary traditions by engaging in an equally oppositional politics” (11), paying particular attention to “ethnicized, racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized harm” (10).

and political consciousness of Chicanas, it is important to note that they are also inclusive endeavors. Chicanas’ acts of public mourning defend the welfare of Chicana/o families and communities, as they move towards a larger vision of social justice.

For the purposes of this dissertation, I define grief as the “primarily emotional (affective) reaction to the loss of a loved one through death” (Strobe et al 5).9 I understand grief as something that encompasses various felt emotions in response to an experience of loss, ranging from sorrow, despair, depression, fear, and loneliness to anger. For this reason, I do not reduce grief to one emotion. Grief is a subjective experience, given that there is a distinctive bond between the individual and the loss. Individuals may have a sense of shared grief with others, but each individual will experience loss in a personal way and, consequently, may not have the same emotional response.10 Given the possibility of various emotional responses to loss, mourning particularly denotes the “social expressions or acts expressive of grief that are shaped by the

(often religious) beliefs and practices of a given society or cultural group” (Strobe et al 5). 11

Mourning points to the construction of cultural and social frames of meaning for understanding and negotiating loss. The expression of grief conventionally follows cultural norms and scripts so that mourning becomes something configured, integrated, and disciplined in society. Rituals (i.e. wakes, funerals, etc.) and discourses (i.e. eulogies and obituaries) neatly package the experience of loss and its emotional responses, while they also contain grief and its expression. Moreover,

9 I interpret the “loved one” as referring to a person, any living organism (i.e. animal), an object, or an abstract idea. Can it include other animals besides human ones?

10 I want to clarify that my dissertation relies on both tangible and intangible understandings of loss—physical loss (i.e. loss of a loved one) and the loss of something abstract (i.e. relationship), respectively.

11 Scholarship that engages the psychological and/or emotional effects of loss sometimes conflates grief and mourning, such as Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004).

mourning is often marked with a temporal quality that puts emphasis on overcoming grief—that is, there is an impulse for the bereaved to come to terms with loss and move on to the normalcy of life, lest the experience of loss produce “complicated grief.” Unregulated mourning or mourning that deviates from cultural and social norms is not deemed socially acceptable, as it challenges social structures that work to shape and police emotional responses to loss.

This dissertation is concerned with the ways Chicanas in the selected plays configure their own expressions of grief, attesting to the ways that experiences of loss perform affective ruptures that, in turn, warrant affective responses. These responses need not follow cultural or religious prescriptions12 that operate to curate grief. Resisting and revising conventions of mourning, Chicanas create different possibilities for what expressions of grief might look like and how they might bear political implications. They carry mourning into the public sphere to disrupt, question, confront, and make demands, so that public mourning positions them as political agents. Ultimately, the public mourning of Chicanas registers dissent, advancing political statements and making political interventions for marginalized Chicana/o communities whose experiences of loss risk become ignored, silenced, and erased.

Public Mourning, Affect, and Performance

Public mourning, as it is conceived in this dissertation, refers to the free expression of grief that makes claims for political change. It is an affective mechanism that challenges the private valences and iterations of grief in order to make loss and its conditions of possibility in marginalized communities visible; the visibility of loss through public mourning urges both

12 Religion strongly shapes practices of mourning, but it is important to note that spirituality can also influence grief and mourning. Constructing a theory of spiritual mestizaje, Theresa Delgadillo makes a critical distinction between religion and spirituality. She claims that the former refers to “organized, institutionalized, [and] traditional religions in Western thought,” while the latter specifically refers to “non-Western and non-institutional forms of relation to the sacred” (Delgadillo 3), which in this case would be the aforementioned lost loved one. For more, see Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (2011).

accountability and social responsibility for injustice. In discussing public mourning as an affective mechanism, I draw on affect theory’s dialogue with cultural studies as an orientation to explain the social and political uses of the feeling of grief, and, in particular, its public-facing expression. Some theorists make a distinction between affect and emotions or feelings, treating affect as a precursor to emotions.13 For instance, Deborah Gould defines affect as a “bodily, sensory, inarticulate, nonconscious experience,” and she notes that it is “something that we do not quite have language for, something that we cannot fully grasp, something that escapes us but is nevertheless in play, generated through interaction with the world, and affecting our embodied beings and subsequent actions” (20). Additionally, Brian Massumi understands affect as a bodily

“intensity” that is beyond narrative and pre-subjective, while he asserts that emotion is a

“qualified intensity,” or “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (28). For the purposes of my dissertation, I make no such distinction, largely because the affective response to loss (i.e. bodily sensation) are entangled with the emotions of experiencing loss; the emotion of grief can never really separate itself from the affect of loss from which it derives.14 Both affect and emotion are transmitted and circulated through subjects. To make these two distinct from one another seems to emphasize a cause and effect relationship, and it problematically forecloses emotions’

13 Theorists including Brian Massumi (Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation), Teresa Brennan (The Transmission of Affect), and Deborah Gould (Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS) treat affect as more of an external stimulation that hits the body.

14 I treat affect and emotion as synonymous terms, as do Sara Ahmed and Juana María Rodríguez. In response to Massumi’s work, Ahmed writes, “I think that the distinction between affect/emotion can under-describe the work of emotions, which involve forms of intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about ‘subjective content’ or qualification of intensity. Emotions are not ‘after-thoughts’ but shape how bodies are moved by the worlds they inhabit” (230) in The Promise of Happiness (2010). In a similar manner, Rodríguez argues that affect “is not about individual self-contained emotions, but rather how feelings function in the realm of the social,” and she also admits that her “use of affect, feeling and emotion becomes entangled in imprecise ways” (17; original emphases) in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014).

capacity to affect. Moreover, the public mourning of Chicanas involves the corporeal as much as it does the emotions that result from loss.

In addressing what public mourning by Chicanas looks like in the selected dramatic works, I delineate the ways in which it engages cultural practices and different aesthetics in storylines that center loss. More than this, however, I aim to increase attention on public mourning within Chicana/o theatre,15 and it begins with a subtle but necessary discursive distinction: the distinction between practices of mourning and acts of mourning. As the former points to performative language, it does so by circumscribing mourning around cultural norms that are deemed socially acceptable; put another way, the implied rhetorical implications of practices of mourning veer towards prescriptive understandings of mourning that situate expressions of loss in repeatedly conventional, arguably ritualistic, ways. The instances of public mourning in the plays I investigate are certainly informed by culture and religion, but they extend beyond traditionally observed or rehearsed practices of mourning. They are, instead, acts of mourning, which discursively highlights their performance (especially as I situate these acts in a theatrical context) and their subsequent expansion of the cultural, religious, spatial, and temporal prevailing limitations of mourning. These limitations aim to contain grief, and thus the discursive privileging of acts over practices reveals how loss can be newly expressed, negotiated, and leveraged; as an act, mourning is an action that performs a kind of work in addition to (and not in opposition to) grief work. Reframing mourning in this way disrupts conventional and apolitical understandings of mourning.

15 Undoubtedly, Chicana/o theatre emerged as the artistic “arm of the Chicano movement” in the 1960s and thus carries forth a spirit of oppositional politics.

Chicanidad and the History of Loss

The attention to public acts of mourning by Chicanas, admittedly, would not be possible without first acknowledging a colossal loss that has spawned over a century of fear, pain, and sorrow: the violent territorial US acquisition of the Southwest and the subsequent dispossession of Mexicano and indigenous groups caused by US colonialism. I say this to clarify that my use of

Chicana/o aligns with literary scholar Marissa López’s statement that “the essence of chicanidad lies in negotiating that engulfment [of Mexican land]” (105; original emphasis).16 To grapple with mourning, one must recognize loss as a quintessential part of chicanidad,17 and there is also an imperative to resist historical amnesia, even as mourning might unfold as a process to “work through” loss in a way that risks unintentional forgetting or even disremembering. Because loss and mourning, as it is tied specifically to 1848 (but also prior to and after this date), encompasses a vast range of historical incidents as well as individual and group experiences, it is beyond the scope of this work to comprehensively examine grief as a recurring affective response and mourning as both a historical and ongoing process that informs chicanidad.

As a result, this dissertation turns to local sites of loss, which is, chiefly, a means to contextualize and examine mourning in the selected plays, but it is also to illuminate that

Chicana/o nationalism is not something locked in the past; it remains relevant today. My attention to local sites of loss affirms that there remain specific Chicana/o historical, cultural, and political realities worthy of scrutiny, even as they extend to or are directly connected with

16 In the short essay, “Why I Still Believe in Chicanx Studies,” López cautions against substituting Chicanx with Latinx because the latter term “makes it too easy to consolidate difference and erase history,” and she contests the term’s connotation of transnationalism, which is an assumption that disregards the “transnational and transamerican perspectives” advanced by individuals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

17 It also bears mentioning that loss has a dual connotation here: loss from the violent conquest of indigenous peoples and lands and loss from disenfranchisement in the US.

transnational issues. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the first chapter of this dissertation begins with Orta’s Braided Sorrow on the US-Mexico border. There is a recognition of transnationalism, as much as there is attention to a border space that mentally, spiritually and physically wounds individuals, that I wish to insert in my use of Chicana/o. In other words, I understand Chicana/o US-based oppression as linked to global struggles against oppression, and my aim is not to homogenize Mexican-American and Chicana/o peoples or their historical and political realities. Ultimately, this dissertation treats Chicana/o as a “living, breathing term with a past, a present, and a future” (López 105) and further understands it as a far more multivalent term than its original heteronormative and patriarchal conceptualization and instrumentation by the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s.

Review of Chicana/o Literature on Loss, Grief, and Mourning

Though loss is a prevalent thematic concern in Chicana/o cultural productions, sustained critical attention on mourning is small in the field of Chicana/o Studies. To clarify, scholars refer to mourning, couched in matters like loss, grief, and trauma, in passing but only do few of them examine mourning and its implications using a concentrated approach that considers the source of grief and mourning; how individuals or communities negotiate grief; what form(s) mourning takes; and what the meaning of mourning is under the context in which it unfolds. Chicana/o and

Latina/o scholars who have written exclusively about loss, grief, and/or mourning in relation to

Chicana/o subjectivities include Belinda Rinn Rincón, Suzanne Bost, and Rafael Pérez-Torres.18

18 Other scholars of interest whose work treats loss, grief, and/or mourning within the larger field of Latina/o Studies include Antonio Viego (Dead Subjects: Toward A Politics of Loss in Latino Studies) and José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics), the latter of which discusses melancholy as a generative state and with which I further engage later in this introduction. See also María DeGuzmán’s Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (2012), especially the chapter titled “Dreaded Non- Identities of Night: Night and Shadows in Chicana/o Cultural Production,” which treats night and shadows in relation to (negative) affect.

In the first chapter of Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and

Culture, Belinda Linn Rincón offers a necessary and robust study of the Chicana anti-war activist in literary and cultural narratives, engaging with the public performance of mourning by

Las Adelitas de Aztlán, a Chicana antiwar collective (37).19 In examining how Chicanas situated their claims of political grievances in the public sphere, rather than in the intimacies of the private (where grief is often located), Rincón makes an excellent case for how mourning is leveraged to combat political repression, to extend the meaning of citizenship beyond the nation- state, and to restore the import of dissent (37). She primarily does so by drawing on the activist bustle of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles as well as the anti-war political sentiments of Vietnam.20

Expanding the perimeters of identity politics, which was so vital to the work of the

Chicana/o Movement, Suzanne Bost focuses on different “corporeal boundary states” like illness, death, and mourning, and argues that they uncover new understandings for Chicana feminism in “From Race/sex/etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism.” Bost turns her attention to Rest in Peace Gloria, an online altar that is unequivocally political and feminist (363). Bost notes that the mourners at the online altar, who reflect a diversity in ethnicity and race, eulogize Anzaldúa using liberatory statements that defy the boundaries of identity politics (363-364). She reads the mourners’ stories and expressions of

19 In particular, she argues that these Chicana activists (and other writers like Stella Pope Duarte) challenged the US state’s regulation of bereavement surrounding the Vietnam War using “unauthorized displays of mourning” to make “larger ethical claims about corporeal vulnerability” (37).

20 Rincón’s examination of mourning and its politics in this chapter is contextualized alongside the very political shadows of the 1960s and 1970s. The acts of mourning that this dissertation examines in the works of Chicana/o playwrights do not correspond to social opposition organizing (i.e. the Chicana/o Movement or the United Farmworkers Union), but they are still very much political and concerned with social justice. For more about how the division between post-60s and 60s and 70s Latina/o literature has been challenged, see Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez’s The Latina/o Canon and The Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2007).

grief as political and anchored in Chicana feminism, suggesting that Anzaldúa’s loss has created a sense of community21 “as a potential response to the defensive and strictly nominal subject of identity politics” (366). In this way, Bost understands mourning as a political coalition-building framework (362) and treats the online altar as a valuable “political gesture.”

Lastly, pivoting towards psychoanalysis and highlighting a politics of loss in Chicana/o literature, Rafael Pérez-Torres discusses loss and melancholy in relation to Chicana/o narrative in the chapter, “Narrative and Loss,” and the stand-alone article, “Placing Loss in Chicana/o

Narrative.” In “Narrative and Loss,” he argues that “loss ineluctably and inevitably informs mestizo consciousness,” (207), given that mestizaje originates in the conquest of both indigenous peoples and land. Theoretically, he employs melancholy22 to underscore how narrative functions as a site for the interaction between absence and presence, so that melancholia helps in the construction of a new Chicana/o subjectivity in a society that disenfranchises Chicana/o communities. The inclusion of loss and “the struggle to reclaim what can never be regained”

(199) in Chicana/o cultural productions is meaningful, as it focalizes “the recognition of loss”

(202), Pérez-Torres explains. While the core of Pérez-Torres’s analysis is the experience of loss, this recognition of loss in Chicana/o cultural productions certainly intersects with a politics of recognition that underlies public expressions of grief. In effect, public mourning openly acknowledges loss, directly combatting instances of Chicana/o disenfranchised grief that make

21 Bost makes note of Judith Butler’s afterword to David Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss, in which Butler signals a politics borne out of and in the wake of loss: “Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community” (468).

22 Pérez-Torres defines melancholy as “sorrow over a displaced sense of loss” (110) in “Placing Loss in Chicana/o Narrative.” Additionally, he notes that “Chicana/o narratives emerge from an attempt to overcome the melancholic condition, to name the loss that engenders melancholia, and therefore to address the sense of displacement and absence that informs these texts” (210).

loss appear inconsequential or invisible and, worse, that perform an erasure of loss (and its conditions of possibility).

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

The study of mourning has much to gain from multiple disciplines and discourses. Thus, I situate this project within the interdisciplinarity of Chicana/o Studies and thus turn to literary studies, women’s and gender studies,23 cultural studies, performance studies, and history to unpack mourning as categorically something more than just an anthropological phenomenon or an object of study for psychoanalysis. To that end, I acknowledging the social, historical, and political contexts that unfold within the plays, and my analyses are informed by the work of

Diana Taylor, particularly her book entitled The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), which illuminates “the rift…between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (19; original emphasis).

Interrogating how performance can inform the expressive cultures of the Americas, Taylor argues that performance circulates knowledge through the transmission of embodied action.

Therefore, she calls for a move away from the “archive” (i.e. textual documents, films, letters, or other print material) and toward the repertoire, which she theorizes as ephemeral forms of knowledge (i.e. music, dance, the vernacular, rituals, etc).

As a result, I understand acts of mourning as part of a Chicana/o theatrical archive but, even more so, as part of a Chicana/o repertoire that both stores and transmits knowledge about

23 Though I take cue from queer scholars and writers in my critical discussions of the selected plays, my project does not robustly foreground queer studies in relation to mourning. For this reason, I choose not to use Chicanx or Latinx as categories or descriptors in the dissertation, lest the use of the term serve as “an assimilationist move as opposed to a demand for respect regarding one’s refusal of or reconfiguration of gender” (Rodríguez 204) that the X connotes.

Chicana/o histories and narratives of grief. Acts of mourning offer alternative perspectives that are an addition to (not counter to) the archive, serving as ontological and epistemological moments that highlight Chicana/o experiences and communities. The utility of the repertoire becomes especially crystallized when I examine stage directions, mechanisms through which affect comes alive on stage, and embodied behaviors, broadly speaking. The Chicana/o repertoire, as it is presented in this dissertation through performed acts of mourning, might be considered ephemeral and, at the very least, varying in its iterations, given that no artistic production of the her plays is ever the same. However, my adoption of Taylor’s idea of the repertoire reinforces the question, how can we access that which has been lost in the archive?

Additionally, I ask, how do these three plays provide a larger, aggregate repertoire about Chicana loss and grief?

Hence, it seems that the repertoire is also suffering from and connected to a sense of loss; given its emphases on rehearsal and repetition, in addition to improvisation and play, performance allows us to access and perhaps even recuperate archival losses.24 Indeed, Peggy

Phelan explains that the ephemerality of performance is fitting and generative for the study of loss.25 We might then consider how the selected plays of this dissertation access the affective realities of past and present grief that pervade the daily lives of Chicana/o communities. Of course, these plays also transmit histories and narratives about sites of loss that have been marginalized, made invisible, or generally erased from the archive. Performance, then, might be a means through which to enact grief and, as a result, stage how mourning is imbued with political resistance. The affective component of mourning in performance something that I want

24 Here, I am referring specifically to the loss of Chicana/o lives, whose deaths may not always be documented.

25 For more, see Phelan’s Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1997).

to foreground, especially in light of the caution toward emotion that influential theatre theorists like Bertolt Brecht, whose works center questions of oppression and the advancement of social justice, have advanced. Following Plato’s belief that the expression of feelings operates in opposition to reason, as articulated in his Republic, Brecht’s epic theatre modeled a didactic experience that appealed to reason, in addition to feelings, precisely to encourage spectators to remain critical throughout the performance.

Affect theorists including Sara Ahmed, Ruth Leys, and Lisa Blackman have critiqued the dichotomy of cognition and emotion, and “the affective turn” in the humanities has likewise pushed back against the bifurcation of cognition and emotion.26 My dissertation follows this line of reasoning, and it also does not privilege resistant action for social change over affect. Douglas

Crimp challenges the idea of giving larger importance to action over affect in his germinal essay

“Mourning and Militancy” (1989). Focusing on the activism around the AIDS “crisis” in the late

1980s and early 1990s, he demonstrates the binary between mourning and militancy and strongly encourages activists to spend time sitting with and processing their grief before, perhaps hastily, moving towards action. Crimp further encourages activists to marry mourning with militancy in order to advance a militant kind of mourning. In so doing, he contests the idea that mourning accomplishes little or nothing at all. To conceptualize mourning as something passive empties it of its political possibilities. However, it also does not critically consider other important work that might not, at first glance, be counted as political: bearing witness to the loss; expressing grief over the loss to combat invisibility; paying homage to the loss; and restoring human

26 The “affective turn” to which I refer takes up debates regarding the Cartesian binary opposition between reason and emotion and reverses the hierarchy that subordinates emotion to reason (e.g. passions and feelings are uncontrollable). Nevertheless, the use of the term “affect” is, arguably, a means to detach from irrationality, which is associated with the use of “feeling” and “emotion” (Cvetkovich).

dignity, especially to bodies that have been dehumanized or otherwise treated as expendable.

While mourning does not always lead to political action or change for Chicana/o communities, it still must be valued as an affective mechanism that both makes important interventions on its own right and provides a starting point for conventional forms of political activism.

This project also aims to dismantle disciplinary boundaries around mourning that do not engage the subject matter of gender and its intersections with dissent in Chicana/o Studies.

Accordingly, I have molded this project with the interdisciplinary work of Chicana feminists that has rightfully challenged the exclusion of Chicanas in a male-centered cultural nationalism preoccupied with interethnic race and class oppression. The sites of loss that this dissertation explores deliberately center the experiences of Chicanas and their acts of mourning and, in so doing, foreground questions of gender. This approach is particularly germane given the ways that mourning has been historically gendered, presenting the essentializing assumption that women are more “emotional” than men and therefore more suited to perform mourning, sometimes on behalf of the family or community. In this light, mourning might be treated as a valuable cultural exercise or social responsibility that is specifically assigned to women, but it fails to consider the expression of grief as a liberatory and political possibility for women. We might understand, then, how the gendering of mourning would render mourning as something passive and incredibly disempowering, if women are treated as one-dimensional suffering subjects. This dissertation contests the idea that mourning is passive and instead subscribes to the idea that mourning “can help resolve political and social tensions that resist resolution through other means” (Pool 2012, 185), which has become an area of focus in political theory.

Engaging with the increased interest and attention to mourning among political theorists in the past few years, my dissertation uses political theory to consider how grief and mourning

serve as analytical lenses for unpacking politics. More specifically, my research considers how mourning gains political force and what kinds of political ideas—diagnostic and/or prescriptive—are attached to different sites of loss and their respective acts of public mourning by Chicanas in the works of the selected Chicana/o playwrights. The particular impulse for my use of political theory is grounded in transformation, as I seek to deploy public mourning as a means toward addressing the social injustices that Chicana/o communities face and as an affective mechanism that can help reshape the political landscape for Chicana/os. As J. Peter

Euben writes, “A theory, or at least a political theory, does not merely describe the world but carries prescriptive force in the sense of creating an imaginary future that either invites or discourages theoretical and political agency” (100). This is to say that political theory can make valuable interventions in a polity, and thus I follow in the footsteps of other theorists who have posited mourning, in numerous angles, as a meaningful source of political intervention.27

Inasmuch as radical political changes are often precipitated by moments of national catastrophe and tragedy,28 this dissertation argues that acts of public mourning for loss in Chicana/o communities that may not be “counted” as catastrophe also demand political transformation.

27 See, for instance, David McIvor’s Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss (2016); Simon Stow’s American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience” (2017); The New School’s journal, Social Research, and its special 2016 edition entitled “Borders and Politics of Mourning,” edited by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass; and The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss (2019), edited by David W. McIvor and Alexander Keller Hirsch. As a caveat, the attention to mourning in political theory might be reflective of a mourning of politics; for this pessimistic perspective on the turn toward mourning, see J. Peter Euben’s Platonic Noise (2003).

28 One recent global crisis includes the large number of migrants arriving in Europe in 2015 (“the refugee crisis”). National US crises includes Central American unaccompanied minors migrating to the US in the summer of 2014, and, most recently under the Trump administration, the US-Mexico “border crisis,” which has led to the separation of Latin American immigrant families seeking asylum; the caging of children under federal immigration custody; and the deaths of both children and adults (despite a long-standing history of Latin American migration to the US). Unfortunately, these “crises” and tragedies have created tangible policies focused on tighter border security and militarization as well as inhumane policies to ostensibly punish and deter migrants. In regards to these and other border crises, the 2016 special issue of Social Research considers the political potential of public grief and asks, “when and how does our grief for strangers gain political force?” For more, see especially the introduction to the issue by Alexandra Alonso and Benjamin Nienass.

Accordingly, Giorgio Agamben writes, “Just as, during periods of anomie and crisis, normal social structures can collapse and social functions and roles break down to the point where culturally conditioned behaviors and customs are completely overturned, so are periods of mourning usually characterized by a suspension and alteration of all social relations” (222). This kind of “suspension” and “alteration” in social dynamics are what the selected plays I examine precisely exhibit; in addition, as works of theatre, they literally engage in a suspension—an arrest—of time and space involving an audience. Still, outside of these sites of loss, outside of these Chicana/o communities, and outside of the theater space, mourning can aspire to make larger interventions on social (and political) relations pertaining to Chicana/os, as imagined by political theorists who understand mourning as a generative tool that might revise and revitalize the polity as well as embrace a commitment towards justice in US democracy.29

Mourning Becomes Pathology: The Influence of Freudian Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) has largely influenced

Western approaches to loss, and, though Freud conceptualizes mourning as a psychological process of working through grief, many disciplines outside of the health sciences have wrestled with loss, grief, and mourning. Freud primarily approaches the subject of grief by articulating a distinction between mourning and melancholia. Both of these psychological processes are a reaction to “loss of a loved person” or “of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud 243). Whereas mourning constitutes an eventual withdrawal of the lost object, Freud contends that melancholia diverges from

29 There is an argument to be made, however, that grief (paired with the political activity of mourning) can undermine democratic politics because it is “seen to collapse into morality: first, by appearing to insulate arguments by and about certain people and issues from critical evaluation; and second, by filtering the actual debates about those issues and people through a disavowal that frequently obfuscates the intentions and structure of political arguments” (Stow 11). For more on grief’s threat to democracy—an idea first offered by the Greeks—see Stow pp. 8-13.

mourning in its preservation of the lost object at the cost of feelings of hatred or anger directed towards the self. The symptoms of melancholia, which Freud considers a kind of interminable or even failed mourning, include “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world…[and] a delusional expectation of punishment” (Freud 244) that seemingly capture the

“inability to resolve grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss” (Eng and Kazanjian 3), or the inability to “move on.”

Rather than explain the implications of Freud’s essay or trace its development in psychoanalysis literature,30 suffice it to say that discourses of mourning since the publication of

“Mourning and Melancholia” have embraced, adapted, and opposed Freud’s understanding of mourning. I want to briefly sketch a few of the ways that select scholars have engaged with mourning and/or melancholia; and, in so doing, I will present some interpretations that focalize one key point in Freud’s essay: the normative distinction between mourning and melancholia, where Freud conceptualizes the latter as a pathological response to loss due to an inability to detach from the “lost object.” Indeed, this is a line of inquiry with which scholars, and especially scholars of color, have grappled and contextualized around questions of social and system injustice that concern racialized or queer bodies. Scholars like Jose Estebán Muñoz, Anne

Cheng, and David Eng are invested in disrupting the idea that mourning can become pathological, and I contend that their interpretations of Freud illustrate how grief is something ingrained in the lived experiences of people of color and, accordingly, how mourning might be understood as perennial but certainly not pathological. By de-pathologizing melancholia, these

30 Post-Freudian contributions to the essay in question are too vast to cite. For an extended and focus study of the essay, see On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia (2009)” edited by Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz. Various contributions in this monograph particularly account for the evolution of Freud’s ideas in relation to “Mourning and Melancholia,” so that the essay is not read in isolation.

scholars reclaim mourning in political ways that center its generative capacities and its viability as a tool of resistance; they also importantly treat mourning as a personal and social phenomenon.

Queer politics and aesthetics scholar José Esteban Muñoz, for instance, argues for a need to de-pathologize melancholia and proposes that it is “‘structure of feeling’ that is necessary and not always counterproductive and negative” as well as a “mechanism that helps us

(re)reconstruct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names” (74). In this way, melancholia can be understood as an ongoing

“structure” and “mechanism” necessary for advancing a politics of identity for the oppressed— for both the living and the dead. In fact, Muñoz points to melancholia’s daily presence in the lives of oppressed subjects: “melancholia, for blacks, queers, or any queers of color, is not a pathology but an integral part of everyday lives” (Muñoz 74). If social injustices cause and exacerbate melancholia on an everyday basis, then perhaps Muñoz points to another consideration: melancholia will not and must not go away; if mourning dissipates and comes to an end—if there is a detachment from the dead, as Freud would encourage—then it would be tantamount to the erasure of a sense of identity that has been largely shaped by social injustices, and, worse, an erasure of the lived experiences of dead queer subjects of color. Mourning must not be lost. Related to Muñoz’s reflections on mourning is the understanding that the affective and stubborn remnants of loss can be politically productive. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning

(2003), David Eng with David Kazanjian argue that the “deferral of closure” characteristic of melancholia can be a site of resistance and creative transformation because the attachment to the lost object allows “the past [to] remain steadfastly alive…bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present” (4). Here, Eng and Kazanjian are actually in

dialogue with Muñoz when he asserts that melancholia, as a mechanism, enables us to “take our dead with us.”

Adding to a discourse of de-pathologizing melancholia, as well making a case for its integral part in the lives of racialized subjects, are Eng and Ann Cheng, who have both theorized an Asian American specific form of racial melancholia.31 They suggest that Asian Americans must negotiate the loss of ideals of assimilation (the lost object) with which they remain ambivalently attached (i.e. model minority stereotype). In particular, Cheng contends that, even as the melancholic individual wrestles with loss,32 the individual also obtains some kind of nourishment from it, so that these often unacknowledged and painful losses form an Asian

American subjectivity lost to a true sense of “American” identity due to US racial dynamics.

These losses are especially painful because of the social status of the lost object, as Eng argues in

“Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century”: “women, homosexuals, people of color, and postcolonials are all coerced to relinquish and yet to identify with socially disparaged objects on their psychic paths to subjectivity” (1278; emphasis mine). In other words, Eng notes that the ambivalent attachment to lost objects that are “socially disparaged,” or devalued, produce oppressed subjectivity.

In these ways, scholars of color have pushed back against Freud’s original theorization of melancholia as pathological. They have used a psychoanalytic lens to assert that racialized subjects inhabit a productive, perhaps an imminent and necessary, melancholic process that can operate on an axis of resistance. It is not a state of illness, which thus challenges the stark

31 See David L Eng, "Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century" and Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2001).

32 Ideals of assimilation constitute loss because everyday racism prevents Asian Americans from achieving them; this is a racial type of injury examined through a psychical lens.

normalization and pathology that Freud draws between the two psychological processes. The works of Muñoz, Eng, and Cheng does not dismiss Freud’s psychoanalytic insights regarding mourning, but they challenge the idea that there must be a detachment from the lost loved object.

In their alternative psychoanalytic accounts, which underscore the political resistance of melancholia, they ultimately favor an attachment to the lost object, or at least they do not condemn such an attachment.

The Politics of Mourning in Political Theory

Beyond the fields of the natural sciences and humanities, psychoanalysis has been profitably employed by political theorists,33 and it has notably influenced the sustained inquiry about the politics of mourning over the last several years. As David W. McIvor and Alexander

Keller Hirsch note in the introduction to The Democratic Arts of Mourning (2019), political theorists have framed mourning as “the basis for the work of political theorizing and for the political work of building communities of solidarity” (xvii).34 One of the leading voices on the politics of mourning is Judith Butler, whose work on mourning takes as its starting point reading

Antigone as a subversive figure of grief and mourning. Drawing on the ways in which Antigone publicly mourns the loss of her brother, Butler argues that the figure’s laments challenge norms regarding grief and, on a larger level, interrogate the limits of the law; thus, Butler reads

33 In “Psychoanalysis and the Study of Political Science,” Shelliann Powell traces the contributions and applications of psychoanalysis in political theory. In addition, Routledge has recently published a comprehensive handbook that showcases the development of psychoanalytic political theory in the 20th century, including how it might be aptly applied to study race, gender, nationalism, etc. See Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2019), edited by Yannis Stavrakakis. Despite the growth of psychoanalysis in political theory and its critical possibilities, some skepticism remains about its application in the field. For instance, Nancy Luxon has challenged political theory’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, specifically arguing that affects like anger, which can be channeled into meaningful political work, might be written off as pathological. For more, see Luxon’s “Beyond Mourning and Melancholia: Nostalgia, Anger and the Challenges of Political Action.”

34 The turn to mourning in political theory seems to operate under the assumption that mourning is not a private process, but that, like politics, it is related to “involves public decisions, institutions, and practices” (McIvor and Hirsch).

Antigone’s mourning as an important political subversion.35 Butler’s more recent work on mourning pivots from theorizing its subversive capacities and toward questioning its relation to precariousness36 and grievability, which allows her to envision how loss can operate as a means for solidarity within communities. To explain, Butler posits that political communities negotiate, by way of differential power relations and positionalities, whose lives are deemed “grievable,” or lives that are otherwise acknowledged and considered worthy of mourning. As a kind of corrective, to defend the grievability of all human lives, she theorizes a universal precariousness for all bodies—one in which everyone is subject to a condition of vulnerability and also dependent on other bodies, which theoretically advances the idea that no human life is more grievable than another.

For Butler, the belief that all human bodies are vulnerable builds solidarity and collective responsibility, and loss (as well as mourning) “becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community” (Eng and Kazanjian 468). Butler’s politics of mourning, with its initial emphasis on subversion and its later recognition or the acknowledgement of grief for all human lives, is a main consideration of my project that unfolds in two ways. First, I see Antigone’s subversive mourning, per Butler’s reading, as engaging in an unequivocal feminist project that disrupts normative practices of mourning (i.e. the manner of the expression of mourning in the

Greek polity) and thereby expands the limits of mourning to enact agency. Second, the emphasis

35 In the Greek drama, Antigone defies the state by mourning her brother, Polyneices, in what is considered a publically disruptive way, and she insists on his burial, eventually burying him twice, against the will of Creon the King (also her uncle). It is important to note that Butler views Antigone “not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics” (page number).

36 Bonnie Honig rejects the idea that mourning is predicated on shared humanity, or a politics of “mortalism” that posits death as a basis for political solidary. For Honig, mourning can be a practice that eludes political claims or even one that is anti-political, hinging instead on ideas of victimhood, for instance. For more, see Antigone Interrupted (2013).

on the question of grievability is particularly relevant to the Chicana/o communities I examine, which are often viewed as unimportant, subaltern, and disposable, notwithstanding that the treatment of Chicana/o bodies indicates that they are undeserving of mourning by dominant

Anglo-American society and, in some cases, by members within Chicana/o communities.

Butler’s ideas of social vulnerability and dependency direct their attention to human life losses, but my dissertation advances a politics of recognition for both human lives and other kinds of losses, some of which are abstract. These include the loss of livelihood, land, safety of life forms, female reproduction, family, and kinship. This is to say that even non-human losses must be considered grievable and must be encompassed in a politics of mourning.

Butler’s attention to a politics of mourning has led to further research on questions of

(in)visibility, community, democracy, and political change among scholars like Heather Pool,

David McIvor, and Simon Stow. Pool has theorized political mourning37 as an important practice that subverts the invisibility of loss and challenges the status quo. Using the open funeral of

Emmett Till,38 which was also open casket upon the insistence of his mother, Mamie Till-

Bradley, as a case study to exemplify the work of public mourning for race relations and racial violence in the context of the Jim-Crow South, Pool argues that his “unusually visible death,” paired with the mobilization of mourning among African American political agents managed to garner white sympathy and oppose white supremacy in the South. Political mourning, then, has robust implications for oppressed communities, who can participate in the creation of a larger

37 In “Mourning Emmett Till,” Pool conceptualizes five components for political mourning: “contested identities, visibility, a failure of law, attributions of collective responsibility, and political change” (417). She clarifies that not all deaths are intertwined with a politics of mourning, but that, like in the case of Emmett Till, some losses and the response that follows are disruptive to a degree that “the only reasonable response is political change”; nevertheless, “calls for political change need not be successful to count as political mourning” (422).

38 Till was an African American adolescent who was brutally beaten, mutilated, and murdered for reportedly whistling at a white woman during his summer vacation in Mississippi.

platform for mourning that contests invisibility, provokes a sense of collective responsibility for justice, helps to expand (racialized) lines of belonging, and possibly prompts political change.

Pool’s study of mourning Emmett Till buttresses the idea that mourning need not be a private affair and that there is much political traction to be gained in conceptualizing it as a public practice or process.

Accordingly, David McIvor’s recent work insightfully identifies mourning as a kind of

“democratic work” and the beginning of “democratic repair,” insofar as it moves loss to the public sphere (i.e. the Black Lives Matter social movement; truth and reconciliation commissions), where communities can engage in open dialogues about loss and past social traumas. McIvor understands mourning as necessarily public, which seems fitting as he discusses the role of public civic and political institutions or how they might work through and/or mediate loss. Pool and McIvor discernibly advance a public attribute to a politics of mourning, and they insightfully address the concern of “what it might mean to organize a space around a shared vulnerability and agency” (Luxon 155). Lastly, Simon Stow’s scholarship works on the premise that “the stories a polity tells about the dead help shape political outcomes of the living” (2), as he theorizes how critical responses to loss might “reinvigorate and/or reshape American democracy through its rituals and practices of public mourning”39 (17). Like McIvor, Stow seems invested in using public mourning as a tool that might aid in addressing and correcting the

39 Stow specifically defines public mourning “as the attempt to employ grief for political ends, where grief is understood as the expression of ‘deep emotional anguish, usually about death and loss’” (5); this understanding of mourning draws a distinction between mobilizations of grief that are “democratically productive and unproductive” (5). Stow’s examples of responses to loss that prompt “critical-theoretical reflection, democratic pedagogy, and political” (16) include Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and African American funerary tradition.

shortcomings of American democracy40, which fruitfully couches public mourning as a practice that can revitalize democracy and shape the future of politics.

One prominent claim with which Pool, McIvor, and Stow would agree is that loss, grief, and mourning are generative, producing an ongoing plurality of activities for political ends. They also understand mourning as an important political tool that helps to diagnose and critique social injustices that disproportionately impact under-represented communities. Political theory, in fact, positions mourning as a valuable source of insight that identifies how loss and subsequent responses to loss are especially telling about contemporary politics and its problems. Responses to loss, or lack thereof, contribute to the elevation of unjust realities faced by under-represented communities, lifting them above political frays that disavow and/or deliberately mitigate their loss, grief, and mourning. Beyond situating mourning in a squarely theoretical domain, political theorists have done the important work of identifying and inviting political agency through acts of mourning, so that the politics of mourning constitute a practical intervention.

Dissertation Chapter Overviews

My dissertation explores three different sites of loss and mourning, which are contextualized in three distinct Chicana/o plays: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in Marisela Treviño

Orta’s Braided Sorrow; the San Joaquin Valley, CA in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints; and the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles, CA in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad. Though these sites each have specific geospatial anchors, the plays gesture towards loss and mourning that might occur in similar settings encompassing migrant farmworker communities, US-Mexico

40 As a caveat, Stow also acknowledges that mourning, as political activity, can undermine democracy, and he sees the Greeks’ concern about grief in politics relevant for contemporary democratic politics. For more about how grief problematizes democratic politics, see especially pp. 7-12 in American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (2017).

borderlands, and barrios that have a strong Chicana/o or Latina/o gang presence. Despite distinct geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts, I unite these spaces under the aegis of mourning, being mindful of the ways these fictional dramatic works are reflective of incidents and realities pertaining to Chicana/o communities.

The organization of the body chapters is guided by a migratory pattern that begins in

Mexico, traverses the “herida abierta” that is the US-Mexico border,41 and ends in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, California—from maquila labor to farm work to gang culture. In part, this is to map the physical movements of bodies and the different locations they inhabit (either temporarily or permanently) in the three plays I examine, but it also metaphorically signals the ways in which peoples south of the US-Mexico border bear the weight of losses as they migrate to a new country in hopes of a better future.42 Migration can be classified in many ways, and it can be understood as voluntary or involuntary; to migrate is to experience some kind of loss, which may effect different kinds of psychological, emotional, and even physical responses.

Nevertheless, this dissertation acknowledges the longstanding presence of indigenous and

Mexican communities before the territorial gains of the US with the signing of the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848,43 so that losses produced in the experience of migration stand in

41 My dissertation deliberately returns to the site-specific Chicana/o cultural contexualization of the border, as first theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Thus, it contests the ways in which the border has been decontextualized, become a widely-used metaphor for liminality, abstractly spatialize, and/or universalized. For more on border theory and a critique of its decontextualization, see Mary Pat Brady’s “Fungibility of Borders” and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject”.

42 Various losses occur with migration, including the loss of home, family, and community; potentially, migration and resettlement can also lead to the fracturing or loss of language, culture, and a sense of identity.

43 Despite the signing of the treaty, which guaranteed full citizenship rights to Mexicans who remained in consolidated US territories, Lázaro Lima states, “Mexicans living in the newly consolidated United States found themselves as foreigners in places they had inhabited even from Mexico’s Independence from Spain” (22). See The Latino Body (2007).

addition to many other apertures for loss, grief, and mourning that do not necessarily entail migration; these apertures include colonialism, displacement, and territorial dispossession44.

Indeed, Latina/o literary scholar Ylce Irizarry’s four-storied project identifies narratives of loss as instrumental for the study of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, explaining that “one must recognize the losses the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo catalyzed—geographic, economic, and cultural” (38).45 She also addresses loss in relation to the “United States’ neocolonial path” following 1848, a path which she claims was largely set up by the northern migration of thousands Mexicans into the US (Irizarry 38).

Though the second chapter of my dissertation would argue that “narratives of loss” for

Chicana/o communities, where loss is a product of cumulative structural injustices, find their origins in the arrival of Hernán Cortes and annihilation of Mexican indigenous peoples, I follow in Irizarry’s footsteps in calling attention to how a history of US neocolonialism, which may have originated with various seemingly benign “interventions,” has produced the very sites of loss my dissertation engages. These sites undoubtedly point to neocolonialism, as they particularly address femicide along the US-Mexico border, environmental violence in migrant farmworker communities, and the formation of gangs in East Los Angeles. Moreover, I see northern migratory patterns as a significant force that both illuminates and contributes to the development of social and economic structural injustices for Mexican, Mexican-American, and

Chicana/o communities.46 Lastly, another organizational component of my dissertation

44 For instance, see María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885).

45 Attending to the US’s neocolonial relationship with Mexico and acknowledging recovery projects for Chicana/o literary production, Irizarry locates the origins of Chicana/o literature in the eighteenth century, when writings documented how those who were born in the New World negotiated contact and conflict with Anglo-Americans (39).

46 The first chapter, for instance, begins with migration to the border city Ciudad Juárez, and it is no coincidence that the play confronts the industrialization of the border with the passage of NAFTA in 1994; this trade agreement had

emphasizes the distinctive ways that these Chicana/o plays draw on Mexican and Mexican-

American cultural repertoires: folklore (specifically, the figure of La Llorona), the acto and activist legacies of El Teatro Campesino, and the Mexican performance tradition of the carpa47.

These cultural repertoires contribute to the development of both the aesthetics and the politics of the plays I examine, and thus are invaluable tools for Chicana/o playwrights to advance a theatre for social change.

Chapter one, “The Wailing Woman, or La Llorona: Maternal Mourning as Resistance in

Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow (2009),” frames femicide and the mourning of young, brown Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez, the first site of loss my dissertation treats. The chapter provides a review of transdisciplinary and intersecting approaches for understanding femicide in

Ciudad Juárez, and grapples with the question of why femicide continues to happen in the context of criminal impunity and the normalization of gender violence resulting from its repeated

“performance.” I raise questions about grievability à la Butler, which elucidates the exploitation and disposability of women and thereby combats the seriality of violence against women. While many cultural productions about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez have focused on its causes or finding the culprit(s), this particular play turns away from such an approach and instead centers the city’s affective landscape of grief and mourning. It does so through its reimagination of La

Llorona, a well-known figure of folklore in the Americas who bears many interpretations and contextualizations related to mourning.

implications for Mexico that radically changed its economic and political landscape, displacing thousands of Mexicans and forcing migration north for employment and survival.

47 Chicana/o theatre’s use of Mexican American performance traditions, as Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez demonstrates and my dissertation further elucidates, points to how a spirit of opposition (and its corresponding aesthetics) preceded the birth of Chicana/o theatre. For more, see the chapter on Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad and Broyles- Gonzalez’s El Teatro Campesino: Theatre in the Chicano Movement (1994).

Rather than kill her children, as the traditional story goes, La Llorona of Braided Sorrow becomes an ethereal defender of the vulnerable Mexican women living and working near the US-

Mexico border, including the play’s protagonist, Alma, who has only recently arrived to Ciudad

Juárez due to familial financial difficulties. Nevertheless, La Llorona cannot save all of the women from violence and death. Alongside Juárense women leading precarious lives, she, too, must combat misogyny and larger structures of power that adopt apathy toward or otherwise fail to adequately respond to crimes of femicide. I contend that La Llorona in Orta’s play is a maternal presence that de-privatizes grief, propelling mourning into the public sphere in such a way that public mourning becomes a political response to gender-based violence. Here, mourning is not contained in social spaces like wakes and funerals. La Llorona’s mourning, in fact, encroaches upon public spaces as she moves within Ciudad Juárez to save her children’s lives and as she publicly mourns the loss of her children in ways that might not be considered

“socially acceptable.” She poetically explains her experiences of grief through monologue and simultaneously calls out the state’s inaction, incompetency, and lack of legal action.

My analysis contributes to how other Chicana writers and scholars have positioned La

Llorona as a subversive figure, rather than one who is volatile, vengeful, and immoral. I also connect Orta’s appropriation of La Llorona to a Mexican indigenous past of loss and mourning, wrought by forces of colonization that the Indian woman protests through wailing. In this way, I link the political registers of mourning in 20th century Mexico with an indigenous history that focalizes the female as a figure of resistance. In sum, this chapter theorizes mourning as a process and affective act upon which one can develop agency and make political interventions, resisting the idea that mourning is synonymous with a state of victimhood. By paying special attention to La Llorona’s maternal resistance, this chapter delineates how affective responses to

loss and questions of grievability play important roles in the critique of Mexican criminal impunity as well as the demand for state responsibility. It also considers how Braided Sorrow’s use of La Llorona signals the loss of indigenous peoples and cultures, which importantly elucidates how the figure continues to haunt, through grief and mourning, the sociopolitical landscapes of Mexico and, chiefly, the US-Mexico border. Because the first chapter focuses on femicide in Ciudad Juárez and Mexican women, Chicana playwright Marisela Treviño Orta invites a transnational critical reflection of mourning based on a history of loss (beginning with

Spanish colonization) that extends into the present day with gender-based violence in Mexico and then crosses into the US, where other forms of violence transpire. Hence, the transnational perspective with which I begin expands the parameters of understanding Chicana/o inasmuch as

I imbue the term with both indigenous and Mexican histories of oppression.

Chapter 2, “Mourning Slow Violence and Contesting Invisibility: Migrant Farmworkers in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), probes a Chicana/o migrant farmworker community plagued with continued toxic pesticide-use as a site of loss. Mirroring the real-life circumstances that occurred in the San Joaquin Valley of California from 1978 to 1988,

Moraga’s play predominantly grapples with the repercussions of environmental injustice on the fictional town of McLaughlin: contaminated land that is considered a waste dump; diseased female reproductive systems; children born with birth defects; children who have (terminal) cancer; and, by and large, ailing and dying Chicana/o farmworker bodies. Simply put, pesticides are slowly destroying the bodies that labor to cultivate the harvest, so that food production comes, precisely, at the expense of farmworkers’ lives. In the world of Heroes and Saints, local and state authorities, however, are not concerned with the well-being of migrant farmworkers, as they continue to use harmful substances and also fail to provide adequate resources for the

McLaughlin community (i.e. safe drinking water). Indeed, the invisibility of power authorities in the play denotes absolutely negligence and an unwillingness to see migrant farmworkers as something other than subaltern.

The matter of (in)visibility, particularly as it intersects with the issue of environmental injustice, is a guiding theme for my examination of mourning in Heroes and Saints. Drawing on environmental scholar Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, I argue that acts of mourning, originating from both the town’s children and grieving mothers, capture an insidious form of environmental violence and, in so doing, combat the relative invisibility of violence and death that circumscribe McLaughlin. At first glance, the use of harmful pesticides may not be perceived as violence, but I employ the theoretical lens of slow violence and its robust engagement with environmentalism to read damages to the land and injuries to the body48 caused by pesticides as a distinctive kind of violence—one that occurs gradually over time and space.

As Moraga’s play makes evident, environmental racism and injustice in the form of slow violence threatens the well-being and survival of the subaltern migrant farmworkers living in the fictionalized town of McLaughlin. Accordingly, the play engages with the politics of neglecting and making invisible a Chicana/o community that labors to put food on the tables of US households.

Acts of mourning in Heroes and Saints, then, are necessary for subverting the invisibility of slow violence and of an ailing migrant farmworker community. The play’s opening

48 For more on grieving environmental loss, see Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief (2017), edited by Ashley Cunsolo and Karen Landman, which explores grief in relation to nonhuman, environmental degradation. In Environmentalism: An Evolutionary Approach (2017), Douglas Spieles briefly discusses loss of nonhuman entities and the need for humans to experience grief in order to cope with environmental change. See also “Grief from the Destruction of Nature” by John Cianci in Radical Environmentalism: Nature, Identity and More- than-Human Agency (2015). For scholarship about the environmental loss specific to Chicana/o and Latina/o communities and experiences, see Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics (1998) by Devon G. Peña and Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (2019).

crucifixion and the organized demonstration that later occurs in Sacramento have previously been read as instances of political protest, but I illuminate how they might also be read as public mourning. Led by Cerezita, the play’s protagonist who suffers a severe birth defect of her own, children in McLaughlin strikingly resist invisibility by engaging in their own public mourning act: the crucifixion of already-dead children in the fields. Community members led by Chicanas, most of whom are mothers, come together to express their grievances related to toxic living and working conditions, and they also collectively mourn the deaths of McLaughlin children in a public way. It is through mourning and its political efficacy that they call on governmental officials to action. Meanwhile, the television news reporter in the play broadcasts McLaughlin’s acts of mourning, which communicates the plights of subaltern migrant farmworkers to a larger audience and therefore expands the affective limits of mourning insofar as the public acts of mourning become televised.

Mourning acknowledges the continued presence and condition of loss in McLaughlin, and, in the process, raise questions about the treatment of field laborers as disposable and inconsequential. This chapter examines how mourning, devised and performed in multivalent ways, becomes a means through which children and Chicanas exercise agency and become political participants through different forms of protest. I am particularly attentive to how acts of mourning in the play feature dead bodies, sometimes in a visceral manner, not to signal some enigmatic or stoic relationship with death, but rather to deliberately make public and make visible the serious effects of slow violence, especially in a society that refuses to see and treat migrant farmworkers as human. The larger political awareness about Chicana/o farmworkers is a key concern of this chapter, with a focus on the question of gender, as I show the activist lineage of Heroes and Saints stemming from El Teatro Campesino (ETC). While ETC’s use of satire and

wit significantly contrasts with the play’s mournful overtones, I contend that Moraga, too, understands the theater as an important space to make farmworkers visible. Ultimately, the acts of mourning examined in this chapter bring the grief of mothers to the fore, as does the first chapter, but it does so by reframing seemingly innocuous pesticide-use as environmental violence and by exploring the politics of invisibility in McLaughlin.

Chapter three, “Performing Violence and Mourning: The Chola/o and Patriarchal Power in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad (2003)” pivots from the previous two chapters in its exploration of the intersection of grief and rage within the context of the barrio—an intersection, I argue, that illuminates how rage can displace the generative affective dimensions of mourning and ultimately kindle retribution that leads to interpersonal violence, which involves both emotional and physical injury that brings about more loss. A contemporary re-telling of the Greek tragedy

Electra, Alfaro’s Electricidad is set in the barrio of East Los Angeles, and more specifically, in the chola/o gang world of the East Side Locos. At center stage is the protagonist Electricidad, who very publicly mourns the death of her father and “king” of the barrio, Agamenón (“El

Auggie”); Electricidad wishes to retaliate against her mother, Clemencia, for committing the murderous deed. Unlike the Greek iterations of the tragedy,49 Clemencia kills her husband to ostensibly seize power of the barrio for herself, but I draw attention to how the weight of grief over many years actually leads her to murder the patriarchal tyrant of her family and the East

Side. I read Clemencia’s desire for power over the barrio as a means for self-governance and agency. Her narrative of forced matrimony and motherhood, given the barrio’s patriarchal proclivities, is not so different from the narratives that other female characters in the play,

49 In Aeschylus’s version of Electra, Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon to avenge the death of her daughter, Iphigeneia. In another version, Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus, is the one to kill Agamemnon.

including la Abuela, have been compelled to live and uphold. Indeed, scattered throughout

Electricidad are moments of grievances from women who have become subordinate domestic subjects and witnesses to violence in the barrio. Even Ifigenia (La Ifi), Electricidad’s sister, understands the ruthless and damaging patriarchal sovereignty of the barrio. In contrast,

Electricidad remains absolutely loyal to the “cholo” code, which is wedded to patriarchy.

Whether Electricidad is blind to or perhaps chooses to remain ignorant about the oppression of females in the barrio is unclear, but her stubborn adherence to the chola/o code extinguishes a critical view of the patriarchal hierarchy under which she lives. In pursuit of justice, she insists on avenging her father through violence.

This chapter shows that the treatment of violence is multifaceted in the world of

Electricidad, as the play coalesces the barrio’s socioeconomic conditions and the ancient Greeks’ penchant for warfare and violence. Alfaro even integrates an Aztec mythology of war, which further invokes violent acts. In this way, the play presents a continuum of violence in a barrio that has resorted to its own extra-legal measures for justice, on account of its marginalization as well as their physical and spatial exclusion from dominant society, which speaks to the real-life development of barrio spaces. While the playwright’s “Chicanoization” (Allatson) of the tragedy of Electra ostensibly perpetuates the stereotype that the chola/o or gang member is inherently violent, my examination of the play through the characters of La Ifi and Orestes challenges this idea. Respectively, La Ifi chooses religion as a pathway to escape the barrio, and Orestes resists engaging in interpersonal violence before Electricidad finally compels him to kill Clemencia at the end of the play.

The play’s bleak sequence of events and their implications for the characters become tempered by Alfaro’s turn to the Mexican performance tradition of carpa, which this chapter

briefly examines. On the surface, the sustained spirit of humor might find basis in the idea that one laughs to keep from crying—a mantra that seems especially fitting in the chola/o world that

Alfaro has created. Drawing on the word of Mikhail Bakhtin, I argue for a more critical understanding of humor that underscores the incorporation of carpa in Electricidad as both relief from and transient victory over violence. However, the use of biting humor does not mitigate the tragic circumstances that culminate the play: the murder of Clemencia by her son, Orestes. This act of matricide has serious consequences for Orestes, for he becomes his father’s successor as the new king of the East Side Locos, while he also seems to have suffered psychological and emotional problems after killing his mother. Clemencia’s death brings about more grief centered around the destruction of La Casa de Atridas, rather than her actual passing. Alfaro’s play may be more aptly called the tragedy of La Casa de Atridas, which points to the demise of the nuclear family in Electricidad. As the characters of the play focus on violent retribution in the face of loss, it becomes clear that grief that becomes or even works in tandem with rage diminishes the political efficacy of acts of public mourning. In this way, the political ends of grief are deemed ineffective in the play; grief-turned-rage catalyzes militancy, and mourning becomes anchored in the public display of rage, followed by the desire to injure others in the pursuit of justice.

Nevertheless, I contend that Electricidad offers a different kind of public mourning: it becomes the space where Alfaro’s chola/o word meets the public sphere via its spectators, and it turns the private (or contained) grief of the barrio into something public. In short, Electricidad stands as a conscious performance of public mourning that focalizes the barrio and therefore provides an important window into a marginalized and often dehumanized world. By centering violence loss in the world of the chola/o, the political efficacy of Electricidad ultimately rests in its staging of chola/os who grieve and mourn.

The conclusion of my dissertation, “Coda: The Politics of Public Mourning for

Chicana/os and Beyond,” summarizes my project’s main findings and discusses the wider implications of studying public mourning in Chicana/o theatre as well as its contribution to

Chicana/o cultural productions that reflect an ethos of social critique and activism. To advance my project’s particular attention to works of drama, I contextualize mourning in our contemporary political moment by briefly shedding light on a site of loss and mourning in direct conversation with the body chapters and also negotiated in the space of theatre: Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María. In discussing the larger social and political significance of public mourning, I make the larger argument that we must see the theatrical stage as a viable and meaningful space for marginalized communities to grieve and mourn their losses, given the absence of such spaces, the lack of acknowledgement that these losses are real, and the problematic erasure of mourning in favor of, albeit very necessary, political activism to change the systemic structures that continually disenfranchise Latina/o—whether or not they are considered US “citizens.”

As a whole, this dissertation is preoccupied with the political implications of public mourning and the possibilities it offers to intervene upon systemic inequalities and injustices.

However, my emphasis on the politics of public mourning does not lose sight of necessary affective responses to loss, both private and public, and the emotional processes of mourning that importantly return to an understanding of what it means to be human and to suffer loss. It is on this note that the chapters of my dissertation examine theatre as especially fruitful for negotiating and exhibiting losses experienced in Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. In the staging of mourning, audience members might develop empathy toward the bereaved and marginalized individuals who populate the stage.

The theatre space stages the precariousness of certain bodies, and this embodiment importantly serves to prompt a meta-theatrical awareness among spectators. In other words, the presentation and representation that underlies the staging of dramatic works provides a starting point for serious contemplation about the real-life vulnerabilities of Latina/o communities that suffer from nefarious agendas guided by xenophobia, nativism, and racism. Of course, the staging of public acts of mourning invite spectators to bear witness to loss and to critically consider its local and national implications for Latina/o people. In a contemporary moment where individuals are so utterly disconnected from loss due to individual and systemic acts of

“othering” communities that embody cultural, ethnic, and racial difference, combined with what might be a denial of morality and a decline of empathy in the US, theatrical performances and the circulation of affect seem more important than ever. The value of staging mourning cannot be understated, for it creates a necessary suspension of time during which we can attend to loss and begin to see mourning as a political vehicle for social transformation.

CHAPTER 1: THE WAILING WOMAN, OR LA LLORONA: MATERNAL MOURNING AS RESISTANCE IN MARISELA TREVIÑO ORTA’S BRAIDED SORROW (2009)

Introduction

This chapter begins in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—in the borderlands of the US and Mexico, where Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphorical “herida abierta” (25) is made flesh on the bodies of female subjects who have been raped, mutilated, and/or dismembered before death. The femicides of Ciudad Juárez are not a “black legend”;50 femicidal violence has, indeed, claimed the lives of hundreds of women and girls since 1993, and this gender violence continues to the time of this writing in 2019. Countless responses to femicide in Juárez have emerged in the past two decades, ranging from academic investigations, to media coverage, to grassroots forms of activism. Undoubtedly, these responses have revealed the feeling that justice seems to be deeply buried in the desert alongside the bodies of dead women. To engage in an inquiry of mourning in relation to femicide, I turn my attention to Chicana Marisela Treviño Orta’s play, Braided

Sorrow (2009), which importantly provides a window into how a mother mourns the death of her daughter and, subsequently, all of the daughters of Juárez. In this play, mourning can be interpreted as a resistant act aimed at the pursuit of justice for the victims and their families as well as the end to femicide.

50 I borrow this from María DeGuzmán’s Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo- American Empire (2005), which examines how many Anglo-American cultural producers deployed the Black Legend against Spain to paint the Spanish as barbaric and cruel, as opposed to Anglos, whose Anglo-American empire was made to seem like a morally righteous empire. The Anglos were deemed as the right kind of “white” (along ethical and racial lines), while the Spanish were cast as the wrong kind of “white.” While femicides along the US-Mexico may be regarded as a Black Legend that shifts blame entirely on Mexico, Anglo-American corporations, too, are complicit in these femicides, as this chapter will demonstrate.

Braided Sorrow, which won the prestigious University of California Irvine

Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in 2006, is Orta’s first dramatic work. The play follows sixteen- year-old Alma Cardenas, who has moved with her brother, Carlos, and sister-in-law, Yadria, to

Ciudad Juárez in hopes of obtaining employment in Mexico’s maquiladora51 capital to send her parents money in San Luis Potosí (Mexico). Alma’s migration to the border city is not uncommon, as maquiladoras were “dependent on continual flows of migrant women from the center and south of Mexico” (Volk and Schlotterbeck 63). Moreover, young Mexican women became the primary labor force because maquiladora managers understood the ideal worker as

“docile, undemanding, nimble-fingered, nonunion and not militant” (Sklair 172); these characteristics became problematically synonymous with female workers and, by 2004, women made up just over half of assembly plants’ workforce (INEGI 6). In these ways, Orta paints

Ciudad Juárez as the site of a racialized and gendered political economy. Alma and her family quickly learn that Juárez is also the site where women are disappeared, sexually violated, brutally murdered, and then disposed of in the desert.

51 Maquiladora refers to a foreign-owned assembly plant in Mexico that manufactures imported goods for export at a low cost. After the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, the Mexican government established the Border Industralization Program to create jobs along the border and thereby slow down migration to the US; the program allows duty-free importation of raw materials and equipment so long as they are exported back to the US (Leonard). Maquiladoras are highly relevant to femicide in Ciudad Juárez, as the city’s maquiladora sector has been connected to the kidnappings and murders of young female maquila workers.

In the midst of the deadly borderlands, Braided Sorrow summons La Llorona52 as a mother and protector who vigilantly watches over young women like Alma.53 La Llorona first appears at a bus terminal upon Alma’s arrival in Juárez, temporarily guarding Alma in her brother’s short absence as he cares for his wife, who, unbeknownst to them, is pregnant. As the play unravels the daily challenges of the Cardenas family and the socio-economic conditions of living in the borderlands (including Alma’s troubling experiences working at a maquiladora), so does La Llorona continue to materialize when women most need her protection from threatening forces. Yet, even La Llorona’s omniscience is not enough to save many of the women of Juárez.

She admits that she “can’t save them all” and subsequently directs Alma to “dig up [her] river of blood”; she calls on the adolescent to “let the earth bleed its sorrow” and “[t]ell them that the river will bleed into the desert as long as [her] daughters are hunted” (Orta 57-58). La Llorona’s command is a tall, even dangerous order, because Alma must dig up this river in Anapra, which is in the outskirts of town and a perilous journey for any young woman to undergo. Obediently serving as La Llorona’s messenger, Alma travels to Anapra where she ultimately meets her demise. Vulnerable and frightened, Alma tries to scream but freezes; as a result, La Llorona does

52Although there exists a catalog of lloronas—that is to say, there exists a wide variety of productions of the figure— the traditional version that haunts our cultural imagination goes some like this: a woman commits infanticide and then spends the rest of eternity searching for and mourning over her murdered children near bodies of water. Dissemination of this traditional version maintains a few essential elements: a woman, water, wandering, and crying for lost children. Some versions even maintain that the weeping woman wears a white dress. Reasons for why La Llorona murders her children vary, but popular recounting affirms that it is in direct response to her husband’s infidelity. While this act ought to be read as the reaction, admittedly unmeasured, to sexual and familial betrayal, the conventional version of the weeping woman legend fails to concede patriarchal betrayal; instead, according to a patriarchal logic, La Llorona is cast as the menacing villain who committed infanticide and who must be ultimately condemned.

53 The appropriation of La Llorona in relation to factories in Mexico is not entirely unique. Alicia Schmidt Camacho notes that the legend cropped up in the late 1980s in the Matamoros-Brownsville area because a young woman factory worker became pregnant after having an affair with her Anglo plant manager. Because her children were stillborn and had signs of significant birth defects, the woman kills herself. As the legend would have it, her spirit walks the Rio Bravo, looking for children (Camacho 27). Camacho offers different arguments for reading La Llorona in this version, including the idea that she is an “allegory for the national anxieties about the partnership between U.S. companies and the Mexican government” (29) precisely because it advanced a “subversive circulation of cautionary tales about the sexual and economic exploitation of women in the maquiladoras” (28).

not appear in time to save her. Alma “wasn’t supposed to join them” (Orta 74) because her work at the maquiladora was only temporary. But, Orta’s distressing line, “Women are devoured here”

(74), echoes from the play’s beginning to end, and Alma Cardenas is, unfortunately, not exempt.

My examination of Braided Sorrow focuses on the intersection of femicide, mourning, and maternal resistance. Orta does not uncomplicatedly conjure La Llorona in Ciudad Juárez, who remains an intriguing and complex persona in oral and literary traditions. In the context of the play, she is most immediately read as an ethereal figure who defends and liberates women from femicide; she is the savior that Juárez desperately needs. However, La Llorona figures in various ways throughout the play: an extended metaphor that relays the Mexican history of conquest and destruction, a guardian angel, a goddess, and victim of commodification in the context of neoliberalism, among other interpretations. I argue that La Llorona is a surrogate mother whose haunting presence grieves deaths caused by femicide and whose maternal resistance manifests in the form of public mourning, which defends the grievability of the women of Juárez and simultaneously critiques how Mexican state authorities have excluded these women from the political to justify the state’s criminal impunity. La Llorona’s public display of grief and mourning is ultimately an intentional, communal and subversive act that deconstructs grief as a strictly private experience that empties it of social power.

Mourning over the murders and the ongoing hunt of her daughters, La Llorona’s emblematic public expression of grief performs a kind of haunting because listening to her (or even being around her) causes discomfort and anxiety; this anxiety is incidentally familiar with the legend of La Llorona when it is interpreted as a cautionary tale with sexual and patriarchal overtones. La Llorona’s public mourning requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement of deep- seated pain, and it simultaneously generates the social power to demand justice because her

expression of pain—“pain which knows no limits,” according to José Limón (414)—calls for more than indignation and sympathy. These kinds of emotional responses may serve as foundations for social and political change, but La Llorona’s haunting presence prompts and champions action from local and state authorities who have allowed femicide to continue in

Juárez because of their disturbing apathy and employment of a narrative that blames the victim for her demise. While La Llorona may ostensibly emerge as a maternal defender in Braided

Sorrow, she, too, is fighting larger social, political, and economical forces that have shaped the tragic circumstances in Ciudad Juárez. She cannot save Alma, and she alone will not save all of her daughters; accordingly, her haunting presence is important for its maternal resistance and public mourning.

Before analyzing La Llorona’s public expressions of grief, I begin by briefly mapping the dominant discourses that have advanced the investigation of femicide in Ciudad Juárez. These discourses, which are grounded in various academic disciplines, engage sociocultural, economic, and/or political arguments that each bring attention to femicide’s relationship with ideologies and larger structures of power. Femicide is not an isolated phenomenon that can be easily explained, but rather a multifaceted issue whose scope requires a synthesis of interdisciplinary discourses.

Contributing to these discourses are cultural productions by both Mexican- and US-based artists, some of which have made critical interventions for understanding femicide as a structural issue.

Unlike scholarly inquiries, however, cultural productions inevitably grapple with the difficulty of representing violence without sensationalizing it or otherwise participating in a voyeuristic, racist, and/or colonialist gaze. To this end, I explain how Braided Sorrow strategically negotiates the problem of representation by moving away from the desecration of female bodies to focus on mourning in response to death and violence. While the play has been criticized, ostensibly, for

the saccharine portrait of its protagonist and for the inability to aggressively paint a portrait about violent crimes against women in the borderlands, I make the case that Orta’s more poetic treatment of femicide on the theatrical stage rejects the fixation on dead corpses in the desert; instead, it concedes personhood to Juárense women as much as it displays the social injury that femicide causes.

Next, I explore La Llorona as a figure in Mexican folklore and Chicana/o literature, attending to the ways she has been historically and culturally reimagined. I especially consider how Chicana writers have cast La Llorona as a figure of resistance and how Orta similarly follows suit but does not abandon her characterization as a mother who mourns the death of her children. Accordingly, I discuss the play’s aesthetics of mourning and the ways it is particularly framed using the mother-child relationship. It is here that I briefly turn to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of grief and mourning to contest the notion that successful grief work requires the mourner to sever bonds with the deceased. On the contrary, parental grief challenges this idea and, instead, suggests that negotiating the loss of a child leads to the recognition of an inability to be whole again. My attention to La Llorona’s emotional pain, and even the physiological manifestations of grief, leads me to question to what degree the lives of Juárense women are considered grievable in the public sphere. Employing Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, I contend that femicide is a repeated performance of violence, made possible by criminal impunity, that reduces women to what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as “bare life.” In short, the issue of grievability and “bare life” existence go hand-in-hand.

In the last sections of this chapter, I elaborate on the abandonment of Juárense women by

Mexican state officials and other entities of power (i.e. maquila corporations). I draw attention to how Braided Sorrow weaves the problem of criminal impunity and blaming-the-victim

narratives into La Llorona’s problematic experiences with the police when she reports that her daughter has gone missing and when she learns about her daughter’s murder. In particular, I address how her public mourning enables the critique of the state’s failures, which have made the lives of Juárense women ungrievable. Because La Llorona’s carries her grief wherever she goes, refusing containment, her public mourning directly undermines the idea that the murders of these women do not matter. Even the use of black crosses in the play, painted on telephone poles to serve as visual markers of loss, contribute to a politics of public mourning. As an act of resistance, public mourning ultimately raises serious questions about state responsibility and structural neglect. To conclude, I briefly describe how public mourning acts have been realized by real victim’s mothers and activists on the ground; these acts have importantly galvanized and politicized communities in response to femicide in Ciudad Juárez.

Ciudad Juárez and the Contexts for Femicide

Femicide at the border has caused the world to view Ciudad Juárez not only as a “city of vice” due to considerable drug crime, prostitution, and other illicit activities that capitalize on the border’s fluidity and porousness, but also as a “symbolic place of women-killing” (Staudt xi).

Grounded in a commitment to understanding and eradicating violence against women, journalists, academics, activists, national and worldwide organizations, and cultural producers of all kinds have contributed to the study of femicide by producing knowledge using various methods of inquiry, theoretical frameworks, and approaches. Many theories about why the murders have happened (and continue to happen) have subsequently emerged, but there are a couple of dominant theories that have been corroborated by several interlocutors. However, I want to acknowledge that a comprehensive understanding of femicide requires a synthesis of

several interdisciplinary discourses to avoid minimization or, worse, erasure of structural problems at local, state, and global levels.

Before providing a review of these salient discourses, I first want to make clear that my use of femicide, as opposed to gender violence, is a direct expression of violence against women that collectively stems from political, economic, and social realms and that can also, indisputably, be attributed to male power. The United Nations General Assembly defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women” (1993) and acknowledges that such violence has roots in gender inequality. While girls and women constitute the majority of persons affected by gender violence due to an unequal distribution of power, this is not to say that men are exempt from gender violence. Due to heteronormative norms and roles associated with gender, men, too, can become targets of violence, should they transgress these norms and roles. Further, not all gender violence results in murder, though the possibility of murder certainly increases under an escalation of violence; thus, femicide is best understood as a specific kind of gender violence.54

Perhaps the most inadequate approach to understanding the scope of femicide in Ciudad

Juárez is the idea that there are several perpetrators whose psychotic state or otherwise deranged disposition leads them to serial killing. Though several suspects were arrested,55 the femicides

54 Scholars may use the terms femicide and feminicide, sometimes interchangeably, to refer to the “the murder of women and girls because they are female,” a generic definition developed by feminist sociologist Diana Russell (15). Feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde translated femicide into Spanish as feminicide, with Russell’s permission, but added to the original word’s meaning the impunity with which crimes against women were treated by misogynist state power officials. Thus, feminicide seems to implicate the state’s role in taking responsibility for these murders. I use femicide because it refers to gender-based violence that either implicates the state or individual perpetrators, or both. For an extended discussion of femicide vs feminicide, see Fregoso and Bejarano introduction to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (2010), especially pp. 4-5.

55 Egyptian Abdul Latif Sharif became a chief suspect and a scapegoat, due to his history of sexual violence. Sharif was arrested in 1995 and eventually sentenced to 60 years in prison after being found guilty of one of the two

continued.56 Another theory connects the disappearance and killing of women with existing organized crime or isolated criminal activities (Gonzalez Rodriguez). In fact, Mexican police participation in the murders through organized crime has been cited (Gonzales Rodriguez;

Dominguez-Ruvalcaba and Ravelo; Rodriguez). More developed approaches and analyses are socioeconomical in nature, as they thoroughly contextualize the murders in the borderlands, taking into account the rise of maquiladoras with neoliberal developments like The North

American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 as well as the intersectional identities of the female victims (gender, class, race); these two threads are not mutually exclusively. Weismann, for instance, argues that we must explore theories “related to political economy and the socioeconomic injustices that global economic liberalization produces” to underscore “the relationship between socioeconomic systems that contribute to and depend on the subordination of poor communities and gender oppression” (225). Cultural approaches to understanding the femicides foreground traditional gender roles and norms that reflect long-standing patriarchal values and gender power dynamics in Mexico, while they also point to a misogynist culture to which these Mexican cultural imperatives give rise. Of particular interest is the threat that women pose to the social order that maintains male power when they take jobs, leaving their

“place” in the domestic sphere and displacing men as breadwinners. One final framework that has sought to explain the killings along the border, incorporating the lenses of political science and feminism, has been advanced by Kathleen Staudt; she posits that institutions must be held

accused murders; he died in prison. More bodies of raped and mutilated women continued to appear in Ciudad Juárez while Sharif remained behind bars.

56 In Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism, Patricia A. Ybarra uses seriality “as a form of temporality under neoliberalism” (106) and concludes that the femicides represent “a different mode of serial neoliberal violence (emphasis mine)” (107).

accountable for their ability, or inability, to promptly and adequate respond to femicide, noting that Mexican “state and municipal police investigative and prosecutorial systems cannot be counted” as competent institutions, especially since “violence against women is trivialized as normal” on the Mexican side of the border (145). In sum, the theories I have briefly explained, together, contribute to a more nuanced understanding of femicide in Ciudad Juárez and ultimately call for the use of a human rights laws framework that is capable of employing these interdisciplinary and intersecting analyses, while still maintaining specificity and context for the

Mexican border space, to legally contest the conditions that produce this kind of violence and criminal impunity.57

In a blog piece, the playwright parallels the devastation of the Mexicas after the arrival of the Spanish to the “invasion” of hundreds of maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border following the Border Industrialization Program in 1965 and NAFTA’s inception in 1992—both neo-liberal invasions made possible by foreign factories which contribute, in part, to the deaths of Mexican women who Orta calls “casualties of an economic conquest” in the Americas (“An

Essay: On Braided Sorrow”). The Procuraduria General de la Republica (Office of the Attorney-

General), documents that 379 girls and women were victims of intentional homicide between

1993 and 2005 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Rosa Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, editors of

Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (2010), report that over 500 girls and women have been murdered since 1993 and more than 1,000 have disappeared in the state of Chihuahua,

57 It is important to keep in mind that, while femicide may be construed as a phenomenon in Ciudad Juárez or an exceptional occurrence, femicide actually occurs throughout the Americas, including in other parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and part of South America, as Fregoso and Bejarano’s Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas can attest.

Mexico (7), where Ciudad Juárez is located.58 These numbers alone certainly nod to Orta’s characterization of women as “casualties” of a neoliberal agenda made possible by NAFTA.

While Orta treats femicide in direct relation to maquiladoras, it is important to note that the violence against women is not only about the border assembly plants.59 According to Julia

Monárrez Fragoso of the Colegio de la Frontera in Tijuana, about 20% of women murdered actually worked in the maquilas between 1993-2001 (in Volk and Schlotterbeck 61). Further, in

Trama de Una Injusticia (2009), Monárrez Fragoso argues that violent crimes against women actually preceded NAFTA, in light of newspaper articles published in 1991 and 1992 that document victims of rape and murder (12-13). As Alice Driver suggests, femicide perhaps started to be quantified during NAFTA’s implementation (18), but this does not necessarily mean that the prevalence of femicide has been a direct result of the 1993 global turn in Mexico’s economy. Femicides in Ciudad Juárez actually need to be placed in hemispheric and global contexts. Fregoso, in fact, makes a pointed call to “de-Juárezify femicide,” as she contextualizes misogyny and violence against women in neighboring countries south of the U.S-Mexico border including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica (109-110). As a human rights issue, femicide transcends binational agreements, relationships, and borders. It requires a global vision of social justice that fights against misogyny, poverty, labor exploitation, and criminal impunity.

58 The numbers disappearances presented here relies on Fregoso and Bejarano. Because the Mexican government has not conducted a rigorous investigation, statistics of femicide and disappearance in the state of Chihuahua is a subject of contention. Government authorities, nonprofit organizations, as well as advocates for the victims may vary in their reports.

59 In an arts and entertainment article featuring a conversation with Orta, John Kuebler erroneously reports that most of the victims of the murders and disappearances in Ciudad Juárez are young women who work in maquiladoras (2008).

Representations of Femicide in Transborder Cultural Productions

Adding to the body of scholarship, cultural productions have engaged with the disappearances and murders of female bodies in Ciudad Juárez to give voice to women, to unpack the complexities of femicide, and, in some cases, to restore justice to the victims, to name a few agendas. Though varied in genre and aesthetics, representations of femicide in fictional accounts often draw from and affirm the aforementioned analyses. In her study of select fictional and nonfictional productions, Marietta Messmer concludes that these representations convey how the femicides are a “structural and highly significant transborder issue that has roots in the region’s current political and economic developments, as well as its pervasive social and cultural changes” (3). Most important, “cultural producers have filled the vacuum left by state officials,” as Volk Schlotterbeck suggest (54). Artists from both the United States and Mexico have created films (including both feature and documentary style), novels, plays, and visual arts, and they may exclusively use English or Spanish and, in some cases, codeswitching.60 While cultural productions may indeed make necessary and viable interventions in the lacuna of official documentation, and certainly, raise awareness about the femicides, they are not always without their problems in representation. Scholars have aptly studied the aesthetic decisions of artists to point out how these may be unintentionally complicit in replicating the same socio-cultural issues relevant to violence against women. One such example is Fregoso’s critique of Charles

Bowden’s photographic-essays in Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. She argues that

Bowden fails to attend to the “multiple structures of violence in the lives of women” (14), and,

60 Films include Bordertown and, in documentary style, Señorita Extraviada. Diana Washington Valdez has done extensive journalistic coverage on the femicide, and Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez’s Huesos en el desierto (2002) is significant work of investigative journalism. Novels in Alicia Gaspa de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005) and Roberto Bolaños’s 2666 (2004).

most reprehensible, that his photograph and description of a dead female corpse, whose mouth is open as if screaming in horror up to her death, “crosses the line between titillation and information” (15). Fregoso states the Bowden adopts “a racist and colonialism gaze” as the body of the woman is “aestheticized and transformed into a fetish” (16), which, I suggest, is further exacerbated by the fact that the photograph becomes a commodity upon publication.

Fregoso’s assessment of Bowden’s commentary productively generates an important question: how is femicide and, more specifically, how are the bodies of dead girls and women, in fact, “aestheticized and transformed” in cultural productions? And what additional knowledge or interventions do these representations actually make, if we are to follow the notion that they fill gaps that exist in official publications from state authorities or even in the work of academic researchers? These two preliminary questions, especially the former, raise ethical implications, or, specifically, the ethics of representing violence and death. The aesthetic decisions that inform representations of the Juárez femicides vary to the nth degree, and choice of genre(s) guides artistic composition on both formal and informal levels.61 It is outside the scope of this project to comparatively examine the representations of femicide in different genres. Instead, I deliberately focus on one cultural production, Braided Sorrow, to explore its aesthetics, formal elements, and, above all, its socio-political import, which I argue lies in the embodiment of grief–an emotion that is discursively present in nearly all cultural productions about the Juárez femicides.

61 Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood, for instance, is considered a murder mystery novel, but it actually loosely adopts mystery conventions; more than just functioning as a murder mystery for entertainment’s sake, the novel, which is incidentally written by an academic, attempts to raise larger questions about the complex conditions under which these murders have continued. Nonetheless, the novel has been critiqued for the protagonist’s concern for “solving” a crime, which reveals how a “whodunit” plot device is gravely inadequate for unraveling social, political, and economic intersecting threads; as Marissa Lopez notes, it is not until the protagonist is “disabled as a rational actor” due to unforeseen plot twists that the novel ostensibly begins to unpack more complex questions.

Orta’s attention to mourning functions as a strategic dramatic representation that abstains from the “abjection of women through death, as well as the desecration of their bodies in public discourse” (Fregoso 25). Discussing the best-known activist documentary film about the femicides, Señorita Extraviada, Rosa Linda Fregoso notes that it is a challenge to “represent the bodies in a respectful manner” (26). If cultural productions and representations of femicide must convey the violence against women through artistic means, then artists’ engagement with femicide intersect with questions of ethical responsibility: How does one re-create the paralyzing fear and violence the women of Juárez face without depending on a sensationalist and voyeuristic on-stage experience? Orta is careful to tell a story about femicide in a sincere and compassionate manner, and she invokes La Llorona—a figure whose pain becomes braided strands of sorrow due to past and present instances of loss—to create uneasiness and perhaps even produce empathy among audiences, without relying on an aesthetics of sensationalism. I do not mean to suggest that playwrights are entirely different from their artistic counterparts, for both literary writers and visual artists must make careful decisions as far as how they choose to depict the gender-based murders, to what degree, and to what end, if they do decide to engage with the violence of it at all. But, there is something about staging the violence and considering a real-life audience that perhaps makes a dramatic representation of femicide in Ciudad Juárez especially difficult.

In addition to Braided Sorrow, the repertoire of theatrical representations of the femicides include Victor Ronquillo’s Las muertas de Juárez: Cronica de una larga pesadilla (1999),

Humberto Robles’s Mujeres de Arena: Testimonios de Mujeres en Ciudad Juárez (2002), Ruben

Amavizca’s Las Mujeres de Juárez (2002), Virginia Hernandez’s La ciudad de las moscas

(2008), Cristina Michaus’s Mujeres de Ciudad Juárez (2008), Victor Cazares’s The Dead

Women of J-Town and Smiley (2008) and Coco Fusco’s The Incredible Disappearing Woman

(2001).62 These works, however, have not been given the same scholarly attention as other cultural productions. With the exceptions of Patricia A. Ybarra’s recent work and Christina

Marin’s activist and reflective pieces about productions of Amavizca’s Las Mujeres de Juárez, there is limited scholarship surrounding theatrical representations of femicides in Ciudad Juárez, though academic works make note of these productions when mentioning activist endeavors. In part, this could be a result of the bifurcation of research and activism around the subject matter; one attempt to bridge the two is made by Marin, but I see her work as leaning more towards advocacy using the theatre. Research and activism are not mutually exclusively domains; they can energetically inform one another, but there are particular questions that drive their specific agendas. I see theatrical advocacy around the femicides geared towards reparative measures and restorative justice, with the goal of completely eradicating the murder of girls and women; in other words, they aspire to bring about tangible political and social change. Research on theatrical works, on the other hand, I understand as more concerned with exploring the nature and implications of representations, which are sometimes political, and an examination of how and why these works might foment change, or what kind of theoretical contributions they make to the larger fabric of humanity. With this in mind, the questions I raise are aimed at further understanding the aesthetics and formal elements of Braided Sorrow to arrive at a discussion of grief and mourning, focused on the expressive, public, and political nature of mourning.

I am particularly drawn to Braided Sorrow because its attention to embodied grief and mourning, as I will illustrate, dovetails with the fundamental concern of embodiment for

62 It is important to note that while some of the plays have been produced in Mexico and the United States, others have never or rarely been produced.

theatrical representations. Unlike other genres, plays, whether or not they are actually staged, contend with the representation of something in visible form; real bodies populate the dramatic stage, dialogue is the chief means for communication, and ideas and feelings must be made manifest in literal or figurative ways. And, as expected, the representation demands its presentation through performance. The matter of embodiment, then, raises the stakes for representations of femicide. But, unlike other plays which depend on the testimonio form to construct a kind of docudrama,63 Braided Sorrow wields nonrealistic representations to interrogate the violence and death that turn the play’s attention to grief and mourning.

Nevertheless, the play has been criticized for its aesthetic, specifically its ostensible refusal to participate in the representation of corpses in hyper-visual ways. In his review of El

Centro Su Teatro’s performance of Braided Sorrow, theater critic John Moore described Orta’s representation of the femicides as “intentionally careful,” “palatable,” and possessing “inherent sweetness,” the latter of which he argues, “prevents [the play] from reaching its full dramatic potential.” Additionally, he says that the subject matter “calls for more theatrical aggressiveness and abandon,” hence Orta’s resolve to “spar[e] the audience the sight of anything too graphic is to its detriment” (Moore). Moore critiques Orta’s play for not confronting its audience enough with the realities of death and horror in Ciudad Juárez, and, regrettably, his flawed understanding of Braided Sorrow as “sweet” signals an utter disregard for the tragedy of a young woman the play presents. Moore’s comments unwittingly rob the play’s political engagement and emphatic, but not garish, demand for social justice through more poetic means. There’s an implicit argument here that Orta’s representation of these violent crimes lacks the ability to agitate and

63 Such is the case with plays like Amavizca’s Las Mujeres de Juárez and Michaus’s Mujeres de Juárez. For a discussion about the use of testimonio and its theatricalization, see Ybarra 113-121.

emotionally stir the audience in the manner that a dead corpse would. Orta has certainly taken a different approach, and she has done so strategically. The absence of dead bodies on a stage may signal the literal disappearance and loss of girls and women. Moreover, Orta may understand that reducing the humanity and life narratives of women to corpses is not a productive means to honor the deceased, especially in consideration of how some bodies that have been found are so severely maimed, mutilated, and violated that it is impossible to identify them; these corpses remain in anonymity.

In “Body Counts on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Alicia Schmidt Camacho warns against artistic representations that “consign Mexican womanhood to an unchanging death” (36).

Critiquing the discourse of the cadaver, Camacho adds that the “proliferating figure of the dead body, which invites indignation at the victimization of Mexican women, incites observers’ identification with their wounded femininity after death, but may displace any recognition of poor women’s subjectivity in life” (37). Here, Camacho ultimately argues that the image of the cadaver reduces or altogether vanishes the subjectivity of vulnerable women. In this way, the work of mourning that Orta makes possible through the figure of La Llorona becomes much more valuable, for how can one mourn the dead (or the disappeared) if there is no subjectivity acknowledged? And how can the discourse about femicide in Juárez depict women if the discourse continues to uplift corpses and unrecovered subjectivity in death? Melissa W. Wright argues that it is important to engage with the “project of reversing the discourse of female disposability” (564). Along these lines, it is also important to refuse the normalization of murder and death; not doing so cultivates a numb and passive resignation that will not move authorities towards action for justice. While Braided Sorrow’s protagonist does suffer the unfortunate fate to which many women in Juárez have succumbed, Orta’s lack of fixation on dead bodies pivots

from a rhetoric of female disposability that does not concede personhood. Rather than being treated as another cadaver in the desert, the play bears witness to Alma’s experiences both in and outside the home. In so doing, the play restores Alma’s subjectivity.

La Llorona Reimagined: From Tenochtitlan to the Borderlands

Before moving to an analysis of the play, it is important to consider the rise and dissemination of the story of La Llorona. This consideration is not all inclusive, as iterations of

La Llorona appear in hundreds of spaces and would require specific contextualization that account for historical, cultural, and political nodes. The Mexican legend of La Llorona, or the

Weeping Woman” has received extensive critical attention, with its genesis in folk oral tradition and its continued transmission beyond the spoken word in written works, art, and even cyberspace. The legend refers to a woman who is abandoned by the man she loved and whose grief (others may read her grief as a kernel for her eventual anger and revenge) leads her to kill her children by drowning. La Llorona is condemned to wander the earth for eternity in search of her dead offspring until their bodies have been recovered; she looks for other children near bodies of water for replacement. Accordingly, oral traditions often position La Llorona as the female “bogeyman” to caution mischievous children and to regulate their behavior. She is a looming threat to which the Mexican folk community is no stranger. In her robust survey of the various representations of Greater Mexico’s haunting figure, There was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (2008), Domino Perez notes that La Llorona is “alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, a person, legend, ghost, goddess, metaphor, story, and/or symbol” (2). Stories of La Llorona have evolved to a point that the figure materializes in diverse ways and takes on new meaning through adaptation, so that it maybe be difficult to find semblances of the more traditional lore. Adaptations are building cultural, even moral,

ambiguities that abandon some of the lore’s most recognizable components: a suffering woman, infanticide, water, to name a few. Further, La Llorona has become a commodified figure outside of Mexico, making her a transnational legend of interest.64 For the specific purposes of my research, I will provide a brief overview of her development and place in Chicana/o oral and literary traditions, and the latter will inform the basis of my reading of Braided Sorrow. I turn to

Chicana literature as a source of critical inquiry because it offers a catalog for how La Llorona has become manifest and because it enables us to interrogate what kinds of cultural, social, economic, and political issues the figure helps illuminate, especially questions at stake for the welfare and advancement of Chicanas.

There have been efforts to locate La Llorona’s origins and to identify a historical figure with which she best aligns. Using the testimonio in Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, Perez locates the first documented recounting of her appearance before the arrival of Hernan Cortes in

1591, identifying her as an indigenous woman and grounding her story in indigenous Mexican roots: “In the beginning, there was a woman. Throughout the streets of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Mexicas (more commonly known as the Aztecs), a woman was heard weeping about the fate of her children prior to the Spanish conquest” (16). Within the context of this particular conquest, La Llorona and the meaning attached to her surfaces as a direct result of the massacre of the Mexicas, such that she is ultimately “condemned to either foresee or bemoan the fate of her children” (Perez 18). These children can both be read as biological and figurative, for all indigenous peoples suffered geographical, cultural, and political displacement by the Spanish.

Grieving the anticipated loss of peoples, culture, and place, La Llorona weeps; her affective

64 In April 2019, New Line Cinema released The Curse of La Llorona (other markets referred to it as The Curse of the Weeping Woman).

response signals the demise of Mexica culture. While Perez here indicates a more subdued mourning with “weeping,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands aptly returns to a consideration of the magnitude of the loss, noting instead the Indian woman’s “wailing” to signify her deep-seated grief, pain, and anger in response to the colonization and decimation of her indigenous roots. She adds, “the Indian woman’s only means of protest [is] wailing” (Anzaldúa 43)—a claim that posits wailing as an affective and audible act of resistance. Anzaldúa’s claim is central to my reading of La Llorona as a figure of maternal resistance, whose wailing, or mourning, does not proclaim an excess of grief that leads to an affective paralysis, but rather that her mourning is indeed a means of protest. In other words, I read La Llorona as a figure who employs grief for political ends, mobilizing her grief as a form of resistance and as a critical response to loss that raises important questions about gender violence, citizenship, criminal impunity, neoliberal practices, and globalization.

Anzaldúa’s reclaiming of La Llorona as indigenous and, especially, as a subversive woman is a foundational kernel in the composition of Braided Sorrow. Orta deliberately invokes a history of Spanish conquest a la Anzaldúa: “One of the omens of doom that foretold the coming of the Spanish and the fall of the Aztec empire was a woman dressed in white wandering the streets of Tenochtitlan” (2). Even the play’s mise-en-scene, including “an Aztec pyramid,” is telling of an indigenous history that helps to situate the wailing woman within a history of violence and decimation. The pyramid, which is conspicuously and symbolically “made out of junk, a patchwork of corrugated tin, wire and tires: the discarded and scavenged artifacts of a border town” (Orta 5), literally becomes undone throughout the play’s duration. It is not difficult to liken the remnants of the Spanish conquest with the “artifacts” of the borderlands, and we wonder to what extent these artifacts are not actually the physical remains of murdered girls and

women in Ciudad Juárez. Nevertheless, it is the wailing that resounds through space and time as a mode of resistance—from the arrival of the Spanish to the contemporary moment of femicide.

Though I anchor the development of my analysis of mourning in Chicana literary works using La Llorona of Braided Sorrow and in the context of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, I am not the first to reposition La Llorona as a figure of resistance. Indeed, my reading of La Llorona as a defiant figure falls in line with how she has been reimagined as a symbol of resistance in cultural productions by other Chicana writers. Writers who invoke La Llorona in their works reimagine her in ways that challenge La Llorona’s rigid constructions and representations, which negatively cast her as a person defined by filicide, a “bad” mother, a cultural betrayer, and a victim, among a variety of readings. In Women Singing in the Snow (1995), Tey Diana Rebolledo turns to one incisive point for her culturally-based analysis of the Chicana literary tradition: the study of how

Chicanas have claimed and revised literary myths and archetypes, from Coatlicue to La Llorona.

She notes that, “Chicana writers choose, define, and image [sic] their myths and heroines,” thereby creating “new role models” that subvert existing ones, while also making room for

“different (sometimes radically different) traits and characteristics” (49).

The introduction of these new traits and characteristics contribute to Chicana writers’ project of actively articulating their identities, as Rebolledo argues, and it also points to their implicit project of writerly transgression. For instance, Helena Maria Viramontes’s short story

“The Cariboo Cafe” in The Moth and Other Stories (1995), Cherrie Moraga’s play The Hungry

Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Ana Castillo’s novel So Far From God (1993) and Sandra

Cisneros’s title short story “Woman Hollering Creek” from her short story collection, Woman

Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), are some of the salient literary works that challenge the heteronormative, patriarchal, and Catholic underpinnings at work in more traditional

constructions of La Llorona. Working against a Manichean understanding of the world, these writers transform La Llorona into a figure that resists different manifestations of oppression and thereby transgress narratives fixed on the dichotomy of the virgin and the whore rooted in

Mexican tradition.

In addition to the transformation that La Llorona undergoes as she is historically and culturally reimagined, her resistance in these new narratives becomes a locus for transformation and, especially, a means for re-shaping the social, political, and sexual lives of women to advance a new female consciousness and subjectivity. These literary works, then, fall under what

Ralph E. Rodriguez has called “contestatory literature,” or “one that employs varying narrative strategies to critique, resist, and oppose racism, sexism, homophobia and/or classism” (67). I would add that that the various transformations of La Llorona in literary works are acute politicized activities which, in aggregate form, create a new narrative: La Llorona as a figure who is invested in the persistent opposition of oppressive forces, grounded as she is in the contestatory nature of her reimagination by Chicana and other Latina writers.

While La Llorona predominantly haunts our cultural imagination in cautionary tales intended to discipline thought and behavior, I want to suggest that she visits, or haunts, us with the reminder that oppressive forces exist and they must be invariably challenged. Further, the temporal and geographical fluidity with which she moves in Chicana writings indicates a sustained aesthetic and political investment in reimagining La Llorona to address contemporary oppressive forces, which, ironically, are not necessarily divorced from the oppression wherein La

Llorona was originally positioned. The story of La Llorona, as it has been passed down orally through generations for almost five hundred years (Perez 13) and beyond the Greater Mexico area, and then through written works, has perhaps been stripped from its indigenous roots and

undergone countless mutations, but (and maybe as a result of these mutations) the wailing woman endures through the present day as she is continuously being reimagined and contextualized in new social, cultural, and political milieus. She has become, as Perez states, “an avatar of social and cultural conflict” (13).

My reading of La Llorona in Braided Sorrow is perhaps more forgiving than others.

Marin addresses the multiple roles that La Llorona takes on in the play, stating that she is an

“evocative spirit who teaches, frightens, mesmerizes, tricks and betrays” (200). The latter part of this reading suggests that Marin holds her responsible for tricking Alma into going to Anapra and then betraying Alma by not saving her. Marin, however, may be conflating Braided

Sorrow’s appropriation of La Llorona with the figure’s historical configuration as a cultural betrayer, or a version of La Malinche. Whatever the case, Marin’s analysis of La Llorona does not forthrightly condemn the weeping woman for Alma’s death; this is something Ybarra critiques as a shortcoming. Following the comment that her instructions for Alma are “sinister,

Ybarra contends that La Llorona shows a lack of remorse and that this remorse is exacerbated by the fact that the maternal figure blames Alma. She further notes how La Llorona deliberately leads Alma to the desert, functioning as a plot device that “displaces the fact that most women are taken there rather than journeying there on their own” (123).

Ybarra seems ambivalent about reading the play in a “classically tragic manner” as the playwright Orta herself does when she confesses that “Alma had to die” (interview with Orta), arguing instead that the inevitably of Alma’s death should be read in the context of neoliberal labor. Specifically, she contends that Alma ultimately dies because she is an “exceptional” character who does not submit to the disciplinary procedures that neoliberalism requires for its conservation (123-124). Ybarra is not off the mark when she situates Alma within neoliberalism,

specifically in the disciplinary and exploitative realities of the maquila industry, because Braided

Sorrow takes care to emphasize labor. As previously mentioned, Alma’s family is in dire need of money, and though all of the members express reservation and worry about young Alma’s wellbeing as a worker in the maquiladora, the financial need is greater. Nevertheless, the perils that come with the labor that Alma undertakes lead Alma’s family to worry over Alma’s safety.

Indeed, young girls and women in Ciudad Juárez remain vulnerable.

La Llorona’s Grief: Public Expressions of Emotional and Physical Pain

While many conversations about these femicides, in both popular culture and

(inter)disciplinary scholarship, have centered around its causes (or the culprits), the sequence of scenes that compose Braided Sorrow focuses on exhibiting Ciudad Juárez as a city of and in mourning. Stage directions note that voices and echoes, or “ripples of grief” fill the city (Orta

10), while the barren landscape can be heard “groaning” in pain (Orta 12). Alma’s aunt, Socorro, and Socorro’s friend, Eulalia, ostensibly cannot talk about Juárez without talking about how another body was found on the outskirts of town; Socorro shares, “They said the ground was still moist, still red” (Orta 21). Moreover, the sound of “trickling water” can be heard in a few scenes, which carries a couple of different interpretations: the drips of water represent a city that weeps, while they simultaneously reinforce the water motif associated with La Llorona, who actually appears physically wet in the play. Further, the trickling water strongly contrasts with the desert setting. In a barren landscape where violent killings transpire and blood stains the ground, perhaps it is not water that is trickling but blood. In one scene that takes places at an outdoor market, pomegranates laying on top of a white tablecloth “begin to bleed juice. A dark stain spreads down the length of the tablecloth, the juice spills on the floor” (Orta 22). These

images serve as a reminder that women are being frequently murdered and leading extremely vulnerable lives.

Engulfed in pain, La Llorona willingly does not mourn silently and privately. Long monologues shape her pain into words as she expresses what it feels to suffer the loss of her daughter:

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, I couldn’t even pray. A mother feels the absence of a child— A limb torn from a body. Throbbing [...] When you were born Water flooded out of me So much I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t stop crying. [...] When you didn’t come home I knew something was wrong I felt it. My whole body felt it. A pain, here in my breast, Deep and heavy. It spread out in waves Until every inch of me was rigid Until I couldn’t even see. The body does strange things. It mourns in its own way. (Orta 45-46)

La Llorona frames the depth of mourning using motherhood, and her mourning is figured through much more than incessant cries. She establishes that there is a special bond between mother and child when she explains that the loss and subsequent absence of her daughter is tantamount to ripping a limb from the body. This simile transforms her emotional pain (which remains somewhat abstract) to physical, “throbbing” pain that others can come close to approximating through imagination. Further, La Llorona alludes to giving birth (bringing up the water motif, incidentally)—a great physical pain that is almost too much to bear, as she states she

thought she would die from labor. When her daughter does not come home, she adds, “My whole body felt it. A pain, here in my breast,” and then the body “mourns in its own way.” Through these somatic emphases, La Llorona packages the pain of grief in the language of physical pain.

She suggests that mourning can and does, quite literally, sicken the body to the point that it disrupts normal human functions (e.g. she stops eating, sleeping). The gravity of La Llorona’s pain resulting from the loss of her daughter, as expressed here, is difficult to ignore, and to deny her pain is to deny a human condition. Ultimately, this monologue is a means through which La

Llorona can publicly express her grief and articulate its depth. La Llorona mourns on an emotional level, while her body also mourns the loss, or the torn limb, of her child.

Parental Grief: Freud Reexamined and the Metaphor of Amputation

The unique experience of child loss is “the deepest measure of sorrow and is the most lasting” (Kozlova 5), and the intensity of parental grief can be so much that the grief is labeled as

“pathological, abnormal or unhealthy” (Hindmarch 33). These characteristics suggest that there is something problematic about parental grief and further implies that resolving this grief is somewhat of an impossibility. Of course, the resolution of grief or “successful” grief work was first theorized in Freud’s influential psychoanalytic work on loss in the 20th century. Freud argued that “mourning has quite a precise task to perform; its function is to detach survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead” (Freud 253) such that the bereaved and the dead sever bonds because the bereaved individual’s ability to function in a restructured lifestyle is at stake. Simply put, Freud suggests completely letting go of and moving on without the dead; the dead may as well be regarded as lost, emotion-barren objects that are left behind. The inability to let go and move on points towards a “pathological” way of dealing with grief that Freud theorized as melancholia. The matter of how severing bonds occurs, however, is not actually conceptualized

by Freud, and his theoretical model of mourning seems to break down when he experiences grief in response to his parental loss (Davies 507). Freud describes the experience of his daughter’s loss nine years later in a letter of condolence to his friend, Ludwig Binswanger:

Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. Actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not wish to relinquish. (239)

Freud’s conceptualization of mourning as a means to disengage from the deceased does not follow suit with the above passage. Whereas Freud’s original ideas seem insensitive to the lasting value of the deceased person and the pain of mourning, here he considers the pathos that underlies mourning by focusing on the love for his daughter as a sort of nostalgic tie that maintains a relationship with her; it is a tie that he does not wish to sever. If this short passage is any indication, Freud’s traditional understanding of grief and mourning has been supplanted by new perspectives that reject the idea of severing ties with the deceased as a means of working through and resolving grief. As shown by ethnographic research and other qualitative studies, it is actually the case that parental grief (and not only parental grief, but other forms of grief as well) aims to maintain bonds with the deceased and that this practice brings solace to parents

(Davies 509-510).

Cultivated bonds may bring the prospect of comfort, but the individual is not able to negotiate pain, death, and mourning without also being transformed in some kind of significant way. The literature on parental grief shows that there are three prominent themes in child loss:

“1) the loss of a sense of personal competence and power; 2) the loss of a part of the self; and 3) the loss of a valued other person whose unique character was part of the family system”

(Malkinson and Bar-Tur 104); these themes would also apply to other kinds of loss—where the

loss is central to the mourner’s world. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to focus on the second theme and make the claim that, to my knowledge, little attention has been given to the social and, in particular, biological implications for bereaved mothers who feel like they have lost a part of themselves65; indeed, bereavement means “torn apart.” Experiencing the “loss of a part of the self” is perhaps more aptly conveyed in what has been called the “amputation metaphor” (Klass et al.), or “the vivid sense of a permanent loss of a part of oneself that may be adapted to but will not grow back” (Malkinson and Bar-Tur 105).66 This kind of loss is ostensibly figurative, but the specific adoption of amputation to metaphorize the loss leads to two important ideas for further understanding bereaved mothers: 1) the loss can have a somatic quality to it given that amputation is the physical removal of a body part; and 2) the loss emphasizes the inability to be whole again, because amputation removes a body part that was once integral and/or functional for the body. These two ideas are exemplified when La Llorona expresses what it feels to feel loss in her long monologues that aim to communicate the pain of her grief.

Grievability and The Concept of Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez

It is important to meditate on how La Llorona describes and metaphorizes the loss of her daughter because it underscores its profundity while it simultaneously communicates the grievability of her daughter, a daughter who I suggest functions synecdochally here for all the

65 In “Understanding gender differences in bereavement following the death of an infant: Implications for Treatment,” Wing et al. discuss research findings that consider gender similarities and differences among parents as they negotiate their grief following perinatal loss or loss from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Categories of discussion include shock, numbness, and disbelief; denial; depression and intense sadness; preoccupation; somatic symptoms; anxiety; anger; guilt, self-blame, and blaming the mother; withdrawal and social isolation; search for explanations and attributing responsibility. Ultimately, Wing et al. state that gender influences the experience of loss following infant death.

66 The amputation metaphor for loss can be associated with the term, phantom limb, which refers to painful or non- painful sensations perceived from an amputated limb. Phantom limb explains physiological loss (of a limb), but it can also function as a useful term for discussing abstract kinds of loss—the loss of a child, or part of the self, in this case. For clinical understandings of the term, see the entry on phantom limb in the Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health and Herta Flor’s “Phantom-limb Pain: Characteristics, Causes and Treatment.”

murdered girls and women in Juárez. La Llorona’s mourning, heightened by her own historical embodiment of mourning, suggests that these girls and women need to be recognized as losses in a public sort of way and mourned beyond the private space. Not to mention, the play itself creates a space for grief and mourning. Grievability is an issue that has been raised by Judith

Butler in her work on violence, politics, and mourning following the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a platform she uses to argue that an increasingly divided humanity has adopted a differential distribution of public grieving. She asks, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (20; original emphasis).

In response to these questions, Butler argues there is a common thread that can help us, as a community, to rethink what makes a grievable life: the social vulnerability of our bodies. In other words, we are all linked by the reality that our bodies are indeed vulnerable, thus subject to violence and the experience of loss, which, incidentally, is also a human universal. We recognize the life of the other, contends Butler, by acknowledging a shared vulnerability, and this can lead us to reflect on our interconnectedness. This is further substantiated by the idea that there is a

“fundamental dependency on anonymous others” (Butler xii). Our failure to recognize our shared vulnerability and interdependence, makes the lives of other less human, less valuable, and less real. Ultimately, they have become both unreal and excluded, suggests Butler. Accordingly, the loss of those whose lives were not recognized through a lens of shared vulnerability—those whose lives are deemed not grievable—“cannot be mourned because they are always already lost” (Butler 33).

The fact that hundreds of girls and women in Ciudad Juárez have been murdered, reflected in Braided Sorrow’s repetition of “There are too many” and “Women are devoured here,” raises the question of whether their lives are considered valuable and therefore grievable.

In “Killing as Performance: Violence and the Shaping of the Community,” Veronica Zebadua-

Yañez uses the idea that political communities are “constituted and acted out by and through performative practices” (3) as a baseline to argue that the killing of girls and women in Juárez is a repeated public performance that communicates the meaninglessness of their lives. She reads the repeated violent performances that materialize in the form of sexual assault, torture, and murder as assertions that are not uttered in the public sphere but are still evident in Ciudad

Juárez: “you women are nothing! See, no one cares about you! You are not really part of our society; at most you belong to its fringes” (Zebadua-Yañez 9). Zebadua-Yañez calls attention to how femicide relegates girls and women to the fringes of society, made unreal and excluded, such that their lives become ungrievable and thus incapable of being mourned. I want to emphasize that the repetition of the killings depends on and illuminates criminal impunity in

Ciudad Juárez, which conclusively claims the lives of girls and women as meaningless by virtue of their unpunishable deaths. The fact that there are insufficient measures to bring justice to their lives condemns these lives to “meaninglessness” within a secular, worldly context. That these murders keep happening—as repeated public performances of violence—only reinscribes the idea that inaction from the state makes clear which lives have value and which ones do not.

In this vein, it is useful to introduce what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has theorized as

“homo sacer,” which is taken from Roman law and characterized by the “unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice” (73; original emphasis). Homo sacer indicates a person who may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. The death of the homo sacer results in idleness because it goes unpunished; this means that the killing is literally not understood as a crime that warrants action toward retribution and justice. At the same time, he cannot be sacrificed or killed through legal means (i.e. the death penalty). Agamben adds that he

is “simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law”

(82). Combined with the former characteristic of homo sacer, this statement underscores the law’s abandonment of the homo sacer, such that he has no relation to it other than through exclusion; he stands outside the law. When the homo sacer is reduced to “bare life”67—when he is a politically irrelevant person—then he cannot turn to the law as a recourse for safety. Though he may exist within a political and social community, he is not protected by and within the law.

This term has been employed by the aforementioned work of Zebadua-Yañez and in the work of Stephen Eisenhammer. Eisenhammer specifically uses homo sacer to explain how femicide is rooted in a violent disenfranchisement that was made possible by the maquiladora industry; he connects the murders to drug-related violence in Mexico during the 1990s and early

2000s (Eisenhammer 101). My use of Agamben’s concept of biopolitics with the notion of homo sacer emphasizes that the absence of the imperative for punishment is connected to the idea of ungrievability. Simply put, the ungrievability of women in Juárez is predicated on their “bare life” existence, which is reflected in and continually reproduced through criminal impunity. To what degree has the law claimed that these girls and women are politically irrelevant, or reduced to “bare life” and consequently abandoned by the law as well as positioned outside of it?

Juárense Women Abandoned: The Problem of Criminal Impunity and Blaming the Victim

Several scholars have investigated criminal impunity among Mexican state authorities, citing police negligence, investigative inaccuracies, state incompetence due to lack of resources

(which implies lack of proper funding), among other reasons why the state has failed to locate

67 To clarify, Agamben’s concept of “bare life” stems from his observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words (zoē, or the biology of life, and bios, the manner in which life is lived) for what is contemporary known and understood as “life.” Because now there is no distinction between the two with the word “life,” Agamben argues that “life” seems to exclusively point to biological fact (zoē), with no attention to the quality of life. Therefore, Agamben critiques the way life is solely conceptualized using biological fact rather than the way a life is lived.

the disappeared, either dead or alive, and, most important, why the killings have gone unpunished. The incompetence of the Mexican government and their lack of pursuit of justice, however, is not specific to femicide. A statement of the UN High Commissioner for Human

Rights divulges that 98% of all crimes in Mexico remain unsolved and relays that a majority of crime cases are not properly investigated (UN 2015), which means that the number of people convicted, if they are ever indicted, for these crimes is simply unacceptable. To make matters worse, the same statement claims that “[Many] enforced disappearances, acts of torture and extra-judicial killings are alleged to have been carried out by federal, state and municipal authorities, including the police. . . either acting in their own interests or in collusion with organized criminal groups” (UN 2015). Police corruption, too, has been cited as a recurring problem in the literature about femicide. Schmidt Camacho adds that the levels of impunity evidenced by alarming statistics of unpunished crime suggests that “the security forces and criminal justice system serve an entirely different function within the state” (280).

It is this consideration that leads me to emphasize one of the social control tactics that the government used to simultaneously negate the political agency of girls and women in Ciudad

Juárez, thus reducing them to bare life, and to justify its indifference towards disappearances and femicide: the “doble vida,” or double life, narrative. In attempts to explain the crimes, city officials made the following assertion to members of the Comisión Nacional de Derechos

Humanos (National Human-Rights Commission): “Many of the murdered women worked in factories during the week and as prostitutes during the weekend in order to make more money”

(Benitez et al. 61). The state argued for “women’s non normative behaviors, accusing them of transgressing sexual norms, either of lesbianism or of leading a ‘doble vida’ [...] as though nontraditional sexual behavior justified their killings” (Fregoso 3). Clearly, the state deflected

attention from its failure to fulfill its civil duties to Juárense women, while foreign corporations operating the factories took no responsibility. In addition, Ileana Rodríguez argues that the blame-the-victim narrative “push[es] the problem back into the private and personal as a way of dismissing its political nature” (162). Denying that the murders were not a systematic experience of violence against women, the state’s position was that each case was “independent” and that the murders were being erroneously politicized (Pineda-Madrid 31). Through the displacement of responsibility and protection, the Mexican government and transnational corporations should be held accountable for being complicit in the continuation of violence against maquiladora workers and for abandoning Juárense women.

The concept of homo sacer, unpacked here within the context of femicide and through

Mexican criminal impunity as well as victim-blaming, surfaces in Braided Sorrow when La

Llorona first explains how her daughter did not come home one afternoon after work:

The police didn’t care. Said she probably “ran away.” Asked me if she was in a gang if she did drugs or ran around with boys. (Orta 21)

The quoted passage effectively illustrates the strategic use of the “doble vida” narrative by the police when they interrogate La Llorona, as she describes the memory. I would like to point out some specific observations about this passage. First, it seems that police apathy, evidenced by

“the police didn’t care,” nullifies the purpose of interrogation, which is to acquire information about the crime for the investigation. Why ask questions when there is an utter lack of concern?

Hence, the questions that La Llorona claims to have been asked by police were not aimed in any way towards investigating the disappearance of her daughter. The sole purpose of these questions was to raise speculation that La Llorona’s daughter was not a “good girl” and to deliberately take

advantage of framing the disappearance in a way that blames the victim. These questions, in fact, are not real queries; they are instead accusatory statements disguised as inquiries.

Second, the possible reasons raised for why the daughter has disappeared (i.e. running away from home, gang violence, drug use, sexual transgression) are listed as the only reasonable options for the situation. It is especially telling that this list culminates with the final possibility that she “ran around with boys.” The police end on this note, at least as indicated in the passage, to emphasize an alleged transgressive sexual behavior that vilifies the young girl and makes her wholly liable for consequences, like murder, because these are the outcomes of sexual transgression. To lead a double life suggests that one is entirely responsible for her life and, perhaps, that one is searching for trouble and, even more disturbing, violence and murder.

Finally, coupled with the police’s ostensible insensitivity toward the matter over which La

Llorona grieves is the fact that their lack of sympathy, as advanced by the “doble vida” narrative, adds to the ungrievability of disappeared and murdered women of Juárez.

Therefore, there appear to be two threads regarding the ungrievability of Juárense women. The first was discussed using homo sacer and further unpacked through the realities of criminal impunity in Ciudad Juárez, which rely on blaming the victim. The second source stems from the perception of young girls and women as the sources of violence. To clarify, if women are engaging in acts of (sexual) transgression, then they have caused the violence. There is a very problematic cause and effect here that ultimately weakens public sympathy for the victims of femicide and turns them into femme fatales deserving of death. We are less likely to be sympathetic when we understand that the “victim” is the source of violence, and, as such, the victim is recast as someone who needs to be removed from society. In her article “Necropolitics,

Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Melissa W.

Wright argues that this removal “performs a kind of urban cleansing. The public woman discourse [those women in public areas that who sold sex, or the woman who led a “doble vida”], in short, was a key tool for positioning the dead women and girls in the political order”

(715)—or, more accurately put, positioned outside of the political and reduced to bare life. The passage that immediately follows in the play reveals what La Llorona decides to do in light of police apathy and willful negligence. Since there are no measures taken to search for her daughter, she makes her own attempts to try to locate her:

I walked up and down these streets carrying her picture looking for anyone who’d seen my daughter, anyone who could tell me where she was. (Orta 21-22)

In light of impunity and apathy toward femicide, it is troubling to consider that La Llorona’s desperate efforts of searching for her daughter, while largely futile, are perhaps the only means through which her daughter might be found. She does not have any expertise or the knowledge to conduct a proper investigation of her daughter’s disappearance, but the work that she does reveals the importance of challenging the norms that the state has produced. As she moves through the desert, it is also the case that La Llorona steps in to protect all of her daughters as she sacrificially gives herself to the violence that engulfs Ciudad Juárez. She searches for them with the intent to save them from injury and death. La Llorona here transgresses political boundaries by proactively undertaking the civil duties of the state, and I read this as a direct attempt to combat criminal impunity. She publicly mourns and, at the same time, seeks retribution for justice. Further, that she carries a picture of her daughter around the streets demonstrates the importance of visibility for recognition of the disappearance (and loss) and for opposition against the state’s indifference. After a little boy happens to find her daughter while playing in the desert

(Orta 22). La Llorona explains that the police would not let her identify the body—a practice that is standard and necessary to ascertain the identity of the victim. La Llorona hints at the lack of following protocol or formal procedure for identifying the deceased as the police automatically identify her daughter using the object found closest to the body: a name tag. This impertinent, and perhaps illicit, assumption by the police—to identify someone based on a nearby object without body identification from a relative to corroborate her identity—showcases state authority incompetence, and it also reduces the victim to nothing but a maquiladora worker.

But, La Llorona does not mourn a female laborer who led a secret life of transgression, as state authorities might surmise. She sees her daughter, whom she deeply mourns. In fact, the signifer used for the victim is important for three reasons. First, “daughter” positions the victim as part of collective community, which underscores that this is, indeed, a loss to be mourned.

Second, it restores a kind of personhood to the victim aimed at aimed at restoring dignity and humanity. Lastly, the use of daughter directly contests the public woman discourse or the idea that the victims were not “buenas hijas.” In fact, a group of women called La Coordinadora de

Organizaciones No Gubernamentales en Pro de la Mujer (the coalition of nongovernmental organizations for women), which was formed in 1994 after emerging news of the murders in

Ciudad Juárez, directly challenged this discourse “by personalizing the victims and introduced them to the public as daughters (hijas)” (Wright 711). The notion of re-introducing the victims to the public by engaging in oppositional discourse leads me to my closing line of inquiry in

Braided Sorrow: the public nature of mourning that provokes discussions about who (or what) is allowing these crimes to happen, as the protagonist of Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood:

The Juárez Murders astutely puts it.

Deprivatizing Loss, Politicizing Mourning

In The Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler argues that while “many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation. . . I think it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self, a basis for thinking a political community of a complex order” (20). She subsequently sees a privatizing state of mourning as

“depoliticizing” (2). Here, Butler suggests that by rejecting loss as privatizing, we actually begin to rethink the potential of mourning for theorizing a democratic way of life based on the social constitution of our bodies. As I have demonstrated, her inquiry about what makes for a grievable life leads to a response focused on the recognition that all bodies are vulnerable. Per Butler, we are constituted politically by this vulnerability. Put another way, our shared proximity to loss and death is an important component for our sense of self, and the potential of mourning can be located in its ability to highlight our affective bonds to one another. To mourn is to reveal that we are “undone by each other” (Butler 23), albeit temporarily, and that others are important to our sense of self.

Mourning might be understood as a private experience, due to internalized feelings of loss that cause one to feel sorrow and pain, but this is not how Braided Sorrow treats mourning.

La Llorona’s grief is anchored in the personal loss of her own daughter, as denoted in the previously discussed lines, but she mourns in response to the loss of all her daughters—all of the young girls and women in Ciudad Juárez who are victims of femicide. The play situates La

Llorona within a context of indigenous history, so that she also mourns an irretrievable indigenous past destroyed by colonization. In these ways, the mourning of Braided Sorrow— largely an entwined past and present in Mexico that registers loss—emerges at the intersection of the private and public and then veers towards the public in a politicizing way. Mourning is not

contained within a private experience nor is it contained through specific cultural practices like funerals, ceremonies, or other rituals that subscribe to public norms of emotional desirability, because La Llorona carries her grief everywhere she goes and her wailing. Her cries of grief and protest resound throughout the desert of the borderlands. As an embodiment of grief and mourning, she enters into public spaces, like the market, to engage in public-facing expressions of loss as she communicates her lament with strangers and, in so doing, critiques the lack of recognition and responsibility from the state. Juxtaposed with La Llorona’s mourning, even the aforementioned repeated sound of water dripping symbolizes a public expression of grief that fills the city of Juárez, making sound a fundamental piece of the play’s aesthetics. Braided

Sorrow, in part, taps into aural sensations to give mourning a more rounded expressiveness and to elevate the role our sense of hearing plays in our perceptions of grief. The audible “ripples of grief” serve as a consistent and disconcerting reminder that girls and women are being tortured murdered in the desert. The sound of water dripping further signals a shared sense of bodily vulnerability. In this way, the play characterizes Ciudad Juárez, not as a city of vice, as it often has been called, but as a city in mourning, wherein the public nature of mourning comments on current conditions while it also calls for their change.

Public Mourning: Acts of Resistance Against Femicide

Orta’s use of La Llorona as an emblematic figure of public mourning gesture towards the real-life practices of resistance that have emerged in direct response to the femicides, some of which have actually operated under the aegis of mourning. Accordingly, La Llorona’s haunting presence in Braided Sorrow reflects the existence of many lloronas in Ciudad Juárez who have deployed mourning as social and political power and created public spaces for mourning, thereby engaging in a communal vision of protest. The Ocho de Marzo (8th of March) feminist group,

originally formed out of concern for sexual and reproductive rights, was “the first to document and denounce the violence against women in Ciudad Juárez,” says Mark Ensalaco (428). In the years that followed, groups like Voces sin Eco (“Voices without Echo”), Mujeres de Negro

(“Women in Black”), and Justicia por Nuestras Hijas (“Justice for Our Daughters”) were among many groups formed by mothers of murdered victims and their supports to raise public awareness about the femicides. After the discovery of 17-year-old’s Maria Sagrario Flores

Gonzalez’s body was found in April 1998, her mother, Paula Flores, and relatives of other victims formed Voices sin Eco (which eventually dissolved in 2011) to pressure state authorities to offer support for victims’ family members and to conduct thorough investigations aimed at finding the person(s) responsible (Ensalaco 428). This group especially gained social power through its symbolic use of black crosses against pink backgrounds, which were painted on electric poles throughout the city to symbolize mourning and to simultaneously honor the memory of the victims. These crosses continued to materialize each time another girl or woman was murdered (Valdez 38). Voces sin Eco, then, advanced a necessary cartography of femicide under circumstances where state officials have ignored and inadequately addressed widespread crime.

The playwright deliberately uses the very same symbolism of these black crosses as a visual reminder of grief and mourning. The stage directions note how that the black crosses are speckled across the top of a telephone pole (Orta 55), which happens to also be covered with

“Missing Posters” that have pictures of young women who remain “desaparecidas” (disappeared or missing). At one point in the play, the stage directions indicate that the women on these posters begin to weep black ink, and this is coupled, once more, with the sound of water dripping—a haunting aesthetics of sound that is aimed at pronouncing the necessary public

nature of mourning. In addition to the kind visual markers of grief and loss that Braided Sorrow mirrors, other practices of resistance have been realized in public spaces: “Activists [have] mourned silently in public, setting symbolic political stages for anti-violence activities. Victims’ mothers and activists [have] repeated stories, showed pictures, and gave personal testimonies at rallies” at the border (Staudt 19). Through religious symbolism and “performance activism”

(marches and vigils, for instance; Staudt 79), under the pillar of public mourning and protest, these activist networks come face to face with extreme loss. Like La Llorona, they refuse to treat mourning as a private and isolating pain. The knowledge that women in Juárez continue to be murdered, coupled with the fact that other mothers and relatives of the victims will experience similar pain, depicts an extremely bleak portrait of the present and future of Ciudad Juárez.

However, Braided Sorrow illustrates that La Llorona’s maternal resistance through public mourning is especially important for politicizing the community to decry apathy, criminal impunity, and an active state cover up. Mourning in this play functions as a form of agitation, political in nature, that demands an end to femicide in Ciudad Juárez.

CHAPTER 2: MOURNING SLOW VIOLENCE AND CONTESTING INVISIBILITY: MIGRANT FARMWORKERS IN CHERRÍE MORAGA’S HEROES AND SAINTS (1994)

Introduction

Evoking a history of labor migration, from Mexico to the southwest part of the US,68 this chapter geographically moves from Ciudad Juárez into the site of loss that is the San Joaquin

Valley in California to treat the intersection of public mourning with environmental injustice. I locate this particular intersection in Cherríe Moraga’s celebrated dramatic text Heroes and

Saints, which premiered at El Teatro Misión of San Francisco in 1992. Since its first staged production and subsequent publication in 1994, Moraga’s play has become a critical artistic and literary means through which to consider environmentalism and subaltern Chicana/os together.69

As a Chicana lesbian and feminist writer-activist, Moraga’s dramatic oeuvre, so emblematic of a spirit of protest that characterized the beginnings of Chicana/o theatre, focalizes Chicana/os in their individual racial, social, and sexual contexts in order to reclaim their presence and significance, attempting to illuminate the effects of the historical processes of colonization and marginalization. Heroes and Saints engages with these varying contexts in complicated ways to

68 Here, I am specifically referring to the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which brought millions of laborers from Mexico to the United States for agricultural and railroad work; these laborers would become marginalized transnational subjects who struggled to survive. For more, see Deborah Cohen’s Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (2011).

69 While my reading of Heroes and Saints is focused on the events of the play and their historical origins, it is important to note that the plight of migrant farm workers continues today. These plights include hazardous working conditions, poor housing, and unsatisfactory child labor laws. To define subaltern in the context of environmentalism and farm workers, I draw on literature that explores marginalized or subordinated groups oppressed by race, class, and gender. Laura Pulido engages in a comprehensive discussion of subalternity in Environmental and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (1996, pp. 3-57).

study the past and changing present conditions of Chicana/os, particularly the conditions of migrant farmworkers who inhabit and toil in US agricultural fields. The attention to environmental racism and injustice is Moraga’s most noteworthy contribution to the developing scholarly work on the intersection of eco-criticism and Chicana/o studies, with additional consideration of Chicanas’ political agency.

Heroes and Saints takes place in 1988 in McLaughlin, California, a fictional town in the

San Joaquin Valley. The Valle family and the other members of their community, subaltern people who are predominantly Chicana/o, face environmental conditions that have resulted in illness and death and that continue to threaten their survival. The bodies of women and children are the most immediately affected by these conditions, while the land also bears its own damage.

The play can be located within a real-life history of environmental racism70 and environmental injustice. It broadly recalls the United Farmworkers of America union's fight for social and economic equality against agribusiness in the 1960s, and the play's notes specifically mention the actual town of McFarland, California where, between 1978 and 1988, a disproportionate number of children were born with birth defects or diagnosed with cancer. McFarland's detrimental health effects on Chicana/o bodies came from Chicana/o farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides while working and living near poisoned fields.

Moraga admits that her play was a response to this environmental occurrence, and she also cites as a contributing factor for the play’s inception the United Farmworkers documentary

70Reverend Benjamin Chavis, at the time director of UCC-CRJ (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice) coined the term “environmental racism” and defined it as “racial discrimination in environmental policy- making and the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement” (qtd. in Di Chiro 1996). Chavis coined the term after a 1987 report, which revealed the strong relationship between race and the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.

video The Wrath of Grapes (1986), which highlighted McFarland’s environmental problems.

Perhaps the most haunting image in the documentary is one that shows the fruits of a pesticide- damaged female reproductive system: a child born with no arms or legs. This image stimulated

Moraga’s creative faculties as a playwright, because she created Cerezita71 Valle, the limbless female protagonist and both figurative and literal head72 of Heroes and Saints. Using Cerezita as the play’s uncanny focal point, Moraga challenges the idea that environmentalist concerns are irrelevant and elitist, or that they are inimical to the resource priorities of subaltern Chicana/o farmworkers. I argue that the play offers a confrontational environmentalist agenda through collective acts of public mourning, which impress upon death and loss in the service of advancing life-centered politics. The agenda is confrontational in two ways: first, it posits environmental injustice as violence; and second, it re-imagines public mourning in ways that do not conform to familiar or even socially-sanctioned expressions of grief. Mourning in

McLaughlin takes visceral and poignant forms, but it is not something to be pathologized or something to be contained. It is, rather, an active and communal process that resists the idea of

“moving on” from loss, or returning to normalcy. The irony, of course, is that there is nothing normal to return to in McLaughlin, as injury and death are reoccurring phenomena.

Public mourning in the play coincides with the long-term use of pesticide poisoning in

McLaughlin, which is critical for understanding the play’s treatment of pesticides as a form of

71 The literal name of Cerezita is translated as “little cherry,” which characterizes her as a fruit of the earth; her bodiless head is the fruit of a contaminated Earth. Accordingly, Cerezita’s name can be linked to the Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility. The name also carries sexual connotation, but this reading is beyond the scope of this chapter.

72 Moraga takes cue from Luis Valdez’s “head” in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1963), as Cerezita echoes the bodiless head of Valdez's character. Obviously corresponding to Moraga’s bodiless Cerezita, Pancho Villa’s Belarmino is a head with no body that recalls the head of revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa, who was murdered and whose head was never found. Valdez’s play departs from the collective to focus on the individual plights in a family that return to the question of Chicana/o identity in relation to stereotypes.

environmental violence. Building on eco-critical scholarship that examines environmental violence in relation to temporality and space, I propose the need to think theoretically about the environmentalism of Heroes and Saints through the lens of "slow violence," and thereby to destabilize dominant conceptions of violence that center on immediacy and visibility. "Slow violence" is a concept proposed by environmental studies scholar Rob Nixon, and refers to environmental degradation that manifests as occluded forms, occurring gradually across time and space (Nixon 2). Moraga engages with the challenge of representing two relatively invisible categories: the category of slow violence itself, and the category of subaltern farm-working communities. Public mourning, I argue, draws attention to these categories, engaging with a politics of (in)invisibility that keep Chicana/o farmworkers—both the deceased and living—out of sight as well as socially, politically, and economically inconsequential to environmental liabilities long in the making. A collective project, public mourning deploys a recognition of loss that brings injury and death to the fore, and in so doing, signals the emphasis on the pursuit of justice, which I contend ultimately manifests as the pursuit of the right to life. Mourning, which highlights shared and communal grief in McLaughlin, foregrounds slow violence and its detrimental effects in order to move from death and toward life-centered politics that demand responsibility and accountability from state and federal government authorities. In short, mourning in Heroes and Saints highlights the need for a biocentric perspective in environmentalism that includes both land and humans.

Notably, the collective project of public mourning is led by women in the play, such that mourning becomes an important vehicle for women to deploy political agency and leadership.

Women are the driving agents of mourning not because the expression of grief is an essential gendered enterprise, but because women doubly experience loss. As mothers, some of them must

suffer the deaths of the children they carry; as women, they suffer injury to their bodies. Indeed, the bodies of women proffer a feminist critique of the gendered aspects of environmental violence, as their reproductive systems bear the effects of toxic pesticides. Cerezita is born without a body as a result of her mother Dolores’s injured reproductive system. Evalina,

Cerezita’s niece, succumbs to cancer as an infant, which also suggests that her mother’s reproductive system was compromised by pesticides. While public mourning acts in Heroes and

Saints materialize in direct response to the deaths of McLaughlin children, they encompass an underlying grief that involves injury to and loss of reproductive faculties. As such, the play creates a productive space for eco-feminist engagement in the pursuit of the right to life that mourning makes possible.

My analysis of Heroes and Saints aligns with those critics who have treated the play’s engagement with feminist orientations, violence against farmworkers, invisibility, and resistant acts. Linda Margarita Greenberg argues that the dead corpses populating the play cast injury and death as productive sites of inquiry by unpacking the play’s “pedagogy of crucifixion,” which she understands as resistance and social protest (164). She nods to the truth of structural violence that impacts farmworkers, mentioning environmental racism and the abuse of laboring bodies by the U.S. agriculture industry. Similarly, Irma Mayorga's examination of Chicana/o dramaturgy considers the performance of violence and raises the issue of Chicana/o invisibility (158). Her analysis of staging violence treats pesticide poisoning, but it also suggests that violence, too, emerges from within Chicana/o culture’s oppressive traditional gender roles (Mayorga 162), the majority of which the character of Dolores emblematizes. Ariana Burford takes pause with regard to racist ideologies against Chicana/o farmworkers when analyzing the play’s mapping of violent landscapes that specifically affect women. She argues for a gendered geography of unjust

landscapes rooted in a history of colonization, and she maintains that Chicanas play a critical role in a history of continued resistance (Burford). Finally, Ariana Vigil pivots on the issues of visibility and protest73 to focus on the reporter, Ana Pérez, who becomes an activist by the play’s end (87). Vigil importantly isolates the play’s engagement with media and representation to examine its relationship with political power; this relationship presents the limits of representation and subsequently calls on the need for collective action.

Building on this criticism and noting their particular intersections, this chapter first addresses the subaltern status of McLaughlin and its farmworkers. Then, I extend previous claims made about the play’s entanglement with environmental racism and injustice by redefining environmental degradation in the town as a form of slow, invisible, and untraceable violence. I unpack the implications of this kind of violence to highlight how its temporal axis threatens to obfuscate the social injury and death it causes in the farmworker community. Thus, this chapter pauses to analyze the character of Cerezita as the play’s focal representation of slow violence, raising questions of mobility that turn our attention to physical loss as well as the implications of technically staging Heroes and Saints. Departing from Cerezita’s own experience of loss, I shift to the death of children in McLaughlin and the way in which public mourning manifests as something unnerving and yet provocative with the crucifixion of a child, which grounds the play’s opening scene and is ironically orchestrated by children, under Cerezita’s leadership. I read the crucifixion as an organized act of public mourning through which to challenge the invisibility of farmworkers and defy socially-sanctioned mourning processes.

73 Vigil’s argument focuses on Ana Pérez’s role in making the cancer clusters of McLaughlin known to a larger public audience and on this character’s transformation throughout the course of Heroes and Saints. Vigil contends that Pérez’s role in the play significantly shifts from that of a journalist who is distanced from the McLaughlin community to an activist for McLaughlin. Vigil’s attention to questions of visibility intersect with my reading of how Chicanas make mourning visible as it takes on public forms.

Public mourning, then, participates in a refusal to bring closure to the expression of grief, lest it lead to the concurrently invisibility of those who are already dead and those who are living in constant danger.

Expanding a human-centered environmentalist viewpoint, I scrutinize the play’s concern with violence on the land to build a case for the play’s biocentric environmentalism. The practice of mapping, initiated by the Dolores Huerta-like character of Amparo, productively brings land and bodies together. To further illustrate how the play insistently probes the politics of invisibility in relation to slow violence, I turn my attention to the way Bonnie, Amparo’s adopted child, plays with her doll. At first glance, Bonnie’s doll-play signals the presence of childhood innocence, but additional scrutiny suggests that Bonnie’s imagination—her world of play— reflexively reckons with the effects of slow violence, which in this case cause her doll to “die.”

Noting the connection between Bonnie’s “dead” doll and the real death of the infant Evalina, I argue that Yolanda’s grief over her daughter’s death advances a reappraisal of environmental slow violence as an unlawful, criminal offense.

Evalina’s death is a turning point that shifts attention from death to the pursuit of the right to live safely and in good health—to not be poisoned by one’s labor or living conditions. This pursuit, I suggest, undergirds the collective mobilization of McLaughlin to Sacramento, wherein community members heighten the visibility of farmworker plights by participating in a traditional mode of protest while the Mothers of McLaughlin, in particular, stage an act of public mourning. The last part of this chapter unpacks this instance of mourning, particularly how its affective registers press for a recognition of loss. In this recognition of loss, the mothers’ public mourning demands the government’s political responsibility for injury and death, and it simultaneously holds the government accountable for meeting certain demands, all of which

function in the pursuit of the right to life. Finally, I suggest that Moraga’s play aligns with early iterations of protest staged by Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino (ETC), but importantly departs from ETC’s misogynist and patriarchal configurations by uplifting the voices of

Chicanas and by codifying public mourning as a form of resistance.

McLaughlin and The Subaltern Status of Farmworkers

The play's treatment of the deliberate poisoning of land and people to serve the profit of agribusinesses paints a poignant portrait of McLaughlin’s ecosystem. The land is a body that has been violated—ridden with chemical fertilizers and other artificial agents in the same manner that the bodies of farmworkers and their families have been violated. The violation of farmworkers' bodies has caused an unnatural order of succession: McLaughlin families have had to bury their young children, whose small, frail bodies manifest the cancerous conditions that began invisibly in their mothers’ wombs. Despite the affective and political registers of public mourning that mobilize dissent, the town’s powerlessness remains a sizeable obstacle to overcoming the environmental injustices that plague it. When machine gun fire rains over the fields of McLaughlin towards the end of the play, it becomes apparent that agribusiness authorities are intent on destroying the seeds of collective action among the farmworkers. Yet while there is no substantial justice by the end of Heroes and Saints, there is an important building of coalition among the denizens of McLaughlin that public mourning advances. In the last moments of the play, the townspeople burn the fields that threaten their livelihood. In burning the fields, they claim and pursue their right to life.

The play’s narrative of farmworkers’ plights as coupled to their subaltern status is not unfamiliar. In fact, the specific environmental problem of pesticides, examined in Heroes and

Saints, points to a larger struggle for power between the dominant culture in the United States and Mexican descendants. The United States farmworkers, who encounter economic, racial, and

cultural domination, provide a key understanding of subaltern populations in wealthy and industrialized nations, says race studies and environmental justice scholar-activist Laura Pulido

(1996). Farmworkers are subordinated during the division of labor and are further subordinated through work exploitation; their sub-standard housing conditions situate them in a state of poverty; many Mexican migrant workers do not enter the country legally and hence have no legal or social status; and, finally, the language barrier impedes access to the dominant language, which keeps farmworkers from being culturally accepted by the dominant group (Pulido).

Certainly, these larger issues of domination and the multiple levels of oppression farmworkers face surface in Moraga’s play, but they are primarily couched in terms of environmentalism. The problem of pesticides in Heroes and Saints is but another manifestation of the unequal power relations between the dominant group and Chicana/os, one that further indicates farmworkers’ need for organized mobilization and resistance to shift the power dynamic. In many ways,

Moraga’s fictional rendering of the McLaughlin farmworkers attempts to represent all Chicana/o farmworkers. By documenting their day-to-day living and working conditions, the play makes it impossible to ignore their subaltern status and the ways in which environmental unjust practices might be read as insidious violence.

Re-defining What Constitutes Violence

Indeed, Heroes and Saints successfully extends our understanding of violence to include violence that is incremental—a type that is usually of relative insignificance in our image-driven world. According to Rob Nixon, “violence is customarily conceived as an event or action” (2011, 2).74 As Nixon theorizes the term in Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the

74 Take, for instance, the catastrophic Haitian earthquake in 2010 that killed over 200,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more; or, recall the deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that struck the Gulf Coast of the United States—both violent environmental disasters whose scale and depth of physical devastation and aftermath was captured on television screens and in photography. These mega-disasters demonstrate a type of spectacular violence

Poor (2011), slow violence “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence” (2). He inextricably connects slow violence to the environment, foregrounding the way in which violence can be divorced from its original causes. Because the repercussions of slow violence may be postponed for years—sometimes decades—it is not necessarily perceived as violence; discourses around slow- moving calamitous phenomena may be (wrongly) emptied of violence in the public imagination.

Nixon coined the concept of slow violence, becoming the first scholar to develop a compelling relationship between postcolonial and environmental studies through interdisciplinary means. He responds to the environmental humanities’ eco-critical silence toward negative environmental transnational consequences of imperial practices. The concept expands our understanding of violence, akin to the way sociologist Johan Galtung’s theory of

“structural violence” challenges what counts as violence. According to Galtung, structural violence refers to systemic forces that create inequalities like racism and sexism, which in turn create a violent, yet hidden, system for oppressed groups (1969). Structural violence is clearly a guiding influence for the concept of slow violence, yet Nixon departs from the “static connotations of structural violence,” choosing instead to focus on questions of temporality and space to emphasize the impacts of environmental degradation, rather than conducting a comprehensive study of all structural forces that create inequalities.

Nixon additionally builds on the works of Edward Said, Rachel Carson, and

Ramachandra Guha to widen the scope of eco-criticism. The latter two writers have especially shaped environmental studies in contemporary society. In Silent Spring (2002), a book first

that can be immediately seen; these acts' sensational visibility caused the media to exhibit and re-exhibit the tragedies for days.

published in 1962 that considerably shaped the environmental science movement, Rachel Carson documents the way in which synthetic pesticides (e.g. DDT) compromised the biosphere, killing bugs and eventually bird populations. It is important to note her diction: “This sudden silencing of the songs of birds… [has] come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected” (103; emphasis mine). Nixon accordingly builds on Carson’s work in conceptualizing the nature of environmental violence as “slow” and “insidious.”

Moreover, Nixon argues that slow violence particularly affects the subaltern of the

Global South. Examining Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), which reworks the aftermath of a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India in the fictional Khaupfur,75 Nixon discusses how thousands of people near the plant immediately died; thousands more perished in the years that followed while others developed life-threatening disabilities from gas cloud exposure (46). Nixon’s development of the environmentalism of the poor, which here reveals the compromised livelihood of subaltern peoples near the Bhopal plant, strongly nods to the work of sociologist Ramachandra Guha. In

Environmentalism: A Global History (2000), Guha provides a history of environmental ideas and movements around the world, and he uses “environmentalism of the poor” to point out particular struggles against environmental degradation in peasant and indigenous communities of India,

Malaysia and Brazil, to name a few. In short, he links environmentalism to concerns of social justice, so that “environmentalism” is indeed relevant to the “poor” and not exclusive to affluent communities. Influenced by Guha’s work, Nixon’s slow violence concept argues that there are social justice claims to be made about environmentalism that involve poor populations who are

75 Nixon notes that Khaupfur functions as both a “specific and nonspecific site” because it is, on one hand, the fictional site author Sinha creates to reflect Bhopal and, on the other, it is a synecdoche telling of other communities in the Global South suffering the aftermath of poisoning and chemical toxins (2011, 48).

struggling against imperial structures.76 These impoverished communities often remain invisible, voiceless, and under-represented.

Ultimately, Nixon prompts a reconsideration of violence that fractures packaged materialities by drawing attention to slow violence’s underrepresentation—both in the real world and on the fictional page. This adverse underrepresentation stems from the narrative and representational challenges posed by slow violence. Nixon calls on writer-activists to take up this challenge, to engage with, even combat, slow violence using strategic narrative means. However, his examinations of both fiction and non-fiction writing are somewhat exclusionary because he completely depends on more transnational environmental degradations set in motion by foreign policy of the global North. By focusing on the “Global South,” he does not include subaltern communities in industrialized countries—marginalized farmworkers in the United States, for example, laboring in land with a clear colonialist past. Moraga’s Heroes and Saints importantly fills this lack, and thereby critiques the latent and racist environmental practices that continue to render subaltern status in the United States to certain minority communities.

Of course, the detrimental effects of slow violence gain a sense of urgency in Heroes and

Saints because, as a dramatic text, it accounts for many years of environmental violence into the length of a theatrical production. We might consider how the Valle family’s dis-ease begins with the birth of Cerezita and extends through the death of Evalina, in conjunction with the deaths of other children in McLaughlin which occur over time. It is critical to note that Evalina’s death in

Act II occurs months after the passing of the child Memo, which prompts the crucifixion with which the play opens. In other words, violence carried out on the town’s land and on human

76 Nixon specifically cites Guha’s influence in the preface of his book, but it is also worth mentioning that the “environmentalism of the poor” was further developed by Spanish economist Joan Martinez-Alier, author of The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2003).

bodies is captured in the duration of the play, although the dramatic text itself represents only a small fraction of years’ worth of environmental degradation. Slow violence here becomes compressed. The temporal compression the play facilitates is especially productive, because it allows violence that is characteristically slow and undetected to be perceived. The play seizes its readers and audiences, transporting them through the temporal and spatial dispersal of slow violence toward the present environmental situation in McLaughlin.

The Visceral Head of Cerezita

As the female protagonist and head of the play, Cerezita herself is perhaps the most evocative representation of slow violence in the play, pointing to an extreme corporeal consequence of pesticides possible, apart from the loss of life, for subaltern farmworker communities. It may be hard for readers to understand Cerezita as an intellectual and emotional

“head,” a fully developed character despite her lack of a body. But by drawing on readers’ imaginative capacity, the play emphasizes that Cerezita must contend with the lack of corporeal wholeness on a daily basis.77 Yet, it is Cerezita’s mother, Dolores, rather than Cerezita, who is most troubled by this. Dolores grieves her daughter’s condition to the point that she will not allow her daughter to be seen by the outside world, keeping Cerezita hidden inside the house.

However, Dolores’s understanding of Cerezita’s birth defect is problematically entangled with her marriage to Cerezita’s father, Arturo, who abandoned the family. Questioning Arturo’s virility, Dolores’s claim that “[h]alf a father make half a baby” (Moraga 103) maintains a denial

77 Though an argument is to be made that Cerezita does not suffer loss because she never lost any body parts, which operates under the assumption that one must have something before losing it, I would argue that Cerezita’s experience of loss centers on the feeling of grief that takes root in knowing she is deprived of something—that she does not have something others do. Cerezita bears loss and is bereaved. As a developing fetus in her mother’s womb, she suffered harm. Traces of mourning are made evident when she discusses the orange-yellow color of the drinking water: “The mothers dip their heads into the long rusty buckets and drink and drink while their babies deform inside them. Innocent, they sleep inside the same poison water and are born broken like me, their lamb limbs curling under them” (Moraga 99).

of negative health outcomes wrought by pesticides she encountered in the fields while pregnant, in favor of a narrative that understands Cerezita’s birth defect as a direct result of her husband’s sinfulness. Cerezita is the grotesque manifestation of sin, in Dolores’s eyes, and she insists on keeping her away from the world. This isolation deeply inhibits Cerezita’s interactions with others, and it accentuates the limits of mobility she faces.

The issue of mobility is something Moraga is keen on emphasizing. Cerezita overcomes the total lack of mobility through the use of a mechanical apparatus. Per the stage directions,

Cerezita operates her “raite,” which functions as a rolling platform and is automated by a button, to move around. This raite allows Cerezita to undermine her mother’s rule to stay inside the home. However, there are moments when the raite becomes disengaged, and this leads to the loss of control for Cerezita; in these moments, she must completely depend on others to become mobile. Staged versions of Heroes and Saints face the difficult task of shifting the representation of Cerezita’s head from a textual and imaginative one to a visceral representation that negotiates mobility. As scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano notes, “the larger-than-life, non-naturalist... calls attention to the nature of the field of representation itself" (73).

Cerezita’s representation on the stage, however, is not easily achieved. Focusing on the acting and directing decisions in two Bay Area productions of Heroes and Saints, performance- studies scholar Telory W. Davies quotes director Alma Martinez, of Teatro Vision, discussing her problem in staging Cerezita’s bodilessness with the playwright herself (Davies 35). Moraga’s main concern when discussing Martinez’s plans for production was how the director was going to do execute the raite (in Davies 35). Its construction and mobility is complicated yet very important for bringing Cerezita to life on stage. Because Cerezita is described as only a head sitting on a box, evidence of moving arms or legs would confound the absence of corporeal

wholeness that the character experiences. Although the character is a non-realist representation, a theatre director must be cautious in taking creative licenses that risk displacing Cerezita from the compelling image from which her character derives—the child with no limbs from the United

Farmworkers documentary. Cerezita’s head must ultimately function as a visceral reminder of the actual physical harm that she has endured. In present-day fictional McLaughlin, she is both the visual and physical centerpiece that immediately confronts readers and audiences alike.

Cerezita is a stalwart representation of slow violence, whose uncanny materialization simultaneously fixes environmental violence’s elusiveness and symbolizes loss.

Crucifixion in the Vineyards: A Haunting Act of Mourning

In Heroes and Saints, the experience of loss shapes the lives of everyone in McLaughlin, including children. The capacity with which children emotionally cope with the deaths of their peers or other members of the community remains uncertain, but they doubtless understand that death in McLaughlin is something that cannot be passively accepted, and that death ought not be a normal occurrence. In effect, the children participate in the communal experience of loss, embracing a subjectivity of death under Cerezita’s leadership that advances dissent through public mourning. Though mobility is a challenge for Cerezita, she disobeys her mother’s instruction to stay inside the house and transcends her physical limitations by leading and mobilizing the children of McLaughlin to erect crucifixions in the vineyards. Cerezita’s quiet leadership78 functions as an inclusive force that gives the children of McLaughlin the opportunity to come together. The act of crucifixion and the image of a crucified child produce an

78 By the play’s end, Cerezita’s leadership is very public, as she acquires saint-like qualities and fashions herself like La Virgen de Guadalupe,78 an iconic representation of the Virgin Mary, to persuade the McLaughlin community to cross the patrolled border of the pesticide-ridden fields as a gesture of political consciousness and activism. Moraga deliberately genders Chicana/o leadership and activism as female through her play’s protagonist, critiquing male- dominated Chicana/o nationalist agendas that precluded the outstanding leadership of women in the 1960s.

uncomfortable opening to the play: "At rise in the distance, a group of children wearing calavera masks enters the grape vineyard. They carry a small, child-size cross that they quickly and exit, leaving its dark silhouetted image against the dawn’s light. The barely distinguishable figure of small child hangs from it. The child’s hair and thin clothing flap in the wind" (Moraga 92).

Because didascalia79 here imparts elements of performance that lack verbal exposition in the play, the crucifixion and its meanings are unclear and open to interpretation at this point.

Reporter Ana Pérez, covering news for the week’s Hispanic hour (Moraga 94), is the first to “read” the crucifixion, fixating on the ostensible irreverent treatment of the child’s small, helpless, and lifeless body:

ANA PÉREZ: Señora, what about the boy? AMPARO: Qué boy? ANA PÉREZ: The boy on the cross…in the field. AMPARO: Memo? ANA PÉREZ: Yes, Memo Delgado. […] ANA PÉREZ: Why would someone be so cruel, to hang a child up like that? To steal him from his deathbed? AMPARO: No, he was dead already. Already dead from the poison. ANA PÉREZ: But ma’am... AMPARO: They always dead first. If you put the children in the ground, the world forgets about them. Who’s gointu see them, buried in the dirt? (Moraga 94)

Pérez’s interpretation of the crucifixion as a cruel and macabre deed stems from the fact that she is an outsider to McLaughlin, completely oblivious to the environmental circumstances that have led to Memo Delgado’s death. She is unaware that the real source of cruelty is environmental

79 Didascalia, or stage directions, are distinguishing markers of dramatic texts. Per theatre scholar Marvin Carlson, didascalia has to do with the “translation of the literary text into the text of performance” (37). While stage directions are certainly a part of the literary text, they importantly engage in an act of translating, or transforming the text into that which can be performed. For more on didascalia and typology for reading and staging plays, see Carlson’s essay, “The Status of Stage Directions,” which examines five different kinds of stage directions (attribution, structural, locational, character description, and performance). “Performance didascalia” is most relevant in the opening scene of Heroes and Saints, as it focuses on the movement of the cross and corpse of a child (props on a set).

injustice, not the crucifixion. Referring to the spectacle as a “publicity stunt,”80 Pérez incorrectly assumes that the crucifixion itself ultimately caused the child’s demise, until Amparo, an outspoken community member and surrogate mother whom Moraga likens to activist Dolores

Huerta, informs her that this is not the case—that Memo was already dead due to “the poison.”

In this case, the poison is cancer. Amparo’s abstract reference to poison and the inferred uselessness of burying dead bodies only begins to unveil why crucifixion might even be regarded as an appropriate response to Memo’s death.

In their interpretations of the play’s crucifixion, critics would agree that the crucifixion is a spectacle of protest. Its legibility as an object of dissent, of course, requires an awareness of

McLaughlin’s existing environmental problems and of the fact that Memo’s death bespeaks these problems. An unnatural set of circumstances confront McLaughlin community members: children are born with birth defects and/or terminal illness, and their parents must be the ones to bury them. The deaths of children in McLaughlin advance a disruptive order of events that leave parents and the larger community bereaved and full of grief, engulfed in an inconceivable reality.

While “unnatural” events are typically inexplicable, it is the case in McLaughlin that the deaths of children can be explained by scrutinizing the effects a toxic environment has on the human body, especially on the body of a child. These deaths and their environmental causes, however, remain out of sight when bodies are interred in the cemetery. As Amparo notes, they hold little significance because, once buried in the ground, the world forgets about them. Memo’s death, for instance, is not seen and consequently becomes a matter of neglect; it is as though the Memo who was once full of life never existed.

80 The irony is that we do not know if or to what extent mass media will sensationalize the news that Pérez is reporting about, in which case this “publicity stunt” will certainly be consumed by viewers.

Accordingly, the crucifixion of the deceased Memo is an important active response and resistance to an otherwise invisible death.81 As the leader who mobilizes the children to crucify dead corpses of children, Cerezita expresses disapproval at the idea of interred bodies, commenting on the invisibility of bodies that burials produce: “Nobody’s dying should be invisible” (Moraga 139). Here, Cerezita’s use of “dying” operates as a noun to denote death as something that has already occurred, but it simultaneously suggests that dying is something which is still underway, painting a tragic end for all Chicana/o farmworkers in McLaughlin if nothing is done to combat environmental injustice. This is further corroborated when Amparo notes that the children’s bodies are “already dead,” if interpreted as an affirmation about the inevitability of death in McLaughlin. The crucifixion thus serves to signify the dying state of children, which is reinforced with the children’s calavera masks that conjure up the Mexican Día de los Muertos and its veneration for the dead.

While the crucifixion is an act of protest, specifically a protest against farmworkers’ invisibility as well as that of slow violence, it also emerges as an act of public mourning.

Reexamining the crucifixion in this manner expands the ways we might conceive of mourning in

McLaughlin: what it looks like, what it denotes, and what it can accomplish. Grief is a universal phenomenon whose expression is mediated by various contexts (Cowles; Stroebe and Schut), which may include culture, geographical location, race or ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status, etc. Because there is a wide variation in how grief makes itself manifest (Rosenblatt 69-

70),82 there is no universal or “right” manner in which to mourn. And, yet, grief and its

81 It is a concealed act because it occurs offstage and therefore invisible. At this point, the audience does not really know why the crucifixion is occurring, unless Moraga’s notes are printed in the program or, of course, if someone is reading the play. I also use the adjective “concealed” to point out that the agency is not always clearly articulated in slow violence because the agent might be alienated by time and space.

82 Anthropologists have studied and documented variations of grief responses around the world, with a special emphasis on culture. For more, see Attitudes on death and dying: A Cross-cultural View (1976) by Lunceford and

expression are constantly being controlled or policed by secular and religious institutions (Holst-

Warhaf 5) and medicine (Walter 101-102). It is acceptable to express grief in socially-sanctioned spaces (i.e. funeral homes, cemeteries, etc.) and via ritual practices (i.e. wakes, funeral processions, burials, etc.), which all aim to contain grief in Western societies. Thus, grief undergoes a spatial containment. This dovetails with the aforementioned pathologization of grief that arises when it goes on for too long or when the mourner not “move on” during a reasonable timeframe. Ironically, this timeframe remains wildly abstract and relative. Mourning, therefore, can be prescriptive, and it can disavow other potential modes for the expression of grief.

Accordingly, the crucifixion in Heroes and Saints is an articulation of agency in mourning, to the degree that it does not conform to a socially-sanctioned expression of grief. The crucifixion completely subverts our understanding of how grief might be expressed, and through this subversion, perhaps there is a suggestion that the crucifixion is the most fitting way to manifest the town’s communal grief. The cross, which bears the religious signification of passion, becomes an instrument of a new ritual practice that develops out of the exceptionally dire and reprehensible circumstances in McLaughlin. For Cerezita, who has orchestrated this crucifixion with the help of other children, the act of crucifying Memo is a respectful way to mourn him as well as the proper way to acknowledge his loss in ways that a funeral will not.

Indeed, if one of the functions of a funeral is to dispose of and conceal the body of the deceased, then it engages in an exercise of absence,83 which the crucifixion rejects. Instead, it is an act of

Lunceford and also Maurice Eisenbruch’s “Cross-cultural aspects of bereavement. I: A conceptual framework for comparative analysis” in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

83 I would also add that funerals may culturally signal “closure” for grief, which is problematic because grief can extend well beyond any social-sanctioned mourning practices.

public mourning that represents the corpse as something very much present, and that may, in turn, resist the discourse around grief that posits the need or urgency to “move on” from loss.84

The corpse of a child hanging on the cross also eludes the minimization and displacement of death, providing a means for town to viscerally and communally experience its grief. Bearing in mind that the cross was a device to achieve a slow and painful death, the crucifixion also performs a social need: the need to communicate that the loss of a child is something exceedingly painful. The farmworkers’ experiences of environmental racism are so unnatural and unjust that they warrant a confrontational kind of mourning, aimed at McLaughlin community members and its outsiders, even as it stirs both readers and spectators of the play. As

Amparo and Cerezita correctly point out, no one will see the bodies of McLaughlin’s dead children if they are buried in the ground, which means that their deaths may not only go undetected but also unacknowledged. If their deaths go unacknowledged, then there is a consequent dismissal of any claims that give testimony to the presence of harmful pesticides.

The crucifixion, then, might be further read as an instrument to contest the invisibility of slow violence and its effects. Ultimately, as an act of public mourning, it is an activating political force toward an agenda for social and environmental justice.

The issue of (in)visibility, which is a central issue in the play, prompts an important question: who sees the violence? In other words, who counts as a witness? As Nixon observes,

84 Grief becomes a matter of pathology when mourning does not cease or when the mourner is not able to “move on” as soon as possible (Granek 2014, 62). This pathologization can lead to a diagnosis of “Complicated Grief” that requires medication and/or psychotherapy. As Leeat Granek puts it, perhaps the denial of the “normalcy, intensity, and duration of grief is the pathology, not the other way around” (280). Granek critiques the ways in which medical and scientific models have significantly and negatively limited the study of grief: “This erasure of how we used to think about grief as a holistic, necessary, human, relational experience is a disciplinary wound” (277). For more on the pathologization of grief and its development as an object of psychological study, see Granek’s “Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present.”

“contests over what counts as violence are intimately entangled with conflicts over who bears the social authority of witness, which entails much more than simply seeing or not seeing” (16).

Nixon’s statement suggests that a witness helps define what constitutes violence, but only witnesses in a position of social (and I would add economic) power. Since farmworkers lack power, their testimonies about pesticides’ direct negative consequences on their health were not taken seriously by growers and agribusiness enterprises in the early 1990s. Robert R. M.

Verchick, environmental lawyer and scholar of environmental regulations, discusses the neglect of farmworkers’ living and working conditions: “Scientific experts and government officials, far removed from a contaminated site, are sometimes slow to link health problems or property damage to environmental contamination” (67). Detached from the reality of slow violence,

McLaughlin outsiders fail to recognize environmental threats because they do not approach the issue from the subaltern position of farmworkers. It is only the farmworkers’ positionalities— living on the contaminated land and in close contact with other environmental health hazards— that creates urgency. This exigency is what ultimately gives rise to the crucifixion, a new kind of public mourning that operates in the service of political aims.

Mapping Violence on Land

While the protracted environmental violence in McFarland brings human bodies to the forefront, Heroes and Saints does not isolate injury and loss to the human body alone. Moraga also turns our attention to animal and plant life, as she takes care to describe the territorial state of the fictional San Joaquin Valley in locational didascalia: “The hundreds of miles of soil that surround the lives of Valley dwellers should not be confused with land. What was once land has become dirt, overworked dirt, over-irrigated work, injected with deadly doses of chemicals and violated by every manner of ground- and back-breaking machinery” (Moraga 91). Moraga’s language clearly suggests territorial abuse of the land by human intervention, toxic chemicals,

and machinery—layered violations that advance the exploitation and degradation of natural resources. In a collection of essays, Moraga defines land in a complex way: “[it] remains the common ground for all radical action. But land is more than the rocks and trees, the animal and plant life. . . land is also the factories where we [immigrants and natives] work, the water our children drink, and the housing project where we live” (1993, 173). Moraga's capacious definition of land as including animal and plant life and even physical buildings links the violence done on human bodies to that done on the territory that those bodies inhabit. This broadening of the term, then, further “infuses nature with the political history of possession and dispossession” (Ybarra 241). In other words, land becomes wrapped up in historical events and attitudes of conquest or land tenure, and land therefore emphasizes power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups. The narrative of land possession and dispossession is not only historical, but also political. In Chicana/o contexts, the rhetoric of possession and dispossession brings to mind the loss of land endured by Mexican peasants and many indigenous populations in processes of colonization. Land, as both the physical and metaphysical location where conflicts of possession and dispossession take place, materially suffers everyday violence.85 If Moraga thinks about the land as the space in which “we” can and do exist, then she implies a necessary relationship between the physical land and the people inhabiting it. The violence on the physical territory, then, is tantamount to violence on the body.

Accordingly, Moraga’s play invokes cartography to map violence on land and bodies, another tool employed for the purpose of making violence visible: “Miren, the red dots mean those houses got someone with cancer. Estos puntos azules donde tienen tumores. Los green

85 The play specifically recalls the colonization in the Southwestern United States wherein Americans in the 1848 Mexican-American war took land that belonged to Mexico, which would later become U.S. territory,

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ones son para birth defects y los amarillos, the miscarriages” (Moraga 129).86 Here, Amparo discusses the map that plots the locations and number of households that have been and are affected by cancer, tumors, birth defects and miscarriages. Incidentally, she points out that the

McLaughlin “pueblito” is “on the map now” in the play’s opening scene (Moraga 93), and she actually engages in the process of gathering and evaluating data that results in the production of an intellectual and graphical design. This is to say that Amparo understands cartography as an intellectual means for further investigation on the town’s environmental issues. More than just a practical visual exercise, the practice of mapping aims to objectively record McLaughlin’s health problems. It is a visual account that treats the town’s health problems as factual and thus validates the existence of different ailments.87 Amparo’s map serves as a tool of representation for the town’s inhabitants, wherein McLaughlin households are counted and catalogued as important data points. The data then prompts further examination and questions: How many households have someone with cancer? Besides cancer, what other health problems exist? What patterns does the map reveal? Ultimately, the question of why the town has a disproportionate number of serious health issues is the fundamental inquiry that this map raises. As such, the map visually communicates information that must become known to authority officials and the general public, making a claim for visibility. On a broader level, Moraga’s use of cartography effectively condenses past and ongoing environmental violence in the community. Because the colored dots indicate health afflictions spanning years, the map essentially flattens slow

86 For a discussion about cartography and its intersections with feminism, see Burford’s, “Cartographies of a violent landscape”.

87 Contrary to the incredulity knowledge-based experts might express, Cerezita and Yolanda do not doubt the veracity of Amparo’s map (or her methods for gathering the data, by extension). McLaughlin farmworkers have a hard time proving that pesticides are the cause of their strife, but they are certain about this knowledge. For instance, Amparo says, “But we know Cere turn out this way because Dolores pick en los files cuando tenía panza” (Moraga 94), which privileges a different kind of epistemology than that which experts advance.

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violence’s temporal expanse to this one particular moment in the play when Amparo presents her diseased and dying town on a map. Cerezita’s own birth defect literally puts the Valle family on the map,88 yet, ironically, this mapping implies that the family’s struggles are noted, known, or cared about by McLaughlin outsiders,89 which is not the case.

Dying Children and Dead Dolls

In Heroes and Saints, the town’s elementary school board notably denies the existence of slow violence and, in so doing, disavows communal mourning. The school board excludes the subaltern group's perspective from any kind of decision-making that would improve environmental conditions. For example, it refuses to accept Arrowhead’s offer to provide free, safe drinking water for the schoolchildren, dismissing the farmworkers’ attestation to contaminated water (Moraga 110). In response, community members collectively gather in protest outside the school. A leading voice in the protest, Amparo, articulates the community’s outrage and frustration toward the school board, which ostensibly does not want to acknowledge the plights of the farmworkers or communicate with them: “The board says, No, there’s not’ing wrong with our water. We don’ know for sure, it hasn’ been prove. How much prove you need?

How many babies’ bodies pile all up on top of each other in the grave?” (Moraga 111). Even though Amparo is perhaps the most appropriate witness to testify about pesticides’ effects because she has immediate and firsthand knowledge as a farmworker,90 she does not have the

88 Attempting to make light of the situation, Yolands says, “You put us on the map, Cere” (Moraga 129), which implies that the Valle household is, sadly, only on the map because of Cerezita. The mapping of Cerezita’s birth defect emphasizes her position among the farm workers of McLaughlin; Cerezita is both the “head” that is a product of slow violence and the symbolic “head” of her community.

89 Earlier in the play, Amparo notes that “los Americanos are always coming through McLaughlin nowdays. Pero, not too much change” (Moraga 93). Her statement suggests that authority officials are, perhaps, looking at and investigating McLaughlin, but whatever actions they take, if any, are not adequately addressing environmental issues.

90 The witness has this type of knowledge through his/her senses. For instance, the play illustrates the sense of sight when Cerezita sees that the drinking water is an “orange-yellow color” (Moraga 99). Other human senses are used

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political, economic, or social authority—what can be otherwise theorized as power—to counter the board’s denial of water contamination. Amparo is the subaltern witness whom McLaughlin outsiders do not see or hear.

Heroes and Saints importantly opens a discursive space in which Amparo can speak the silences of Chicana/o farmworkers. The play's witnesses need not be vested with authority by any system or institution to assert environmental injustices. While the school board gives little credence to Amparo’s protest and does not take the necessary measures to decontaminate the community’s water supply, Amparo’s authority as witness derives from her positionality—she reports on what she has experienced and seen firsthand. She becomes the spokesperson who highlights the relative invisibility of farmworkers’ health problems and makes visible the denial of slow violence’s existence. And, Amparo’s audible and resilient voice of protest occurs in the collective setting of the school community, indicating that the contamination of the water supply is a problem that must be addressed collectively.

For the McLaughlin community, ending the water contamination, and accessing safe water, proves especially pressing because the school water supply specifically endangers the lives of children; according to Amparo, these children are “already poisoned” (Moraga 111).

Moraga suggests that even the children are aware of their diseased bodies and heightened risk of mortality, for the child character Bonnie provides the most poignant representation of slow violence in the play. Bonnie, the adopted child of Amparo and her husband Don Gilberto, is the

to expose the conditions that are visible to the farm workers: McLaughlin continually has planes spraying the fields with pesticides; when Yolanda fills up a glass of water from the faucet, Cerezita and Yolanda’s brother Mario smells the toxins: “Chale. The shit stinks” (Moraga 95); Dolores invokes the sense of taste when she explains that the “the poison they put on the almonds, it would make you sick. The women would run out of the place coz they had to throw up” (Moraga 99); and Cerezita notes that the taste of Yolanda’s breast milk, which painfully will not stop trickling, is “very bitter” (Moraga 95). The farm worker witness, then, does not only depend on the sense of sight to gain firsthand knowledge about hazardous living and working conditions.

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only child's voice in the play, but her small presence makes a cogent commentary about how even children's bodies do not—but should—matter. Bonnie represents the health trajectory of many children with her play doll, which she imagines is riddled with cancer. The fate Bonnie gives her doll points to her incontestable awareness of pesticides’ harm. Accordingly, Yarbro-

Bejarano reads Bonnie as a character who “stands for all the children damaged, both physically and emotionally, by pesticide poisoning” (66). While Bonnie’s doll “play” certainly points to the internationalization of physical and emotional damage done by pesticides, Bonnie sees in her imagination her doll’s health worsening. The violence on the doll’s body happens slowly, as the doll's body increasingly deteriorates across the play's timespan.

Bonnie does something akin to playing doctor, and she quickly learns that she cannot help her doll; she is a sitting witness to the doll’s declining health instead. She is, indeed, bearing witness to environmental slow violence. Admittedly, the doll's body does not have the same emotional resonance as the real bodies of real children. It would be absurd to give the doll’s death the same emotional weight the mothers of McLaughlin give to their dead children.

However, Bonnie’s doll plays an uncanny role in the play:

BONNIE (takes out a thermometer and puts it into her doll’s mouth): Estas malita, mija? (Checking the thermometer.) Yes, I think you got “it.” (She rubs the top of its head, chanting.) ‘Sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy sanaras mañana.’ [...] She puts the doll into a small box and covers it tenderly with the remains of the cloth. (Moraga 99)

Bonnie treats her beloved doll as if it were alive: the doll becomes “she” rather than “it.”

Bonnie’s care for the doll positions her as a mother figure, and her status as the doll's mother is made especially evident with her use of “mija”— short for “mi hija,” which is a parent's term of endearment for a daughter. She wants to treat her doll’s illness and “tenderly” goes about doing

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so. Her use of the diminutive “malita” also expresses affection, and in an effort to make her

“little daughter” feel better, she rubs the doll’s head and invokes a traditional rhyme from Latin

America told when a child gets hurt. Although Bonnie refers to her doll’s ailment as “it”

[cancer], there is little ambiguity for her about what plagues the doll’s health. She understands what “it” is because she has witnessed “it” take the lives of many other children in the community. Bonnie’s understanding of cancer serves as a poignant reminder of how children, too, are bound up in subaltern positionalities.

Bonnie’s doll further serves a metonymic function: it is a small, lifeless model of the human body subjected to the detrimental effects of pesticide use. Her doll specifically mirrors the dying infant Evalina, who is Cerezita’s niece. Yolanda, Cerezita’s older sister and Evalina's mother, worries about her infant’s wellbeing and tries to stop her inevitable death. Bonnie’s

“play” with the doll is uncannily prescient because it plays out what will happen to Evalina:91

BONNIE: We knew she wouldn’t make it. The cancer got her. CEREZITA: How did you know? BONNIE: She bled through all her openings, her mouth, her ears, her nose... even through her pee hole, she bled. It was outta control. CEREZITA: What are you doing now? BONNIE: I gotta bury her. I’m making her coffin. (Moraga 130)

As Bonnie’s language shows us, she does not treat the doll as something lifeless. Even though it is an object, the doll bleeds profusely, and cancer eats away the doll’s nonexistent organs. Yet the ambiguity of the pronoun “her” allows for the possibility of reference to either the doll or

Yolanda’s baby. Yolanda herself acknowledges the baby's forthcoming death: “Evalina’s dying,

‘ama. My baby’s dying,” and then “I know it’s a tumor. I know it’s malignant. I know what that means” (Moraga 131). Although Dolores remains steeped in denial, given her summoning of

91 This playing out is further exacerbated by the rather ruthless comment Bonnie makes: “Lina’s gonna die, too, just like this (Moraga 131; emphasis mine).

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religion as a means to defy the idea that God has forsaken those who live in the farmworker community, Yolanda and Bonnie both understand that cancer will eventually take Evalina’s life.

Bonnie’s offering—the shoe-box she specifically makes for the baby—certainly indicates that death in the family is imminent, even as death and illness have been made a part of the lived experiences of farmworkers living in McLaughlin. Bonnie’s construction of the coffin hearkens back to the idea that the child is always already dead.

Thus, Bonnie's playing out of Evalina’s inevitable death offers yet another representational instance of slow violence. Her doll play speeds up the slowness of violence, since both deteriorations—the doll’s and Evalina’s—happen throughout the duration of the play, which effectively compresses long-scale temporality to make violence visible.92 Evalina’s death eventually occurs offstage, but if Bonnie’s doll stands in for her metonymically, it is probable that Evalina, too, bleeds to death. The specific cause of the death for the youngest member of the

Valle household actually remains unknown in the play. This detail is irrelevant, in part because it is understood that Evalina and other children all had some kind of terminal cancer, which would likely only be determined by an autopsy.93 More important, however, is the fact that Yolanda refuses to see the cancer as the primary agent of her baby’s death. Instead, she insists on finding someone on whom to place blame and make responsible for Evalina’s premature and unwarranted death: “Don’t you see, ‘amá? I gotta find her killer” (Moraga 132). Her grief is guided by the desire to identify and locate her daughter’s killer, as she puts it, which marks a critical turning point in Heroes and Saints. No longer are the environmental conditions of the

92 Bonnie’s doll later becomes a subject of crucifixion; the figure joins the other children whose bodies have been crucified in an act of public mourning. Once again, the child spearhead and participates in this act.

93 Besides care in the home, there is no indication in the play that ill children are properly diagnosed before death or receive any kind of medical treatment.

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town viewed as the culprit for infant mortality, nor is death abstractly linked to the use of toxic pesticides in the field.

Instead, Yolanda asserts that her daughter was murdered, and in so doing, she refuses to frame her daughter’s death as a result of “unnatural” causes triggered by environmental hazards, choosing instead to acknowledge that an unlawful killing resulted in Evalina’s death and the denial of her right to life. Here, the environmental discourse that calls attention to the attritional violence enacted on both land and farmworker bodies intersects with a socio-legal discourse, as the deaths of McLaughlin children are reframed as a matter of homicide. Facilitating the viewpoint that McLaughlin’s social injuries exceed definitions of harm delineated by the state or national legislation, there is an important shift here from environmental injustice to the domain of criminality. The spray of toxic pesticides and the fact that McLaughlin farmworkers live on toxic land is not only wrong, undeserved, and unjust; it is also criminal and unlawful. Evalina’s death is an act of murder and is a discrete example, among many in McLaughlin, pointing to a larger agribusiness apparatus that profits from environmental practices. In this case, it is the lack of regulation for pesticides that constitutes a criminal offense. Ultimately, Yolanda’s desire to find her baby’s killer moves toward a critical reappraisal of environmental harm as a criminal offense that unlawfully denies McLaughlin denizens, even infants and children, the right to life, and, in turn, prompts accountability. Inasmuch as public mourning in this farmworker town brings attention to human loss, it also implicitly conveys the loss of the right to life and the legacy of injury for present and future generations. On a larger level, it is this loss and legacy, I argue, that drive the central act of public mourning in the second act of Heroes and Saints.

From McLaughlin to Sacramento: Challenging Invisibility

Understanding that collective pursuits of dissent remain locked within the town’s geographical limits, members of the McLaughlin community collectively travel to Sacramento

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with the intent of reclaiming the right to life by making demands on government actors deemed responsible for slow violence. The resolve to travel to Sacramento is necessary for overcoming the invisibility of slow violence. In effect, McLaughlin’s insularity speaks to the ways of seeing and not seeing that both mitigate environmental calamities and shroud feelings of grief in the community. Moraga's notes for the play’s setting indicate that McLaughlin is a bifurcated “one- exit town off Highway 99” (91), where small businesses make up the old part of town and

“single-family stucco houses and apartments” form the new McLaughlin. The latter is further described as a “large island,” which denotes its geographical separation, or, perhaps better put, the quarantine of ailing and dying bodies whose right to life has been severely threatened by “a sea of [toxic] agricultural fields” (91). Assuming that only the town's inhabitants take the exit off the highway to this "island,” McLaughlin's physical isolation calls attention to its literal lack of visibility to outsiders. If outsiders witness a glimpse of the despairing circumstances of the town, it is the extent to which the world of the play opens itself to spectators in the theatre as well as the reach of Pérez’s televised broadcast about the town’s protests and the motivations behind them.

In some ways, McLaughlin's relative invisibility to outsiders inscribes silence around farmworkers' issues, and unfortunately, some farmworkers have historically been complicit in this silence,94 fearing that they will lose their jobs if they speak out. In turn, this encourages environmental authority figures to ignore, question, or farmworkers’ accounts of pesticide poisoning, letting the financial incentives to maintain silence dominate in the absence of scientifically-proven causation. The geographical isolation of McLaughlin gives rise to a state of

94 Finding strength in coalition, some farmworkers in the play, however, have challenged this silence by joining the Union of Campesinos, which is “an outspoken advocate for pesticide control” (Moraga 93).

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invisibility that impacts whether farmworkers' concerns about pesticide use in the fields garner any attention from authorities, and whether public mourning carries forth political efficacy.

Unless they are the subjects of televised news stories, the denizens of McLaughlin are largely imperceptible to the outside world. Moraga thus develops the internal activist work of the play itself in her suggestion that a collective body of protestors must search for and create as many opportunities as possible to be seen and heard. It is critical for farmworkers to prioritize their corporeal visibility, most of all, to show evidence of what it means to live and work under toxic conditions—to demonstrate that their bodies are the sites upon which slow violence occurs.

Members of the McLaughlin collectively mobilize to make themselves and their plights visible to outsiders, thereby challenging the geographical limits of and the silence around their town—the isolated “island” that outsiders do not see and about which they do not hear. Both children and adults participate in the Sacramento demonstration. Children carry signs that make pleas concerning the right to life, including “Quiero Vivir!” and “I Want to Live!” (Moraga 132), and the use of Union of Campesino’s red and black flags undeniably recalls the historical movement of the United Farmworkers of America that kindled a spirit of political organizing and sustained efforts against oppressive forces. The signs advocating for the boycott of grapes, per the stage directions, subverts the silence around farmworker living and working conditions.

Moreover, the mothers’ white bandanas mark a politicized connection with Las Madres de la

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Plaza de Mayo,95 who protested the disappearances of their children during Argentina’s “Dirty

War” (1976-1983), and reflect a transnational utilization of mourning for political ends.96

Grieving Mothers of McLaughlin: Public Mourning and Dissent in Sacramento

Though environmental violence has implications for all McLaughlin denizens, it especially concerns maternal bodies whose injured reproductive systems have yielded children with birth deformities and other fatal sicknesses. Such is the case with Yolanda who apprehensively discloses, “I think my womb is poisoned” (Moraga 143). This statement sadly implies that her womb might have contributed to Evalina’s premature death as much as it indicates severe injury to her reproductive system. In addition, Evalina did not receive any treatment for her illness, because the town does not have any apparent structures in place for proper medical attention and treatment. Choosing to organize around a maternal identity,

Chicana farmworkers spearhead the “political demonstration,” as the stage directions refer to it, that takes place on the capitol steps in Sacramento under Amparo’s leadership, who is revealed to be the founder of Mothers for McLaughlin (132).97 It is no coincidence that Moraga casts

Amparo as the leader of these women—an obvious nod to the historically strong leadership of

Dolores Huerta. Though Amparo is not a biological mother, she becomes a mother via Bonnie’s

95 Demanding information about the whereabouts of their disappeared children, fourteen Argentine mothers took to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in April 1977, a public demonstration that grew in numbers as mothers from diverse backgrounds continued to gather in the Plaza every Thursday afternoon. Much of the scholarship about these protests considers how motherhood operated as the central impetus and organizing mechanism, while it also examines the effectiveness and limitations of the deployment of motherhood. See especially Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1997).

96 In “Learning from the Dead,” Greenberg notes that Heroes and Saints carries forth vestiges of transnationalism focused on “communal histories of pain” when Cerezita stages herself as La Virgin de Guadalupe. In effect, Cerezita makes mention of a larger injured comunidad across Latin America that has faced a matrix of oppression. She situates the local environmental plights of McLaughlin in a transnational context, which then helps to position environmentalism as an important matter that concerns many subaltern populations of the Americas.

97 We can infer that Amparo and McLaughlin mothers decided to organize after the death of Yolanda’s daughter Evalina.

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adoption. Most important, Amparo’s maternal identity grows out of her dedicated activism around saving the lives of McLaughlin children.

The Mothers of McLaughlin acquire a collective identity that offers them a symbolic base on which to stand as leaders.98 As Ana Pérez reports on the demonstration, she makes clear that the mothers stand in solidarity with an agenda of remediation that requires action from government actors:

The mothers’ demands are quite concrete. They believe that the federal government should pay for their families’ relocation to an environmentally safe community, since federal moneys subsidized the building of their housing tract. They further demand that the well which provides tap water for the area be shut down and never again be used for drinking water. And finally they urge the governor to see to the establishment of a free clinic for affected families and to monitor the growing incidence of cancer in the region. (Moraga 132)

The mothers’ demands, as summarized by Pérez, express concern for the welfare of families and the need for direct action from state and national authorities. They are allegations as well as stalwart petitions for safety. It is worth acknowledging that these demands also stem from the pain of loss. The mothers do well to acknowledge the complicity of the federal government in creating the conditions for an unsafe environment. Claims presented here about federally subsidized housing built on a dump site and the contamination of water are not new,99 but the specific measures that must be taken to prevent or alleviate future injury and loss are important additions to these claims. Specific directives oblige state and federal authorities to take responsibility for the wellbeing of farmworkers and, at the same time, hold them accountable for

98 In addition to giving voice to marginalized women, it is worth noting that Moraga also takes care to insert the sidelined or silenced queer of Mario, Cerezita’s brother. Mario left McLaughlin for a time and contracted HIV. He notes that the “city’s no different. Raza’s dying everywhere. Doesn’t matter if it’s crack or…pesticides, AIDS, it’s all the same shit” (Moraga 141).

99 The claims of an “American Dream” built on toxic land (Moraga 103) and the suspected effects of toxic chemical aerial spraying on the community’s water system (Moraga 110) are made known in the first act of the play.

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future actions (or lack thereof). The mothers’ articulated demands speak to their roles as protectors and nurturers of their nuclear families; they are also caretakers of their extended families and of the larger farmworker community. At the same time, these roles do not diminish or run counter to their leadership against environmental violence, as they do not passively fall into the backdrop of the political protest. The mothers do not claim a state of static victimhood.

Instead, they execute political agency in mobilizing the McLaughlin community and bringing visibility to their plights.

Following Pérez’s presentation of their demands, the mothers stage a poignant statement that compels outsiders to contemplate the loss of McLaughlin children, which departs from the more conventional mode of protest illustrated at the start of scene three in Act II. As such, I read the demonstration in Sacramento as a two-part endeavor that calls on the state and federal government to take political responsibility for injury and loss in McLaughlin. In the latter part of scene three, a group of mothers individually declare the deaths of young children, methodically announcing the names of the deceased, their dates of death, their ages, and their lethal ailments.

These objective facts help to corroborate the existence of a cancer cluster in McLaughlin, though authorities may insist on denying a relationship between environmental conditions and these deaths. In addition, each mother holds up a “picture of a dead child” (Moraga 133), and this visual artifact importantly prevents each child from remaining faceless, or invisible; the artifact most immediately serves to identify the dead. In other words, the photographs provide a visual record of loss.100

100 Again, Heroes and Saints makes a transnational link between the Mothers of McLaughlin and the Argentine Madres of the Playa de Mayo, as the latter employed photographs of their missing children to protest. These visual representations proved especially defiant in the face of a government that tried to literally erase its citizens through disappearance. While the photographs represented missing persons, they also performed a metonymic function insofar as they represented all of the desparecidos. For more on photography and mourning during Argentina’s Dirty War, see Julia Reineman’s article, “Between the Imaginary and the Real: Photographic Portraits of Mourning of

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On another level, the ceremonious and affective frequencies of this verbal and visual exposition by the Mothers of McLaughlin constitute public mourning. Public mourning here relies on the collective presence of bereaved mothers and the employment of pictures of their dead children. In Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (2005), Jay Prosser contends that photography and loss are connected: “Photographs are not signs of presence but evidence of absence. Or rather the presence of a photograph indicates its subject’s absence. Photographs contain a realization of loss (1). Prosser suggests that photographs are the instruments through which we enter into a recognition of loss. Accordingly, when the mothers hold up photographs of their deceased children, they suggest that the tangible objects they hold symbolically represent that which they have lost. Though the visual images allow the children to be seen, perhaps even imagined, the photograph itself serves as a bleak reminder of their absence.

The photograph also functions as an artifact that highlights the loss of the mother and child relationship. Vamik D. Volkan explains that “A linking object is something—usually inanimate—actually present in the environment that is psychologically contaminated with various aspects of both the dead and the self of the mourner” (334). As a linking object, the photograph connects the deceased children with their mothers and, in so doing, draws attention to the mothers as now bereaved individuals—as mourning mothers whose worlds have been ruptured by the fatal effects of slow violence. This rupture leads to severe emotional injury for the mothers, which we can specifically witness through Yolanda’s participation in the demonstration. As the last mother to step forward to declare the death of her infant daughter,

Yolanda cannot even finish her statement, proceeding to shout, “era mi hija…era…¡mi hija!”

Melancholia in Argentina.” See also “Photographs and Silhouettes: Visual Politics in the Human Rights Movement of Argentina” by Ana Longini.

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(Moraga 133) and then collapsing out of distress. Here, Yolanda’s grief comes to the fore as she considers her daughter’s death and the way she must now articulate the past particle of “to be” in relation to the word daughter (“she was my daughter”). Her collapse even signals her body’s physical response to grief. Evalina no longer “is,” and Yolanda’s photograph of Evalina poses a recognition of her loss as well as the loss of the mother-child relationship. In these ways, the mothers’ demonstration does not only follow traditional modes of political protest, with dissenting subjects carrying signs and crying out for justice. The demonstration also operates on an affective register as it engages with the intimate work of mourning in a public way. Mourning here brings forth a politics of recognition of loss that challenges state and federal governments to assume responsibility for ensuring the right to life and to meeting the demands that prioritize farmworker protection and safety.

For the Mothers of McLaughlin, to mourn is to resist the negligence of agribusinesses as well as the disavowal of environmental racism and injustice. Further, to mourn the deaths of their children is also to acknowledge that they experience a double environmental burden, as both their female bodies and their children are compromised by the effects of slow violence. Thus, the commanding presence of the women of McLaughlin reveals the gender asymmetry of pesticide poisoning, because women's gendered bodies are affected differently, more forcefully, than men’s bodies. Moraga privileges the female body, empowering the mothers of the play by giving them a strong voice in the larger world that is so often dominated by men.101 Nonetheless, there

101 Chicana/o social movements and cultural nationalism relegated women to subordinate status and subservient roles while men remained in the forefront (Garcia 1989), and Chicanas have cogently challenged their positions in the social order. The women in Heroes and Saints participate in dismantling a patriarchal order that insists on female subservience by assuming leadership positions. In this scene, for instance, the Mothers of McLaughlin collectively advance verbal protest and, hence, the power of voice. However, “verbal protest is ineffectual” in light of Amparo’s beating by the police (Vigil 103). While Pérez raises her voice to help Amparo, it is Don Gilberto who tries to thwart police brutality by literally shielding Amparo’s body (Vigil 103). The power of women’s voices, then, has its limitations and thus cannot be the only vehicle towards change in the social order.

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seems to be a cost for the mothers’ outspokenness and their resistance to subordinate positions.

As Yolanda collapses into Amparo’s arms and protestors advance forward, the police beat

Amparo at the end of the scene—another nod to Dolores Huerta, who was severely beaten by

San Francisco police offers in 1988 during a lawful protest. Amparo suffers physical injury to her spleen, but her experience with police brutality does not deter her from continuing to advocate on behalf of her community. In her words, “that policia got another thing coming if he think he could take away mi pasión. ¿No, viejo?” (Moraga 135). While Amparo’s “passion,” or hunger for justice, is fed by the urgency of McLaughlin’s environmental issues, her husband does not suppress Amparo’s activist agenda. Indeed, Don Gilberto’s character does not embody hyper-masculinist or machismo traits that insist on the subservience of women. He is, instead, a

“supporting actor” for Amparo, willing to follow in her leading steps. In attending to the strides that women, in particular, make against environmental injustice, the play insists that the larger

Chicana/o community embrace women as political agents and leaders, which requires support and defense for the work that women do. Though the scene in Sacramento most visibly frames

Chicana leadership, I argue that the play, as a whole, documents Chicanas’ interventions, situating public mourning as a critical “movida”102 that might be lost in larger narratives of movement and social change.

102 I borrow this term from Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era. Building on how Chela Sandoval theorizes “movidas” as “revolutionary maneuvers” in Methodology of the Oppressed, the editors of Chicana Movidas define movidas “as a submerged technology of struggle” that “illuminates a multimodal engagement with movement politics that included acts of everyday labor and support as well as strategic and sometimes subversive interventions within movement spaces” (2). I find “movidas” relevant to my project because my examination of mourning reveals how the public expression of grief, as a mode of resistance, might not be readily understood as a robust political strategy. While mourning operates on a very real affective level in response to injury and loss, it also takes on a subversive political form; its resistance manifests as a kind of undercover “movement.” In Heroes and Saints, mourning becomes a tactical movida for organizing the community and creating a Chicana political praxis that outlines the matrix of race, class, and gender in relation to environmental racism.

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The Agenda of Protest and Activist Lineages

In its direct engagement of farmworker plights and resistant acts made possible through mourning, Heroes and Saints importantly aligns with the history and tradition of protest in

Chicano theatre, particularly with Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino (ETC). Touted as “the symbol of the Chicano’s theatrical expression. . . dedicated to exposing the sociopolitical conditions of the Mexican-American community" (Huerta 1982, 1), ETC quickly generated political consciousness and activity among Chicanos,103 and especially so because it served as the theatrical arm of the United Farmworkers of America, which was led by Cesar Chavez. In some ways, the attention to slow violence, death, and mourning in Moraga’s play are not unlike the hardships that the farmworkers of the 1960s proffered in grassroots theater. Both ETC and

Moraga see art as a political means, understanding theater as a promising didactic space—a space where farmworkers can teach themselves and others about unequal power relations.

Despite ETC’s significant contributions to political endeavors and to the development of

Chicana/o theater, ETC had its own problematic internal gender issues. Critical evaluation condemns its reinforcement of male dominance in its program of Chicano nationalism and cultural representation.104 ETC's history and historiography are marked by misogyny; women are relegated to stereotypical gender roles and secondary levels of importance. These stereotypes, which appear alongside race and class assumptions, pigeonholed Chicanas as accessories to the male protagonist(s) and failed to consider women's potential agency. While Moraga’s Heroes

103 Valdezian teatro, which began to build political consciousness through the actos, was invested in the exploration of sociopolitical inequalities, but had a myopic vision for its articulation of identity, focusing on Chicanos and excluding Chicanas. I use Chicano rather than Chicana/o here to signal this.

104 Feminist Chicana scholars Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and Yolanda Broyles-González have brought to bear the ways in which El Teatro Campesino marginalized Chicanas, proving that a matrix of ethnicity, race, class and gender (especially) was imposed on Chicana bodies and identities.

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and Saints can trace its activist lineage to ETC, there is no doubt that Moraga deliberately deviates from the oppressive gender roles depicted in the ETC's productions and historically imposed on Chicanas. As a fearless young leader, Cerezita perhaps voices the clearest divergence from the misogyny of Valdezian teatro. But of course, Moraga’s gender critique of

Chicano cultural nationalism and her revised treatment of Chicana women do not heal the existing problems of female farmworkers, since the oppressive matrix of race, ethnicity, and class are still at work. Nevertheless, Moraga’s play actively pushes against this matrix, positioning Chicanas as leaders who use kitchens as political sites and who mobilize their community to increase visibility and awareness of environmental injustice. They are political agents who astutely understand that that loss is not something to be concealed, muted, forgotten, or erased in the pursuit of social change. Even as she engages in the painful work of mourning, the doubly subaltern Chicana within the already subaltern farm-working McLaughlin community resists.

El Pueblo’s Right to Life and Collective Action

The culmination of Heroes and Saints is essential to a discussion of farmworkers’ resistance against environmental racism, and I close this chapter by highlighting the intersection of mourning and collective action. The play’s last scene attends to the infant Evalina’s funeral, but the ceremonious procession will actually not lead to Evalina’s burial. Rather, there is preparation underway for another crucifixion that constitutes public mourning and, in turn, makes the infant’s death visible. The act of crucifixion itself signals a staunch refusal to end mourning by putting Evalina into the ground. To crucify Evalina is the only way to truly make her loss known. After Cerezita addresses El Pueblo as La Virgen de Guadalupe,105 she and

105 For an extended discussion about Cerezita’s transformation, see pp. 175-177 in Greenberg’s “Learning from the Dead.” Per Greenberg’s reading, Cerezita’s performance of La Virgen makes possible the figure’s reconfiguration,

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Father Juan make their way towards the vineyards to erect the cross with Evalina’s corpse on it.

At this point, helicopters appear on the scene and violently halt the crucifixion by gunning the actors down from overhead, which is the most visibly violent act against the farmworkers. In response, Mario instructs El Pueblo to burn the vineyards, and community members instantaneously follow this command. It is true that the act of burning down the vineyards does not change the structural systems in place that create the power dynamics for environmental racism, and it is also true that the militancy portrayed in this scene paints quite a pessimistic future for socio-environmental transformation in McLaughlin. Incidentally, the intentional attempt to kill farmworkers resonates with Yolanda’s aforementioned assertion that her daughter did not simply die—she was murdered. The irony is that this is not the first time that violence has been wrought by a faceless helicopter. Chemical crop dusters and helicopters are ever- present in McLaughlin,106 their shadows passing over the fields as the toxic fog of pesticides slowly destroy life.

It is this unequivocal, hyper-visible act of violence at the end of the play that opens up a space for the subaltern farmworkers to take collective action. The farmworkers' reciprocating violence against agribusiness corporations, which represent larger structures of power, is unprecedented. If these structures see farmworkers' bodies as exploitable and expendable—as bodies that do not matter—then the sudden destruction of the fields is a direct retaliation against this attitude. It is an impulsive protest that underscores the workers' grief and anger toward the environmental problems that maintain their subaltern positionality. At the same time, this violent

insofar as the virginal saint becomes an “open and wounded body” that helps to imagine “injury as a kind of peoplehood” (176). 106 At the start of the play, a “low helicopter invades the silence” of the crucificixion (Moraga 92); later, Dolores hears the “sound of a low-flying crop duster” and watches as its shadow (Moraga 103); and finally, Dolores and Mario both watch the evening sky as “the fog begins to roll in. Sound of crop duster overhead” (Moraga 122).

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protest makes clear that the resistant politics of public mourning do not always lead to tangible change in the form of local assistance or legislative reform. The government appears not to have acted on any of the demands the Mothers of McLaughlin put forward in Sacramento, choosing instead to let agribusinesses treat farmworkers as people that must be either slowly or swiftly exterminated. While it is clear that public mourning here has limitations, its utmost value is that it advances a politics of the right to life for McLaughlin community members. Though public mourning fixates on loss and its necessary recognition, it also shifts its focus to life, as I have argued. It is precisely this claim to life that leads El Pueblo to take collective action by burning the fields in which they labor—a destructive act that further demands socio-environmental transformation.

As a writer-activist, Moraga importantly narrates both the deaths and the survival of local farmworkers, giving voice to those who are marginalized, invisible, and in mourning. This sets her activism apart from more mainstream approaches to environmentalism, which mostly fail to engage larger issues of societal inequalities. Mainstream environmentalists are not seen to concern themselves with the particular issues of subaltern communities, which emphasize subsistence; mainstream environmentalists instead privilege a concern for quality of life, which is perceived as elitist or racist (Pulido): according to Austin and Schill, “the narrowness of the mainstream movement, which appears to be more interested in endangered animals (nonhuman) species and pristine undeveloped land than at-risk humans, makes poor minority people think that their concerns are not ‘environmental’” (quoted in Pulido 25). But Moraga’s play counters the idea that farmworkers' concerns are not environmental, thereby challenging readers and audiences to give subaltern Chicana/o communities their rightful place within discussions of environmentalism. Challenging conventional understandings of violence as something

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immediate or visible, in some cases sensational, Moraga engages instead with violence that is spread out across time and space, and hidden from sight. Slow violence functions as an opportune method of concealment for entities that profit from ignorance of their violent actions, justifying their (lack of) response. This is the case with Chicana/o farmworkers in the fictional

McLaughlin, who experience the detrimental effects of pesticides over a long period of time but whose injury and loss do not “count” or are of importance to growers and large agribusiness enterprises. These farmworkers are in a state of chronic mourning. They mourn their injuries and losses; they mourn the fact that no one outside McLaughlin takes notice of these injuries and losses; and they mourn the lack of measures in place that would ensure their safety and wellbeing.

In sum, the public mourning of Heroes and Saints contests the invisibility of farmworkers’ injuries and losses, and simultaneously operates to counter the invisibility of slow violence. Indebted to Chicana/o theater’s historical focus on social change, the play rouses political awareness of farmworkers’ own environmentalism and conceives of mourning as a core affective mechanism for understanding the lived experiences of Chicana/o farmworkers. The play directly challenges audiences’ social and moral imagination of the lives of Chicana/o farmworkers. Audiences suddenly grasp the magnitude and extremity of environmental slow violence, finally understanding it as equally catastrophic as more immediate and explosive examples of violence. Moreover, they witness the public mourning of Chicana/os that advances the recognition and visibility of loss, which ultimately work toward the pursuit of just environmentalism and collective responsibility.

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CHAPTER 3: PERFORMING VIOLENCE AND MOURNING: THE CHOLA/O AND PATRIARCHAL POWER IN LUIS ALFARO’S ELECTRICIDAD (2003)

Introduction

Departing the rural area of Central California, this chapter geographically moves toward the urban spaces of Los Angeles in its investigation of grief and mourning in the barrio. Like the previous two body chapters, social injury and loss in the barrio are products of structural ills intimately connected to violence. Discourses adversely circumscribing the barrio, however, often preclude the consideration of grief and mourning on the basis that violence comes from within, thereby situating the barrio and its inhabitants as innately violent and thus undeserving of lament.

I contest this unsympathetic notion by directly engaging the grief and mourning that unfolds in

Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad: A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra (2003), acknowledging it is, indeed, an outcome of interpersonal violence but emphasizing violence as part of a code of behavior influenced by patriarchal power. I unpack the robust and valuable, intra-ethnic critique

Alfaro’s play offers—a critique that does not serve to deprecate the barrio, but that instead critically analyzes its social, political, and cultural circumstances and dynamics.

Born, raised, and based in Los Angeles, Luis Alfaro is a gay Chicano performance artist, playwright, and director, whose oeuvre reflects a commitment to art and politics, and a communal vision for social change. He is a 1997 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius

Fellowship, which brought recognition and national exposure to his work. Alfaro, whose early career focused on solo performance to interrogate intersectional identity within a larger discourse of multiculturalism in the early 1990s, has turned to Greek tragedies for three of his most recent plays. Anchoring ancient storylines in a Chicana/o milieu and cultural imaginary, Alfaro has

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created new ways of “seeing” Greek tragedies, beginning with Electricidad: A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra (2003),107 the first play in his Greek trilogy, which takes the Electra myth108 as its point of departure. Following Electricidad are Oedipus, el Rey (2010) and Mojada:

A Medea in Los Angeles (2012-2013).109 These plays have been produced across the United

States and have been generally well-received by audiences and critics alike. Especially by audiences who grasp that, more than rewriting familiar storylines, Alfaro’s adaptations make important critical ethno-interventions on the theatrical stage.110 Accordingly, Paul Allatson posits that Alfaro engages in a “Chicanoization of the theatrical canon,” whereby the gay Chicano playwright critiques “ethnocentric edges” that place limitations on Chicana/o representation

(“Luis Alfaro”).

107 Electricidad had its world premiere at Borderlands Theatre (Tucson, Arizona) in 2003, where it was directed by Barclay Goldsmith. Other professional productions include: Goodman Theatre (Chicago, Illinois) in 2004, directed by Henry Godinez; Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles, California) in 2005, directed by Lisa Peterson; Teatro Vision at the Mexican Heritage Plaza Theatre (San Jose, California) in 2006, directed by Mark Valdez; Artes De La Rosa at the Rose Martine Theatre (Fort Worth, Texas) in 2012, directed by Yvonne Duque; and Teatro Carmen Zapata (in collaboration with Project Twenty12 and Homeboy Industries) at the Bilingual Foundation of The Arts (Los Angeles, California) in 2012, directed by Sylvia Blush. This list does not include university productions.

108 In the aftermath of the Trojan War, Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, having never been able to forgive Agamemnon for murdering her lover, Aegisthus, and sacrificing her daughter, Iphigenia, to placate the Gods. As Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s second daughter, Electra is intent on avenging her father’s death. As a result, she plans on committing an act of matricide and recruits help from her brother Orestes. Ultimately, Orestes murders both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and the Furies torment him as a result. There are several versions of the myth of Electra, but I present this synopsis as a foundation. In the context of the late nineteenth century US, Electra (and particularly Sophocles’ version) “became one of the three most popular Greek tragic figures on the US stage, along with Medea and Oedipus” (12), according to Helene P. Foley.

109 Alfaro’s Greek trilogy is part of a larger body of adaptations. These adaptations include the screenplay for From Prada to Nada (2011), co-written by Alfaro as a comedic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Alleluia, The Road (2013) based on August Strindberg’s play The Great Highway; Painting in Red (2014), adapted from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s The Painter of His Own Dishonor; and Aesop in Rancho Cucamonga (2013), which rewrites Aesop’s celebrated fables.

110 For example, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995) rewrites the Medea myth; this work importantly engages with border theory, Chicana/o queer identity, and the geo-mythical site of Aztlán.

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In Electricidad, the Greeks’ House of Atreus becomes La Casa de Atridas, and the primary setting becomes the East Side of Los Angeles. 111 Alfaro’s adaptation of Sophocles’ original tragedy112 begins with a daughter in mourning. Electricidad, described as a tough chola, drapes herself over the decomposing body of her recently murdered father, Agamenón or “El

Auggie,” on her family’s home front yard. Agamenón was not just her father, he was also the king of the East Side Locos—leader of the East Side gang who provided protection for his kin and his barrio. It is quickly revealed that Electricidad’s mother and Agamenón’s wife,

Clemencia, was the one to upset the gang regime by murdering her husband; she killed

Agamenón in the hopes that a new kind of barrio would rise up after the demise of its leader and under her distinctive female leadership.

Prior to murdering Agamenón, Clemencia banished her son Orestes, who is next in line to become the king of the East Side, to the city of Las Vegas. The precise motive for this exile is unclear in the play, though it is assumed that Clemencia aims to eradicate the longstanding patriarchal order of the barrio and all possibilities of its continuity. Meanwhile, Orestes believes his father has sent him to Las Vegas to receive the physical, mental, and emotional training he needs to assume a position of power within the gang when the time comes. As for Electricidad, her eyes are set on vengeance. Although both La Abuela and her sister, Ifigenia (La Ifi), direct

Electricidad towards the idea of forgiveness and an alternative nonviolent path, they are not successful in squelching her fervent desire for retribution. When Orestes ultimately returns to the

111 Los Angeles has a history of displacement, dispossession, and marginalization, all of which shaped barrio formation; displacement, changes in demographics, and public policy measures, forced Mexican Americans into “ecologically inferior neighborhoods” (Pérez 19).

112 When discussing Electricidad as an adaptation, Alfaro does not specify which version of the Electra myth he uses as a source text. In fact, the play seems to derive out of the many variants of the Electra myth that were created by Sophocles, Euripedes and Aeschylus.

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East Side after residing in Las Vegas for several months, he learns the truth about his exile and must come to terms with the fact that his mother has murdered his father. Compelled by a vindictive and tenacious Electricidad, Orestes kills his mother to avenge his father, a ruinous act that ostensibly induces a state of madness. Electricidad, in turn, achieves her agenda of revenge.

Not unlike the story of Electra and other ancient Greek tragedies, Alfaro’s play engages with a continuum of violence, honor, and justice. In particular, the East Side must negotiate cyclical patterns of violence that are anchored in gang life and echo the Greek philosophy, “violence begets violence.” In spite of the play’s portrayal of violence, injury, and loss, Alfaro denies a one-dimensional and unfavorable portrait of the barrio. He celebrates Chicana/o expressive culture, which includes the chola/o113 expressive culture (i.e., language, clothing, behavior), and he strategically imbues Electricidad with humor, providing moments of release and relief, even as one tries to grapple with the deleterious realities of the East Side barrio.

My examination of Alfaro’s Electricidad departs from the previous chapters, wherein I demonstrate the generative capacities and political labor of Chicanas’ public acts of mourning.

Instead, I explore the relationship of mourning to patriarchal power, the loss of female agency, and interpersonal violence. I argue that Electricidad’s engagement with loss displaces the affective dimensions and potential political efficacy of mourning, and therefore provokes more

113 Anthropologist James D. Vigil explains that, in the cultural context of the US, chola/o refers to individuals who are “marginally associated with both Anglo and Mexican culture” and “caught between two cultures” (57); more than this, however, the chola refers to a “larger subset of the Mexicans who have undergone extreme and destabilizing marginalization” (57). Vigil expands on the ways immigration, adaptation, poverty, and socialization (specifically through “Choloization” and “street socialization”) have led to the development and persistence of youth gangs in East Los Angeles. Though the formation of the East Side Locos gang in Electricidad may well stem from these processes, Alfaro’s play seems more intent on showcasing mechanisms of socialization that have created the subset of the chola/o and the even smaller subset of the gang, both of which exist on the social and economic margins of US society. For more, see Vigil’s “Cholo!: The Migratory Origins of Chicano Gangs in Los Angeles” in Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, edited by Jennifer M. Hazen and Dennis Rodgers. For more on the chola/o identity, see also the subsection of this chapter titled “Chicanoization”: The Chola/o and the Interpellation of Violence.

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violence, which is expressed in the play as both emotional and physical injury. Mourning and grief are deemed ineffective; mourning focuses on the public display of injury to the self, and grief-turned-rage catalyzes violent pursuits of retribution following loss. Accordingly,

Electricidad’s grief over her father’s death is what takes center stage, but this familial loss is not the only social injury that needs addressing. Under the patriarchal power that organizes the

Chicana/o family and gang culture, Clemencia grieves the male-dominated, and domestic- centered life she has been forced to have. Sharing Clemencia’s grief and participating in the critique of gang culture’s patriarchal order and violence, which leads to the disempowerment of females, are La Abuela, La Ifi, and even Las vecinas of the East Side. Clemencia’s experience as a chola with little agency is what eventually leads her to murder Agamenón, a violent act meant to dissolve the patriarchal organization of family and gang life and a means toward claiming female emancipation and power. While Clemencia’s resistance is bold and noteworthy, she nonetheless traps herself within a cycle of violence; she rebels against patriarchal power but, in the end, enacts violence that begins the disintegration of the Chicana/o family. Similarly,

Electricidad is a chola who has internalized the violence of gang culture, indicated by her ardent desire to have Clemencia killed. More than this, Electricidad is interpellated to believe power rightfully belongs to a patriarchal order, and this belief makes her complicit in her own female oppression as she works toward restoring patriarchal power to Orestes.

Mourning is productive in the play, as it creates opportunities for acknowledgement of violence and loss, but it does very little beyond this; it actually often morphs into or fixates on destructive rage, lending credence to a way of life that depends on violence for conflict resolution and the realization of justice. Here, gang culture advances a different metric of justice that operates on the need for retribution and functions independent of dominant society’s judicial

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processes and law enforcement—a system of justice from which the barrio has been excluded by virtue of its socioeconomic marginalization. This chapter highlights destructive114 examples of

Chicana grief and mourning and their relationship to an ongoing cycle of violence that is contextualized in the barrio and more specifically, in chola/o culture and gang life. Earlier I addressed Chicanas from subaltern positions and spaces, namely borderlands near maquiladoras and migrant farmworker communities, who actively move mourning and grief from the private to a public sphere. This noted transition converges with a larger space of discursive social and political relations. Whereas, Chicanas in Electricidad do not leverage the public sphere outside of the barrio. They operate within and remain locked in the world of the chola/o set in East Los

Angeles.

In the pages that follow, I first address Alfaro’s engagement with the ancient Greeks and its implications for both Chicana/o communities and the American stage. Then, I provide an overview of how critics have treated Electricidad as both dramatic text and performance.

Because the chola/o and its expressive culture are precisely the mechanisms through which

Alfaro transforms the ancient Greek storyline to a contemporary Chicana/o milieu, I examine the chola/o identity and its relationship to gangs and violence. Next, I attend to the sociological understanding of the barrio as urban space that has been constructed in the US as a marginalized community. Acknowledging the barrio as a valuable space of cultural empowerment, I also present the barrio as a space that disempowers Chicanas and prompts their desire to “get out.”

Along these lines, I unpack Clemencia’s grief, and the brief but sharp critiques of the patriarchal

114 My understanding of destructive here stands in contrast to the constructive possibilities of mourning discussed in the previous two chapters, wherein grief and mourning are politically deployed to interrogate loss as a product of social injustice and to elicit political change.

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cholo order from the other female characters of the play who oppose Electricidad’s desire for retribution.

The play’s negotiation of violence is primarily achieved through the emphasis on gang culture and what it means to be a chola/o, but violence also becomes inseparable from Greek and

Aztec mythologies of war, both of which I explore. I bring attention to how the violence of Aztec mythology informs and serves as an integral part of the chola/o creation story that Electricidad inherits from her father. Electricidad depends on hybridized references to violence stemming from Indigenous and European cultural systems, showing that violence is not something innate to the barrio, as demonizing perceptions of the urban space might suggest; rather, violence is framed as a longstanding cross-cultural phenomenon associated with patriarchal power, with which different communities grapple—from Athenian audiences to marginalized Chicana/os.

Next, I examine how Orestes’s return to Los Angeles sets in motion the reclaiming of patriarchal power and violence, but not before it provides a robust critique of the chola/o’s interpellation of violence and the performance of the chola/o identity. Orestes’s murder of Clemencia ultimately causes the breakdown of the Chicana/o family, and, as he fades into an ostensible state of madness, the end of Electricidad presents various uncertainties for the future of the East Side

Locos gang and the barrio. Beyond the attention to violence and loss, or perhaps in spite of these things, I emphasize Alfaro’s use of humor in Electricidad as both a tool for relief and for resistance by addressing the play’s intersection with the Mexican cultural performance tradition of carpa.

In the last section of this chapter, I reframe my dissertation’s main inquiry of a public kind of mourning to assert that the extent to which the mourning of Chicanas in the chola/o world is made public has to do with how grief is circulated in the theatre space as a performance;

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the theatre space is where the chola/o world meets the “public” audience. Accordingly, I argue that the play, in its entirety, is a conscious performative act of public mourning, and the theatrical stage functions as a space of mourning for the chola/o.115 This world is not often staged because of its raw and dishonorable, even stereotyped, representations that strip chola/os of human dignity and of sympathy from outsiders. The performance of Electricidad contests familiar unsympathetic portrayals that treat the lives of chola/os as inconsequential and/or ungrievable. It provides an important window into a chola/o world that, following its ancient Greek precursors, grapples with similar questions of violence, rage, mourning, and justice within a Chicana/o context. Despite my claim that Chicanas’ grief and mourning is unproductive because it lacks political efficacy and instead reproduces violence, the performance, as an act of public mourning, yields political potential in leveraging the theatre stage as a space to mourn the realities of a marginalized barrio. Deaths resulting from gang violence are often not mourned in the dominant public sphere, and Electricidad engages in a refusal to accept this absence of mourning by staging a public mourning of its own.

Electra Becomes Electricidad: An Overview of the Literature

Alfaro’s solo performance oeuvre have been a subject of many critical studies,116 and there is growing public interest in his theatrical adaptations of ancient Greek myths, which engage “timeless” moral questions with the quotidian realities of Chicana/o communities.

Electricidad, in particular, was inspired by a real-life story Alfaro encountered during his work

115 Underlying this statement is the idea that mourning can occur when the stereotype of the chola/o meets the public sphere and then is knowingly performed as a stereotype. This is, perhaps, the main difference between Alfaro’s play and a work like West Side Story, whose 1957 theatrical production on Broadway, proffered the gang member role but pointedly racialized the Puerto Rican Sharks. Both the Jets and the Sharks emblematized youth gang culture, but it was the latter that became problematically criminalized and marginalized in dominant society.

116 For a review of scholarship on Alfaro’s work from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, see Allatson.

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with community programs in California. He explains in an interview that, while working for youth authority programs that target teenage felons, he met a young girl who had killed her mother (Johnson). Shortly thereafter, Alfaro picked up a collection of the Greeks, which was on sale at a local bookstore: “I thought, I should read this. And you know, you’re reading Electra and it’s basically the same story. Nothing’s changed. Why do we still have a need to avenge?”

(Johnson). For Alfaro, it seems that the Electra myth has its place in gang culture as much as it does in a Greek or European setting; he finds that the questions Athenian audiences asked in the face of tragedy are also preoccupying questions pertaining to Chicana/o cultures.

But, why does Alfaro insist on returning to the Greeks? I suggest that Alfaro’s return to the Greeks indicates an anxiety about aesthetic values and the canon, such that his adaptations are part of an enterprise that, above all, desires to repopulate the theatrical stage with brown bodies. To the degree that the voices and experiences of Chicana/os and Latina/os, more broadly, have been excluded from American theatre, Alfaro wants audiences to consider a question that might dismantle a cultural and racial divide: “How are we [Chicana/os] part of the classics, too?”

(Pollack-Pelzner). I would also argue that for Alfaro, Greek adaptations are not only a means for inclusion within a Western canon; they are a means for rewriting and recasting what theatre looks like, literally bridging the ancient Greeks with contemporary Chicana/o communities. In

Electricidad, Alfaro crosses international and linguistic borders, and even significant temporal distances. While there might be merit in scrutinizing the intertexuality between the Electra myth

(and its textual variants) and Alfaro’s adaptation, the project of dismantling a cultural and racial divide must move toward analysis of the play that focalizes its distinguished chicanidad; this requires grappling with the contours of a Chicana/o urban space rather than assessing whether the play is “derided as sycophantic, derivative or inferior” (Cartmell and Whelehan 1-2) to its

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Greek roots.117 In other words, I suggest that treatment of the play focalizing on its particular chicanidad leads to fruitful intra-ethnic perspectives and critiques for Chicana/o communities. At the forefront of this play is, of course, chola/o culture, which is a unique subculture that expresses marginalized identity, demeanor shaped by socioeconomic factors, verbal and nonverbal communication patterns, and style (i.e. clothing and makeup). Adding to the literary criticism of Alfaro’s contemporary Greek plays, this chapter thus aspires to examine Electricidad on its own merits, paying little attention to what the play inherits and reconfigures from its literary predecessors.

Scholars, nevertheless, have acknowledged the ways in which Alfaro’s play departs from the Greek source text. For instance, Helen Moritz traces the development of religion, revenge, community, and the mother figure in Electricidad and their thematic resemblances with appropriations of the Electra myth by Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.

What is most productive about Moritz’s article is how it begins to locate and discuss the play in its culturally-specific Chicana/o milieu, therefore pivoting from an analysis of intertextuality, of which adaptation is a paradigmatic form. In conversation with Tiffany López’s conclusion that

Chicana/o family depictions of violence is a trademark of Alfaro’s work in the 1990s, Moritz highlights the play’s multi-generational violence (131), as it unfolds in a “dysfunctional”

Chicano family. This assessment, however, paints a backward portrait of the Chicano family, with no acknowledgement that dominant society’s socioeconomic marginalization of the barrio has, in fact, produced many social ills that would render it “dysfunctional.”

117 Engaging with a fidelity discourse that haunts adaptation studies, Cartmell and Whelehan support the desire to “free our notion” of adaptations from a dependency on the source-text (1-2).

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In discussing how Alfaro’s adaptation “resignifies the traditional association of classics with a monolithic Anglo-American identity” (193), Melinda Powers posits that Electrcidad engages with larger questions about US belonging, marginalization, and alienation. Powers explains how the use of language, dress, and pop culture references in the play challenge stereotypes about chola/o culture and, in turn, center Chicana/o barrio experiences. In another critical study on the play from her book, Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US

Stage (2018), Powers demonstrates how Alfaro’s play “executes stereotype,”118 but she fears that to execute the stereotype may actually result in its very reinforcement, with the consideration that non-Chicana/o audiences may read the play as “other” and thus may not be able to discern its subversive tones (82-83). While the subversive effects of executing the stereotype may remain ambiguous, I would suggest that the stereotype nonetheless calls attention to itself as a social construct that should be eliminated. The extent to which the play undermines stereotypes, especially the stock gang member, is a concern that Carlos Morton also shares in an email conversation with theatre critic Jorge Huerta after attending the Los Angeles premier in 2005.

Morton explains that there is some anxiety about Anglo audience members who laugh at the stereotyped-characters, representative here of the Chicana/o community as a whole, rather than with audiences who identify as Chicana/o (177).

In a similarly guarded review of the 2005 production, David Román states that

Electricidad reshapes the original Greek myth to highlight the legacy of violence and to question what agency means under “conditions of tragedy that govern the lives of impoverished and disenfranchised Latinos” (169-70). Further, Román suggests that the play does little to offer

118 In Latin Numbers, theatre and performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera explains that “executing the stereotype” can be understood as a process of playing up the representation in the attempt to challenge it (128-53).

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respite from an undercurrent of nihilism present in La Casa de Atridas and gang life; except for the rich and expressive chola/o culture that emphasizes vernacular language, dress, and cultural codes, the play paints a cynical portrait of life in the barrio (170). In these ways, the literature is very attuned to and celebrates the cultural expression and specificity of Alfaro’s Electricidad, but it simultaneously tries to grapple with some of its larger Chicana/o political and social concerns, especially the undercurrent of violence in disenfranchised communities and the simultaneous troubling but subversive use of the gang member stereotype, which is projected onto the chola/o identity.

The Chola/o Subculture

The chola/o must be understood within larger sociocultural, historical, and political contexts under which it emerged. The term cholo has roots in Spanish colonization, during which time it was derogatorily used to refer to assimilated Indians. After the Treaty of Guadalupe-

Hildalgo (1848), it became a pejorative label for Mexicans in the US who were part of the working class, or mestizos. In the 1940s and 1950s, the pachuco employed an urban style that reflected the combination of both Mexican and American culture; the chola/o evolved from this style. In early 20th century US, the chola/o became associated with Chicano gangs and engaged in a refusal to assimilate to the dominant culture. I particularly locate the chola/o identity and its association with deviancy within a history of Mexican American youth in Los Angeles, particularly the Sleepy Lagoon Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots (treated in Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit); the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots”119 especially introduced the criminalization and racialization of

119 The riots of June 1943 took their name from the suits worn by pachucos, which were deemed as a “symbol of terror in the homeland” (Lucas 79). They took place in Los Angeles, where military personnel were temporarily stationed while awaiting deployment overseas for World War II. Members of the US Navy and Marines assaulted Mexican American youth, or pachucos, in the streets by publicly stripping their zoot suits and leaving them naked. While Blacks and Filipinos were also assaulted, the Zoot Suit Riots were clearly violent attacks against the Mexican

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Mexican American youth into the US public imagination. These two events illustrate “the construction of racialized youth subculture (in this case gang activity) as a serious threat to society” and a general preoccupation with Mexican Americans as a social problem (Rios 109). I also locate the chola/o within a larger history of (mis)representation about Chicana/o and

Latina/o individuals in the media (i.e., journalism, film, etc.), which frequently employ demonizing stereotypes.120

Processes of marginalization and ostracism from mainstream society have contributed to chola/o identity formation, but cultural expressions have also influenced this identity. One discernible characteristic of chola/o street subculture is clothing. The style of the cholo includes baggy khaki pants, a white t-shirt, a plaid shirt that is worn as a jacket, and a bandana, as well as other elements like tattoos (Oboler and González).121 Cholas, in particular, use heavy makeup around the eyes and lips. The image of chola/os is often linked to criminalization (i.e., gangs and prison), but the image is also a “statement of cultural pride” as it deploys dress, language, and body movements to “assert a distinct Chicano or Chicana identity” (Oboler and González).122 For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to Electricidad’s characters as chola/os because they self- identify as such and because they claim membership in a barrio gang (the East Side Locos). To clarify, the chola/o is not always a gang member, but an individual who identifies as a Chicana/o

American community; the violent act of destroying the pachucho’s zoot suit communicated desire for the “eradication of an ethnic other” (Lucas 80).

120 For instance, Richard Mora’s study of selected films that employ the chola/o stereotype concludes the chola/o is “turned into the abject because his existence and nature offends the imaginary of civilized sociality” (126). He adds that dominant discourses portray youth chola/os as “fatalistic, anti-social, [and] antiauthoritarian others” (Mora 130).

121 Richard T. Rodríguez further defines the “homeboy aesthetic” as “an assemblage of key signifiers: clothing (baggy pants and undershirts are perhaps the most significant), [slicked back] hair (or, in the current moment of the aesthetic, lack of hair), bold stance, and distinct language (think caló mixed with hip hop parlance), all combining to form a distinguishable cultural affectation hard to miss on Los Angeles City Streets” (127).

122 For more information on chola/o, see Oboler and González.

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gang member is always a chola/o (J. Vigil 57). Moreover, the aesthetics advanced by the play’s stage directions Electricidad both align with the aforementioned chola/o or “homeboy” aesthetic.

Finally, the term chola/o, as it is performed in the play, can also be understood through the way it includes elements of traditional Mexican culture (i.e., marianismo and patriarchal organization).

Because chola/o identity and expressive subculture originated in the barrios of Southern

California, I examine the emergence and development of the barrio in the section that follows.

The Barrio’s History of Marginalization and the Interpellation of Violence

Understood through a socio-spatial lens, the barrio highlights the way cities in the US are planned around socioeconomic and ethnic hierarchies. The barrio developed on the urban fringes of society; therefore, it became a segregated and marginalized space that was then increasingly locked into inferior socioeconomic conditions. These substandard conditions would become the basis upon which the barrio was perceived as “a place of poverty, crime, illness, and despair,” not to mention these conditions also fostered racist characterizations and stereotypes of its predominantly Chicana/o inhabitants (Griswold del Castillo 140). In turn, the very negative characterizations ascribed to the barrio would justify its socio-spatial segregation from dominant society.

Electricidad is very much attuned to the barrio’s history of marginalization and prioritizes making this information known in the opening scene. Resembling a traditional Greek chorus, Las vecinas123 of the play (La Connie, La Carmen, and La Cuca), function as important mouthpieces to comment on the play’s action and give voice to the community, providing a

123 The female neighbors who represent the rest of the East Side community. The play casts Las vecinas as “mitoteras” whose often-comical gossip about the barrio stands as a source of knowledge. In the manner of an ancient Greek chorus, Las vecinas offer the opening and closing lines of Electricidad, with other interjections throughout the play.

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“creation story” for the chola/o. This narrative helps to orient readers and audiences toward a sociological understanding of the barrio’s emergence and development. The trio of vecinas share that,

LA CARMEN: In the beginning. […] LA CARMEN: There was the cholo. LA CONNIE: And the cholo was no myth. LA CUCA: He wasn’t even a god. LA CARMEN: No, he was made by man. LA CONNIE: The product of racismo. (Alfaro 67)

The assertion here that the cholo was “man-made” certainly illuminates how dominant structures marginalized and abandoned Chicana/o peoples. In the search of belonging and refuge, chola/o subculture and gangs evolved in and out of the barrio. According to Las vecinas, the chola/o is also the Chicana/o’s “otro yo” and “dark side,” which points to the barrio’s “negative values and norms” advanced by chola/os who are part of gangs, specifically “racism, sexism, substance abuse, violence, and crime” (Acosta and Ramos 5). The chorus of the play, however, admits there is a need for the chola/o: they tolerate the chola/os of the barrio because they offer protection from the “elements” (i.e., the city, the police, other gangs, and politicians). La Connie even states, “Thank dios for cholo protection,” and the implication is that there is no recourse to outside institutions of law and justice (Alfaro 67). It is the chola/o who protects the community from social threats and internally negotiates wrongdoings in the barrio. Thus, the barrio is positively construed as a safe space, in spite of its “dark side.”

Accordingly, scholars have presented positive representations of the barrio, characterizing it as a vital place for Latina/o communities whose denizens have “imbued space with meanings and memories” (Dávila 64). It is important to note that the Chicano Movement of the 1960s brought about an important transformation to the barrio—one that reconstituted the

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barrio as a special cultural space symbolizing “the cultural lineage of Chicana/o social and political history,” so that the barrio was not only understood as a place but as a spatial location of

“cultural memory, identity and pride” (Diaz 56). Indeed, many scholars have critically studied the barrio as a unique place, space, and metaphor (Pérez, Guridy and Burgos 2011), rejecting the idea that the barrio is only a space of crime and vice.124 Latina/o cultural productions have also contributed to subverting one-dimensional accounts of the barrio; these productions have offered narratives about coming-of-age, assimilation, violence, resistance, and the struggle to survive.125

As Gina M. Pérez states, the barrio has “deep cultural, material, and symbolic meanings for so many who seek not only to ameliorate economic and social conditions, but also to preserve them as precious spaces that nurture and sustain cultural identities” (21). Although positive re- conceptualizations focused on Chicana/o culture have challenged negative portrayals of the barrio, it would be imprecise to paint the barrio in an idealized or even romantic manner. As many ethnic and sociocultural studies have evinced, the barrio does not exist without its problems of poverty, violence, and crime.

To this degree, the fictional East Side Los Angeles world Alfaro has created in

Electricidad ushers in an intra-ethnic critique of the barrio. Alfaro populates the barrio with chola/os who are members of the East Side Locos gang, treating chola/o culture’s sanctioned system of violence (and the need for revenge) as the play’s centerpiece. Las vecinas, in effect, introduce the East Side barrio as a space where violence occurs; they direct our attention to La

124 See Ricardo Romo’s East Los Angeles, which built upon Griswold del Castillo’s study of the racial, socioeconomic, and political phenomena that advanced the growth of a disenfranchised Mexican American class in the latter part of the 20th century. Romo rejects previous negative portrayals of the barrio, choosing instead to portray East Los Angeles as a “homeland” for Mexican American communities.

125 These works include Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running, Ernesto Quiñones’s Bodega Dreams, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, and Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street, to name a few.

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Casa de Atridas and the recent murder of cholo and gang leader Agamenón, Electricidad’s father.

“Did you see?” asks La Carmen, and La Cuca states, “She’s [Electricidad] still there” (Alfaro

67). Las vecinas sympathize with the loss that Electricidad has suffered,126 but they criticize

Electricidad’s excessive mourning.127 They especially express concern over Electricidad’s decision to steal Agamenón’s corpse from the cemetery. Making a public altar for all to see—a physical site of mourning—Electricidad cries incessantly and does not leave her father’s body.

This odious public display of the deceased rey is a ghastly sight, exacerbated by the putrid smell of a rotting corpse. Since Las vecinas appear to be preoccupied with keeping their homes and the barrio clean, as evidenced through their obsessive sweeping in the play, they are especially critical of Electricidad for threatening their project of cleanliness. La Cuca admits that

Agamenón’s corpse on the front lawn “can’t be good for barrio pride,” while La Connie expresses irritation over the thought that they will “never get this barrio clean” (Alfaro 67).

Las vecinas’ desired removal of Agamenón’s corpse significantly reveals the community’s need to clean the “dirt” that chola/o gang members bring to the barrio. Here, dirt serves as both symbol and symptom of the “dark side” of the chola/o, and in this particular case manifests as violence. Agamenón’s corpse links the barrio with vice, and it is something Las vecinas compulsively attempt to remove from public sight. On another level, Electricidad’s

126 There is also an underlying worry, on Las vecinas’ part, that the barrio is vulnerable because its gang leader is dead.

127 Here, Electricidad’s grief is couched as something abnormal and, especially, something akin to a life-destroying disease inhibiting normal day-to-day activities in the barrio. Las vecinas of the barrio think that Electricidad’s mourning is excessive, and they worry about how long her grief will go on (Alfaro 67), while even la Abuela later tells Electricidad, “Your grief is going to kill you.” (Alfaro 82). Electricidad pushes against the conventional temporal dimension of grief. In this light, I would critique Alfaro’s decision to present Electricidad’s mourning as something pathological; he presumes that human beings must follow appropriate mourning behaviors, which then curbs the potential of grief and problematically reduces mourning to a process that must terminate as quickly as possible. As the other chapters show, this dissertation is invested in considering how mourning takes unconventional forms, subverting discourses that medicalize or pathologize grief.

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decision to disinter her father’s body from the cemetery, only to make his body a public installation, begins the critique of East Side’s cholo order, which operates under patriarchal power. The young chola’s act of public mourning, coupled with her agenda of violent retribution, is telling about her devotion to her father, and subsequently to his sovereignty. She clings to her father’s memory, which represents the cholo ways. Nevertheless, by installing Agamenón’s corpse on the front yard for all to see, she inadvertently exposes the now-deceased barrio rey’s

“dirt” and the pollution of patriarchal power, which Las vecinas are conscripted to sanitize.128 As we are introduced to the voices of other cholas (Clemencia, La Abuela, Ifigenia), there is a growing understanding of the patriarchal order that organizes and governs, especially, La Casa de Atridas. It is, in fact, the “dirt” of Agamenón’s power that sets in motion a cycle of violence leading to the family’s demise.

Chicana Grief and The Female Desire to “Get Out” of the Barrio

The barrio’s patriarchal proclivities foster a hierarchal gender structure under which

Chicanas have little agency. While the barrio may cultivate a sense of home and belonging, or even aspire to protect families and the community, it also creates a social order where Chicanas are compelled to become wives and mothers. Gender roles and norms become entangled with the welfare and prosperity of the barrio, and patriarchal power is the cause of grief for many

Chicanas who have lost their voice, a place of their own, and the possibility of becoming something other than wives, mothers, or chola veteranas. The grief over loss of agency for

Chicanas has been a subject of literary texts, though this loss has not always been framed using a discourse of grief and mourning. Take, for instance, Sandra Cisneros’s The House and Mango

128 Las vecinas’ anxiety about cleanliness also positions Chicanas as workers who are tasked with maintaining, or cleaning, the household. By cleaning, Chicanas reinforce a gendered division of labor that reflect and reproduce power relations based on gender differences and asymmetries.

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Street (1984), a foundational text for Chicana/o literature that reveals the conditions of urban life from the perspective of a young girl. The girl named Esperanza notes that she has inherited her grandmother’s name, but relays a strong fear of inheriting her grandmother’s fate: a woman trapped inside her home, only to look through a window:

[…] so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. […] And the story goes she never forgave him. She looks out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what these got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the thing she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window. (Ciserno 10-11)

Here, the great-grandfather’s act of throwing a sack over a person’s head—in effect, capturing them—carries with it a level of violence and coercion. Esperanza does not describe the relationship between her grandparents as a consensual one, and it is not far from the mark to suggest that her grandmother was forced into both marriage and motherhood. Though many would characterize Esperanza as an innocent onlooker, it is still not lost on her that even her grandmother, “wild” as she was, was unable to escape the confines of the home.

Indeed, according to Esperanza, there are quite a few women looking out of the windows on Mango Street, feeling trapped in their homes and unable to experience a state of self- sovereignty. However, more than feeling imprisoned, there is an overwhelming sadness regarding the lives these women lead. On Esperanza’s part, she is sad and sympathetic for the women’s inability to access the world outside of the home. Esperanza’s grandmother, who witnessed the very one-dimensional and superficial view of the world her window offered, very likely was “sorry” and concomitantly bereaved, or saddened at being deprived of her

“wildness”—her freedom. In effect, this passage from The House on Mango Street demonstrates and condemns the overtly gendered order of the barrio. More than this, I would argue that it provides a focus on the feeling of grief and a state of mourning as the women on Mango Street,

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including Esperanza’s grandmother, “sit [with] their sadness” towards the loss of an alternative life never fulfilled. In Electricidad, the character of Clemencia mirrors the women on Mango

Street who look out of the windows, for she too grieves the status of her life as a chola in the barrio.

Clemencia partakes in a mourning of her own, drawing attention to her positionality as a chola, wife, and mother in the barrio. For Clemencia, Agamenón embodies empowering gendered structures that leave women lacking, wanting, and otherwise bereft. On the contrary, with the death of the rey of the East Side barrio, there emerges the possibility of a new and invigorating future for Clemencia, and for the barrio itself under her leadership. It is a future attempting to remedy the barren feeling that so engulfs Clemencia. In particular, she grieves the patriarchal life centered around matrimony and motherhood under which she has been forced to live. In the ironically-titled “We Are Family” (Scene 11), Clemencia shares with Electricidad precisely what kind of family member her father was, providing an alternative narrative about

Agamenón that Electricidad believes to be untrue and refuses to accept: “Everyone forgets what a bully he was. He made us think that we couldn’t grow and change and make something better than we are. He beat me and made me scared of the world. Scared of crossing over these bridges.

It was the only way he could control us” (Alfaro 75). Here, Clemencia paints Agamenón as someone who used intimidation and harm as a means of control. As a “bully,” he deliberately subjugated those individuals he perceived as vulnerable: women. Clemencia’s back-and-forth movement between “me” and “us” in these lines are intended to inform Electricidad that she has also been a subject under Agamenón’s control. Further, she contrasts the ostensible protection and feeling of safety fostered by gang culture with the feeling of fear that pervades the home.

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Admitting to being a victim of domestic violence, Clemencia notes the psychological effects of intimidation caused by domestic abuse, the effects of which are so profound her life becomes static, disconnected from the rest of the world. Yet the most disturbing piece of information about Agamenón has to do with the beginnings of his relationship with Clemencia, which began with some flirting on her part and then escalated to sexual assault when she was only thirteen: “I was an innocent. But he took my girlhood from me. In the back of a car. And he brought me here” (Alfaro 75). Clemencia discursively undercuts the violence of rape, putting it mildly with “took my girlhood,” while also minimizing her own abduction by Agamenón (“he brought me here”). She repeatedly makes claims that it was her “petty thief” of a husband who forcefully took her sexual agency in a physical assault and who, consequently, stole her dreams of being something other than a wife or mother. Clemencia understands the gravity of not being able to make her own choices in the “hombre world,” which ultimately motivates her to murder

Agamenón, the main source of her oppression. Her grief, coupled with anger and resentment, led her to become increasingly aware of her subservient position within the family structure and the social fabric of chola/o culture. Clemencia’s act of violence, then, signals her desire for self- sovereignty and the possibility of a new future. She even shares a vision of a liberated future with Electricidad: “I am going to forget all this, sell this house and buy a condo. In Pasa-fucken- dena!” (Alfaro 76). However, in her efforts of dismantling the “old ways” that her husband taught and upheld, and rebelling against patriarchal violence, Clemencia actually enacts the “old ways.” She is unable to transform the cholo order into a new order because she is caught in the same system of violence, which signifies her inability to undo structures of power, ultimately prohibiting her to “get out” of the barrio.

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The notion of “getting out” of the barrio appears often in the Latina/o cultural productions.129 In gang culture, however, “getting out” of the barrio may not be seen as something desirable, for it is the outside world that has marginalized and constructed barriers for

Chicana/o communities. Further, leaving the barrio is an enterprise that requires resiliency and the ability to make choices that depart from traditional Chicana/o family norms, values, and life paths. In Alfaro’s play, Ifigenia (La Ifi) is the “other daughter, formerly muy peligrosa” who appears to have made it “out” by running to a Catholic convent. Returning to the barrio after years of being away, she presents new ideas and has gained new perspectives on life that do not align with the cholo order. She offers her sister some radical alternatives to revenge, like forgiveness. Though Ifigenia’s actual commitment to Christian values remains ambiguous (she is described as a “possibly born-again” Christian) and the pursuit of Christianity problematic given its patriarchal underpinnings, what is indeed made clear is Ifigenia’s decision to pursue something other than the chola life to which Electricidad remains unwaveringly loyal. Chola/o culture has figuratively and quite literally marked Ifigenia, as she’s unable to conceal all of her tattoos despite her attempts at a more conservative attire. Arguably, she is born-again—creating an identity for herself outside of the East Side, while also escaping the confines that have led

Clemencia to commit murder. Alfaro goes as far as calling her the “moral and spiritual voice of the play” (Johnson 65).130 As such, Ifigenia encourages her sister to escape a continuum of

129 For instance, Esperanza in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street will leave the barrio but will come back for those she left behind; Nina in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights proudly makes it “out” of the barrio through higher education, while Daniela and Carla are getting out or, better put, being forced out of Washington Heights due to increasing rent and gentrification.

130 La Ifi’s character might be read as someone who has, in fact, been "born again” and therefore has undergone some radical Christian transformation. Some instances in the play would suggest this. For example, she claims that she has come back to the barrio to “make amends,” and she tries to insert Jesus in her conversation with La Abuela (Alfaro 69). Indeed, Alfaro seems to intentionally use the idea of being “born-again” to consider the Christian faith as a potential vehicle for escaping gang life. At the same time, the idea of rebirth that La Ifi advances may also take

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violence and to liberate herself from the chola/o code; she tells Electricidad, “You have a chansa, my sister. To make a choice. I did, and I left” (Alfaro 79). Ifigenia underscores the fact that she made a deliberate choice to disentangle herself from gang culture and its violence; she has experienced a symbolic rebirth that accords a new way of life—away from the barrio’s damaging patriarchal structure and system of violence.

Electricidad, however, has no desire to “get out” of the barrio, and the death of her father only seems to buttress her fervent commitment to a chola/o code of violence. During an intimate moment with Agamenón’s corpse, she declares:

You are the old ways, Papa. You are the history and reason we know how to live. I want to live the old cholo ways, Papa. Simple and to the point. You mess with me, I mess with you back. You want to party, party in your own backyard. You shoot, I shoot back. (Alfaro 70)

Electricidad’s loyalty to a system of violence that endorses “an eye for an eye” is a corollary of her loyalty to her father. For Electricidad, Agamenón literally embodies “the old ways,” and she refuses to let the chola/o code come to an end as a consequence of his death. In seeking vengeance for her father’s death, she carries on with the only history and way of living she knows. Of course, Electricidad’s commitment to “the old ways” is rooted in the fact that she and

Clemencia have diametrically opposing reactions to their lived experiences as cholas.

Electricidad denies that Clemencia has been disempowered and injured by the patriarchal power that undergirds Agamenón’s ways because she herself has not experienced the grief of abuse,

on a secular meaning, in which case the playwright suggests that to be born-again does not necessarily mean devotion to a deity; instead, it might simply connote a transformation without a religious dimension.

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constraint, and oppression.131 Clemencia warns her daughter about the true meanings of “the old ways”: “No my stubborn daughter, I didn’t get to choose. And neither will you. History just keeps repeating itself. Cholos don’t move forward. They just keep going farther into the past”

(Alfaro 75). The idea of going forward requires change, and for Clemencia, female emancipation, is a feminist project that implicates everyone in the barrio. Electricidad’s myopic vision for the barrio stifles the possibility of liberation and change, as she embraces a system of violence with an embedded patriarchal power. In effect, she is a chola who decidedly looks to her father and the (his)tory that does not make space for female resistance.

Another Chola/o Creation Story: War, Violence, and (the lack of) Female Resistance

Standing in contrast to the chola/o “creation story” presented by Las vecinas at the beginning of the play is Electricidad’s own articulation of who she is and from where she comes.

As she reflects an anxiety about forgetting the stories her father told her, she proceeds to recall the chola/o origin story she learned from Agamenón: “We were Aztecs, huh, Papa? And the mujer god of human sacrifices, Coatlicue, 132 made the first cholo. And she gave the first cholo the switchblade, so that he could leave the barrio and defend himself” (71). Electricidad continues the story by enumerating the other kinds of provisions for the chola/o from Coalicue, including baggy pants, house parties, and lowriders. These supplies, of course, are very material

131 This grief is not only articulated by Clemencia. Ifigenia asserts that their father was a “mean-ass cholo” and that he caused physical as well as social injury: “Hermana, he gave us these tattoos. But these tattoos are also scars” (Alfaro 73). She further notes that their father left them trapped in jails; Ifigenia says, “Even in his muerte, he still won’t let us go” (Alfaro 73). La Abuela also shares her own grief in relation to the cholo ways; she tells Electricidad, “They killed a mi husband and my two children. I am one of the living dead. A chola in limbo” (Alfaro 77). La Abuela additionally suggests that Agamenón’s death creates a window of transformation: “The mundo of the chola is muerte y sadness. What your mama did, changes todo” (Alfaro 77). Together, Clemencia, La Abuela, and Ifigenia hint at the possibility of forging strong female bonds to collectively dismantle patriarchal power, but this never actually materializes in the play.

132 Within the Aztec pantheon, Coatlicue is the decapitated earth-mother goddess, as well as the mother of warrior and sun/son god, Huitzilopochtli, and moon goddess Coyolxauqui (see the following footnote). Cultural productions by Chicanas represent her as “symbol of feminine strength and creativity” (Chablé 330-333).

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objects that would not ordinarily be construed as “divine” or metaphysical provisions, but

Electricidad interprets them as important gifts from the female god. In so doing, she not only sees these provisions as specific markers of chola/o identity, but she also suggests that chola/o culture turning to violence can be understood as a mandate from Coatlicue. Electricidad further illustrates a history of violence rooted in her Aztec identity when she relays Coalicue’s response to her daughter’s questioning of authority:

But then, one of her four hundred daughters, Coyolxauqui,133 stood up to her and was like, ‘Why you get all the power, vieja? Why you get to decide everything for us?’ And that’s when Coatlicue cut her up in four, carniceria style, and made the four corners cholo world. [...] And then she cut her daughter’s head off and did a fly ball into the sky, and her head became the moon. (Alfaro 71)

Coyolxauqui’s rebellious spirit, coupled with jealousy towards her mother’s omnipotence, leads to her own demise; in fact, the reference to “carniceria style” amplifies the violence of her murder, as it indicates she was slaughtered similar to how a butcher would slaughter animals and then prepare cuts of meat. Coyolxauqui’s head became the moon and her body the four corners of the chola/o world, of which the East Side Locos are the fourth corner.

Those familiar with Aztec mythology, specifically the story of Coyolxauqui, know that

Electricidad’s version elides an important figure in the story that enables a critique of masculinity and male power; it is the absence of Huitzilopochtli134 that seems to be deliberately erased here. Per the myth, Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of life and death, and mother of

133 Coyolxauqui (often spelled Coyolxauhqui) was a moon goddess and daughter of Coatlicue. After learning that Coatlicue found herself inexplicably pregnant, she conspired to kill her mother with the help of her 400 siblings (Sánchez 373-375).

134 A chief deity in Aztec mythology, Huitzilopolchtli is typically represented as a blue man with hummingbird feathers; he is occasionally represented as an eagle. Huitzilopolchtli was the god of the sun and warfare, as well as the patron god of Tenochtitlan (Sánchez 613-615).

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Coyolxauqui, achieved virginal conception after the feather of a hummingbird touched her belly.

Upon learning this news, Coyolxauqui conspired, with the help of her brothers and sisters, against her own mother to murder the child in the womb, Huitzilopochtli. The unborn son told

Coatlicue not to fear because he would protect her, and indeed he did; Huitzilopochtli became an adult the moment he was born and murdered all of his brothers and sisters. As for Coyolxauqui, he decapitated and dismembered her, throwing her head to the sky and thus it became the moon.

While through these acts Huitzilopochtli presumably offers protection to his mother, the power he asserts is made possible via a platform for patriarchy and female disempowerment. Unpacking this Aztec myth through the lens of Chicana feminism, Cherríe Moraga comments on how

Huitzilopochtli exercises machismo in his decimation of Coyolxauqui because of his sister’s resistance against the threat of male power, which he embodies. She writes, “el hijo comes to the defense of patriarchal motherhood, kills la mujer rebelde, and female power is eclipsed by the rising light of the Sun/Son. This machista myth is enacted every day of our lives, every day that the sun (Huitzilopochtli) rises up from the horizons and the moon (Coyolxauqui) is obliterated by his light” (Moraga 74). Following this Chicana feminist interpretation of Coyolxauqui in relation to Huitzilopochtli, there seems to be a need to recognize the emergence of female power and resistance, and to condemn the idea that Coyolxauqui is a disruptive or a transgressive agent in the story. Indeed, for Gloria Anzaldúa, Coyolxauqui actually becomes her “symbol for reconstruction and reframing...the process of healing” (19-20).

Electricidad’s erasure of Huitzilopochtli in the chola/os “creation story” effectively denies the presence of misogynist males, as well as the assertion of the patriarchy, which performs female degradation and disempowerment. In fact, it is more accurate to say that it was

Agamenón who erased Huitzilopochtli to create an alternative story line that would conveniently

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omit the display of masculinity, male power, and dominance when opposed to any kind of female dissent. Instead, the message that Agamenón advances in teaching this story to

Electricidad is that transgressive “cholas” like Coyolxauqui must be punished.135 Perhaps it is the example of Coyolxauqui feeding the rage Electricidad feels towards her mother. If Clemencia has killed the rey of the barrio, then Electricidad treats this act as something akin to what

Coyolxauqui planned to carry out. she believes her mother must pay a price for her resistance to patriarchal control—a resistance which prompted her to murder her husband and the father of her children, fragmenting the family structure. More than this, Clemencia commits a serious violation of the chola/o code in murdering the gang leader of the East Side. Not to mention,

Electricidad believes that Clemencia has also killed Orestes, an added transgression for which she must seek revenge. Her mourning death of her father, coupled with anger and the desire for vengeance, further inhibits her ability to sympathize with the cholas in the play who provide testimonios about gendered concerns born out of their experiences as women feeling “trapped” or even “dead.” Electricidad has ostensibly yet to experience the oppressive nature of male power herself, which leads to her disavowal of women’s grievances. She refuses to acknowledge the oppression and bereavement her mother has endured under her father’s “protection,” and she certainly does not fathom how Clemencia’s grief might be a catalyst for murder. In so doing, she does not question the rigid gendered hierarchy of power that has caused injury and loss for women living in the barrio.

Ultimately, the Aztec mythology of Coyolxauqui, rewritten by Agamenón and recalled by Electricidad, serves two main purposes. First, the story justifies an ongoing cycle of violence

135 Relatedly, it is important to note that in Electricidad’s recalling, unlike the original Aztec myth, Coyolxauqui does not collude with her brothers and sisters; she acts alone, and thus she is the only one to receive punishment by decapitation and dismemberment.

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within chola/o culture, as it is “often interpreted as both an explanation of and justification for continued warfare” (A. Vigil 3-4).136 Incidentally, this cyclical attribute also finds application in the intergenerational oppression that cholas in the barrio face. Second, the story swiftly condemns female resistance, which subsequently disempowers cholas and dismisses their grief and mourning. In effect, Electricidad’s penchant for violence, grounded in a learned creation story of the chola/o, leads her to make Clemencia’s death her primary agenda, with no regard for the gendered dynamics of chola/o and gang culture that Clemencia and other cholas have identified as consequential sources of female grief and oppression. Despite several moments in which Electricidad is made privy to her father’s participation in a toxic masculinity, asserting dominance over women, and mourning becomes her; anchored in rage, her public mourning promotes violence as the sole means for justice. Similar to Clemencia’s expression of grief, which also explodes into the public sphere, it is an “unproductive” kind of mourning divorced from a politically-motivated response to loss that would typically challenge the patriarchal system and offer alternatives to violence in chola/o culture. Though the objects of their mourning are different, both Electricidad and Clemencia participate in the reproduction of a gendered hierarchy that breeds justice through violence and perpetuates the subordination of cholas, in which case they are thus complicit in their own harm.

The Return of Orestes and the Imperative to Reclaim Patriarchal Power

After months of conditioning, or preparing to become a “strong” cholo in Las Vegas,

Orestes returns to the East Side, completely unaware of his father’s murder. Electricidad’s first

136 In “The Visionary Power of Chicana Girls in Virginia Grise’s blu,” Ariana Vigil explains that “Chicano literature often invokes Aztec and Mayan figures and motifs to suggest a continuation of war and to depict contemporary Chicano struggles against racism, imperialism, and colonialism as outgrowths of earlier struggles against colonization” (4). In Electricidad, the use of Aztec mythology presents a link between historical colonial struggles and the barrio’s socioeconomic marginalization. It also facilitates an intra-ethnic critique regarding the “violence begets violence” dogma that sustains a cyclical pattern of violent acts in the East Side barrio.

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encounter with her brother leads her to believe Orestes has returned as a ghost to haunt her, and it is a moment of dramatic irony that shifts the focus of the play from Electricidad to the male figure who is supposed to take his father’s place as El Rey del Barrio. Orestes has physically transformed into a “man”; his new physique mirrors strength, and he has acquired chola/o knowledge about “hand signals and territories” and the cartographies of body tattoos. He even has the “stone-cold scary cholo look,” though it might be more accurate to conclude that he has learned and perfected its mimicry, rather than assimilated a “tough” chola/o demeanor as a way of carrying himself (Alfaro 82). After all, Orestes admits that Nino, a cholo veterano, taught him

“the look” while he was in exile in Las Vegas (Alfaro 82).137 When Orestes learns about his father, his response is one of disbelief at his mother’s violation of chola/o rules and of grief at his father’s death. His cries betray his performance of a stone-cold cholo, and even the stage directions provide instructions for a moment that magnifies his vulnerability and innocence: “My papa… Orestes starts to cry. He holds Electricidad. Suddenly they seem way smaller and younger than they are” (Alfaro 83). This particular moment of shared grief serves as a reminder that Orestes and Electricidad are now fatherless, and as a result, La Casa de Atridas is in mourning, excluding Clemencia who is exuberantly making entrepreneurial plans for the barrio’s takeover.

The restoration of justice and of a male-dominated chola/o order becomes a burdensome responsibility for Orestes, demanding a reclamation of patriarchal power and masculinity. When

Orestes vocalizes the fear about the lack of protection in the barrio, a concern which Las vecinas also expressed after learning about the death of Agamenón, Electricidad quickly asserts that he

137 In addition to serving as a godfather figure for Orestes, Nino is also his “attendant,” per the character descriptions of the play. He trains Orestes in the cholo ways, and he seems to take pride in the fact that he is the one tasked to transform “the little lion king into the poderoso heir to La Casa de Atridas” (Alfaro 74).

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must become the next kin: “say adios to the little homie inside for the good of el barrio, for the

East Side Locos, and family” (83). Electricidad hence charges her brother to relinquish his impotent “homie” identity in order to assume his father’s place, but it is a role that Orestes does not desire:

ORESTES: But what if I don’t want it? ELECTRICIDAD: What are you talking about! You are the next king. We can’t be doing everything for you. ORESTES: But, but…you, you’re the one that’s all eager to get rid of her… ELECTRICIDAD: I can’t, Orestes. Don’t you understand? I want nothing more than to take these hands to her neck. But it isn’t our way…I give her to you. With a smile… ORESTES: But, I…can’t. ELECTRICIDAD: Where is your loyalty? Everyone is circling La Casa de Atridas. They all want a chance to take the throne. To take our way of life. Your return. Is a sign, my brother. That all will be made right in el barrio once again. (Alfaro 84)

This exchange elucidates Electricidad’s utter loyalty to a structure of patriarchal power on which she counts to carry out justice. She explains that, though she has a fervent desire to kill

Clemencia herself, she cannot do so because it isn’t the “cholo way” or the proper way to negotiate Agamenón’s death. If the chola/o way dictates what females can or cannot do, then

Electricidad’s loyalty to this structure prohibits her from undermining it, which is one of the main obstacles as to why she cannot and is reluctant to accept alternatives that run counter to the chola/o way; such alternatives Electricidad is presented with are forgiveness and walking away.

She questions her brother’s loyalty and insists that he be the one to kill Clemencia. In so doing,

Electricidad believes that, above all, Clemencia will pay for her heinous crime (“eye for an eye”), and Orestes will assert himself as a figure of male dominance and subsequently eradicate any competition for the “throne” from other gang members. Then, there will be a return to normalcy in the barrio.

Orestes, on the other hand, rejects Electricidad’s vision of what must be done, which signals his desire for alternative pathways. First, he distances himself from the urgency of killing

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Clemencia, stating that, unlike Electricidad, this is not something he wants to do, nor something their father would have agreed with. In fact, Orestes does not subscribe to his sister’s desire for extreme punitive measures, proposing a much less extreme consequence for his mother: “why don’t we start with the house and just take it away from her? Kick her ass and throw her out into la calle?” (84). Orestes’s suggestion for a less punitive consequence for Clemencia demonstrates compassion towards his mother, and a simultaneous dread over having to kill someone, especially his own flesh and blood. When Orestes objects with “But, she’s my mama,”

Electricidad is quick to strip Clemencia of her identity as a mother and instead exclusively positions her as an assassin: “She’s not your mother anymore. She is the murderer of your father” (Alfaro 84). She encourages Orestes not to consider Clemencia’s murder as an act of matricide, but rather as necessary and proper retaliation for the death of their father. Second,

Orestes does not demonstrate a strong devotion to the ways of the chola/o, despite the fact that he has spent the last few months training. In effect, Orestes lack of loyalty, as Electricidad puts it, underscores his very superficial performance of the chola/o identity and even indicates an inner conflict with the ways chola/os lead their lives. He tells his sister, “Maybe we don’t need this?

Maybe we could make other rules,” expressing a desire to “get out” of the barrio and certainly out of the situation wherein he must assume his deceased father’s leadership role (Alfaro 84).

Because Orestes has been socialized into a world of violence, he has ostensibly never had an opportunity to turn away from it, and now that he cannot go back to being just a homeboy, he fears killing Clemencia will force him to perform the chola/o’s “animal instinct” —a violent rage and darkness his father encouraged, which he absolutely abhors (Alfaro 84). Orestes recoils as

Electricidad reminds him of when Agamenón first showed them this “animal instinct,” as though he is confronting the ways of the chola/o through trauma: “He brought that vato home from the

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North Side Locos and he told us that we were going to kill him […] Papa made us kick him and kick him and kick him until he cried […] Papa gave us a dollar and told us to go out and play, no big deal right?” (Alfaro 84). Here, it is evident that both Electricidad and Orestes are taught and forced to engage in violence, and repeatedly so, as Electricidad suggests this episode was “no big deal” revealing the degree to which she understands violence and the adoption of an “animal instinct” as something normal. Whereas Orestes possesses a different disposition; his fear and rejection of violence thus seem incongruent with the ways of the chola/o and certainly with the masculine role he must assume as Rey of the Barrio. In other words, Orestes’s disposition inhibits him from recalling his father’s legacy of violence and power. If Orestes states that “he can’t” fulfill his duty to take over the barrio, “it is not because he lacks the skill, means, or permission to do so; rather, it is because he cannot bring himself to embrace a chola/o identity that would require him to “find [his] courage. Find [his rage]. Find [his] darkness” as

Electricidad, and his father at one point, instructs him to do (Alfaro 84).

In her attempts to compel Orestes to kill Clemencia, Electricidad turns to divine power for aid. She searches for the moon and calls upon the “darkness inside the Four directions”

(Alfaro 84) and chants that Orestes might find the necessary courage, rage, and darkness that would enable him to embrace the chola/o way. Performing an incantation, she recites these lines over and over again, hoping that they will trigger its intended effects on Orestes.138 Most

138 Here, the play momentarily casts Electricidad as a bruja who returns to indigenous conocimientos, providing a stark contrast to La Ifi’s Christian faith and its ostensible colonial and western outlook. Electricidad does, indeed, demonstrate pride in the cholo’s creation story and its indigenous foundations. Because Electricidad’s brujería focuses on seeking revenge, and specifically equipping Orestes to kill Clemencia, she functions within patriarchal control and remains complicit in the sexist status quo of chola/o and gang culture. I would argue that this moment in the play does not position Electricidad as an empowered bruja who exists outside of or subverts the patriarchy. For more on what Chicana scholars have written about the bruja (or even the curandera) and her resistant knowledges and practices, see Irene Lara’s “Bruja Positionalities: Toward a Chicana/Latina Spiritual Activism” and Tey Diana Rebolledo’s “The Curandera/Bruja: Resolving the Archetype.”

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important, her turn to the Four directions’ darkness recalls the aforementioned story of

Coyolxauqui and recognizes the mythological figure as a source of virile violence. Though

Electricidad’s earlier recounting of the chola/o creation story deems Coyolxauqui’s act of violence as a transgression worthy of punishment, as I argued earlier, here Electricidad seems to indirectly invoke the darkness embodied in Coyolxauqui’s dismembered body, which makes up the four corners/directions of Los Angeles. She redirects the violence associated with

Coyolxauqui, pursuing its courage, rage, and darkness to uphold the status quo of the cholo order. That is, Electricidad aspires for Orestes to be equipped with a darkness akin to

Coyolxauqui’s so he can avenge their father and reign over their father’s kingdom. Ultimately, this short scene’s return to Aztec mythology is yet another example of the violence encouraged and demonstrates how it is linked to male power.

Are We Family?: Orestes Becomes a Cholo and the Murder of Clemencia

Succumbing to his Greek counterpart’s tragic fate, Orestes kills Clemencia at the end of the play. He thereby performs the abject “animal instinct” expected of him as the cholo who will replace Agamenón. The moments leading up to Orestes’s act of matricide, however, introduce an important perspective regarding the desire for family, but ultimately its disintegration. The last couple of scenes present vying longings for family: Electricidad states there is “a chance for la familia, to be together again” without Clemencia (84). Previously, Clemencia tells Orestes a similar longing: “Now, we can be a family [without Agamenón]. . . I was never good at making one. I didn’t know how. Pero now you and I, y Electricidad, if she wants. We can be a family”

(Alfaro 85). Both Electricidad and Clemencia position the family as something that must survive and as something that can be forged, for Clemencia, with the removal of patriarchal authority, and for Electricidad, with Orestes killing their mother and assuming power over the barrio.

Clemencia’s expressed regret over not being “good at making” la familia indirectly serves as a

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reminder that she did not willingly choose to become a wife or mother who would be charged with cultivating a social unit. Yet, it also reveals that Clemencia did not know how to foster a family under oppressive gender roles and under the control of her gang-leader husband who caused her so much grief. She sees Agamenón as the most threatening force to family, and it is only after he is murdered that she believes her family can be rebuilt and reorganized. She tells

Orestes, “All I wanted was to make it better. To get us out of here” (Alfaro 85; emphasis mine).

Clemencia’s desire for family intersects with her claim to motherhood at the end of the play, which focuses on appeasing Orestes. Clemencia repeatedly refers to Orestes as her son and emphasizes their mother-son relationship: “Orestes, mi hijo!” followed by, “You are still mi hijo, right? Mi hijo? My little baby, my little boy? You love me, Orestes? Say, ‘I love you, Mother’”

(Alfaro 85). The characterization of Orestes as a baby and little boy, of course, infantilizes

Orestes, making him a “homeboy” rather than a cholo. The use of “mi hijo” quite simply disempowers and emasculates Orestes, while it is also telling of how Clemencia sees her son as a potential threat to her newfound dominance, which she feels a need to dissolve. Orestes appears as a threatening force precisely because he is a male and the rightful “heir” to Agamenón’s throne. At the same time, however, Clemencia’s emphasis on her identity as a mother would suggest she genuinely loves and cares for her son, as she explains that she tried to spare him from Agamenón, who “wanted to beat the cholo into [him]” (85). Her crass statement is not off the mark, considering how Orestes was being trained—mentally, emotionally, and physically— to become a cholo capable of violence and oppression.

Here, Clemencia might be read as a benevolent mother who does not wish for Orestes to have any kind of participation in the cholo order. She alleges: “It was me, Orestes. It was me that tried to save you. From this vida. This vida that would have killed you. I saved you. I did it. This

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is not your life” (Alfaro 85). Notwithstanding, Clemencia’s last desperate pleas to Orestes, as he advances to kill her, escalate toward a sense of self-preservation; she pulls a switchblade on

Orestes. In the end, she asks Orestes to forgive her and attempts to convey her affection: “I gave you. Mijo. I gave you my…Unconditional…” (Alfaro 85). Orestes silences his mother by cutting her throat. This final interaction between Orestes and Clemencia certainly generates more questions than answers. Did Clemencia really try to save Orestes from “this vida” that caused her terrible grief? Or, did she “save” Orestes by exiling him so she could gain complete sovereignty over her husband’s kingdom? Though Clemencia’s true motives remain vague, the last scene of

Electricidad seems to reflect larger anxieties about the inability to “get out” of the barrio (to escape violence and patriarchal power) and about the disintegration of family. The family in

Electricidad is a precarious unit, imperiled by violence and engulfed in grief and mourning. But,

La Casa de Atridas is not a mere victim of “the old ways”; it is complicit in reproducing the system of violence that leads to its utter destruction. In spite of the scale of injury and death in

Electricidad, the grief and mourning to which the action of the play give rise exist alongside

Alfaro’s strategies use of humor, which not only serves to buoy the play’s disheartening tenor but advances an oppositional sentiment.

Laughing to Keep from Crying: The Subversive Role of Humor in Electricidad

When asked about the humor or biting irony of Electricidad, Alfaro has been quick to clarify that the play engages with the performance traditions of carpa. The carpa, in Spanish meaning a “canvas cover tent” and also a “type of folksy down to earth circus” (Kanellos 97), can be traced to at least the eighteenth century, per Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido: “Un teatro carpero popular viene desde el siglo xviii pero muy probablemente antes, ya veces ha dado algo de su vena vitriólica a nuestro teatro político culto” (1988: 2). According to Nicolas

Kanellos, much of the scholarship work on the history of Chicana/o theatre does not examine its

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Hispanic or Mexican theatrical past, and instead locates its foundations, for instance, on the work of Bertolt Brecht. Chicana/o theatre engages with “underground or forgotten” traditions of

Hispanic theater in the US, particularly with the emergence of El Teatro Campesino in 1965, whose style of theater can be traced back to Mexican tent theatres, or carpas (Kanellos xiv).139

The carpa cannot be reduced to a specific cultural performance practice, as it encompassed

Mexican actors, clowns, stereotypes, folk wisdom, music, and humor, more generally speaking

(Kanellos 97), but it has been specifically linked to the disenfranchised Mexican population; thus, it has functioned as a tool for disenfranchised masses against oppression (Broyles-Gonzalez

7). Correspondingly, the carpa experienced resurgences during times of social upheaval, including in the years following the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910-1920). Though the carpa evolved to include other kinds of cultural performance practices, it remained attuned to its working-class roots and lasted well into the 1950s and early 1960s, another period of social upheaval where the carpa would influence the emergence of a labor theatre rooted in a specific

Chicana/o context.

One aforementioned characteristic of the carpa necessary for understanding its sociocultural importance is humor. In her sustained examination of shared performance conventions between the carpa and El Teatro Campesino, Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez asserts that humor, made manifest through a variety of techniques and forms, was a centerpiece that enabled an exploration of social phenomena, which subsequently helped to punctuate daily struggles and oppressive forces (27). She notes that one of the ways that the carpa achieved its humor and

139 The subject matter of Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez’s El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement aligns with Kanellos’s assertion; it offers a robust examination about the relationship between El Teatro Campesino and Mexican popular performance tradition, as it aims to rewrite a genealogy of El Teatro Campesino in a way that does not identify Eurocentric antecedents and also does not configure El Teatro Campesino as the “theatrical fountainhead” of all Chicana/o theater (4). Broyles-Gonzalez theorizes how a Mexican culture of orality, here synonymous with Mexican popular performance tradition, is foundational for El Teatro Campesino.

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combative overtones was through the comic figure: “El cómico se volvió el imán que atrajo al pueblo para oír, de labios de quien ayunaba con él, las bromas cáusticas con que burlaba y criticaba a la sociedad injusta” (Ortega qtd. in Broyles-Gonzalez 26). The carpa’s humor was also achieved through other elements including archetypal characters (i.e. the peladita/o, or the underdog), a hyperbolic “mimetic acting style,” slapstick, and a spirit of picardía, or vulgar humor (Broyles-Gonzalez 27). These techniques, whose intent it was to produce both laughter and a vision of social critique, established humor as a bedrock for the carpa, and this reliance on humor was something that El Teatro Campesino would also adopt. Broyles-Gonzalez adds that

Luis Valdez highlights the social import of a comedic spirit in his comments on the relationship between slapstick and tragedy: “We found that we could make social points not in spite of the comedy, but through it. Slapstick can bring us very close to the underlying tragedy” (qtd. In

Broyles-Gonzalez 27). Indeed, slapstick and other techniques were used in the acto, one basic structure of El Teatro Campesino, in order to “satirize the opposition” (Valdez 6) and to bring audiences closer to understanding the oppressive conditions of farmworkers' lives as a serious social problem, or a tragedy. Valdez, then, understood humor as a vehicle to safely access the tragedy so that that which was considered utterly menacing and possibly destructive could be transformed into something funny.

The simultaneous access to and distance from tragedy is a curious dimension of humor that Alfaro’s play adeptly negotiates. For instance, when Ifigenia shares that she was gone for a period due to “serving time,” Electricidad says that she actually thought her sister had become a

“victim”—a dead subject: “…I looked for you at the bottom of the river, on the railroad tracks, under the freeway” (72). Electricidad’s search for her sister’s corpse, alluded to her rather quickly and obliquely, is a leading indication of the kind of vulnerability and fatality enmeshed

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with the gang violence of the barrio, with an increased vulnerability for females. Soon thereafter,

Ifigenia’s explanation for her absence (“I joined a convent”) operates as a humorous and ironic substitute for “doing” or “serving time,” while it also undercuts the somber reality of becoming a

“victim” as well as the trajectory of death and dying in the East Side. Similarly, later in the play when Ifigenia tells her mother she has been gone for a year, Clemencia asks, “Estabas en la jail, mija” (78). Ifigenia explains that she was in an order with nuns, and there is a humorous interjection that follows as Clemencia responds, “You’re a born-again chola? Oh, that’s a good one” (78). Clemencia’s mocking comment heightens a culture of laughter, but not without first hinting that doing time—being in “la jail”—is not something uncommon for being a chola/o gang member. I would also add that the way in which Clemencia calls out “a born-again chola” as a joke may imply that there is no possible “regeneration” or “rebirth” with a chola identity, and therefore she dismisses Ifigenia’s hope of “looking for answers” that run counter to the chola/o code. These two examples show a deployment of humor that attempts to negotiate tragedy.

Along these lines, the predominance of humor in the characters’ dialogue has been described as a Greek “mask,” or a “protective medium between the audience and the very real violence endured in underserved communities” (Powers 64). More than a Greek mask, however, the prevalence of humor in Electricidad designates laughter as an oppositional tool. Mikhail

Bakhtin’s work is particularly relevant here, as he theorizes about laughter’s relationship with freedom, noting a “festive liberation of laughter” where laughter functions as a symbolic

“victory” over social violence, fear, and intimidation. Related to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, which describes manifestations of a counter-culture that opposes a formal and hierarchical official culture, Bakhtin explains the importance and subversive capacity of a culture of laughter:

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“The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation […]

Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations” (90).

Though Bakhtin writes of a class culture different from that of Mexican society, his theory of laughter’s oppositional essence, especially its defeat of social violence in the act of laughter, seems very fitting within the context of Alfaro’s play and the larger gang culture it engages.

Laughter here provides a means for survival, which captures Alfaro’s attention to the motto,

“you laugh until your cry,” which he has cited as a way of living in the cholo order (Johnson 64).

When the order of things becomes too serious or menacing, Electricidad’s characters turn to humor to transform violence into something ironic or absurd, thereby exercising a moment of freedom over this violence. Though the carpa tradition from which Electricidad’s reliance on humor draws may have included only one or a couple of archetypal comic characters, Alfaro fosters a sustained spirit of humor through the play embedded in the dialogue and with which all the characters engage; this inclusive participation and knowledge of humor signals how the East

Side community understands the culture of laughter as a regular and necessary practice. Humor may very well be how one lives another day, and it is not to be regarded as an ebullient energy that stands in stark contrast to the more serious and oppressive realities of the barrio. It is not a

“feel good” element to amuse and therefore make the content more palatable to audiences.140

140 In her analysis of Ana Castillo’s short story “La Miss Rose,” María DeGuzmán addresses the fear among critics of a “feel-good” story with a happy ending. She asks if the story is “simply a manifestation of false consciousness feeding directly into a conformist assimilation model in which palatably ‘safe’ or predictable Latino/a identities will be consumed by and subsumed within what Chicano performance artist and cultural critic Guillermo Gómez-Peña has called ‘the meta-reality of the dominant [Anglo] culture?’” (DeGuzmán 134). The use of humor in Electricidad engages with similar concerns.

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In addition to offering safe access to the tragic and advancing an oppositional vitality, I contend that Electricidad enacts humor in a Brechtian fashion. For Bertolt Brecht, the purpose of theatre was to “stimulate in the audience a questioning, critical attitude” (Hoffman 161), and his work frequently elicited laughter as a response that established the comic as a “knowledge tool” for “blowing open what he saw as the paralyzed consciousness of the masses” (Silberman 172).

The Brechtian comic, then, challenged audiences to engage in a critical thought process and to wonder about the subject of their laughter. Extending this logic to Alfaro’s play, humor prompts audiences to critically think about the representation of the barrio’s socioeconomic conditions and its marginalization. It instigates a reflection on class and race (Powers 200), particularly pausing on the note that chola/os have been the subject of stereotypes—deemed inferior for belonging to a lower-class economy and criminalized for forming gangs that have spiraled downward into violence. Above all, the ostensible incongruity between a culture of laughter and the more sobering social realities of the barrio, when the latter is discretely detached from the comic penchant of the characters, opens up a space to make visible the problematic normalization of grief and mourning.

Electricidad: A Performance of Public Mourning and Negotiating the Theatre Space

Though at the conclusion of Electricidad Las vecinas declare that there will be “[p]eace at last,” now that Electricidad’s vengeance has been realized, Clemencia’s murder produces a state of uncertainty for the future of the barrio. Will Orestes rise up as the King of the East Locos in Agamenón’s place and continue to perform his “cholo-ness,” only to reproduce a nihilistic cycle of violence? As the new King, will he contest the cholo’s interpellation by patriarchal violence? Perhaps Orestes’s act of matricide left him mentally and emotionally unfit to assume a position of power, in which case there is imminent violence in the barrio as gang members from within and outside of the East Side fight for the sovereignty of the East Side. Though these are

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different speculative pathways for Orestes, which yield different ramifications for the barrio, the most telling aspect of the Electricidad is its attention to the aftermath of violence and loss. In this light, I want to suggest that Electricidad is a performance of mourning, or that the theatrical production of Electricidad is, itself, an instance of public mourning that laments Orestes’s predicament. This assertion may seem obvious at first blush, but here I want to draw attention to the play’s work and intervention in the public sphere as a theatrical event—as a performance— and the implications of taking this approach. In “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies,

Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Jill Dolan expresses concern for the way in which transdisciplinary performance studies pay little attention to theatrical performance itself. She writes:

But as much as performativity seems to capture the academic imagination, and as much as performance captures the political field, theatrical performances, as located, historical sites for interventionist work in social identity constructions, are rarely considered across the disciplines, media, and politics that borrow its terms (419-420).

Dolan indicates that the proliferation of the performative141 in other academic fields has caused the interventionist work of theatre studies to go overlooked, and she expresses a desire to revisit the theatre by “borrowing back concepts of performativity” (420; original emphasis). My agenda is similar in that I re-center the theatre to examine it as a cultural and political platform for performing public mourning.

Electricidad mourns la vida loca of an isolated, insular, and disenfranchised gang that imparts a sense of belonging at the cost of violence and loss. In particular, it mourns the conditions of being and living as a chola/o, which in this case is an identity that is interpellated by patriarchal violence. My intention in calling attention to the play’s nihilistic orientation is not

141 Dolan explains that theories of the performative, which cross different disciplines (i.e. Women’s Studies; Gay and Lesbian Studies) argue for the social construction of subjects through performance, borrow from theatre studies.

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to re-inscribe, substantiate, or endorse circulating stereotypical representations of the chola/o and gangs, though I would add that Alfaro does, in fact, participate in ‘executing the stereotype’ through various embodiments of the chola/o and the use of humor.142 Whether the play, as a theatrical performance, is a site of “interventionist work in social identity constructions”

(Dolan)—that is, whether it subverts or propagates the stereotype of the gang member is unclear, given that so much depends on audience response and the directorial choices for the production.143 Violence in Electricidad faces a similar conundrum in that, on the one hand, there is an attempt to reframe violence as a product of social and economic inequalities as well as the result of an absent legal enforcement of justice. On the other hand, the incidents of violence may instead promulgate the idea that the chola/o is innately prone to violence or even that violence is a cultural malaise that conclusively defines the barrio. To this extent, the representation of violence in the world of Electricidad cannot account for how audiences watching a performance of it will or will not reduce chola/os to agents of violence, as they are embodied on the stage. I argue, however, that treating Electricidad as a performance of public mourning144 perhaps undermines these ambiguities of audience reception, and certainly makes an important intervention in the representations of chola/os that are centered around marginalization and criminalization. To clarify, the performance of mourning in Electricidad unfolds on two levels:

142 See Powers’s essay, “‘Executing Stereotypes’ in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, and Mojada,” for an extended discussion of the ways Alfaro executes the stereotype of the Latina/o gang member. Herrera explains that the stereotype of the Latino gang member takes root in the character of Chino in West Side Story (127).

143 See Powers’s discussion of how Alfaro’s Electricidad may reinforce stereotypes, particularly how “the cultural disparity between the demographic of the audience and that depicted by the actors” and costume design (i.e. striking the “right aesthetic” and its lack of consistency across productions) affect the performance itself.

144 Here, I am interpreting public mourning in two ways here: 1) the mourning is public because it exists in the open view of the theatre and thus made visible; and 2) the public attribute of mourning signals the way in which the theatre space is actively creating a space for a collective; in other words, Electricidad engages in a collective, communal display of mourning, regardless of the different sources of grief that emerge.

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1) the characters’ behaviors and nonverbal communication can be read as performative expressions of grief; Electricidad, for instance, mourns as she erects an altar on the front yard of her home or when she repeatedly calls for her father in anguish; and 2) the actors perform mourning in traversing the theatrical stage; the embodiment of the dramatic text on stage constitutes a performance. In addition, we might consider Electricidad itself as a performance of mourning because is proffers a public-facing representation of mourning rooted in a specific cultural and geosocial context. It embodies what mourning might look like in world of the chola/o, and, in effect, it performs mourning as a theatrical event. As such, it is worth examining the affective capabilities of Electricidad in the theatre space.

The transformation of the barrio’s contained grief into something public that can be seen by audiences shifts popular discourses about chola/os. The expressions of grief dispel the idea that chola/os are only perpetrators of violence or that they are callous violent agents who are responsible for their own social ills. When Clemencia reveals that Agamenón raped her, she shares a vulnerability that counters a one-dimensional portrait which might paint her as a cold- blooded murderer and a “bad” mother. In short, the grief of sexual assault redraws the limits of the chola identity and therefore gives her persona more complexity. In a similar way, Abuela’s grief over her dead children, who died because of gang-related reasons, reconstructs her subjectivity to highlight the longstanding suffering of a mother, so that her ill-mannered conduct becomes almost inconsequential by comparison. The staging of Electricidad momentarily lifts the geospatial confines of the barrio, so that grief and mourning are public-facing and audiences thereby witness its manifestation in the barrio. As audiences experience an “inside-look” in watching the performance, no longer is the grief contained within the barrio; audiences quickly

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learn that chola/os grieve and mourn, too. This makes possible an interpretation of chola/os as multifaceted and as worthy of human dignity.

Relatedly, Electricidad as a performance of public mourning advances the claim that lives of chola/os are grievable, unlike prejudicial depictions of chola/os that disavow their deaths. Moreover, this declaration of grievability challenges notions of ungrievability that are drawn using borders of belonging and nonbelonging, which is in conversation with a historical marginalization of the barrio that has socially, economically, and politically pushed it to the fringes of society. Electricidad’s mourning of her father, through its very performance, marks

Agamenón’s life as grievable. Its public quality also marks Agamenón as a member of the barrio, whose death must not go unrecognized. In turn, this mourning combats exclusive conceptions of belonging that are shaped on the basis of race, wherein grievability calls for whiteness and ungrievability defaults to racialized bodies. Agamenón, who might be reduced to a racialized and delinquent leadership figure, is instead reconfigured as a father and as a protector of the barrio, whose loss matters a great deal because the security of the barrio is in jeopardy, as Las vecinas in the play make known. Dominant discourses of racialization and marginalization do not preclude the mourning of Agamenón, and though it is troubling (as an earlier part of this chapter shows),

Electricidad’s performance of mourning subverts the way grievability might only be afforded to those individuals whose bodies are not racialized, criminalized, or marginalized. The performance, then, proposes a form of democratic mourning that expands the limits of belonging.

Finally, understanding Electricidad as a performance of public mourning makes a case for how its affective turns, made possible by its centering of loss and mourning as well as of an emotion as strong as grief, strategically deploy emotion to build sympathy for chola/os and therefore disrupt the norms of rational and unemotional dominant discourses that fail to

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humanize chola/o families and communities. While this may occur when readers engage

Electricidad as a dramatic text, the deployment of emotion becomes much more pronounced in the theatre space, as there is an expression of grief onstage that is inevitably performative and public-facing. In the space of the theatre, which is also a public space, the play opens up an affective dimension wherein audiences can reflect on their own experiences of grief and mourning. This forms the basis for audiences’ critical reflection of the chola/o world and for the possibility of empathy that acknowledges the barrio’s own materializations of mourning. Though identification with characters through emotion may stand in opposition to intellectual thought, which ostensibly diminishes “critical” engagement with theatrical performance, anthropologist

Michelle Z. Rosaldo understands “emotions not as things opposed to thought but as cognitions implicating the immediate, carnal ‘me’ – as thoughts embodied” (138). She adds that emotions are “embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that ‘I am involved,’” and she importantly moves from “I” to “we” when she writes that “emotions are about the ways in which the social world is one in which we are involved” (Rosaldo 143). Accordingly, emotions as

“embodied thoughts” help to break down any barriers of “I” and “we” or even “us” [audiences] and “them” [chola/os], producing a shift of recognition towards the “embodied thoughts,” or emotions, of others that approximates empathy. In this way, Electricidad is a performance of public mourning ripe with moments that enable audiences to evaluate, reflect on, recognize, and empathize with the world of the chola/o. As a final point, I suggest that the political efficacy of

Electricidad lies in its staging of marginalized chola/os to voice, express, and otherwise publicly embody their grief. As I argue in the conclusion of this dissertation, the theatre is a necessary and vital space for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities to stage stories of grief and mourning but, most importantly, to come together to mourn the continued realities of their injustices.

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CODA: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING FOR CHICANA/OS AND BEYOND

Together, Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad provide spaces for Chicanas’ mourning, which critiques structural forms of oppression that differentially effect loss and injury in marginalized Chicana/o communities. Loss in all three works can be observed on a thematic level, such that these works belong to a catalogue of cultural productions that position loss as a recurring phenomenon for

Chicana/os, beginning with the decimation of indigenous communities by the Spanish and extending into the 21st century in the US with systemic forms of violence.145 Noting and attending to this emphasis on loss, my project examines how Chicanas’ public mourning grows out of different sites of loss that bear a relationship to structural and/or interpersonal forms violence. In these sites of loss—the borderlands, a farmworker community, and the barrio—

Chicanas engage public mourning as a means of resistance, actively pointing towards mourning as a political endeavor.

The public mourning of Chicanas constitutes onerous emotional and intellectual labor. At its basic level, the public expression of grief asserts the existence of emotional pain and declares a rupture produced by loss; both of these assertions posit loss as something deserving of attention and response. Bearing witness to loss or social injury, Chicanas’ public mourning and its politics intervene in daily life activities, though it may not necessarily lead to any concrete social or

145 This statement does not reify loss as a defining characteristic of Chicana/o cultural productions, lest it might circumscribe loss as something that can never be mitigated. But, I do see loss as a persistent subject matter with which Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural producers engage on both abstract and tangible levels, related to histories of colonization, the rise of Spanish and Anglo-American empires, political disenfranchisement, social alienation, as well as processes of assimilation, to name a few.

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political changes. In conceptualizing mourning as a political act, however, this dissertation does not rest on the argument that mourning might be “so emotionally powerful that [it] threaten[s] to overwhelm political order” (Alford 7) and obliges sociopolitical change for disenfranchised

Chicana/o communities. To theorize about mourning’s political efficacy using affect alone might problematically rely on optimistic assumptions about empathy and morality as leading forces for transformation. And, while empathy is a desired response from individuals who have knowledge about or proximity to a loss that is not their own, empathy is but a kernel for igniting protest aimed at transforming structures of power and their injustices. As I have demonstrated, Chicanas express their grief in various forms, and the labor of mourning is more than a simple public display of an emotional state.

The specific works I examine convey mourning as a cultural, social, and political project where Chicanas recast what it means to actively respond to and engage loss and injury. Their public expression of grief amplifies political consciousness and cultivates political agency in the service of elevating Chicana/o loss as a matter of civic resistance and protest. Public mourning is an active and political response that forges questions, concerns, and meaning about loss (tangible or physical), and, as such, it compellingly re-centers loss in spaces and contexts where it is mitigated, silenced, disavowed, made invisible, or altogether erased. My project concludes that, in acts of public mourning, Chicanas become political agents who disrupt the silence or disavowal of loss and social injury; reject the privatization of mourning; deliberately mourn in public spaces; question whose losses “count”; defend the grievability of Chicana/o bodies; challenge the social invisibility of loss; urge public recognition; and demand both responsibility and accountability from state authorities. In these ways, Chicanas’ public mourning acts have larger political implications, and they position Chicanas as leaders in their communities in the

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pursuit of social change. And yet, these acts of public mourning, as much as they carry forth political implications, may not always achieve social change. Notwithstanding, the structural injustices revealed by public mourning shift the discourse around grief and loss for these

Chicana/o communities to focus on political shortcomings in need of transformation.

Scholarly Contributions

Most immediate, my project uniquely brings Braided Sorrow, Heroes and Saints, and

Electricidad in conversation with one another to explore what public mourning looks like in various spaces and what its implications are for Chicana/os, especially for Chicanas who spearhead the labor of mourning in these works. While Moraga’s Heroes and Saints has garnered lots of critical attention from scholars, the literature on Orta’s Braided Sorrow and Alfaro’s

Electricidad is still growing; thus, this project contributes to the literary criticism of these plays, with special attention to their respective historical, political, and social landscapes. I provide a new lens through which to interpret how these works forge a politics of public mourning that, incidentally, correspond to the spirit of protest associated with the Chicano Movement as well as with the political resistance that guided the beginnings of Chicana/o theatre. Inasmuch as there is an understanding that Chicana/o communities differentially experience loss and social injury, the juxtaposition of these three plays makes the case that distinctive Chicana positionalities confront long-standing structural injustices through public mourning in their own ways. Whether in the US-Mexico borderlands, in a California farmworker community, or in a barrio on the East

Side of Los Angeles, Chicanas publicly express their grief in different forms, but they all defy the idea that mourning is a passive activity or something to be overlooked in light of more flagrantly political acts. Mourning has not been absent from Chicana/o texts, but focused discussions on the political functions of Chicana/o mourning are limited in literary criticism and theory.

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In addition to making contributions to the study of Chicana/o dramatic texts, my project participates in disrupting the pathologization and/or medicalization of mourning, joining scholars like David Eng, Anne Cheng, and José Esteban Muñoz. I treat mourning as something politically productive, and I reclaim it as a viable means for resistance in Chicana/o communities. This endeavor therefore rejects dominant psychoanalytic discourses around mourning that limit mourning’s generative capacities. Moreover, my project contributes to the field of Chicana/o

Studies, broadly speaking, by putting together Chicana/o plays in dialogue with recent scholarship about mourning that has developed out of the field of political science. In particular, political scientists have theorized mourning as a tool to address and critique the shortcomings of

American democracy, and they have argued for the reparative possibilities of mourning, which can help animate US politics towards a better, more just future. While the recent scholarship on the politics of mourning in political science treats disenfranchised communities, the vast majority of scholars are guided by an evident black and white binary that, consequently, excludes brown bodies.146 My project maintains a critical focus on the plights of Chicana/os in critical conversations about mourning and its political value. Chicana/o Studies, too, can participate in framing understanding of the politics of mourning.

On a larger level, this project theorizes public mourning as an undervalued means through which Chicana/os can critique grave structural problems but also nurture political aspirations that envision a more just world. In the face of loss and social injury, it is important for Chicana/o communities to embrace grief and to mourn their loss, rather than eschew this emotional labor because it seems insignificant. Mourning allows us to meditate on our human condition. When we suffer a physical or abstract loss, our world is involuntarily changed, in

146 Several political scientists, like David McIvor, have written about the social impacts of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the ways it has elicited public mourning in response to the deaths of black men and women.

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some cases shattered. More than this, however, our experiences of loss are interlaced with our political lives; the personal is political. Our personal experiences are rooted in larger social, economic, and political structures, and, as a result, so are our losses and injuries. Put simply, to mourn is a political act. When we make our mourning public, we can begin to condemn the structures from which losses and injuries emerge, as my project shows. Furthermore, public mourning can help orient our politics to pursue dignity, equality, and justice.

Where can and should Chicana/os carry out the labor of public mourning? This labor can take place almost anywhere, but, as my project suggests, issues of (in)visibility might determine in which spaces mourning should take place. I would also like to propose that this labor can materialize in theatre spaces. It is no coincidence that the Chicana/o works I selected for this project are all texts written for the stage; if they were not meant to be staged, then these works would take on other forms and genres, like novels or poetry. I see the theatre as a valuable space for public mourning, because it is a space where grief can be felt, expressed, and embodied.

Theatre arts engage in doing as much as representation. It is a space where private mourning can literally become public, and, as such, it is a space that can store and transmit information about experiences of loss. In an effort to illuminate the broader social and political import of public mourning acts, and to better illustrate that the theatre might be understood as a distinctive space for these acts, I briefly turn my attention to a recent work of theatre in Puerto Rico that evolved out of the loss wrought by the natural disaster that was hurricane María and its subsequent

“unnatural” disaster, or the US government’s response to the hurricane.

Given my focus on Chicana/o communities in this dissertation, the consideration of public mourning using theatre in Puerto Rico might seem incongruous. However, there is an argument to be made about a shared legacy of colonization and imperialism between Puerto

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Ricans and Chicana/os.147 In Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle for Liberation (1972),

Rodolfo Acuña discusses internal colonialism as part of the Southwest’s historiography. He explains,

Central to the thesis of this monograph is my contention that the conquest of the Southwest created a colonial situation in the traditional sense-with the Mexican land and population being controlled by an imperialistic United States. Further, I contend that this colonization-with-variations is still with us today [the twentieth century]. Thus, I refer to the colony, initially, in the traditional definition of the term, and later (taking into account the variations) as an internal colony. (Acuña 3)

Acuña argues that the Southwest is a colony within an Anglo-American empire; his reference to

“colonization-with-variations” has to do Mexican American experiences of social, economic, and political forms of subordination following Anglo-American conquest. This internal colonial theory148 relates to a larger colonial paradigm that elucidates the relationship between the US and

Puerto Rico. In America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico (2007), Pedro A. Malavet explains that “Puerto Ricans’ cultural nationhood conflicts with their external reality: the U.S. control of their territory” (3). Indeed, Puerto Rico is a “cultural nation” with territorial status that lacks legal and political sovereignty (Malavet 4),

147 Since both Puerto Rico and the Southwest territory were formerly indigenous, they share a history of double colonization and imperialism—first by the Spanish and then Anglo-Americans.

148 Regarding the historiography of the Southwest, the internal colonial model has been both dismissed and accepted by scholars. In the preface to the second edition of Occupied America, Acuña himself would later note, “I have reevaluated the internal colonial model and set it aside as a useful paradigm relevant to the nineteenth century but not the twentieth” (1981; vii). In large part, this had to do with his consideration of the number of Mexicans in the twentieth century who were crossing the US border and did not experience the oppression resulting from territorial conquest. In “Ideological Distortions in Recent Chicano Historiography,” Tomás Almaguer echoed the idea that the experience of American Americans in the 19th century did not extend into the 20th century, and he also argued that internal colonial theory did not adequately consider class. Nevertheless, literary critics including Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Emma Pérez have engaged, rather than dismissed, ideas of internal colonialism. Elaborating on Gloria Anzaldúa’s attention to race, class, and sexuality as axes for understanding a colonial condition, Saldívar-Hull understands internal colonialism in relation to gender and mestizaje in “Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics.” Likewise, Emma Pérez engages “coloniality’s imaginary and psychic implications with respect to material, tangible conditions” (6-7) in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Theories of Representation and Difference (1999).

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the oldest US colony with over a 400-year history of colonization. Scholars have rigorously examined the ways in which US colonialism has had extensive implications on Puerto Rican culture and identity149; nationhood and citizenship150; as well as poverty151 and economic development.152 In 2017, the colonial relationship between the US and Puerto Rico would become a focal point for discussing the aftermath of hurricane María, pressing Puerto Ricans to think about political sovereignty and to aspire toward self-sufficiency. As one journalist put it,

“María taught us how deep the seed of colonialism is planted inside us and of how little importance we are to the [US] empire” (Torres Gotay 88).

The Mo(u)rning after María: Making Loss Count in ¡Ay María! (2017)

As a category four storm, María devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017; it destroyed the territory’s electrical grid, damaged hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings, and killed thousands of people. This account of the island’s devastation, of course, has been met with denial at every turn. Nearly two weeks after the hurricane, US President Donald Trump egregiously downplayed María’s fatal consequences, noting that only sixteen individuals had lost their lives.

By Trump’s account, María was not deemed a “real catastrophe” like hurricane Katrina was in

2005. In December 2017, the official death toll rose to 64, according to public safety officials on the island. Nevertheless, Puerto Ricans maintained that the truth about María’s consequences, especially regarding the death count, was not being reported. Indeed, a year later, the local

149 For more on the construction of national identity in Puerto Rico, see Jorge Duany’s The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (2002).

150 On the subject of Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status, see Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (2001), edited by Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall.

151 See Susan S. Baker’s Understanding Mainland Puerto Rican Poverty (2002).

152 See James L. Dietz’s Puerto Rico: Negotiating Development and Change (2003).

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government accepted 2,975 as the official death count. Yet, a study from Harvard T.H. Chan

School of Public Health found that even this number was grossly underestimated. Researchers at

Harvard, in collaboration with colleagues in Puerto Rico and the University Colorado School of

Medicine, found that there were an estimated 4,645 additional deaths that were not counted as disaster-related deaths.

The initial underestimated death count, as well as the discrepancy between the official count and additional deaths estimated by the aforementioned Harvard study, has only served to emphasize the matter of structural negligence. After all, the storm itself did not kill thousands; it was a series of failures on the part of local and federal governments following María that created conditions of possibility for Puerto Ricans to “drow[n] in bureaucracy and institutional neglect”

(Bonilla and LeBrón 4). Of course, scholars and investigative journalists have revealed that

María’s (un)natural disaster and its effects on the island ought to be read as “the product of a long-standing colonial disaster” (Bonilla and LeBrón 11), contextualized in Puerto Rico’s “long history of structural vulnerability and forced dependency” (Bonilla and LeBrón 5). Accordingly,

Nelson Maldonado-Torres contends that to unpack María’s aftermath requires a “significant engagement with Caribbean decolonial thought and decolonial thinking at large” (340), for

María is not really a crisis, he argues, but a disaster whose outcomes are telling of previously- made decisions guided by or subject to colonialism. If María is not a crisis but, instead, a disaster whose outcomes are steeped in the historical roots of colonialism, then the hurricane has “lifted a

‘veil’ covering [past and existing] Puerto Rican realities” (Gregory 152).

Puerto Ricans, who have long understood and experienced the implications of colonialism as citizens of a US territory, still mourn the loss of family members, friends, neighbors, homes, and livelihoods. Meanwhile, in the past two years since the hurricane hit the

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island, federal government officials have co-opted narratives that deny Puerto Rican grief and mourning. These narratives carry forth an agenda of dismissing loss and destruction as well as the critique of US state failures and negligence. Further, public media outlets have dismissed or

“moved on” from covering the hurricane’s aftermath, engaging in a project of forgetting that contributes to the exacerbation of Puerto Rican loss and devastation. How can this denial of death and devastation be interrupted and challenged? What spaces do Puerto Ricans have to negotiate their traumas and loss? How can recovery efforts really take hold when that which needs recovery has not yet been rightfully witnessed, acknowledged, and assessed? These are the questions that anchor my discussion of the larger value of public mourning in relation to Puerto

Rico and the place of theatre.

Rather than attending to the opening night of a play she produced in Puerto Rico,

Mariana Carbonell was instead attending to María’s damage in October 2017. In this process,

Carbonell began to conceive of the empty spaces across the island as bare stages or opportunities

“to relieve some of the population’s anguish and trauma” (Carbonell 39). She eventually recruited actors for these empty stages. These actors would collectively contribute to writing and performing ¡Ay María!, an interactive theatre piece of tragicomic vignettes and songs, under the direction of Maritza Pérez Otero (Carbonell 39-40). According to Amauta Marston-Firmino,

Mickey Negrón and other artists aimed to visit all of the island’s municipalities to perform the play (4). In the play, neighbors come together in the aftermath of the hurricane to procure basic necessities. Extending the aforementioned metaphor of the veil, ¡Ay María! lifts the veil on the experiences of Puerto Rican residents who had to reimagine their lives around loss and devastation and who had to find ways to survive. The play offers a hopeful vision for the island as neighbors come together, but not without first attending to and validating the voices that

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communicate feelings of sorrow, anger, desperation, and anguish. Embedded in ¡Ay María! are voices that respond to loss and express grief, and these voices especially resist narratives that disavow death and that, in so doing, deny mourning. Therefore, I understand the play as a cultural production and performance that constitutes a public mourning act. Literally borne out of hurricane María’s aftermath, ¡Ay María!’s public mourning is political.

The political issues in ¡Ay María! are too many to thoroughly examine in this conclusion, but I do want to give focused attention to the matter of the rising death count on the island, particularly because the play poses questions that warrant further consideration: what “counts” as a hurricane-related death? Do these deaths really “count”? If so, what does it matter? In one section, the play paints the former governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, as an incompetent and rambling official who mishandled death certifications and other reports related to deaths, autopsies and cremations. The neighbors of the play question Rosselló during a press conference:

JOSÉ EUGENIO. Mr. Governor, my best friend committed suicide a week after the hurricane because he’d lost everything. Does that death count? JOSÉ LUIS (ROSSELLÓ). Well, did they do an autopsy? JOSÉ EUGENIO. The morgues were all full! JOSÉ LUIS (ROSSELLÓ). I see, well, then it doesn’t count. MARISA. Mr. Governor, what about the hundreds of people who couldn’t receive medical care without electricity, which was caused by the hurricane. Do they count? JOSÉ LUIS (ROSSELLÓ). Did they get autopsies? MARISA. The administration ordered the cremation of hundreds of cadavers without autopsies! JOSÉ LUIS (ROSSELLÓ). Who approved this? MARISA. Héctor Pesquera. JOSÉ LUIS (ROSSELLÓ). Ah well, they don’t count. (Carbonell et al. 49-50)

While this press conference raises many grave issues that support structural negligence, it is important to close-read governor Rosselló’s curt responses. First, the play represents Rosselló’s an individual who is emotionally unresponsive to deaths. His absence of sympathy in these

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exchanges with Puerto Rican citizens is palpable, which indicates either the governor’s inability to show compassion towards his constituents or his dismissal of these deaths due to the unavailability of autopsies and morgues. Second, the people’s repeating question (“do they count?”) is met with Rosselló’s insistence on downplaying the official death count. He gives particular importance to cause-of-death statements and certifications that autopsies can bring to bear. Rosselló makes clear that, without a proper autopsy, the death cannot be included— counted—in the total number of deaths related to the hurricane.

However, the word “count” carries double significance here. Rosselló's fixation on the death count, or treating fatalities as a number, precludes the consideration that perhaps what

Puerto Ricans are asking is something different. In asking whether certain deaths “count,” perhaps they are instead wondering if these deaths are significant. This line of reasoning returns to Judith Butler’s ideas about grievability, which I have previously discussed. Accordingly,

Rosselló’s curt responses convey that death by suicide in the hurricane’s aftermath is undeserving of public acknowledgement; the same applies to those individuals who lost their lives over the lack of proper medical care, as noted in this excerpt from the play. These lives are not mourned because they are considered ungrievable, for they never “counted” as lives at all.

Rosselló’s agenda of hiding the real number of casualties goes hand-in-hand with presenting hundreds, if not thousands, of deceased Puerto Ricans as subjects whose lives do not matter, or matter very little. Ultimately, the governor of Puerto Rico’s assertion that some deaths “don’t count” exposes a highly problematic disavowal of death and mourning.

If Puerto Rico’s dead bodies do not “count” in the eyes of Rosselló and other government officials, then they do count in ¡Ay María!. As a performance, the play is an act of public mourning that politically resists the denial, mitigation, and erasure of loss suffered by citizens of

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the island. It disrupts official narratives about hurricane María’s (un)natural disaster, pushing back against the ungrievability of Puerto Rican lives. It focalizes individual and shared feelings of grief, and it brings audiences together precisely around these feelings of grief, as it meditates on Puerto Rico’s devastation. ¡Ay María! acknowledges emotional pain and makes it public by staging painful experiences. Artist Helen Ceballos noted that, “Most of the audience members that saw Ay María could see their experiences reflected, and that’s a way of processing”

(Marston-Firmino 4-5). Indeed, the play honors this processing of loss in its recognition and treatment of loss as something real and something that matters.

The artistic work of the theatre, in this particular case, is “an act of survival” (Marston-

Firmino) that gives priority to mourning. ¡Ay María!’s intimate engagement with bereavement, however difficult, is an admirable endeavor that brings Puerto Ricans closer to mending the wounds inflicted by official government narratives as well as structural negligence and abandonment. In the play, Puerto Ricans find alternative narratives that treat experiences of loss as something worth telling, staging, and sharing. Put another way, ¡Ay María! provides a different archive and repertoire that undermines what has been formally been written about

Puerto Rico and hurricane María. In between the lines, the play sharply critiques the lack of government responsibility and accountability, while it also declares that the strength of the characters can be found in mutual support and self-organizing practices. “Los vecinos /

Construímos / Puerto Rico” (59) are the lines that the characters collectively sing at the end of the play. The last notes of ¡Ay María! literally leave us with a sense of community and with the task of rebuilding. It comes as no surprise that the characters of the play are all neighbors who abide in a shared physical and social space and end up helping one another. They are a community with a shared sense of loss—the kind of loss that requires the strength of more than

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one individual to surmount. ¡Ay María! is, after all, an artistic production made possible by a community of theatre practitioners who understood mourning as a critical beginning for political resistance, rebuilding, and healing.

Similar to ¡Ay María!, the three plays I have examined in this dissertation illustrate that acts of public mourning undermine dominant narratives or power structures seeking to disregard experiences of loss in Chicana/o communities. Mourning acknowledges the pain of grief and provides a forum for further understanding how Chicana/o loss and social injuries at the local level are connected to larger structural problems that differentially impact marginalized communities. The juxtaposition of ¡Ay María! with these Chicana/o plays especially highlights the role of mourning in contesting narratives wherein certain lives do not “count” or do not matter, especially when state and national authorities make them invisible or altogether erase them. In the intimate worlds that these plays paint, the deceased are recognized as part of a community. They are counted because of the mourners who grieve them, both on individual and collective levels, and public mourning thus politically resists exclusion. Together, these plays insist on bearing witness to loss through acts of public mourning that carry political import, lest the bodies of Chicana/as and Puerto Ricans alike become physically interred and symbolically put to rest without any demands for state accountability and responsibility. Thus, public mourning is a source of unrest, and its political registers raise necessary questions with which we must grapple in the pursuit of social justice for Chicana/o peoples and communities.

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