Coming Home: US-Latinos on the Broadway Stage A dissertation submitted by Colleen L. Rua in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in DRAMA Tufts University November 2011 © 2011, Colleen L. Rua ADVISER: Dr. Barbara W. Grossman ii Abstract The image of the Latino immigrant and the first-generation US-Latino on the American musical theatre stage is ever-evolving and is tied to issues of stereotyping, identity and cultural authenticity. This dissertation focuses on three Broadway musicals in order to explore the place and significance of the Latino character and culture with regard to the search for and construction of ―home.‖ The representative musicals considered in this study are: West Side Story (1957) and its 2009 revival, The Capeman (1998), and In the Heights (2008). Through a thorough investigation of these musicals and their original Broadway productions, I examine the ways in which theatre artists have represented Latino identity and space and the impact of these representations on both Latino and non-Latino audiences. Over the past fifty years, the perspective of Latino home in the Broadway musical has shifted away from the idea of the ―American Dream‖ and toward a self-constructed space that is a creation and reflection of bicultural identity. After an introduction to the theoretical models referred to in this study and an overview of current issues relevant to the Latino in the United States, I outline the history of the Latino on the Broadway musical stage, paying special attention to the musicals of the World War II era. Chapters two, three and four each focus on a different method whereby the artists associated with the representative iii musicals have treated Latino characters. These methods include: the use of Spanish language, memory and nostalgia, and the New York City barrio as setting. Through interviews, translating Spanish passages, analyzing lyrics and dialogue and considering choices made in performance, I demonstrate changes in character relationships, the assertion of power through language and education, the connections between cultural identity and memory and the idea of home as a public space. iv Acknowledgments With deep gratitude to my adviser, Barbara Grossman, whose encouragement and support have allowed me to reach this goal. I also offer heartfelt thanks to the members of my committee: Claire Conceison, who has provided guidance, faith and laughter, both in and out of the classroom; Downing Cless, who has generously offered his time, advice and invaluable teaching opportunities; and Iani Moreno, for fostering my love of Latin-American language and culture. Many thanks to the families of Arlington Children's Theatre, especially Julie Nash and Quentin Miller whose words of wisdom I have carried with me. My colleagues Wen-ling Lin and Hesse Phillips accompanied me on the early part of this journey. Kyle Sircus generously allowed me to use his interview material and Ali Ewoldt shared her time and thoughts for which I am endlessly grateful. Thanks to my dear friends Nicole Imbracsio and Matt Lundeen for being in the trenches with me and to Brian Calvert for helping me down the homestretch. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Ellie Rua, and my father, Ken Rua, who have always believed in me. v Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter One Performative Bodies and Criminal Minds : The History of Latinos On Broadway Page 32 Chapter Two El Poder y Educación: La Lengua Española Page 78 Chapter Three Here and Now: Memory and Nostalgia in the Latino Musical Page 139 Chapter Four Living el barrio : New York City as Setting Page 193 Conclusion Page 253 Bibliography Page 277 1 Introduction "In the Heights is a classic American story. It's really a celebration of this neighborhood at the top of Manhattan. It's about these three generations trying to find home and what that means to them." (Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights) The above summary of In the Heights, the 2008 Tony Award winner for best musical, was provided by Miranda in an interview with documentary filmmaker Paul Bozymowski, who followed cast and crew for the five months leading up to opening night. In May 2009, PBS aired In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams, documenting the eight-year journey in the making of a new musical; a new musical centered around a New York City barrio, largely inhabited by Latin American immigrants and first-generation US-Latinos. Only as recently as In the Heights has a major Broadway musical been written and composed by two US-Latinos, Miranda and book writer Quiara Alegría Hudes.1 In addition to presenting stories of US-Latino/a characters, the new breed of US- Latino/a production incorporates Latin and Afro-Latin music styles and manipulates language most notably through the use of bilingualism as a means of infusing the production with US-Latino/a culture and challenging familiar depictions of the US-Latino/a.2 1 A First-Generation American is commonly defined as an American born of immigrant parentage. I use it in this dissertation to refer to those Americans born in the United States, with parents born in any Latin American country. 2 I use the term bilingualism here to refer to the use of two languages throughout one play/production. In the case of In the Heights and the other musicals I will discuss here, the two 2 In the same interview, Miranda goes on to describe his motivations for writing In the Heights, ...at first it was, 'I want to write the kind of musical I would want to be in.' I also saw Rent and it was the first time I had seen a musical that took place now and a light bulb really went off. 'You can write a musical about you; about your life!' There is a generation of us who were born somewhere else and moved here or their parents came from somewhere else, whether it's from Latin America or Russia or the West Indies and don't know where they belong and what they're supposed to navigate and what traditions do you take with you. In their search for a geographic place and ideological space to call home, both the Latin American immigrant and first-generation US-Latino/a must grapple with issues of identity, authenticity and stereotyping. These themes are key to this discussion and are connected to a changing notion of home that is built upon the use of language, memory and urban setting. Much writing and research has been devoted to issues of US-Latino/a identity with regard to immigration and assimilation in non-musical plays written by Latin Americans and US-Latinos. Fewer scholars have studied the same themes in the Broadway musical. Through an examination of the place of the Latino/a on Broadway beginning in the early twentieth century and culminating with the 2009 revival of West Side Story, this study will show that the great American immigrant story, as far as US-Latinos are languages are English and Spanish. 3 concerned, is no longer about an attempt at assimilating into the existing American culture, but about reconciling native culture with American culture, and in doing so, creating a space that acknowledges both while transcending the status of ―foster home.‖ In the United States, the word ―home‖ has often been associated with the term ―American Dream.‖ This phrase conjures images of a two-story suburban dwelling, bordered by a white picket fence and a backyard. Endless cliches have shaped our idea of what home should mean. From ―there's no place like home,‖ to ―home is where the heart is,‖ each seems to suggest that our dwelling is a place that promises to satisfy all of our needs. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to divorce intellectual and emotional concepts of home. As scholar Theano S. Terkenli points out, ―A symbol becomes a sign of a thing but also has feelings behind it, as in a house and a home. Home is a multidimensional and profoundly symbolic term that cannot be mapped as an exclusively spatial concept, but it can be depicted as one aspect of human emotional territory.‖3 Over time and across cultures, ―home‖ has come to mean many different things. Terkenli points to the character for ―family‖ in old Chinese, which translates into English as "people in house," as an example of a culture which emphasizes the connection between home and family.4 For individuals in both Eastern and Western cultures, the social aspect of home 3 Theano S. Terkenli, ―Home as a Region, Geographical Review, Vol 85, no. 3, (July 1995), 326. 4 Ibid. 4 and its association with the people/family who live there ―becomes salient in the development of the idea of home by establishing a circle of social relations that validate an individual as a human being.‖5 This social component of home may be as specific as a particular dwelling which houses several family members, while for others, this term broadens to include multiple locations, multiple people and complex ideologies. Increasingly, the primacy of space as the main indicator of home is being usurped by home as ―a state of being, constructed on the accumulation of personal habits, thoughts, or emotional patterns of the lifeworld.‖6 In particular, American society has seen a shift in the idea of home that moves away from the interior, domestic sphere and toward an increasingly public existence. This perspective also suggests that lifestyle, rather than location, is an indicator of increasingly individualized concepts of home. Both individual and collective concepts of home are found on the Latino/a stage and these are connected to evolving attitudes toward public and private spaces as locations of home.