Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 32 Issue 2 Theater and Performance in Nuestra Article 3 América 6-1-2008 Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theatre of Rodolfo Santana Vicky Unruh University of Kansas Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Latin American Literature Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Unruh, Vicky (2008) "Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theatre of Rodolfo Santana ," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 32: Iss. 2, Article 3. https://doi.org/10.4148/ 2334-4415.1677 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Where the Wild Things Go: Tourism and Ethnic Longing in the Theatre of Rodolfo Santana Abstract Tapping into the performative intricacies of tourist activity and showcasing the negotiations of performed ethnicity in the implicit contrasts between tourists and the people they travel to see, Latin American and U.S. Latino theatre artists use the tourist character or theme to investigate the cultural negotiations marking contemporary social life. This work parallels critical theory that investigates the tourist as an improvisatory player in trans-regional interactions and unpacks the tourist-“native” binary to revise conceptions of people and cultures that travel.