The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive: Jorge Huerta, Ph.D.

Huerta, Jorge A.

Theatre Journal, Volume 55, Number 4, December 2003, pp. 757-762 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/tj.2003.0168

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v055/55.4huerta.html

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 THEATRE JOURNAL AUTO/ARCHIVE / 757

The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive:

Jorge Huerta, Ph.D.

In July of 1990, I wrote an op-ed for The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled
Colleges Should Expose Their Students to the Tradition of Hispanic-American
Theater. In that essay I argued for what the title implies: more recognition in theatre
and drama curricula of what Latina/os and Latin American theatre artists have been
doing in the Amricas (which includes the United States) for centuries. I pointed out
the fact that during the 1980s the regional theatre companies seemed more interested
in the theatrical expressions of these communities than did the theatre departments
that were training and educating artists, scholars, and audiences.
Well, the 1980s have passed and by 1994, I was bemoaning the fact that many of
those mainstream theatres were no longer producing plays by Latina or Latino
playwrights and if they were, they rarely hired Latina or Latino directors or other
members of the production team. As a consequence, they often produced disastrous
results. Funding sources had turned their attention to other causes and the main-
stream Hispanic Projects as well as the Latina/o theatres were left to fend for
themselves. The 1980s, dubbed The Decade of the Hispanic, by Time magazine, had
passed us all by and we didnt even notice. Its now the
year 2003 and although I am still concerned about the
state of Latina/o theatre in the profession and in the
academy, there is definitely hope.
Permit me to go back in timea prerogative of this
forumto the 1950s, when I played that cute little
Mexican kid on several nationally televised programs
coming out of Hollywood. I jokingly tell people that I
spent the 1950s in white pajamas and huaraches on a
little screen in black and white (see photo). I learned at
a very early age: (1) I would always be cast/seen as a
Mexican, despite my efforts to pass for Anglo and (2)
the only hope for my Broadway aspirations was West

Jorge Huerta holds the Chancellors Associates Endowed Chair III as Professor of Theatre at the
University of California, San Diego. He is also a professional director and a leading authority on
contemporary Chicano and Latino theatre. He has directed throughout the country for companies such
as Seattles Group Theater, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre in
NYC, and Gala Hispanic Theatre in Washington, DC. Dr. Huerta has traveled widely in the United
States, Western Europe, and Latin America presenting lectures and workshops on Chicano theatre. He
has published many articles and reviews, has edited two anthologies of plays, and has published
Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms (1982) and Chicano Drama: Society, Performance and
Myth (2000). Currently, Huerta is writing a book about comedy in Chicano theatre.

Theatre Journal 55 (2003) 757762 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
758 / Jorge Huerta

Side Story. I did not realize how racist that musical was, I just wanted to sing Maria,
which, of course, isnt even sung by one of the so-called Puerto Rican characters. As an
undergraduate at California State College at Los Angeles, I did get to play Julio in that
infrequently produced Lerner and Lowe musical comedy from the mid50s, Paint Your
Wagon. The story takes place in a mining camp in California during the Gold Rush. A
secondary plot involves the main characters daughter who falls in love with a
foreigner, a Spanish miner. I got to sing one of the more memorable songs in that
show, I Talk to the Trees, but the trees never talked back to me. Was this because I
wasnt Spanish? The creators of that piece just couldnt imagine a romance between
a Mexican and a white woman in those days, I suppose, even though Desi was loving
Lucy on television every week.
As an undergraduate, I eventually realized that I wanted the stability of a teaching
position that would allow me to support a family while doing what I loved. My
mentor, Maris Ubans, suggested that I do what he did: teach during the school year
and direct during the summers. So I earned a Masters degree in theatre from the same
college assuming that I would land a position in a college or university. I never dreamt
of teaching high school drama but I was now married and took the only teaching job
I could find at a small rural high school in Riverside, California in 1966. Born and
raised in East Los Angeles, perhaps it was only appropriate that I would now be
teaching sixty miles east of East L.A. rather than on the affluent Westside.
From my first day at Rubidoux High, I loved what I was doing. After three
wonderful years of teaching high school drama I taught one year at a community
college and then decided that I was now ready for the challenges of a doctoral
program. I had seen the Teatro Campesino in 1968, an event which would ultimately
 THEATRE JOURNAL AUTO/ARCHIVE / 759

change the course of my life. I had never seen Chicano theatre: rough, simple, but not
simplistic, speaking in the language of the barrio about the problems of the farmworkers.
I determined to learn more about this and any other aspects of Chicano theatre. With
a wife and two infants in tow, I entered the doctoral program in the Department of
Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the fall of 1970. Just
months before we arrived in Santa Barbara, students had burned the Bank of America
next to campus in protest of the war in Vietnam. These were heady times and my
family and I were immediately immersed in the social upheaval of the period.
My doctoral studies allowed me to learn more about western European and United
States theatre history, criticism, and practice; my own scholarly and practical interests
enabled me to delve into Chicano theatre. While I was initially motivated by the Teatro
Campesino, I also wanted to learn about the roots of that theatre. Luis Valdez advised
me to study the Mayas and the Aztecs, and so I did and found fascinating, though
limited, accounts of theatrical performances in Mesoamerican cultures. Were talking
about a period way before computers, dear Young Reader, when research meant going
to the archives, looking through reference books and indices in search of a subject. All
that I could find in the Subject Catalogue when I searched through Theatre Mexican
American were references to Spanish colonial religious drama and other performance
genres in Mexico and in the southwest. I found a history where there had been little, if
any mention of my Indian, African, and Spanish colonial roots. The Interlibrary Loan
people became my best friends as I ordered dissertations, books, and journal articles
from long-forgotten sources. However, the majority of articles that I could locate in
English appeared in the 1930s and focused on our folk theatre. The 1930s were
apparently a Big Moment in archeologically-minded theatre studies and a group of
scholars were unearthing typed and hand-written manuscripts of plays and translat-
ing some as well as reporting on performances wherever they could find them.
I discovered that little, if any, mention was made of the secular performances that
were also very prominent. Most of the secular plays and performances that were being
produced in the barrios were in Spanish and from Mexico, Spain, and Latin America.
And although most of the scholars who were writing about Spanish religious theatre
were Spanish-speaking, their interest lay in the folk theatre. The results of my research
led me to determine that Mexicans and Chicanos were only of interest as folk rather
than as activists to scholars of the 1930s.
But I couldnt spend all my time in the libraries, as much as I truly enjoyed archival
work. I also discovered the joys and frustrations of directing a university student
troupe, Teatro Mecha, the cultural arm of UCSBs Chicano student organization. Mecha
is Chicano slang for matchas in to light a fireand the recent conflagration of a
certain bank branch notwithstanding, campus Mecha organizations were, indeed,
lighting fires of activism all over the country. Early Chicano theatre was more
interested in politics than art, but I had found my community and determined to
contribute what I could to this developing form of artistic and social protest.
By the end of my first year in the doctoral program, Mecha split into two groups and
I and six undergraduates under my direction created El Teatro de la Esperanza (The
Theatre of Hope) out of that break up. Academic inquiry fueled my desire to learn;
directing a performing group fueled my need to get involved in the Chicano
communities on and off-campus. By 1974, Teatro de la Esperanza had gained
760 / Jorge Huerta

prominence as a collective of dedicated theatre artists and teachers. I also completed

the doctorate in 1974, apparently the first Chicano to do so. Conscious of the
responsibility and the opportunity, I took my first teaching position at the University
of California, San Diego.
The decision to leave the Teatro was not an easy one for either myself or my wife,
Ginger, who was the musical director and business manager for the troupe. In those
days, very few of the people involved in Chicano theatre had formal training in theatre
and I realized that this should be my goal: to educate and train the next generation of
Chicanas and Chicanos in theatre. Further, Ginger and I felt that we had trained the
members of the Teatro well and knew that they were ready to grow and develop on
their own, which they did. I believed, and still do, that my community was made up
of the many other people producing Chicano theatre and especially those students and
colleagues at colleges and universities who were interested in and supportive of
Chicana/o and Latina/o theatre.
So, I found myself teaching at a nascent research university in a theatre department
that was also just developing. In my job interview, someone asked me if I would
always center my research and creative activity on Chicano theatre, to which I
immediately responded: Ill always be a Chicano. But that did not mean that I could
not teach other aspects of Western drama, which I did and do. Initially, I taught one
course in Chicano theatre, complemented by any number of other non-Chicano topics
in my five-course teaching load. I now teach only one non-Latino course, a lower-
division survey called The Greeks to the Renaissance. I love teaching this course
because it demonstrates that I can. That I love world theatre. That I know more than
my area of research. That I read and speak English. But they also know I read and
speak Spanish.
I published my first article about the background of contemporary Chicano theatre
in one of the first refereed Chicano Studies journals, Aztln, in 1971. So little was being
published about the breadth, scope, and history of Chicano theatre that it was not
difficult to find journals eager to publish this information. From The Drama Review to
Gestos and the Latin American Theatre Review, editors welcomed articles, reports, and
reviews of books and productions. Looking back at my publications, I am reminded of
the balancing act I have had to perform since some of my articles have appeared in
non-theatre publications. Chicano Studies readers do not have to be told about the
differences between a Chicano and a
Puerto Rican, for example; theatre
and performance studies readers do
not need a description of Brechtian
theatre.
When my first article was pub-
lished back in 1971, there was only
one anthology of plays by and about
Chicanos in print and not a single
volume of criticism and analysis; to-
day the number of publications is
astounding. We have several antholo-
gies and many individually published
 THEATRE JOURNAL AUTO/ARCHIVE / 761

plays, as well as several books and anthologies of critical essays about Latina/o
theatre. In fact, we have enough good plays to fill several seasons. And if we add plays
from Latin America in translation, well, theres no end to it. But how many of our
students are familiar
with the names of play-
wrights such as Sabina
Berman, Csar Rengifo
or Antonio Skarmeta?
Three names arbitrarily
picked off the top of
my head: a Mexican, a
Venezuelan, and a Chil-
ean. The student of
Latin American theatre
will know that these
three randomly chosen
names do not even
scratch the surface of
generations of excellent
plays and theatre art-
ists from Mexico to the
southern tip of the con-
tinent.
The close reader will have noticed that I slipped into talking about Latina/o and
Latin American rather than just Chicana/o theatre. This is because the majority of
Latina/o theatre companies across the country are no longer representative of just one
immigrant group. From New York to San Diego, Seattle to Miami, Latina/o theatre
companies are made up of people from any number of countries south of the border as
well as from the U.S. and Spain. Some are recent arrivals, others are the descendants of
immigrants who came Pal norte (to the north) seeking some kind of asylum, usually
economic or political.
The 2000 census informs us
that immigrants from the south
are the fastest-growing minor-
ity in the U.S. In other words,
we are not going away. This
poses a challenge and an op-
portunity to theatres and the-
atre departments across the
country: continue to ignore
these people, or include them
in our seasons and in our cur-
ricula. Academics and artistic
directors can no longer say But
all of your plays are in Span-
ish. Nor can these profession-
als claim ignorance of US
762 / Jorge Huerta

Latina/o or Latin American theatre because we now have a whole new generation of
young scholars who are investigating and writing about these theatres en ingls. There
are now so many plays and critical studies about Latina/o theatre that I, for one, teach
four separate undergraduate courses and three graduate seminars and still cannot
cover all of the available material.
The hope to which I referred early in this essay stems from the presence of the next
generation of theatre artists and scholars developing and investigating US Latina/o
and Latin American theatre in the academy. Its a small group, to be sure, but it is
growing. When I began attending the ATA (American Theatre Association) meetings
in the mid-1970s I was usually the only Chicano there, talking about my research and
creative activity to a handful of interested people. I would joke that we could hold a
caucus in a Volkswagon bug. Judging from the amount of scholarship in this field, we
now need a bus to hold a caucus. From a bug to a bus, weve come a long way, baby,
and theres no stopping us.
So, I say to my artistic and academic colleagues: the work is there, in print and on
the stage. You do not have to be Latina or Latino to understand it (if written in English)
and you certainly can teach it if you want to. Of course knowledge of the Spanish
language gives one entry to the US Latina/o plays that employ Spanish-English code-
switching. But a glossary of terms often accompanies these texts and if not, find
someone in the production team who does read the language. Dramaturgs have been
doing this for some time now in other languages, so why not in Spanish?
Among the many US Latina/o playwrights and directors working in the American
theatre today, we have two MacArthur Fellows, one Pulitzer prize winner and
numerous recipients of Obie, Dramalogue, Rockefeller, TCG/NEA, and other presti-
gious awards. Productions and individual artists have earned every major award in
cities across the country, proving that something vital and valuable is happening in
Latina/o theatre. I call what we do Necessary Theatre, and surely it is.
Along with my publications, I have had the honor of directing staged readings and
full productions of plays in Latina/o and non-Latina/o theatres across this country as
well as in Western Europe. I have to admit that my greatest joy in the theatre comes
from directing or witnessing a play in a Latina/o context. Whether in a mainstream
theatre or in a Latina/o company, indoors or out, when there is a Latina/o play on
stage, Latina/os are in the audience. I love knowing that certain character types, such
as the sellout, or certain words in Spanish (especially the vulgar ones) will always
illicit a laugh from the bilingual audience members. Loving it. Talking back. Laughing
and crying at the opportunity to see their lives reflected on the stage. In those
moments, the venue truly belongs to them. I do it for the audiences and the readers
and for the joy of knowing that the next generation of latino artists and scholars will
continue to advance the cause. And knowing that Ive had something to do with that
is the richest reward anyone could ever ask for.