"Don't Teach These Plays!": Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program

Abstract

"Don't Teach These Plays!":Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program Jimmy A. Noriega (bio) The second decade of the twenty-first century began with a series of milestones that signaled a major turning point for Latina/o theatre. In April 2010 Luis Valdez's classic Zoot Suit opened at the Compañía Nacional de Teatro in Mexico City, and the Association of Theatre Journalists honored it as the Best Mexican Musical of the year, making it the first time a non-Mexican play was given the award. John Leguizamo performed his one-man show Ghetto Klown at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway from March to July 2011; it received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards and was eventually filmed for television. In 2012 Quiara Alegría Hudes became the first Latina to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful, which went on to become one of the most produced plays of the 2013–14 season. And in May 2012 eight theatre practitioners met in Washington, D.C., to set in motion the process that would lead to the founding of the Latina/o Theatre Commons, which in fall 2013 would hold its historic National Convening in Boston. It was during this period of noteworthy progress and acclaim that a number of Latina/o playwrights were thrust into the national spotlight in a way they did not anticipate. In January 2012 several books were removed from the classrooms of Tucson, Arizona, as a result of Arizona House Bill 2281. This legislation, passed in May 2010, targeted ethnic studies in the schools and led to the dismantling of the Tucson Unified School District's (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program. The elimination led to what many called a "banning" of the books that were previously part of the curriculum and classrooms of the district. Among the many such titles, three books were collections of Latina/o theatrical texts: Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992); Culture Clash: Life, Death, and Revolutionary Comedy (1998); and Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (2000). Puro Teatro, edited by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, consists of five full-length plays, three one-acts, four texts for performance pieces, and a series of testimonios by an array of Latinas working in the theatre. In their introduction to the collection, the editors assert that "[a]ccessibility to these plays and circulation of them in a variety of different venues will benefit communities, students at all levels of their education and their teachers, actors and actresses looking for material, and theaters at the community, regional, and national level" (xiv). Despite its well-intended aims, the anthology—created for social, cultural, and artistic empowerment—was deemed unsuitable and outlawed in Tucson classrooms. The legislation not only prevented accessibility and circulation of these works in the schools, but also emphasized the precarity of Latina cultural expression in the US today. Although perhaps it was not intentional, more Latina-written plays were censored than those by Latino men. This ban on Latina theatrical texts is even more egregious, given the lack of production opportunities for female playwrights in general (Evans). In many ways the banning of these plays in the Tucson schools became an extension of the erasure that Latinas face in season calendars and production budgets in theatres across the nation. [End Page 37] With this in mind, this essay aims to explore the ways in which HB 2281 further marginalized Latina/o theatrical texts in the US educational landscape. In the first part I will briefly outline the history and debate surrounding the legislation, focusing on the methods used to target Latina/o theory, pedagogy, and cultural production. The remainder of the essay discusses two banned texts from the Puro Teatro anthology as case studies by which to teach and understand the events: Silviana Wood's And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him? (2000), and Elaine Romero's The Fat-Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen (1995). Although both plays predate the events of HB 2281, they speak to a history of racist pedagogy and acts...