Performance Artist Maria Elena Gaitan: Mapping a Continent without Borders (Epics of Gente Atravesada, Traviesa, y Entremetida)

Abstract

A survey of Chicana/o theater topography from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first centuries—from the Chicana/o civil rights movement to the present—reveals three major performance strands. The first is the 1950s and 1960s working-class itinerant tent-shows (carpas ) and then dozens of movimiento (civil rights movement) collectives, virtually all of them now defunct. Performance collectives featured low-budget and highly-mobile oral creations conceived through the collective improvisational process, stored in the memory through oral tradition, and performed anywhere possible: the streets, the fields, classrooms, or stages. These highly-topical creations ranged from the usually male-centered one-act actos (skits) to the full-length epics, such as Teatro Campesino's Gran Carpa de la Familia Rasquachi. 1 A second strand is the mostly post-movimiento, individually-authored dramatized literary works characteristic of Chicanas/os "breaking into print." 2 These individually- authored works mark the move from an alternative theatrical movement into the establishment mainstream of proscenium theater, ranging from small theaters to the high-tech, monied performance venues. Examples range from Cherríe Moraga's plays from as early as the 1980s, such as her Giving Up the Ghost (1984), to Teatro Campesino/Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1978-1979), and the Latino Theater Group's August29 (1990). 3 A third distinguishable strand is the more contemporary proliferation of one-woman (or one-man) performance pieces presented anywhere possible, some existing earlier in the Raza (Chicana/o) movement of the 1980s. These early solo performances include the relatively rare one-woman, multi-voiced poetry performances, such as Carmen Tafolla's Los Courts and Denise Chávez's Novena Narrativa. 4