Teatro Festival: The Latino Festival Theatre

Abstract

SOUTH BRONX, NEW YORK, July I990 Walking along Brook Avenue in the South Bronx brings to mind the lively lyrics and rhythms of Willie Colon's salsa compositions. On a bodega corner a group of old men discuss topics from pensions to baseball, while across the street a young man who looks like the mythical Pedro Navaja (the barrio version of Mack the Knife, immortalized in one of Willie Colon's songs), walks by with commuters on their way home from work. Salsa has flourished in New York as well as in America during the last couple of decades as an expression of a particular urban reality. It speaks of people who emigrated to big cities (New York, Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires) looking for better opportunities, and of their experiences there. In the midst of this South Bronx community, set off the street on a quiet hill, is an old stone church, St. Ann's, whose parish hall is home to the Pregones Theatre. During July I990, this Church and community center was the site of the i5th International Festival of Chicano-Latino Theatres.1 Hosted by the South Bronx Puerto Rican theatre group, Pregones, in collaboration with TENAZ (Teatros Nacionales del Aztlan, the oldest Chicago company in the U.S., founded in I970) and occurring for the first time in the Northeast, Teatro Festival confirmed for Latino communities the efficacy of theatrical activity as a channel to express a highly charged social and political agenda. Troupes came from Texas, California, Colorado, New York, Puerto Rico, and Mexico to participate. we don't want to exclude anybody, we make a theatre link with a very specific context, says Alvan Colon, member of Pregones. But the context is not so clear-cut. Coming mainly from impoverished and/or politically troubled American countries, the members of this community have had to face severe problems in the U.S., among them culture shock; loss of national, cultural, and linguistic identity; poverty; and drugs. The task of shaping a Latin-U. S. theatre and audience is not an easy one, and even terms such as Latin or Hispanic raise questions. Although Colon expressed that We don't come here [to the U.S.] to dissolve ourselves and emerge as something new, it is necessary to acknowledge that the cultural identity of the youngest Latin-U.S. generation (those who were born here or immigrated at an early age) is the result of the encounter, generally traumatic, between cultures. While this generation doesn't fit the Anglo-American stereotype, its cultural products reveal a uniqueness that is no longer the same as for those produced on the continent. The theatre presented at St. Ann's Church reflected fundamentally different themes and aesthetic concerns from theatre produced in the main capitals of America.