Thinking East and West in Nuestra América: Retracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba

Abstract

Thinking East and West in Nuestra AméricaRetracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba Eric Mayer-García (bio) The photographs in self-described Chicana cultural worker Ana Olivarez-Levinson’s private collection provide new visual documentation of the transnational exchange that propelled Nuevo Teatro, a theatre movement during the 1970s and 1980s that sought to create a distinct Latin American expression in defiance of Eurocentric cultural hierarchies and the hemispheric domination of the United States.1 Her photographs (a selection of which appear in the Mayer-García and Olivarez-Levinson photo essay in this volume) document important meetings, workshops, and performances as well as the lives of the artists happening around those events. For instance, several photos in her collection show a cookout in a park when Chicanx collective Teatro de la Esperanza hosted Cuban collective Grupo Teatro Escambray in Santa Barbara in 1982.2 Taking a break from the hectic tour schedule gave Chicanx cultural workers and Cuban teatristas (theatre artists) the space to build relationships. Photos show the artists on picnic tables overlooking a bluff. They enjoy a meal together, listen carefully to the conversation, and play music on a guitar. One photo shows an artist stretched out on a reclining folding chair not far from a portable radio sitting on one of the tables. In a large group photo, about twenty cultural workers and teatristas gather around another dozen laying and sitting on blankets in the grass. Some people look up and smile toward the camera (see the Olivarez-Levinson and Mayer-García photo essay).3 Others break from their poses and turn in toward each other, laughing, smiling, and reflecting. The larger circle is made up of smaller orbits of [End Page 140] intimacy, friendship, and familia. The image captures a microcosm of the Nuevo Teatro movement and the transnational bonds upon which it was built.4 In this regard, the cookout was just as important to the movement as performances or formal workshops. The personal collection and the personal touch of moments like the cook-out point up the ways that affect both organizes and preserves knowledge often disregarded in the institutional collection. One important case in point is Olivarez-Levinson’s records of the East and West Coast Teatro Brigade, a three-week visit to Cuba by thirty Latinx theatre artists in August 1981.5 The East and West Coast Teatro Brigade is exemplary of the transcontinental interchange happening between Puerto Rican, Chicanx, and other US-based Latinx artists via Latin American theatre.6 In this regard, the Teatro Brigade is important because it adds to our understanding of the ongoing emergence of a coordinated, panethnic Latinx theatre in the United States during this period, which, as “East and West Coast” suggests, mobilized a west-east sense of the hemispheric that contrasts with the more ubiquitous orientation of south-north. Because her experience as a participant in this cultural exchange meant so much to Olivarez-Levinson and her development as a cultural worker, she kept detailed records of the event. As a testament to the importance of personal collections made by artists, we might not have records of the Teatro Brigade without Olivarez-Levinson’s careful archiving.7 In this essay, I analyze the fragmented archives of two US-based collectives that were active in promoting exchange among Nuevo Teatro artists: Teatro 4 (Teatro Cuatro), which was founded in 1974 to address the social and economic injustice facing Latinxs and African Americans living in the area surrounding Fourth Street between Avenues A and B in the Lower East Side, and Teatro de la Esperanza, which formed at UC Santa Barbara in 1971, made theatre by, about, for, near, and with Chicanx communities throughout California, and eventually relocated to San Francisco in the 1980s.8 I concentrate on these groups’ ongoing exchange with Nuevo Teatro artists in revolutionary Cuba during the 1980s. Particularly, I focus on materials in the personal collection of Olivarez-Levinson, a former member of Teatro de la Esperanza who completed her formal theatre training in Cuba as a result of Esperanza’s ties to Grupo Teatro Escambray.9 The Cuban Ministry of Culture...