“Waking Justice”: An @cto on Education

Abstract

“Waking Justice”: An @cto on Education Daniel Morales Morales (bio) “Waking Justice” is inspired by the work of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino as well as Augusto Boal work around Theatre of the Oppressed. Actos that are part of El Teatro Campesino, like the ones in Valdez’s Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (1990), are not only art but social activism, and a key tool to challenge the status quo and advocate for change. According to Valdez (1971), the acto has five goals: “inspire the audience to social action, illuminate specific points about social problems, satirize the opposition, show or hint at a solution, and express what people are thinking” (6). This @cto was created during a series of workshops with middle and high schoolers who were part of an after-school theater class that collaborated with undergraduates, a graduate student, and a faculty member in creating and performing art. I refer to this piece as an @cto instead of an acto since its multiple versions were created online after receiving feedback from the students who authored part of the script and those who performed the @ cto on stage. This collective aspect helped the intergenerational artists of this @cto create work that included multiple experiences in educational spaces. The Latinx Theatre Project The Latinx Theatre Project was a collaborative theater experience that brought together undergraduates in the Spanish and Portuguese Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and students involved in the First Generation Youth Program in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Dr. Kristie Soares, the instructor for the class, created a collaboration in the Fall of 2017 to immerse the undergraduates and the young performers in Latinx art pedagogies, divided into three units: Theatre of the Oppressed, the Nuyorican Poetry Movement, and El Teatro Campesino. The first third of the semester was spent mostly building community among the undergraduates and understanding the sociohistorical context of the Latinx community in western Massachusetts. During the second third of the semester, we started to collaborate with the young performers from First Generation. In the last third of the semester, we worked together with the youth as an ensemble to create and stage [End Page 232] performance pieces in the style of the Latinx art pedagogies that were centered in the partnership. For the whole semester, we not only trained to facilitate Latinx theater exercises as part of our social justice practice but also learned and practiced concrete skills in theater arts, such as writing, performing, and set design. For our final performance at Teatro Vida, in Springfield, we shared with the audience our Nuyorican-style spoken word collage, a rhythm poem combining Nuyorican poetry and Theatre of the Oppressed, a video of our creative process, and “Waking Justice,” our @cto written in the style of El Teatro Campesino. The first element used in our process of creation was Theatre of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal’s work offered us an embodiment of Freirean concepts that can be deployed in the classroom in a novel, engaging, and empowering way. Central to Boal’s ideas is what he terms a “spect-actor” (2002, 243), which means there is not a distinction between actors and spectators; we all have the ability to observe critically and act upon our analysis. As a result, the spectator becomes “spect-actor”—an element of the theatrical performance that both views and actively participates in and co-constructs the course of events, its actions, and outcomes. Boal’s concept of a spectactor is very closely related to Paulo Freire’s concept of “praxis”—the unification of theory and practice and “generative terms”—topics that participants generate which are used as centerpieces of student-centered curriculum (Freire 1970). Rather than talking about the issues affecting Latinx students in schools, the spectactors interacted and manipulated dramatized representations of codified generative themes. In the case of “Waking Justice,” the characters illuminated the disproportionate punishment of students of color in schools, the lack of caring from a predominantly white teacher population, and the focus on a Eurocentric curriculum and standardized testing. The solutions are for the audience to decide, but there is a clear indication for teachers to learn from students, to listen to them...