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El Teatro Campesino presents "Popol Vuh"

Three World-Premiere - Plays Adapted from Mayan Creation Stories



Centuries in the making, the summer's most exciting epic is not available in cinemas and must be experienced live.

El Teatro Campesino presents a unique live theater experience with an original three-part adaptation of "Popol Vuh," the sacred creation book of the Quiche Maya. This cycle of three World-Premiere plays bring to life the major narrative portions of the Mayan text in colorful spectacles of pageantry, puppets, original music, and costumed characters-staged with the style, humor, and flair that El Teatro Campesino has become known for worldwide in its 46-year history of inspiring social action and cultivating cultural celebration.

The first two shows in the cycle will be presented in July and August as FREE family-friendly shows outdoors in historic San Juan Bautista. The third part will be presented in September as a ticketed performance in the in the ETC Playhouse. Adventurous theatergoers can experience the entire three-part "Popol Vuh" cycle daily in back to back presentations over the course of Labor Day Week-end on September 3rd, 4th, and 5th.

The first part of the Popol Vuh cycle will be "Heart of Heaven." This tale of the creation of the world comes to life with large-scale puppetry, captivating masks, colorful pageantry, and dance as the Creator Gods make their attempts to create a being who will worship and revere them. The animals can't speak, the mud people can't walk, and the wood people have no hearts. The Creators must race the impending first dawn to find the right formula for humanity. "Heart of Heaven" will be performed trilingually in Spanish, English, and Quiche-the ancient Mayan language that embodies the oral tradition that has kept this story alive for centuries."Heart of Heaven" is a family-friendly show and will and be performed for free at the San Juan Soccer Field at 100 Nyland Drive in San Juan Bautista on July 23, 24, 30, 31 at 4pm, and Labor Day week-end, September 3, 4, 5 at 12pm.

Next up, ETC will present the second part of the "Popol Vuh" in a new production of "The Story of Seven Macaw." In the days between this world and the last, the arrogant Seven Macaw adorns himself with glimmering jewels and jade and claims to be a golden god and the light of the sun itself. His worshippers believe him too-until the creators of the world send the clever Hero Twins to humble Seven Macaw and show people the true way of reverence. "The Story of Seven Macaw" features lively original music, stunning costumes and scenery, humor, dance and a simple message that all can take to heart. Appropriate for all ages, "The Story of Seven Macaw" will be performed for free at the San Juan Soccer Field at 100 Nyland Drive in San Juan Bautista on Aug. 6, 7, 13, 14, at 4pm and Labor Day week-end, September 3, 4, 5 at 4pm.

In late summer, El Teatro Campesino presents the third and final installment of the "Popol Vuh" cycle with "The Magic Twins "which will be performed indoors at the ETC Playhouse. Set in contemporary times, darker and more provocative than the first two stories of the "Popol Vuh," "The Magic Twins" follows the tale of modern twin brothers, One Hun and Ix Swift as they journey into their subconscious and travel into a parallel ancestral Mayan existence. There, the twins must confront themselves and enter the underworld of Xibalba, where the dark lords of the realm oblige them to play a metaphorical ball game, with which they gain personal retribution and redemption. This contemporary adaptation of the Quiche Mayan myth will challenge and immerse audiences into a sensory, hybrid theatrical experience through the use of innovative puppetry, stirring soundscapes, and mesmerizing lighting by a team of award winning designers.

Note: "The Magic Twins" will not be suitable for children."The Magic Twins" will run as a ticketed performance at the ETC Playhouse at 705 Fourth Street in San Juan Bautista from Sept. 1 through the 5 at 8pm for labor Day week-end, and continuing September 8th through September 25th with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays 2pm. Ticket prices for "The Magic Twins" range from $12-20. Tickets are available online at www.elteatrocampesino.com or by calling the ETC Box Office (831)623-2444.

A team of talented and vibrant writers, performers, designers, puppeteers, choreographers and musicians are hard at work crafting what promises to be a spectacle of cosmic proportions. ETC's core creative and performing teams will be joined by a series of guest artists who specialize in puppet-making, costume, sound, and scenic design for an unprecedented and amazing theatrical treat that is not to be missed.

San Juan Bautista, the "City of History" and home of El Teatro Campesino for forty years, is the perfect place to experience this cosmic pageant. The picturesque village has a colorful history all its' own-as Native American settlement, Mission-town, old west stagecoach stop, and climactic setting of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1959 suspense film "Vertigo." Today, visitors can come and soak in all the vestiges of the town's history by strolling the streets, shopping for antiques and treasures, and enjoying a meal at one of the town's excellent restaurants, providing a perfect opportunity to "come for the play and stay for the day."

Don't worry about 2012-El Teatro Campesino's adaptation of "Popol Vuh" invites you to instead celebrate the Mayan vision of the beginning of the world.

The development of "Popol Vuh" is made possible by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.

More information is available at www.elteatrocampesino.com
High resolution photos and video trailers, are available at http://www.elteatrocampesino.com/News/sevenmacaw.html

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LATINOPIA.COM: New Latino Website Premiers

[Click header to go to website. Click photo to enlarge.]

Music, recipes, poetry, art, cinema, theater and history make up the rich cornucopia of Latino culture showcased on www.Latinopia.com a new website set for launch March 19, 2011.

The brainchild of veteran Los Angeles television director and documentary filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño, the video-driven website is designed as a one-stop web destination for all things Latino.

“As U.S. Latinos enter the digital age, we need a website that can offer videos about all aspects of our history culture and life,” explains Jesús Treviño, whose television credits include programs like Law and Order-Criminal Intent, The Unit, Criminal Minds and Resurrection Blvd and who shot and edited much of the video footage on Latinopia.com.

“We’re starting with five-minute videos in seven subject areas--interviews, music performances, short films, theater plays and authors reading from their works,” Trevino explains. “We are excited that top Latino writers, artists and musicians from around the U.S. have seen the value of Latinopia.com and are enthusiastically sharing their time, stories and creativity.

A click on Latinopia’s Art section will take the visitor to video profiles of Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American artists, painters and muralists such as Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, Ester Hernández, Frank Romero, Yolanda López, César Martínez, Rupert García, José Montoya, Gronk, Judy Baca, Carmen Lomas Garza, Zarco Guerrero as well as print interviews and special features.

The Literature section features a timeline on the emergence of Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American literature in the United States in addition to listings of Latino books. Video interviews include such important Latino writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Pat Mora, Dagoberto Gilb, Judith Ortíz Cofer, Alberto Rios, Denise Chavez and Luis J. Rodríguez. Dramatic re-enactments and additional footage bring their works to life.

The website’s Theater section includes video interviews with Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American playwrights, actors and stage directors and groups like Culture Clash as well as excerpts from plays written performed and directed by Latinos in New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco; among them Crystal City 1969, Gaytino, Regeneración, and The Silver Dollar.

Interviews with leading Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians are an attraction in the Music section: Los Lobos, Little Joe and La Familia, Flaco Jimenez all discuss their art. There are also performances by such groups as Mitote, Los Pochos, La Santa Cecilia, Olmeca.

In Cinema and Television many of the nation’s leading Latino actresses and actors discuss their work and making their way in Hollywood: Hector Elizondo, Lupe Ontiveros, Jimmy Smits, Edward James Olmos, America Ferrera, Evelina Fernandez and are among those to be featured. Behind the camera talent will also be featured such as writer/producer Dennis Leoni (Resurrection Blvd), Director of Photography Rey Villalobos (Nine to Five, Urban Cowboy) and Director Leon Ichaso (El Cantante).

A visit to the History page will reveal videos of important historical events in Chicano and Latino life along with event timelines, biographies and documents. It includes profiles of important Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American leaders and historical figures such as Jose Marti, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

Latinopia Food offers Latinopia’s recommendations on the best places in major cities in the United States to eat Mexican and Latino food along with “how-to” videos on making great Mexican food--enchiladas, guacamole, Spanish rice, salsa-- as well as Puerto Rican and Cuban American cuisine.

“We are launching modestly with a few dozen videos,“ Jesús Treviño explains, “but we add new videos each week and will grow the site into more than hundred videos by the end of the first year. Seeing is believing. Check us out at www.Latinopia.com ”

“Once we establish an audience of regular visitors, we plan to expand beyond short videos into original webisodes and longer form dramas geared to the Latino public. The potential is as rich and limitless as is the life and culture of America’s 47 million Latinos.”

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Students Learn Chicano History By Writing Plays

Theater arts program reaches 10-year anniversary; comes full circle to where the program first began.

By Gloria Angelina Castillo, EGP Staff Writer

Eighteen year-old Diana Ortega wasn’t even born when high school students spilled out into the streets of East Los Angeles to demand quality education at the height of the Chicano Movement and the history-making 1968 “Walk Outs.”

But last week she was one of several local high school students who took to the stage for the reading of three short plays focused on the lives of three of the movements’ activists.

Professional actors interpreted the majority of the play’s roles, but students also performed and told the audience about their experiences in the program. EGP photo by Valerie Mia Juarez

Students at Monterey High School, a continuation school in East Los Angeles, wrote the plays during a semester-long playwriting class. Seven students, handpicked by their principal, wrote “2011 Meets 1968,” a series of one-act plays based on interviews with participants in the 1968 Walk Outs. For many of them, the experience was eye-opening if not cathartic.

“I didn’t think I was going to get anything out of this. I though it would be like talking to old people about things I didn’t care about, but the truth is I don’t want this to end,” Ortega told the audience at Plaza de la Raza’s Margo Albert Theater on March 3.

The young playwrights were assigned to interview journalist Luis Torres, artist Ofelia Esparza and educator Paula Crisostomo —three individuals whose lives were transformed as they fought discrimination and for parity in education for East Los Angeles students.

The “Through the Ages” class is a dialogue between different generations but it is also a literacy program. “The goal is to make them better readers, writers, communicators and collaborators, while engaging them in their own history,” Theresa Chavez, artistic director of “About Productions” told EGP. The “Through The Ages” class is part of About Productions’ Young Theaterworks program.

Chavez notes that the program has only been executed at continuation high schools where the students are struggling in some fashion. The schools’ schedule lends itself perfectly to the program while helping students who need it the most, and have little access to art.

“It engages them, keeps them in school, it increases their reenrollment, the days they are in school. And because it’s their storytelling… They feel connected to it, they feel engaged, and committed to it,” she said. “It’s a transformation in terms of their own academic work but also in terms of their voicing, both literally and figuratively.”

Eneida Ortega, 16, agrees that the class takes commitment. She said students had to meet writing deadlines “so that our mentors could check it and revise it.”

Nineteen-year-old Oscar Lechuga said students did not want to miss the class because “we only get to see each other twice a week for four hours,” and missing meant they were letting down their team.

“2011 Meets 1968” was inspired by their previous play, “By the Hand of the Father,” which explored the writers’ personal histories, according Chavez.

“We asked the students to go back to their own families or whoever they might be who could tell them where they came from, what their history might be, how they came to the states or how they specifically got to L.A.,” Chavez told EGP.

The theater company’s next project “Evangeline, The Queen of Make-Believe,” also relates to “2011 Meets 1968.”

“Each [high school] session is slightly different, it just depends partially on what we are working on professionally because we like to make a bridge between what we are doing content wise and what they are going to explore. So that when they come to the theater to see our work that we are doing, there’s even a deeper connection and we can engage them in that work as well,” Chavez said.

Students said that writing about the activists really affected them.

“Ofelia [Esparza] has inspired me to never give up and be proud of who I am because that’s what is important in life,” sixteen-year-old Melissa Sanchez told the audience.

The short play “About…Ofelia Esparza” recounts the artist’s experience with discrimination in the years leading up to the walk outs, which she participated in with her children.

“I’m 77 and I have had a good life. At times it has been hard being a Chicana. Some times you have to speak out and you have to stand your ground to be who you are,” the students wrote.

Click on this photo to view the videos.

Sanchez, Lechuga and Ortega wrote “About..Paula Crisostomo,” an honor student who helped organize the 1968 Walk Outs.

“What are you worried about Paula? The only pi you should be worried about is the pie you’re going to cook…You’re not going to graduate, you’ll be pregnant by summer,” the students wrote that Crisostomo’s geometry teacher told her.

“I expected to have a boring conversation I didn’t expect her story to be so interesting, she had many challenges that shows how much of a strong person she is,” Sanchez said.

“The truth is she is one of my role models because she really helped la Raza and just looking into her eyes I could tell that she has experienced what I have in my life,” added Lechuga.

It was a new experience for the students to have their work displayed publicly.

“We do our assignment and no one ever notices us except the teacher,” Ortega told EGP. “It’s a great experience to go through something I would never have courage to do on our own.”

Virginia Garcia, 16, described the entire experience as simply “inspiring.”

Learning about the past is empowering because “that’s the only way to know where to go from there,” Esparza said, noting that it was a little strange to see her character portrayed.

“Where we are today is great, but there’s more to do” she said, noting that many of the original walk out participants went on to become doctors and lawyers, and “they’re the main part of change.”

The “desprecio” (disdain) and discrimination of Mexican-American and Latinos continues to happen but “…you need to be strong to know what your history and respect your own background, not be ashamed,” Esparza said.

Journalist Luis Torres, a writer for his school newspaper at the time of the walk outs said the 1960s was an exciting but turbulent time for his generation.

“It was very moving for me to see these students translate those experiences into a different context for a contemporary audience. I enjoyed talking to them; enjoyed meeting them… appreciated the spark in their eyes,” Torres told EGP.

The students confessed that they didn’t know anything about the walk outs before they began the class—they hadn’t even watched the 2006 film Walkout, directed by Edward James Olmos. Their own parents are immigrants, so they did not have first-hand experience with the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles. However, some of them did have experience protesting in pro-immigration reform marches in recent years and say the “Through the Ages” program has helped them feel more confident and capable.

While the program had its first run at Monterey in 2001, the program travels to different schools, said Rose Portillo, program director of “Through the Ages” Young Theaterworks.

“2011 Meets 1968” was written by Eneida Ortega, Benjamin Villareal, Virginia Garcia, Jorge Leal, Oscar Lechuga, Diana Ortega, and Michelle Sanchez; under the guidance of mentors Marco Rodriguez, Tomás Benítez and Daniel Chacón; the scripts were performed by Marissa Herrera, Xavi Moreno, Roberto Alcaraz, Laurel Ollestein, Daniel Chacón, Tomás Benítez and Rose Portillo.

Through the Ages” is a non-profit program that is currently funded by the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. ‘About…Productions’ is supported in part by the California Community Foundation, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Commission, The Pasadena Cultural Affairs Department, and private donations.

Valerie Mia Juarez contributed to this story.

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Culture Clash is proposed to help spur an LA theater's revival

[Click image to enlarge. Photo by Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times]

The LA Times is reporting that Community Redevelopment Agency of the city of Los Angeles is undertaking an initiative to revamp the Westlake Theatre. The Agency plans to make the space into a performance and multimedia center, with facilities for stage and music performances, film, and community and social events. In addition, the Latino performance ensemble, Culture Clash, is set to become the resident theatre company of the space.

"They're very popular; they attract a big audience," said CRA Administrator Leslie Lambert speaking to the LA Times. "Ethnically, they fit perfectly with that community. They're very much in touch with that community. [And] they'll bring in audiences from elsewhere."

A historic MacArthur Park theater could become the permanent new home of the performance trio Culture Clash under an ambitious city plan to bring more cultural amenities to the heavily Latino urban neighborhood.

Under a proposal spearheaded by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the city of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the Westlake Theatre, which was built in 1926 and currently is used for a swap meet, would be converted into a multi-use entertainment space for live theater, film screenings, musical performances and community and social events. The project also would include the creation of 49 units of affordable housing and a 300-space parking garage.

According to CRA officials, the Music Box@Fonda, which runs the Music Box theater in Hollywood, would operate and program the revamped Westlake Theatre, and Culture Clash, the popular and respected Latino performance ensemble that is marking its 25th anniversary this year, would become the facility's resident theater company. In addition to performing at the theater for a minimum of 30 days per year, Culture Clash would provide youth-oriented programming and instruction in writing and acting, said Leslie Lambert, the CRA's administrator for its Hollywood and Central region.

Richard Montoya of Culture Clash, who with colleagues Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas has operated as a gypsy ensemble since the group moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, praised the Westlake Theatre as "a grand old faded lady" and said the trio was excited about finally acquiring a "bricks and mortar" home of its own.

"Thank God there's angels in bureaucracy -- there are -- that have said, 'You guys deserve a home,' " Montoya said in a recent interview. "We're, like, two Salvadorans, one Chicano, there's a need in the area."

However, he emphasized, MacArthur Park is "not an area devoid of culture. No, it's a very, actually, sophisticated place."

Indeed, the new facility is intended to enhance the revitalization of one of the city's most culturally rich neighborhoods, following a long period in which soaring crime rates and economic decline marred the area's image. The 633-acre Westlake Recovery Redevelopment Project Area was conceived in 1999 with the aims of stimulating economic development, rehabilitating existing housing and businesses, creating new housing, and improving public infrastructure and services. Other neighborhood projects include buffing up building facades.

Last week, the CRA's board of commissioners voted to begin negotiations with the project's developers, Millennium Partners, which will have up to 15 months to produce a formal plan to convert the 18,000-square-foot structure and the 1.2-acre site, which is bounded by Wilshire Boulevard, 6th and Alvarado streets and Westlake Avenue.

Plans call for the facility's ground floor to be used for retail; and there has been discussion of adding a central courtyard and a rooftop restaurant. The city will help the swap meet vendors operating in the building to find new quarters.

Lambert estimated that the total cost of the project would be between $20 million and $25 million. She said it is likely that a not-for-profit entity would be formed to assume ownership of the building or else lease it from CRA, which purchased the structure in 2008.

The project would be funded by "largely if not entirely public money," she said, and historic tax credits could be applied, given the building's landmark stature.

Millennium -- which, Lambert said, was chosen as the project's overall developer after a lengthy process of competitive application and soliciting community input -- has developed mixed-use properties, including apartment complexes, hotels and office space.

Neither Music Box nor Millennium representatives could be reached for comment.

Lambert said the theater's old proscenium stage will have to be rebuilt, and retractable seats will be installed. Reduced ticket prices for Culture Clash performances will be offered to area residents, she added.

Montoya said that having a permanent space would enable Culture Clash to extend its creative endeavors and share its resources and knowledge with emerging artists.

"At least turn the keys over to some young people and say, 'We're done, we're just over here if you need us, but here's the keys to the asylum.' "

reed.johnson@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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Queering the Movimiento

Gregg Barrios's Theater of the Repressed, Recovered, and Revolutionized
BY B.V. OLGUÍN

San Antonio Current

Photo by Justin Parr

When bleached-blond Danny De La Paz rollerbladed onto a minimalist stage at Our Lady of the Lake University on August 13, 2005, wearing a glass tiara, a muscle T-shirt, and tight, bulging shorts while Brian Adams’ campy anthem “Heaven” played in the background, you knew this wasn’t gonna be just another Chicano gangbanger story.

The actor who debuted as the ill-fated cholo Chuco in the classic gang saga Boulevard Nights, and later played a fratricidal Mexican Mafia assassin in American Me, is all grown up and out of the closet in Gregg Barrios’s play I-DJ Mofomixmaster.

De La Paz opened the one-night stand with an adaptation from Hamlet:

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

With a perfectly delivered comic pause and femme aside, he deadpans: “Weren’t you expecting Shakesqueer?”

This seemingly dissonant appropriation of the Bard’s classic work of existential angst to explore the 1970s Los Angeles dance-club scene enables a provocative queering of Chicano identity and even British literary history.

“After all, Hamlet is a play within a play,” De La Paz’s character reminds us. “How queer is that?!”

Barrios’s Shakespeare gloss provided an unexpectedly good staging device for a drama about an aging DJ who recalls how his search for validation as a Chicano on West Coast airways coincided with his coming out. The storyline is simple yet profound: A young gay Chicano wants to proclaim his existence by joining the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and ’70s — el Movimiento — but his fellow Chicano activists respond by paraphrasing Eldridge Cleaver’s outrageous party line, that the only position for a woman or a fag in our movement is the lateral position.

The play documents a burgeoning love between the DJ and his neophyte (played by South San Antonio high-school student Jimmy Villa), who resist the binary logic of the axiom that to be Queer means not to be Chicano. After the romance is broken up by a different type of gangbanging — a viscerally disturbing rape scene — the play’s action unravels into a dark yet illuminating exploration of Chicano ontology. I-DJ is nothing less than a Chicano re-staging of Plato’s Symposium: The mascara-wearing Chicano DJ played by De La Paz does a lip-sync of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” while offering metaphysical meditations on the intersections of love, art, Chicano identity, and the ecstatic nature of true knowledge.

This theatrical dialogue with the highly masculine culture of the barrios of the Southwest, and the multiple communities within and beyond — whites, queers of all races, Chicano nationalists — is Gregg Barrios’s signature style in an oeuvre that spans six decades, five genres, and thousands of literary publications and journalism bylines. Barrios has made an art out of creating unlikely fusions and uncovering unexpected influences, collaborations, and liaisons.

Yet the adage that a genius is always unappreciated in his own backyard seems to hold true for Barrios. While I-DJ was published in 2007 in the 15th-anniversary double issue of the venerable Ollantay theater magazine, an expanded re-staging of this play still has not found a home despite the playwright’s success at attracting a Hollywood actor to play the lead role.

Until recently, the same was true of Barrios’s other theatrical works, even as his poetry received early recognition with the 1982 publication of his first collection, Puro Rollo. Prior to his recent hit play, Rancho Pancho (reviewed in the Current’s September 10-16, 2008 issue), Barrios had resigned himself to interstitial anonymity.

“I guess it must be my message,” he said in a recent interview. “Because it doesn’t fit neatly into any pre-established categories, few people want to stage my work. It’s too Chicano for the white venues, not Chicano enough for the Chicano venues, too queer for straight ones, not queer enough for the queer spaces, and just too much of this and not enough of that for everyone else.”

He may be right. Barrios’s work lies at the intersection of so many traditions, political perspectives, and identities it is hard to position it squarely within any single one. Yet Barrios isn’t exactly correct when he complains about a “brownout” and “closeting of Chicano theater” in San Antonio; he has produced two other plays locally, one of which was developed in a short-lived collaboration with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Gateway Grant. But one thing is certain: You either love Barrios’s work for its eclectic cultural fusions and unexpected storylines, or you hate it precisely because of these features.

It's all a matter of perspective

Gregg Barrios was born in Victoria, Texas, on Halloween 1945, and his first contact with the arts was at home. His father, Gregorio Barrios Sr., was a photographer and film projectionist in Victoria in the 1950s and ’60s. His photography recently was published in a father-and-son pairing in Dagobert Gilb’s bilingual multimedia text, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature.

Barrios recalls how his father taught him about the most important element in all literary and visual arts: perspective.

“My father’s studio was next to the downtown bus station, which naturally attracted sojourners from the lower strata of society because it is the most economical way to travel,” he said. “There were bums, prostitutes, hustlers, quick-change artists, pachucos and street toughs, unemployed workers, and just ordinary working-class folks of all races trying to get from one place to another in their daily grind of survival.”

Barrios recalls how “[I] peeked into my father’s dark room once and found photos he had developed of naked men and women ... My father had become something of a fixer, as people would come to him for help with all sorts of problems and activities, legal and not-so-legal. I saw it all from my own little perch in the corner. This was my introduction to the world, from the margins and the bottom up.”

This early exposure to society’s outcasts lead to a lifelong quest for communion with the masses, but Barrios claims his poetry, theater, and journalism have always avoided a condescending or exoticist view. Rather, he seeks to understand and accurately represent his subjects as their ally, as one “who shares similar pains as well as broader joie de vivre.”

It’s also telling that Barrios’s first book review, written when he was a 16-year-old high-school student, was of The Gay Place, Billy Lee Brammer’s thinly veiled roman à clef of Lyndon Johnson’s reign in Pink Dome. His selection is revealing for his innocent belief that as a Chicano in early ’60s South Texas he could pontificate on any topic or author of his choosing. Apparently, no one ever got around to telling Barrios that he could not claim a place in the center and the margins simultaneously, so he just did it.

Having witnessed the fate of the masses excluded from educational opportunities by the cruelly efficient calculations of a capitalist economy, Barrios took a gamble on the Air Force so he could use the G.I. Bill to fund his education. Even though the word “Vietnam” was becoming commonplace, he enlisted in 1962 and for three years served as a combat medic in the 859th Medical Group. Luckily for Barrios, he was stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin — with occasional temporary-duty assignments to pick up severely wounded soldiers from hospitals in Germany. This allowed him to attend class at the University of Texas at Austin as a part-time student.

During his time in Austin, Barrios was involved in the underground newspaper The Rag, infamous for its irreverent political commentary and cultural critiques. He also co-founded the Cinema 40 Film Club, for which he is recognized in Esquire magazine film critic Dwight Macdonald’s 1969 memoir, On Movies:

“While I was in Texas I caught up on my movies, avant-garde and rear-guard ... I was able to see for the first time some films by Warhol and Anger, both programs being put on by Cinema 40, a film club operated with great enterprise by a senior named Gregory Barrios.”

Like most film buffs of the era, Barrios eventually made a pilgrimage to Andy Warhol’s notorious Manhattan Factory. Under Warhol’s tutelage, in 1967 Barrios made his own experimental film, titled BONY (Boys of New York). Shot in both black-and-white and color with a 16-millimeter Roloflex Camera, Barrios’s film captures a day in the life of the Warhol “superstars” — the poet Gerard Melanga and Rene Ricard (the poet and art critic who “discovered” Jean Michel Basquiat) — during which they meet Leonard Cohen and Vogue model Ivy Nicholson.

BONY is archived at UCLA and is included on Chon Noriega’s list of 100 Best Chicano Films. Barrios has since shown his films in San Antonio and elsewhere, paired with an excerpt of Warhol’s epic 25-hour, four-channel projection **** (Four Stars), which Warhol gave Barrios with the express challenge to put it to new use by showing it in different settings. Gemini Ink hosted one of these collaborative screenings in 2003.

Barrios eventually earned a degree in English and accepted his first teaching job in Crystal City in 1970, where his art found new purpose: el Movimiento!

¡Dale gas, carnal!

Like its contemporary, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Chicano Movement art took a combative tone predicated on opposition to racist white capitalist American society. Barrios took his characteristic interstitial approach, positioning himself within the Movimiento and the effort to complicate models of culture and identity that would later come to fruition in works by Chicana Renaissance writers in the 1980s such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga.

He even anticipated the post-Movimiento hybrid poetics that filmmakers, writers, and critics as diverse as Jimmy Mendiola, Marisela Norte, and Alfred Arteaga have shown to be a hallmark of the New Latino Aesthetic. Georges Bizet’s classic 19th-century opera Carmen was transformed in Barrios’s 1975 rendition, which he conspicuously titled, Carmen: A Chicano Rock Opera. It was co-directed by Ruth Zarate and performed by his Crystal City High School student cast.

Barrios even anticipated John Sayles’ 1984 The Brother From Another Planet with his own 1976 sci-fi play, Stranger in a Strange Land. His 1977 reprise of Andrew Webber’s Evita, which includes a post-mortem cameo by Che Guevara, an icon of the Chicano Movement, was also recast as a Chicano rock opera. The production was covered by the San Antonio Express in a May 24, 1977, feature by Ben King Jr., who quotes the young Barrios:

“We are trying to show there’s more in Crystal City than the politics. We’re trying to reinforce our culture ... Our goal is to show the Chicano has the ability to express himself in several ways, besides politics.”

Barrios was responding to national and international attention to the grueling grassroots battle by the Raza Unida Party against the oppressive local government. He was attempting to restore some sense of normalcy for his students in the aftermath of the famous student “blowouts” (as student boycotts of classes were known), while at the same time using culture as the site for consciousness-raising.

But in Cristal, as the city came to be known, politics infused everything, as was dramatically illustrated in another struggle: the infamous “gas crisis” of 1977. The “gas crisis” was directly related to the oil embargo of the 1970s, but specifically refers to the conflict between the Lo-Vaca Gathering Company (a private utility vendor) and the new, all-Chicano Crystal City Council. The Council, attempting to respond to its new mandate to represent its poor constituency, rejected the new higher price the company demanded for gas. The city insisted on a lower rate enshrined in its previous contract. With the support of a Texas Supreme Court ruling, the company eventually cut off all natural gas supplies to Crystal City for more than a decade.

Prior to the gas cut-off, Barrios and other educators and artists traveled the country to publicize the struggle and drum up support. Barrios spoke to the Coalition for Economic Survival in Los Angeles as a guest of liberal politico Tom Hayden, whose wife at the time — Jane Fonda — donated a shipment of solar panels to Crystal City to help the citizens survive the brutally cold winter of 1977. Barrios was invited as a non-member guest to address the Communist Party National Convention in Santa Monica, where he received a standing ovation after his speech about the popular revolt against monopoly capitalism. Angela Davis, then a prominent member of the CP, subsequently wrote a short preface to the 1977 published version of Barrios’s play about the struggle, Dale Gas Cristal!

In the spirit of the era, Barrios also staged a play about another outlaw — the infamous San Antonio gangster Fred Gomez Carrasco. To call the play “controversial” is an understatement. Drawing from Teatro Campesino’s agitprop theater form known as the Acto, the actors in ¡Carrasco! — the same Crystal City High School Students of his other plays — provocatively kidnap Governor Dolph Briscoe and Lady Bird Johnson in response to the allegation that the Texas Rangers executed Carrasco during his violent 1974 prison-break attempt.

Barrios continued his work as an educator, literary provocateur, and journalist after accepting a new teaching position in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1982 to 1999. He retired from teaching in 1999 and relocated to San Antonio, where he began a new teaching career, while continuing his journalism first with the San Antonio Express-News as the book editor, then as editorial-page editor for the Spanish-language Rumbo. He retired anew to focus on his own creative writing, but continues to be involved in journalism as a watchdog and regular contributor to the Current and other publications.

“Gregg is both a creative force in his own right — witness his body of dramatic work — and an observant journalist and critic interested in the work of others and the personalities and driving forces behind their work,” wrote Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News and Barrios’s former boss, via email. “He also lets us know when we fall short in our own coverage. We don’t always agree with him, but oftentimes he is right and we are better for it.”

With Barrios, you either love him or hate him. But you can’t deny his presence and provocations.

Coloring the canon

True to his simultaneous insider-outsider status, Barrios doesn’t respect zero-sum cultural propositions, but this doesn’t mean he won’t air dirty laundry. And Barrios is fond of chisme and a good off-color joke, especially if he can make a play out of it.

His provocatively titled Dark Horse/Pale Rider, which premiered at the San Pedro Playhouse Cellar Theater, immediately alludes to the theme of miscegenation. It focuses on Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter’s interest in, um, Mexican rural themes, as critics have called it. Barrios dug deeper in archives to find evidence of Porter’s predilection for mounting dark brown studs, then using them in her celebrated stories.

The play received mixed reviews, with some vocal Chicano educators asking why Barrios “wasted an opportunity” by writing about a white writer. “Don’t we already have enough of that shit?” quipped one educator who requested anonymity.

These critics miss the point, however: Barrios’s work uncovers the Chicano presence in the Eurocentric canon. He was much more successful at rendering this issue in Rancho Pancho. An unusual amount of copy has been devoted to this play in newspapers from San Antonio to New Orleans to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the play has run to overwhelming acclaim.

The premise again is both simple and profound: Barrios posits that Tennessee Williams pimped his Mexican-American lover’s life to create characters and storylines. The bombshell is Barrios’s claim, backed up by reams of archival documents, photos, and interviews, that Williams’ archetypal character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire is modeled on Pancho Gonzalez, with whom Tennessee had a similarly turbulent relationship.

Sandra Cisneros, perhaps San Antonio’s most famous writer and a personal friend of Barrios, suggested the title he eventually used for the play. She was ecstatic at the opening night of Rancho Pancho last month.

“His play is such a pleasure for those of us educated — and indoctrinated — in English Departments to revere the canon as just a white male thing,” said Cisneros. “He gives us new reasons to love the canon because we now know we have always been part of it.”

Despite this celebratory reception among Latina/o writers who know the sting of academic exclusion first hand, an important question remains: What are the ideological implications of a Chicano writer claiming inclusion in an American literary canon built in part on the U.S. imperialist takeover of Mexican territory?

In his groundbreaking 1971 manifesto, Calibán, renowned Cuban cultural critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar aptly notes that literary canons are extensions of political power. He uses the villain of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a third-world hero and archetype to rhetorically propose that students in the Americas could do without the European and White American canons if this continues to require the effacement of Mesoamerican, Black, Mestizo and populist canons of the rest of the Americas.

Again, Barrios, a student of Martí as much as Melville, rejects the binary:

“My perspective is that it is a both/and situation.”

He proves his point in his next two plays, Hard Candy, and a restructured and expanded ¡Carrasco!, which he currently is polishing for initial readings in San Antonio next year.

Hard Candy memorializes burlesque performer Candy Barr, who was born Juanita Dale Slusher in 1935 in Edna, Texas. She worked for Jack Ruby in his club in Texas, and later was mobster Mickey Cohen’s lover. (She expands JFK conspiracy theories by claiming to have seen Ruby with Lee Harvey Oswald at her home two weeks before Ruby shot Oswald.)

In an extension of the “prostitute with a heart of gold” storyline, Barrios’s focus is on Slusher’s life outside her status as a “kept woman” of the mob — as the author of a poetry collection, A Gentle Mind ... Confused (Dulce Press, 1972) and a humanist. Slusher transcended boundaries and taboos. She maintained life-long friendships with Barrios as well as Mexican American outlaws such as prison poet Ricardo Sánchez.

“She was the first really public sexual outlaw, a star of a porn film and an iconoclast and bohemian. Were she alive today,” Barrios maintains, “she’d be celebrated very much like the early Madonna was revered and reviled.”

Barrios’s reprise of Carrasco’s violent rise and fall is less about the man and more about the struggle to give meaning to a community that was in such dire straights it lionized him as a social bandit fighting evil racist whites with his pistol in his hand, similar to 19th-century heroes like Jacinto Treviño, who are still celebrated in the popular ballads known as corridos.

Barrios’s play also is informed by his access to the Carrasco diary, which he translated. He has yet to find a publisher. One renowned Texas publisher politely rejected the piece with a note stating, “Gregg, we are awaiting a great work from you. However, Carrasco does little to make our people look good.”

The enigmatic book-selling sage of San Antonio

While some theater critics are predicting Rancho Pancho will eventually find its way into the off-Broadway circuit where real theater still is being produced on occasion, Barrios is less concerned with fame than with the wonderful world of books and film.

Rosemary Catacalos, executive director of literary organization Gemini Ink, where Barrios has taught classes on writing book reviews and plays, testifies to Barrios’s role as a bibliophile.

“Gregg’s ability to speak to so many diverse aspects of writing makes him a journeyman, in the old sense of being a well-rounded craftsman,” says Catacalos.

Barrios’s work also has made its way into the academy. His early articles on Chicano film are credited with recovering San Antonio film pioneer Efrain Gutierrez as the very first Chicano filmmaker. He has devoted a considerable amount of time, effort, and money to collecting vintage film posters and the films they advertise, signed first-edition books from authors all over the world, and of course, Chicano texts.

After restarting and retiring anew from his teaching and journalism careers, Barrios has finally found what he calls “my dream job”: he works as a part-time bookseller at a local chain bookstore, where he can be found in the literature section.

On a recent weekday afternoon, standing between the stacks, he was asked what is the role of the artist in society. As usual, he resisted an easy answer. Instead, he recommended a book by Vaclav Havel, another by Gabriel García Márquez, another by Carlos Fuentes, and then another by his all-time-favorite Chicano sexual-outlaw author, John Rechy (City of Night). And so on.

He does this four or five days a week, recommending title after title until his shift is over, and it is time for him to drive home. A recent heart attack gave him a new sense of urgency to bring closure to his lingering projects, but he continues to sneak in a new idea every now and then. “I’ll probably die dreaming of the outlines of another play,” he says with a wry smile. •

B.V. Olguín is a published poet, San Antonio educator, and frequent contributor to the San Antonio Current.