"Uneasy Crossings: Performing Indigeneity in Post NAFTA Latino Theatre": A talk with Patricia Ybarra March 27, 2009

During and after the passage of NAFTA, many US Latino playwrights began to travel to and write about Latin America in their work. Many of these writers chose explicit political topics which fomented their investment in indigenous identity, advocated for US awareness of indigenous issues in the Americas or represented indigenous practices as a way to deal with globalism. Ybarra will explore the possibilities of Latino-Indigenous solidarity in a select number of Latino works, by Cherrie Moraga, Luis Valdez, and playwright-director Michael John Garcés, suggesting the limits and possibilities of these strategies as they were articulated pre and post NAFTA. She theorizes this solidarity as an uneasy crossing which interrogates how indigenous identity is represented on stage, but also how to theorize Latino interest in indigenous identity as a consequence of globalization in the Americas.

Patricia Ybarra (PHD, Minnesota) is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her first manuscript Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico is forthcoming in Spring 2009 from University of Michigan Press. She has also published articles in Modern Language Quarterly, Theatre Journal, TDR, Aztlan, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her area of specialization is theatre historiography of the Americas, with emphasis on the relationship between theatre, nationalism, and American identities in North America. Her second book project is on Latino Theatre under Neoliberalism. She is also a director and dramaturg who has most recently directed Cherrie Moraga's Hungry Woman and Marcus Gardley's ...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/collabs08-09/RethinkingStatehood.php