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On a piece of once-sacred land, where hundreds raised their children and buried their dead, a young Mexican baseball player named Fernando Valenzuela took the mound to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1981 opening day game at Dodger Stadium. Born in poverty, Valenzuela would become, soon after this game, a baseball legend, symbolizing the immigrant success story in the United States. The stories that preceded and enabled Valenzuela's taking this mound, however-the stories of the more than eighteen hundred Mexican American families who were forced out of their homes for the construction of Dodger Stadium-have not fared as well as his. On May 17, 2003, a Latino theatre group premiered a play that told the stories of those former residents and asked LA audiences to reconsider the history of their city, its government, and its people. In doing so, they embodied and promoted an alternate version of the past, foregrounding the actions and concerns of Latina/os and working-class people.1
With a cast of characters ranging from Abbott and Costello to J. Edgar Hoover, the Latino performance trio Culture Clash bridges the gap between history and performance in Chavez Ravine, a play about land, community, and power in the heart of Los Angeles.2 The extensive archival research and interviews conducted by the playwright/performers laid the foundation for a script that is based in historical fact as much as it is constructed as a dramatic fiction. Theatre historian Freddie Rokem describes the way performances about the past link an awareness of the "failures of history" with "the efforts to create a meaningful work of art."3 In Chavez Ravine, the failures of history signify the oppression and marginalization of a Mexican American community and the absence of that community from traditional histories. Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza, the three members of Culture Clash, create a complex and multivocal version of the past in which the displaced people speak louder than the city leaders. In doing so, these playwright/performers make visible what Latina/o theatre scholar Jon Rossini describes as "the need to imagine an alternative that transforms not only the self but also the very structures of representation."4 Chavez Ravine offers an experiential and performative version of Los Angeles history, challenging both who has the right to define the past and how the experiences of our ancestors are transmitted to a new generation.
Chavez Ravine clearly establishes an alternative version of the history of Dodger Stadium and at the same time asserts the right of the contemporary Latina/o community in LA to make and tell their own histories. It insists that the residents of the neighborhood be as much a part of the story line of US history as the hard-won success of Fernando Valenzuela. This play uses elements of fiction and theatricality to point toward larger truths and to reassert the agency of people who were robbed of their land and the opportunity to tell their own stories. Chavez Ravine uses the live, racialized bodies of its actors (and some creative staging) to reinscribe meaning on the past and to offer Latina/os in Los Angeles a measure of space, authority, and visibility in the present.
The History of a Place and a Play
The neighborhood of Chavez Ravine was home to more than eighteen hundred families before Dodger Stadium opened for business in 1962.5 The land was originally settled by the Tongva people, who occupied the entire Los Angeles basin region before the Spanish arrived to explore and later colonize the area in 1542.6 The land eventually became part of Mexico, and in the 1840s city councilman Julian Chavez acquired the land (then appraised at $800.00), which at that time was near the center of the Pueblo of Los Angeles.7 On February 2, 1848, the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the borderline between Mexico and the United States, and a huge portion of Northern Mexico, including much of what we now know as the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, suddenly became part of the United States. The residents of this new US territory had the choice to stay and become US citizens or migrate south of the new border.8 Migration in and out of the ravine continued for the next one hundred years. In 1910 and 1911, social unrest caused by the Mexican Revolution prompted a number of refugees from the war to settle in Chavez Ravine.9 The neighborhood appears to have been inhabited by settlers of various origins at least since the land's occupation by the Tongvas until the evacuation of the last of the ravine residents enabled the construction of Dodger Stadium in 1959.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of the mostly Mexican American residents of Chavez Ravine resisted the city's plans to build a housing project on the land where their families had lived for generations.10 The city used the law of eminent domain to force families to sell their homes to the government, with promises that affordable community housing projects would be built on the land where their private homes now stood.11 City officials had so much trouble severing the community's ties to the land that local sheriffs physically removed the last of the homeowners (the Aréchiga family) from their home in 1959. The Ravine families and their supporters protested to the City Council about the removal, but their efforts could not defeat those of the city's leadership, notably City Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman and Mayor Norris Poulson, who staunchly defended the urban renewal of Chavez Ravine. Mayor Poulson's political support came from the Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times, who had financial and business interests in the property. The promised housing project never materialized. Eventually the city subsidized Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley's bid for the more than three hundred acres of Chavez Ravine.12 O'Malley then oversaw the construction of Dodger Stadium on this site just north of what had become downtown LA.
To tell their version of the story of this neighborhood, Culture Clash premiered Chavez Ravine, their first history-based play, at the famous Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on May 17, 2003.13 This production was the fifth highest grossing production in what was then the Taper's thirty-five-year history.14 The play was revived and sold out most of its performances at the smaller Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City in 2015 with a few notable changes in the script.15
Chavez Ravine differs structurally from the plays in the group's earlier Culture Clash in AmeriCCa series, on which they began work in 1994.16 Their previous site-specific work was set in the present time and was episodic and often mono logic, without a clear plotline or recurring characters.17 These plays do not follow the story of an event and do not present any kind of cohesive journey for the characters.18 Culture Clash in AmeriCCa broadly describes the intersections of various ethnic groups in specific US cities in a time frame loosely defined as the present.19 Chavez Ravine, on the other hand, develops a historical narrative that jumps back and forth through time. It also maintains a clear story line and brings certain characters back to the stage multiple times to ground the audience in their narratives as the history of the neighborhood unfolds. In a research and writing process that took two years to complete, Montoya, Salinas, and Sigüenza conducted interviews, did archival research, and worked with dramaturg John Glore as they reconstructed the history of Chavez Ravine.20
Bringing all this research to the stage, Culture Clash revives the struggle over land rights, socioeconomic privilege, and ethnicity by performing Chavez Ravine.21 They act out their version of history and challenge widely accepted constructions of the past, such as those seen in government documents, newspaper articles, and mainstream history texts. These representations of history construct Chavez Ravine as a neighborhood unworthy of being saved. The play functions as a combination of ethnography, history, fiction, and art, leaving audiences to wonder how much of this representation of culture, time, and place has been invented or shaped by the writers' dramatic interpretation. Chavez Ravine not only provides an alternative version of history but demands that its audiences reconsider the nature and function of history in general as it relates to notions of politics, social stratification, and ethnicity. The members of Culture Clash not only tell a version of history that their spectators might not have heard before but also expose how and why other narratives about this community's past have deliberately obscured the agency of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, destroying what Tara J. Yosso and David G. García refer to as "the cultural wealth present in these communities."22
The First Scene of Chavez Ravine: Setting the Stage for a New Look at the Past
In this play, Culture Clash stages a comparative history, drawing multiple parallels between time periods, dominant and marginalized cultures, and the shifting landscape of Los Angeles. The group opens their two-act play with characters based on familiar public personas. Montoya plays the legendary Dodger announcer Vin Scully broadcasting the start of the 1981 opening day baseball game, while Sigüenza takes the mound as Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela: "Today will be quite a test for young Valenzuela. Imagine folks, here's a young kid, speaks no English, and a little more than a year ago was playing far away, in the childhood sandlots of a sleepy Mexican village, in a place called Etchohauaquila, Sonora. This screw-balling south paw is the youngest player since Catfish Hunter to start an opening day game. And after a quick scratch of the crotch, here we go"23 This narrative about Valenzuela identifies him as an immigrant success story. He came to the United States from what the character of Scully implies was a backward and impoverished Mexico and then became a legendary ballplayer. This depiction of the theatrical character of Valenzuela reinforces the popular perception of the historical figure of Valenzuela and makes the character both familiar and believable. Wearing a bad toupee and anglicizing the pronunciation of the name of Valenzuela's home town, Montoya plays up the contrast between Valenzuela, the racialized immigrant, and Scully, the symbol of the white, mainstream media. This contrast continues to function in a multiplicity of ways throughout the text as the corporate presence of Dodger Stadium overtakes the Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine.
Since the play begins in Dodger Stadium, the audience gains a sense of the current geography of the Ravine before the layers of the past are revealed in the course of the production. The staging works to make the audience members feel as though they were seated in Dodger Stadium. Valenzuela and later a stagehand dressed as team manager Tommy Lasorda both make entrances through the audience, and at one point the actors ask the audience to stand and sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" while ushers dressed as concession sellers wander through the aisles tossing bags of popcorn into the audience.
The audience takes in this heightened yet recognizable version of characteristically American baseball history, and immediately after situating themselves comfortably in the ballgame, a piece of history that generally goes unrecognized drops into the scene, literally: "Small houses gently fall from above onto the outfield. Like ghosts from another era, two Chavez Ravine residents enter... They look toward Fernando,"24 In the staging of the play at the Taper, homes the size of dolls' houses lower from the fly space above the stage and hover in the air above the actors' heads. They do not distract from the action of the play but remain there as a visual contrast to the action in Dodger Stadium. Closer to the audience's and Valenzuela's fields of vision, a house about the size of a microwave sits down stage left, as though it were on the baseball field.
With the emergence of the houses in the outfield of Dodger Stadium, time collapses through a conflation of historical moments in the same space. Siblings Henry and Maria Salgado Ruiz, 1940s residents of the Ravine, visit Valenzuela in 1981 and teach him about the piece of land where he will make history as a great baseball player.25 Henry says he "was born behind second base," mapping out the past on the landscape of the present and staking his claim to a space now seen as a piece of corporate and commercialized property.26 The theatrical scene captures the space in two different modes, each dearly loved by loyal communities. Maria describes the Ravine as sanctified ancestral space: "These are sacred lands you're pitching on Fernando. Long ago burial grounds for the Tongva, Chinese, and Jewish gente."27 When Maria inserts a Spanish word as she lists the "Jewish gente," she evokes the Mexican and Mexican American ancestors who are not explicitly included in her list. This passage also contextualizes Maria and her family/community as a bilingual group honoring many different former inhabitants of this land. As she says this, the audience sees Henry and Maria in 1940s period dress standing in the middle of a physical representation of Dodger Stadium, visually marking the sharp contrast between their claim to this land and the Dodgers' investment in it.
The 2015 revival production preceded this opening scene in the stadium with film footage from 1959 of the actual evictions of the Ravine's last residents, including scenes of bulldozers demolishing houses and of police carrying an elderly woman out of her home.28 This more violent beginning to the play seems apt in light of the heightened awareness of police brutality against people of color in the wake of the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner in 2014.29 The projections of Don Normark's photos of Chavez Ravine in the 1940s, which were interspersed throughout the revival production, further contribute to the palpable sense of loss experienced by the displaced residents of the neighborhood as well as the grief and strife of the political moment in which the audience lives in 2015.30
These additional juxtapositions of historical imagery with live performance further bridge the gaps between what Diana Taylor calls the archive (unchanging records) and the repertoire or "embodied memory... all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducable knowledge" The repertoire, she argues, lends performers and audiences alike a measure of agency in the making of meaning in the present moment.31 By foregrounding historical images in the midst of a performance, Chavez Ravine demands that the archive be reevaluated in the shared context of each live performance of the play. Culture Clash works hard to keep their audiences on their toes as they move through broad landscapes of space and meaning in this play.
Changing Notions of Space in a Shifting Landscape
Chavez Ravine, like most Culture Clash plays, makes huge leaps in time and in the changing landscape of a place. Both the Mark Taper Forum theatre and Chavez Ravine itself are the stationary sites for the play, but over the course of the play and the many decades of the Ravine's gradual conversion from a residential neighborhood to Dodger Stadium, the space changes dramatically. The play has suggestive, minor set changes, but no major walls or backdrops move on or offstage during the show. The light-colored wooden floor of the Taper #
CULTURE CLASH AND THE POLITICAL PROJECT OF REWRITING HISTORY
stage had one panel in it that could be flipped over to reveal a solid green rectangle to suggest the grassy field in Dodger Stadium. A table and chairs were sometimes onstage to create either a family home in the 1940s neighborhood or the office of Los Angeles mayor Poulson. At one point three actors sitting in a group of chairs huddled close to one another create a helicopter flying above the city, with actor Herbert Sigüenza standing on another chair behind them swinging a rotating apparatus in the air above his head to serve as the helicopter's propeller (see figure 1). Creative but not literalized staging allows the actors to move through a long series of fragments of settings and recognizable characters from Los Angeles, showing the audience that the writer/performers have specific knowledge of the city. The performers become living embodiments of the people of LA as they act out the struggles of the characters that are drawn from the community.
Figure 1. Production photo from Chavez Ravine at the Mark Taper Forum in 2003. Back row: Herbert Sigüenza. Front row, from left to right: Ric Salinas, Richard Montoya, Eileen Galindo. Photograph by Craig Schwartz. Courtesy of the Mark Taper Forum.
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The shift from community to corporate space in Chavez Ravine encompasses not just land but ideologies and life practices. Chavez Ravine changed from a place in which people could live and raise children to a place where people paid money to witness a performance of commercialized, masculine, competitive culture in the United States. As the play so tellingly reveals, money did serve as the driving force behind the transformation of Chavez Ravine. In supplanting the communities that lived and died in the Ravine, Dodger Stadium monumentalized the power of US capitalism, Walter O'Malley (owner of the Dodgers), the Chandler press, and commercialized US culture, as embodied by the national pastime of baseball. Historian Cecilia O'Leary notes that the events and icons that publicly identify a culture serve to build a sense of nationalism and "unite disparate communities" under a symbol of the nation.32 Dodger Stadium serves that function both in the play and in the actual community of Los Angeles.
Chavez Ravine recognizes the power of the stadium as an icon, but it also recognizes the people whose way of life is being destroyed by it. The stadium is a place that welcomes all the residents of LA, and it invites them to shed their differences and participate in an "All-American" sporting event. The former residents of the ravine are able to return to the land as Dodgers fans. However, in the stadium, the families who lived on this land cannot bury the umbilical cords of their children under the homes of their ancestors or participate in any of the other cultural practices that were once among the defining characteristics of the neighborhood. If they return to the land, they have to do it on the Dodgers' terms.
A group of unnamed minor characters in the play are being displaced from their land but do not seem to mind much, because, as one of them puts it, "Fight or no fight, we all love baseball."33 This sense of inclusion in the love of baseball and the stadium itself as a symbol of US nationalism encourages this subset of sport-loving characters to shift their loyalties from the neighborhood community to a US national pastime. They maintain a different claim to the land and take pride in the fact that this monument to sport culture will be constructed upon their ancestral homes. O'Leary comments on the implications of buying into the symbols of nationalism: "Never neutral, nationalism always creates, reflects, and reproduces structures of cultural power."34 The admiration and sense of inclusion that Dodger Stadium evokes from these men make them easy to manipulate in this situation. They do not fight the city because they have bought into the power structures represented by the stadium.
Other characters in the play do not shift their loyalties. The women of the Ruiz family reject Dodger Stadium and the nationalist sentiment attached to it. Maria Ruiz puts her faith in her rights to protest this injustice and to vote on measures that might allow the residents of the Ravine to keep their property. Her political efforts to claim the land ultimately fail, but she uses these experiences to align herself with a different sense of inclusion in the nation: "It's true we lost, but what's important is that we helped create a culture of resistance. The struggle for Chavez Ravine prepared me for civil rights, the Farm Workers Union, my labor work with Bert Corona and the Chicana Movement. Chavez Ravine was huge for me. It made me the person I am today"35 Though Maria was not a real person who Culture Clash interviewed, she was based on a combination of activists, including Judith Baca (former director of the Citywide Mural Project in LA), Dolores Huerta (cofounder of the United Farm Workers), and Alice McGrath (activist for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee).36 She represents the activist ideologies that Culture Clash and their collaborators embody in all their performances. When Maria looks at Chavez Ravine, she sees the struggle instead of the stadium, and that is her national symbol.
The Politics of Performance and the Performance of Politics
As David Román notes, "Culture Clash ... bears the influence of early Chicano theatre and the belief that performance should remain oppositional to the exploitative practices of the dominant Anglo culture"37 Early Chicano theatre was born out of the Chicano Movement and its politics of resistance. From the short actos first performed by El Teatro Campesino on the backs of flatbed trucks in the 1960s to the present, Chicana/o theatre has consistently challenged structural racism and asserted the agency of displaced and downtrodden people.
Luis Valdez, the founder of Teatro Campesino, argues that the practice of foregrounding oppressed peoples-Chicana/o or otherwise-enables artists to reconstitute ideas of national belonging: "It's incumbent on all writers and people who tell stories of America to reexamine the idea of America. And if you're talking about the basic issue of human rights, then the idea of America begins to shine"38 Valdez did precisely this in 1978 when his landmark play Zoot Suit became the first Chicana/o play to receive a professional production at a major theatre. Setting a precedent for later works by Latina/o playwrights, Zoot Suit premiered at the Mark Taper Forum, where Chavez Ravine was produced in 2003. As the premier venue for professional theatre in Los Angeles, the Taper has a vested interest in producing plays about its legendary hometown. In the decades after the original production of Zoot Suit, the Taper launched many significant productions about LA by writers of color, including Anna Deavere Smith and Luis Alfaro. From 1995 to 2005, the Taper was the home to the Latino Theatre Initiative, developing and producing new works by Latina/o playwrights.39 Zoot Suit's extended run in 1978 and its subsequent production on Broadway opened the doors for men and women of color and Latina/os in particular to gain access to professional theatre spaces in Los Angeles and beyond.
As Zoot Suit delved into the wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of a group of Mexican American youths in the 1940s, it also revived the culture of the pachuca/os, making them salient symbols of political resistance in the 1970s and beyond.40 Chavez Ravine draws on many of the same types of research materials as Zoot Suit (interviews, newspaper archives) and also meaningfully grapples with LA history in the 1940s. Chavez Ravine challenges the public, as Zoot Suit did, to understand citizenship, community, and national identity differently because of the lives and actions of the Mexican Americans who helped to make Los Angeles what it is today.
Culture Clash draws on the political legacies of earlier Chicana/o theatre in deliberately exposing how the white men who ran the LA city government and press in the 1940s and 1950s forced a long-standing Mexican American community off their land. The playwrights make no attempt whatsoever to give equal weight to the vast range of characters in their plays, because they are strategically bringing previously silenced voices to the forefront of their work. Joining these voices in a single performance creates a larger historical and artistic picture, not just of the past but of class and racial conflict in Los Angeles. This version of history has a deliberate bias, but even the privileged viewpoints in this play offer a variety of perspectives on this community.
The four actors in the play portray fifty-one characters who offer up a complex dialogue about the negotiation of space, time, and power.41 Each voice in this play has a different claim to the history and the land, and those claims often compete with one another. The text of Chavez Ravine brings together the languages of different time periods, social classes, ethnicities, and political perspectives. Culture Clash makes a multifaceted critique of the displacement of the families from Chavez Ravine by using their words, voices, and bodies to perform, rather than merely describe, the struggles surrounding this piece of land. Culture Clash implicates the press, McCarthyist sentiment, and the Los Angeles city government in the series of events that forced the Ravine families off their land.
Theatre scholar Antonia Nakano Glenn calls Chavez Ravine "an act of reclamation."42 The members of Culture Clash look for the unsung voices of Chavez Ravine's history in a way that resembles what Anna Deavere Smith identifies in her own work as the search "to find America in its language."43 Smith uses the words of her interviewees to capture meaning and perspective in connection to the situations of social conflict that her plays describe. In this way, she uses reported speech to seek out a sense of what it means to be living in the United States in a given moment, and in her landmark play, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, she took to the same stage at the Taper to represent this city's history through the eyes of some of its disenfranchised people.44 Culture Clash takes on a similar project in chronicling the history of this piece of land and the people tied to it.
However, the plays of Culture Clash and Smith differ in the weight given to the various voices in the performance. In an L.A. Times review of Culture Clash's play Bordertown (which is part of the Culture Clash in AmeriCCa series), theatre critic Laurie Winer criticized Culture Clash for privileging some voices over others. She praised Smith in contrast to Culture Clash, saying that the Latino trio "does not possess [Smith's] gift for giving equivalent moral weight and serious consideration to each of her subjects"45 Winer identified a key distinction in the ways that Culture Clash and Smith construct their plays, but her critique of Culture Clash outright rejects the politics of representation being deployed by Culture Clash in their plays. Chavez Ravine has no interest in being objective. It offers a multi-perspectival take on history yet also deliberately unravels the narrative threads of injustice that have so thoroughly concealed the shady business dealings behind the stadium and the agency and desires of the displaced residents.
Unlike Anna Deavere Smith, whose strict use of verbatim interview texts creates a sense of legitimacy for all her ethnographic plays, Culture Clash makes deliberate use of fiction for the sake of humor, theatricality, and continuity. Audiences overhear private conversations, listen to musical numbers about flushing toilets, and hear commentary from a dead poet. When a ghost speaks, we know that Culture Clash did not uncover the words of an otherworldly spirit through empirical research, yet the fictive event provides insight into cultural practices, modes of speech and behavior, and, at times, vital information.
Staging Unseen Histories: Using Fiction to Suggest the Facts
Much of the difficulty in staging the struggles of the Ravine's residents derives from a need to represent masked forces of domination. Norman Chandler, the publisher of the L.A. Times from 1940 to i960, had the ability to shape public discourse on a large scale, and Culture Clash takes on the Chandler press in film noir-style scenes where three actors in trench coats and fedoras make underhanded deals to further their financial investments in the Ravine.46 Montoya and Salinas play characters named Mover and Shaker, while Sigüenza embodies a mysterious mastermind character known as the Watchman. These characters, who serve as allegories for the press and certain government agencies, conspire to halt the City Housing Authority's plans for public housing in the Ravine so that they can make a larger profit by selling their land holdings to the investors in Dodger Stadium:
The invocation of McCarthyism links the events of Chavez Ravine to similar manipulations of power by the House Un-American Activities Committee at that time. Mover, Shaker, and the Watchman all have hidden identities. They serve as allegorical figures, like those in medieval morality plays or the actos of early Chicana/o theatre, and in doing so, they give physical form to the hidden political forces behind the actions of members of the press and government officials.48
The joy of watching Culture Clash lies in their ability to transform again and again, imitating humankind in a vast array of characters. The remarkable talent of the interviewer/writer/performers to transmute themselves into so many different, culturally distinct people has attracted diverse audiences in theatres around the country.49 Culture Clash plays with the fine lines between cul- tural truths and stereotypes in the communities they portray. They use stereotypes to make the characters recognizable and then add nuances that make the characters more complex, to the point of eventually questioning the basis of such performative types. Because of the intricacy of their performances, and because their minimal stage directions fail to indicate many important parts of the relevant physical action, their plays lose a great deal when read on paper. The performance itself also makes the lines between fact and fiction more difficult to track, because an audience member must take in the information at the speed of the actors' delivery.
Though they do not have academic training in ethnography or history, the members of Culture Clash used many of the same research techniques as academics use as they prepared the script of Chavez Ravine. They conducted interviews with city councilwoman Rosalind Wyman and other political figures from the time, as well as with several people who lived in the Ravine during the land struggle.50 They did archival research, and a time line of the significant events appeared in the program to the premiere production of the play. Historian Eric Avila states: "The people whose stories are shown by Culture Clash are those who leave very little traces of their history in letters, reports, books, or papers, the kinds of documents traditionally valued by historians... . As Culture Clash shows through their research-which is exactly how an academic historian does research-there are multiple realities which all need to be told and made accessible to everyone."51 The genius of Culture Clash lies in their ability to use humor and physicality in performance to draw the audience into history from their perspective. The performance exhibits historical accuracy in terms of many of the facts it shares with the audience, but the actors also capture an intuitive and experiential sense of the historical events to which the audience can relate.
Culture Clash takes creative license in the presentation of history to challenge previous versions of the same events and to make people care about what happened. Activist and writer Lucy Lippard describes the vital contributions that artists of color make in the writing of alternative histories: "Drawn to the illusory warmth of the melting pot, and then rejected from it, [artists of color] have frequently developed or offered sanctuary to ideas, images, and values that otherwise would have been swept away in the mainstream"52 In the program to the play, above the list of characters, the playwrights assert: "Some characters depicted in Chavez Ravine are based on real people, some are composites of several people, others are fictional. We are grateful to all." The playwrights announce their presence as researchers, editors, comedians, and artists engaged in the process of both creating and re-creating history. In doing so, they humanize not only themselves but the actual people whom the play describes, inviting the audience to connect the facts presented about various injustices with the people onstage and in the communities outside the theatre.
To emphasize the interrelation of history and art, Culture Clash based the narrator of the play on a poet from the Ravine named Manazar, whose poems they discovered while conducting research for the show.53 The character of Manazar operates in ways that the real poet could not have done: "Quivole, my name is Manazar, I am a poet who grew up aqui in La Bishop. When I died, not too long ago, they spread my ashes all through these hills. Now, before we proceed with the play, I have to take you back to the beginning, the genesis of this place. Hey, it's my job as your dead poet/slash/ghost presence/slash/narrator device que la chingada ... any similarity between me and the Stage Manager in Our Town is purely coincidental"54 Based on the play alone, the audience member who had never heard of the real Manazar would have no way of knowing whether he really existed. Indeed, Manazar's humor, ghostliness, and omniscience about the world of the play would probably lead most audience members to believe that he is an entirely fictional character.
Manazar's presence in the play would defy the traditional logic of a historian, but in performance an audience suspends disbelief to allow the dead to speak. Freddie Rokem asserts that all historical figures represented onstage have a "ghostly" dimension to them because they embody the past.55 In that sense many, if not all, of the characters in Chavez Ravine are spirits, but Manazar appears to be ghostlier than the rest because he is both dead and metatheatrical. He travels beyond the grave and through time and all the while realizes that he is part of a play as a "narrator device que la chingada"56 By describing himself in these terms, Manazar appeals to both a traditionally white subscriber audience and a Latina/o audience. He succinctly describes his function in the play while code-switching between English and Spanish to show his ability to navigate both cultures and have a sense of humor at the same time. He also can see and speak directly to the audience members, and he makes an intertextual reference to Our Town, a work with which the actual Manazar may or may not have had any familiarity. Whereas these aspects of a historical figure in an academic text would be immediately contested, in performance the character's flexibility and obvious fictions add humor and a degree of continuity to the play.
Manazar also makes political commentaries as he narrates the play: "Things might have been slow in the Ravine, but the mayor's office was about to get as busy as a triple baptism at San Conrado church on a Sunday afternoon. Now watch me make myself invisible. (Spins and picks up a broom) Orale"57 This passage introduces the next scene in the mayor's office and allows Manazar to overhear the conversation that takes place, but more than that, Manazar critiques the dominant culture's tendency to ignore the working class. He becomes invisible when he embodies the role of a custodian. Even though he remains in the mayor's office throughout the scene, the other characters proceed as if he did not exist. The audience gets the mayor's perspective on the struggle over the Ravine, but the presence of Manazar contextualizes the mayor's voice and prevents him from dominating the process of history-making, as politicians are wont to do.
A good number of the characters in Chavez Ravine appear only briefly, as snapshots of different opinions or viewpoints on the situation. They make up the landscape of the neighborhood and influence how other voices are received. The play contains many characters with various types of public and official authority: Vin Scully, Walter O'Malley, Frank Wilkinson (site manager of the City Housing Authority), Richard Neutra (architect), Pete Seeger (folksinger), Mayor Norris Poulson, and J. Edgar Hoover, to name just a few. The audience listens to and perhaps even sympathizes with some of these characters, notably Wilkinson, but these official voices speak in the context of the unofficial ones that also populate the play, including Henry and Maria Ruiz, Señora Ruiz (their mother), Manazar, Uri (the sheepherder), Lencho (the resident drunk), and the Dodger Dog Girl.58 These unofficial voices often have more potent and memorable things to say than their more authoritative counterparts.
Embodying the Past: The Power of the Live Body in Performance
The audience understands the history of the Ravine as experienced by all the characters, but the manner in which the characters speak and the kinds of stories they tell greatly influence the audience's sympathies. In the most powerful scene of the play, Señora Ruiz takes up her shotgun and defends her home when the sheriffs come to forcibly remove her:
MOTHER: We are not the Mullhollands.
(We hear the pump action of a shotgun)
We are not the Lankershims or the Van Nuys,
(We hear the pump action of a shotgun)
but you'll remember this name, Arechiga
(The pump action of a shotgun)
Cabral, Casos y Lopez ...
(Shotgun)
Perez
(Shotgun)
Ramirez
(Shotgun)
You took our sons to fight your war,
And now you take our homes.
(Shotgun)
Our land ... Mi casa no es tu casa. ¿Sabes que? Why don't you tell the pinche sheriff to build a stadium in his own goddamn backyard.59
Richard Montoya plays the character of the mother, and though several of the earlier scenes with this character are funny, this depiction of Señora Ruiz is not an attempt to achieve humor through the use of drag. Rather, the cross-gender performances in the play only add to the sense that the four actors onstage symbolically mediate a diverse and multifaceted community.60
The most powerful moments of transformation occur when the actors become characters who are developed as people rather than presented as staged cartoons, such as the town drunks, the helicopter pilot, Vin Scully, and others. Señora Ruiz, among others, has the presence of a full person, even though the audience never loses sight of the fact that she is being played by a man. In the staging of this scene in the 2003 production, Montoya wore a housedress and apron over the pants and shirt that serve as his basic costume for the show.61 He wore a wig with one long braid hanging down his back and defiantly pumped his shotgun throughout the speech. The other actors and musicians onstage held up huge photographs of the real families of the Ravine being carried out of their homes by law enforcement agents while members of the press crowded around to record the event.
This scene establishes the community of people displaced from Chavez Ravine as living beings who take physical shape on the stage of the Taper. Drawing on a Brechtian notion of actors as demonstrators, Rokem states: "The notion of performing history emphasizes the fact that the actor performing a historical figure on the stage in a sense also becomes a witness of the historical event"62 In this regard, when he portrays Señora Ruiz, Montoya becomes a witness of the families resisting the forced evacuation of their homes, as do the other actors onstage. The audience, of course, witnesses this reincarnation of the past as well, and they are implicated in and participating in a community with a shared history as they watch the play. Culture Clash more directly involved the audience by making jokes about Gordon Davidson (then artistic director of the Taper), the Taper subscribers, and even ad libs about people present in the audience at a particular performance.63 With these techniques, Culture Clash reinvents their audience as a community united with the actors onstage, and in doing so they displace hegemonic concepts of who has access to the creation of public discourse and the telling of history.
Creating an Alternative Discourse: Significance Beyond the World of the Play
Is Señora Ruiz's version of history less than truthful or accurate because she is a composite of several real people? Audience members may not be able to distinguish the many factual parts of this character's background or pinpoint their origins in the primary source material from Culture Clash's research. Even as I researched the play and the history of the Ravine, I waded through many uncertainties that I have only begun to sort out with much help from the playwrights. Chavez Ravine does not aim to get across precise and traceable information. The vivid language and memorable staging that convey this character's struggle point to a visceral and emotional sense of the real lives of the families displaced from the Ravine, and this may motivate some audience members to connect these struggles to their own lives or those of communities suffering in the present. The sort of historical information conveyed by the character of Señora Ruiz might not be particularly useful to an academician or government official who needs to be able to document her findings. General audiences, people with emotional or familial ties to Chavez Ravine, and even cultural historians might glean more from Señora Ruiz's life onstage than they would from reading/hearing all the research Culture Clash needed to do to construct her. More than facts, Culture Clash asserts that the histories of the people Señora Ruiz represents need to be told.
The version of history presented in Chavez Ravine has the potential to resonate in impoverished communities, particularly those that are also communities of color, across the United States. Beyond that, it raises awareness of the politics of gentrification in audiences who might not otherwise see the effects of urban development on the communities that are displaced by such practices. When Congress passed the Federal Housing Act in 1949, it also set aside $10 billion for cities that would demolish and rebuild their poorest neighborhoods. Wealthy investors capitalized on the opportunity to build more expensive properties in the locations where low-income housing once stood. Fifteen years after the passage of the Federal Housing Act, more than 609,000 poor people, two-thirds of them people of color, had been displaced from their homes in these neighborhoods nationwide.64
With or without federal incentives, developers and government officials continue this cycle to this day, displacing low-income communities in many major US cities. Chavez Ravine certainly addresses the Los Angeles community, but it also has something to say to other groups of Latina/os being displaced in more recent times: Puerto Ricans in New York City were forced out of their homes to enable the construction of Lincoln Center, and many other communities face similar circumstances in the face of major commercial or government development. Urban renewal disproportionately affects people of color and reinforces structures that maintain white hegemony.65
Chavez Ravine clearly aligns itself with the displaced rather than with those who invoke the power of eminent domain. Culture Clash, in a manner similar to that of many contemporary social scientists, identifies their own biases and reveals them to the audience rather than attempting to mask their version of history with the pretense of objectivity. Chavez Ravine offers us a different way to learn about culture and history and challenges often unquestioned ideas about dominant power structures and the structures of "knowledge" that support them. Chavez Ravine acknowledges and portrays the losses of sacred land, a way of life, and an array of opportunities.
Questions remain as to whether this piece of theatre has had or can have a direct and/or lasting effect in people's lives. Did viewing Chavez Ravine change anyone's mind about the practices of urban renewal and gentrification? Did anyone with the power to alter such a situation behave differently after seeing this play? We might also ask whether Chavez Ravine changed people's notions of Latina/o identity or affected their sense of cultural heritage.
These questions prove difficult to answer, but the extraordinary popularity of the play suggests that such ideological transformations might be possible for audience members. Something in the performance drew audiences night after night, in two separate productions and years, to return to the theatre to contemplate how a group of poor and largely forgotten Mexican American families lost their homes and neighborhood. If empathy for those families (or even the desire to see Latina/os onstage) can motivate ticket sales across time, then it is possible that Chavez Ravine could also have had a larger impact on individuals' actions or behavior regarding their neighbors in the city. Culture Clash's ability to consistently book their plays in mainstream, predominantly white, regional theatres makes them an exceptional group, unrivaled by any other Latina/o performance collective in their level of popularity and visibility in US regional theatres. Culture Clash took advantage of the commercial power of their name when they chose to stage an alternative version of the history of Chavez Ravine. Artistically and stylistically, this play stands as the culmination of their work up to the play's premiere, in 2003. Several years later, in 2010, Richard Montoya and Herbert Sigüenza teamed up with a larger cast to stage a Culture Clash production of a similar play titled American Nightmare: The Ballad of Juan José at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.66 Where Chavez Ravine tells a local story, American Nightmare offers a national portrait of racism and immigration in much the same narrative style as its LA-focused predecessor. The later play riffs on the style of the earlier one and suggests that the same sorts of institutionalized racism and exclusion that forced the residents of the Ravine off their land have functioned to enshrine inequality throughout the United States.
Herbert Sigüenza sums up the political function of Chavez Ravine this way: "America is full of cultural amnesia. History gives a sense of place and cultural pride. Ultimately with this play, we want people to realize that together we are making history and that we built this city together."67 Sigüenza suggests that both the community of Los Angeles and its history continue to be built and rebuilt by all Angelenos, past and present. Lin-Manuel Miranda's casting of actors of color in all the roles in Hamilton asserts something similar about US history by bringing the voices of the marginalized to the forefront of a conversation about national identity.68 Chavez Ravine gives voice to a necessary version of history, one that asserts the presence of Latina/os in LA today as much as it records their past. If Culture Clash can make audience members care about the people removed from the Ravine, then hopefully they can change not only that audience's relationship to the past but also influence their perception of the present and the future.
This desire to overcome American cultural amnesia is at the root of all of Culture Clash's ethnographic plays. Culture Clash identifies the historical power structures that have prevented people of color in the United States from having equal access to land, education, government, the press, and the process of history-making. In doing this, Montoya, Salinas, and Sigüenza are reinscribing the narrative of American cultural citizenship and exposing the flaws, prejudices, and limitations inherent in the ways in which mainstream concepts of American identity have been constructed against oppressed and minoritized groups within the nation. By demanding that audiences notice the ways gentrification rewrites US history, Culture Clash gestures toward a more complexly imagined picture of the United States, one that is fuller and truer because it includes those unimagined Angelenos whose bodies are buried under the Dodger Stadium pitcher's mound.
Notes
1.Throughout this article, I use the terms Latina, Latino, and Latina/o to describe people of Latin American descent in the United States. These terms were popularly used by scholars and members of Culture Clash during both major productions of Chavez Ravine, in 2003 and 2015. For this reason, I continue to use this language rather than shifting, as many contemporary academics and activists have at present, to the term Latinx.
2. The group we now know as Culture Clash originally formed under the name Comedy Fiesta. On Cinco de Mayo 1984, visual artist Rene Yañez brought together six actors, comedians, and poets for their first performance together as a performing troupe. When Marga Gómez and Mónica Palacios split off from Comedy Fiesta to pursue their careers in solo performance, Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Sigüenza, and José Antonio Burciaga formed Culture Clash. The four performed monologues and sketch comedy together until Burciaga left the group to spend more time with his family. The remaining three members began writing full-length plays. The early Culture Clash plays-The Mission (1988), A Bowl of Beings (1991), S.O.S.-Comedy for These Urgent Times (1992), and Carpa Clash (1993)-reflect the performers' backgrounds in stand-up comedy, with their reliance on monologues and sketch comedy. These early plays focus on the experiences of Latinos in the United States and often refer directly to the lives of the writer/performers.
3. Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 3.
4. Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 7.
5. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 164; Negotiations for the land began in 1957, but the stadium was not fully constructed and open to the public until 1962. Los Angeles Dodgers Website, accessed March 20, 2005http://losangeles.dodgers. mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/la/ballpark/index.jsp.
6. See the Gabrieleno/Tongva website, accessed March 9, 2005, http://www.tongva.com.
7. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, American Theatre 20, no. 9 (November 2003): 39.
8. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 19.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 296.
11. Eric Avila, "Revisiting the Chavez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal, and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles," in Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities, ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 125.
12. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 163.
13. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the staging and performance and quotes from the script of Chavez Ravine refer to the premiere production in 2003. I saw three performances of that run of the play as well as an early private reading of the script for the production team and lawyers for the Dodgers and former LA city councilwoman Rosalind Wyman. I did not see the 2015 revival but have read the revised script used for this production.
14. Ric Salinas, e-mail to author, March 10, 2005.
15. Most the changes to the script used for the 2015 revival lie in the reordering of scenes. The most significant textual addition occurs in the final monologue given by Maria Ruiz, which has added language about more recent political struggles related to policing, immigration, and prisons: Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine: An L.A. Revival, unpublished manuscript, 2014, 106. The information about the sold-out performances of the 2015 revival comes from Ric Salinas, e-mail to author, May 16, 2017.
16. After Culture Clash's early success with a series of often autobiographical comedies, which ended with the production of Carpa Clash in 1993, the Miami Light Project commissioned Culture Clash's first site-specific, ethnographic play, Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami, which premiered in 1994. Since then, Culture Clash has written and performed four other full-length plays in this style: Bordertown, about San Diego and Tijuana, Nuyorican Stories, about New York City, Mission Magic Mystery Tour, about San Francisco, and Anthems: Culture Clash in the District, about Washington, DC. Montoya, Salinas, and Sigüenza go into a major city for a few months, research the city's history and its current events, interview people from a variety of ethnic communities, and write and perform a play that offers a view of the city from a multiplicity of perspectives, often privileging the voices of racialized and minoritized groups. They have performed these site-specific plays individually and as a compilation show called Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, which juxtaposes vignettes about different sites to create a sense of the diversity of identities and cultures in the United States.
17. The only recurring characters in the earlier site-specific plays are the characters of Montoya, Salinas, and Sigüenza as themselves or "the interviewers." Their earlier plays, sitespecific or not, are full of self-referential humor, but Chavez Ravine does not reference the playwrights or their public personas explicitly.
18. The possible exception to this would be Anthems, which deals somewhat peripherally with the tragedies of 9/11 and follows Montoya as "The Writer" in a very fragmented j ourney through the play.
19. The notion of all events in Culture Clash in AmeriCCa happening in the present is somewhat complex. Anthems, their play about Washington, DC, takes place in a specifically post-9/11 context, but the other plays in the series were all written before 9/11. When the plays are edited together and staged as Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, all events seem to take place in a generalized present moment that does not set vignettes from Anthems apart as temporally distinct from, or even more specific than, the scenes from other plays.
20. Herbert Sigüenza, interview by author (Los Angeles), June 5, 2003.
21. Chavez Ravine, dir. by Lisa Peterson, set by Rachel Hauck, costumes by Christopher Acebo, lighting by Anne Militello, sound by Dan Moses Schreier, Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles: Mark Taper Forum's New Work Festival), May 17, 2003.
22. Tara J. Yosso and David G. García, "'This Is No Slum!': A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Community Cultural Wealth in Culture Clash's Chavez Ravine," in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 32, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 147.
23. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 40.
24. Ibid.
25. No accents were used in the characters' names, either in the printed programs for Chavez Ravine or in the published version of the script.
26. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 40.
27. Ibid.
28. Deborah Vankin, "Trio's Bite Back: Culture Clash Feels a Timely Pull to Update Its Play 'Chavez Ravine' Amid Gentrification Trends," in Los Angeles Times (January 29, 2015), E1.
29. Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan, "Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999-2014," http://gawker.com/unarmed-people-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349, May 17, 2017.
30. Salinas, e-mail to author, May 16, 2017.
31. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19-20.
32. Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4.
33. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 57.
34. O'Leary, To Die For, 4.
35. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 61.
36. Richard Montoya, e-mail to author, April 30, 2005.
37. David Román, "Latino Performance and Identity" in Aztlán 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 157-58.
38. Luis Valdez quoted in Jorge A. Huerta, "El Teatros Living Legacy," in American Theatre 33, no. 10 (December 2016): 30.
39. Diane Rodriguez website, www.diane-rodriguez.com, July 29, 2017.
40. I have argued this more fully in another article: Ashley E. Lucas, "Reinventing the Pachuco: The Radical Transformation from the Criminalized to the Heroic in Luis Valdez's Play Zoot Suit" Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 61-88.
41. The 2003 production of the play featured the three members of Culture Clash and actress Eileen Galindo, and the 2015 revival cast Sabina Zuniga Varela alongside Montoya, Salinas, and Sigüenza.
42. Antonia Nakano Glenn, "Breaking Ground: Culture Clash Unearth Stories Long Buried in Chavez Ravine" in L.A. Alternative Press 2, no. 3 (May 14-27, 2003): 20.
43. Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines (New York: Random House, 2000), 12.
44. Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor, 1994).
45. Laurie Winer, "Bordertown Hits Barriers," in Los Angeles Times (June 2, 1998), F1, F8.
46. Los Angeles Times Media Center Website, http://www.latimes.com/services/newspaper/ mediacenter/la-mediacenter-milestones,0,117814.story?coll=la-mediacenter-footer, March 9, 2005.
47. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 47.
48. Actos are short, political sketches that can be performed in any location. This form of theatre has been a vital component throughout Chicana/o theatre history and is certainly a type of theatre with which the members of Culture Clash are very familiar. The best known actos were scripted by El Teatro Campesino: Luis Valdez, Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Público, 1994), 11-134.
49. Ethnographic theatre has provided an entrée into the regional theatres not just for Culture Clash but also for Anna Deavere Smith and other less well-known performers, such as Heather Raffo and Michael Keck.
50. Ric Salinas describes their interviews with Ravine residents: "We got to interview about six to eight residents from the Ravine, ranging in age from sixty to ninety years of age. The sixty-year-olds were most helpful. They were second generation and remember their last days as children in those three neighborhoods. We spoke to some of the eighty to ninety-year-olds. Many were young adults that moved there when their parents migrated, mostly from Mexico." E-mail to author, March 10, 2005.
51. Tiffany Ana Lopez, "Chavez Ravine by Culture Clash: A Discovery Journal," in Innovative Theatre and Creative Education for Young People: Performing for L.A. Youth (Mark Taper Forum Theatre Education Program, 2003), 8.
52. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 5.
53. Sigüenza, interview by author.
54. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 44.
55. Rokem, Performing History, 6.
56. The phrase que la chingada is difficult to translate. It suggests that Manazar is calling himself a "badass." When asked about how to translate que la chingada in this context, Ric Salinas notes that this phrase was written as a tribute to Luis Valdez's character El Pachuco from Zoot Suit and points out that the real Manazar was a pinto (prisoner) at one point and that he would likely have spoken in "the vernacular of badass pachucos" Salinas, e-mail to author, March 10, 2005.
57. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 53.
58. The young women who sold hotdogs at Dodger Stadium were called Dodger Dog Girls. The character in the play was not based on a specific person but rather on an idea of what a Dodger Dog Girl might have been like. This character loves Fernando Valenzuela so much that she literally levitates with joy at seeing him play.
59. Culture Clash, Chavez Ravine, 60.
60. Ibid., 83.
61. In the 2015 production, Sabina Zuniga Varela, the lone actress in the show, played this role rather than Montoya.
62. Rokem, Performing History, 9.
63. On one of the three occasions when I saw the play performed in 2003, Richard Montoya as Vin Scully ad-libbed a joke about several elderly women in the front row of the theatre who were crunching loudly on the popcorn that the ushers had passed out during the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"
64. Acuña, Occupied America, 295.
65. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 6-7.
66. Richard J. Montoya, American Night: The Ballad of Juan José (New York: Samuel French, 2015).
67. Lopez, Chavez Ravine by Culture Clash, 4.
68. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution: Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (New York: Grand Central, 2016).
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