Theatre History Studies

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 [End Page 279] 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.