Latin American Theatre Review

In May 2012, a group of eight Latinx theatre-makers from across the country met under the auspices of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.—soon to be HowlRound Theatre Commons at Emerson College.¹ There, the so-called “DC 8”—Kristoffer Díaz, Anne García-Romero, Lisa Portes, Tlaloc Rivas, Antonio Sonera, Enrique Urueta, José Luis Valenzuela, and Karen Zacarías—discussed the state of Latinx theatre in the twenty-first century. While each artist brought a unique perspective into the room, the DC 8 all focused on one thing: what the future might hold for Latinx theatre-makers nationally. It was in this moment that the seeds for the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) were planted.² José Luis Valenzuela aimed to produce a month-long Latinx theatre festival at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Lisa Portes wanted to resurrect the new play pipeline with a Carnaval of New Latinx Work at DePaul University, the group would form a Steering Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons, and Tlaloc Rivas pitched the idea of an online journal exclusively dedicated to Latinx Theatre, the end result of which would become Café Onda. Shortly after the DC 8 meeting, the first convening of the LTC took place in Boston in fall 2013 and all of these projects went into motion.

While each of these projects merit in-depth analysis, here I use Café Onda—the online journal of the LTC—as a case study to explore the vulnerabilities of digital scholarship in the age of the digital humanities. Operating as a subset of the larger digital journal on HowlRound’s website, Café Onda published blogs, essays, interviews, and critical reflections on contemporary Latinx theatre.³ While the journal met its mission and flourished in many ways, it ultimately had an abrupt ending in 2018, which brought up several issues with collaborative work and with digital projects in general. In what [End Page 237] follows, I provide a history of Café Onda. In addition to published materials and first-hand accounts from interviews I conducted, this article is informed by my own relationship with the journal. In January 2015, I joined the LTC’s Steering Committee, a process whereby I became tightly involved with Café Onda. In October 2015, I became co-champion of Café Onda alongside Emily Aguilar, a position we would both remain in until fall 2017. My work here is not meant to be a “cheerleader” for Café Onda, but is instead meant to capture a moment and unpack the troubles the journal faced as a digital project due to infrastructure problems, disparate visions, and lack of support from the LTC Steering Committee at large. My argument is that digital humanities projects such as Café Onda must be collaborative and non-hierarchical in organizing structure in order to have long-term success.