Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances as Emancipatory Practices

Abstract

We examine Chicano on the Storm, performed in 1991 by Richard Montoya of the theater group Culture Clash Culture, Clash. 1998. Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy, New York: Theatre Communications Group. [Google Scholar], and Border Brujo, performed in 1990 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña to explore the ways that the performances stage identities. We contend that the performances advance commentaries about the cultural milieu shaping Chicana/o identities and the notion of a foundational “Chicano” identity by performing psychic trauma so that struggles and tensions may be exorcized. Subsequently a ChicanoBrujo subjectivity is possible. Both performances yield insights about the confluence of culture, performance, and narratives that position us to advance the contours of a decolonial performance practice that melds insights from cultural performance scholarship with that of emancipatory cultural concepts derived from Mexican oral tradition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.