12.+Cruz

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 3 discussions ONLY.//
Chris Olsen (University of Puerto Rico)

=Migdalia Cruz's //Telling Tales//=



The narrator in one of the “Telling Tales,” Parcheesi, remarks about her friend: “She wanted to have a future and I wanted to have a past.” In many ways, the experience of being Latino/a in the US is about balancing these two desires – to create a new life for yourself but not to forget where you come from. Certainly in the Cuban and Puerto Rican communities of New York, this balancing act is played out daily in the neighborhoods and within the extended families. However, as we come to the end of the first decade of the 21s Century, Latinos no longer exclusively live in large urban neighborhoods but have moved into small-town America. The largest growth of the Latino population in the US is now in such areas as North Carolina, Georgia, and New England rather than Florida, Texas, and California. “Latino” can be used as a label for people from any Spanish-speaking country whether it is the Dominican Republic, Equador, or Venezuela. All their experiences living in the US produce different narratives and often cannot be neatly bundled into a volume about the Latino Experience in the US.

Migdalia Cruz is writing about a very specific “barrio” – the Ground Zero for Puerto Rican migration to the New York City area – The Bronx. //Telling Tales// is a group of stories emphasizing the poor surroundings of the narrators, mostly infant and juvenile voices. The characters described in the stories are often marginalized and find themselves in precarious situations. These situations can quickly turn violent and cruel and the stories often end with acts of torture or with death. Rosalina Perales has written that in the play “we find the presence of the fundamental motifs of Migdalia Cruz’ theatre: injustice, blood, and death. Using bitter humor and a cynical perspective, the playwright reveals her trademark approach to theatre. Words lead to actions which lead to violence.” Ironically, Cruz gives us “a theatre of cruelty,” not so much in the Artaudian sense but in the Maria Irena Fornesian sense of a minimalist environment stripped of everything to its bare essence. Cruz was a disciple of Fornes and emulates the Cuban-American playwright’s exploration into violence, especially violence towards women.

In Tiffany Ana Lopez’ article, she included Cruz in the growing body of Latino/a writing about the female body as a territory of violence. Cherrie Moraga and Edwin Sanchez along with a number of performance artists (especially from Cuba) have used Latina bodies as a violent inscription of Latino societies in general. Whereas Fornes often narrowed her focus to a particular domestic situation, Cruz introduces political and cultural traditions which not only act as a backdrop to the violent act but often cause the violence to occur. Certainly the narrative, Sand, is reflective of Cruz’ bitter adult voice but she tells the story through the eyes of a child. In the story, a young girl watches as her best friend falls to her death while escaping from her rapist and then later observes a neighborhood mob catch him and extract revenge.

Cruz places her narrators in the midst of a violent world yet there are vestiges of religious traditions and of small treats like chocolates. In Jesus she uses the metaphor of sewing pin cushions as a kind of religious act only to find the idea of Jesus very confusing. She often has the narrators describe their relationship with childhood friends (as in Papo Chibirico and Loose Lips) which is ruptured and ends in acts of violence. Even the descriptions of the narrators’ own bodies sometimes seem to be a kind of torturous journey into areas that seem both fascinating and strange to the owner. By keeping the narrators young, Cruz is able to evoke a sense of innocence and wonder even as the violence around them escalates. In some ways, Cruz is telling the classic New York neighborhood story of growing up poor. You spend your life trying to survive.

In Deborah Geis’ book about monologues, she finds the monologue to be an important genre for marginalized voices because it produces a powerful “way of speaking about the about the attempt to enter subjectivity.” Certainly the monologue has become a power dramaturgical device for giving Latino characters an “authorial” role. Cruz, like many Latina playwrights, has been critical of Latino plays of the past which feature one-dimensional characters which are often painted as victims of a racist American society. The techniques of storytelling are told in a linear fashion and often have predictable endings. She prefers to work in the area where fantasy and reality intermingle and where nothing is predictable. Cruz’ most famous play is //Miriam’s Flowers//, a story told in the present and in flashbacks of a girl who having lost a childhood friend in a subway accident grows into adolescence cutting herself with razor blades and selling her body to survive.

Cruz’ mentor, Maria Irena Fornes, was probably one of the first Latina playwrights in the US to create a theatre of images and to freely juxtapose fantasy, reality, and spectacle (including music). There is a cinematic quality to many of Fornes’ plays. So, too, in the plays of Migdalia Cruz.

Bibliography: Geis, Deborah. //Postmodern Theatric(K)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama.// Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. Lopez, Tiffany Ann. “Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays by Migdalia Cruz.” //Theatre Journal// 52 (2000): 51-66. Perales, Rosalina. “The Bronx Also Exists: Brief Theatre of Migdalia Cruz.” (unpublished, 2009).