You Must Listen to Hear Voices of Latino Culture

As co-creator and actor in Culture Clash’s “The Mission” (“Cannonizing Father Serra” by Don Shirley, June 27), currently playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, I must take issue with Shirley’s review on several points.

It’s been a while since a white male has told us that we needed a Latina voice in our show. Shirley went a step further and suggested exactly where it was needed: five politically correct points for Shirley. Perhaps a Latina voice should be incorporated in each of Shirley’s reviews?

Several of this city’s leading Latina writers, playwrights and community leaders have been by to see our production. Not one has mentioned the lack of a Latina voice or point of view. These are women who will and have told it like it is, women we trust--our toughest critics if you will.

In fact, we strongly feel that there are Latina voices in our show, They are the voices of our mothers, our grandmothers, our wives, our sisters, our daughters. They are there. You have to understand the culture a little more.

We must ask that critics stop ghetto-izing every Latino show they’ve seen in the last five years by lumping us all together. We must demand to be reviewed solely on our own merits. Otherwise they might as well compare us to dinner theater productions of “West Side Story” (which probably won’t have Latinos in them anyway).

Shirley misses the point when he suggests that we need more than the material about our search for employment and “occasional one-liners about childhood” for “personal references.” When an actor wheels out a three-foot Virgen de Guadalupe sitting atop a Radio Flyer red wagon (an altar), one needs to know that this image speaks volumes to Latino personal experiences and childhood remembrances. Why do we have to spell out such imagery?

Chicano and Chicana playwrights and filmmakers will be dealing with serious issues, such as selling out, for a long time to come, yet according to Shirley, “it’s the serious side of the show that seems a little stale.” Happily, our diverse audiences do not agree.

It seems that when we stray from the overly symbolic magical realism genre that Anglo critics seem to love and understand, we’re perceived as too conventional.

We do not suggest that only Latino reviewers should review Latino shows--though the lack of Latino representation in the Calendar section is alarming--all we are asking for is a little more understanding and sensitivity toward our culture.

We are here to present our work as close to the truth as we can. This is no easy task in this town, where it seems politically correct theater is the current rage. We have never been about that. We slaughter all the sacred cows from both cultures with glee. Our audiences seem gracious and overdue for a little harmless bloodletting.

See letters to Counterpunch, F6.