Latino Festival Seeks to Build Link With Mexico : Stage: Programs at the UC Riverside campus, starting tonight, feature artists from Texas and California along with Mexican performers.

Carlos Morton is about to turn Riverside into the launching pad for Latino culture in the Inland Empire.

His international Latino theater festival, “On the Border/Between Bridges,” bows tonight through Sunday in the Studio Theater on the UC Riverside campus, where Morton is an associate professor. It will be the first such festival of its kind in the area, bringing together performers from Mexico, Texas, San Diego and the Bay Area, with different programs each night, half in Spanish and half in English.

“The idea was to bring Mexican companies and Southwestern companies together to see if the theater can be used as a bridge,” says Morton, a third-generation Mexican-American who spent 1989-90 teaching on a Fulbright scholarship in Mexico. “Sometimes the Mexican and Chicano communities don’t talk to each other. We want to break down the barriers that divide us, to show what we have in common.”

Morton’s theatrical detente is also meant to widen the scope of what is available to Riverside-area audiences. “Our mission is to promote (Latino) culture in the Inland Empire,” he says. “Now people won’t have to drive to Costa Mesa or Los Angeles or San Diego. With the (Latino) population growth, there’s a sizable community here hungry for programming.”

That he’s able to put on such a festival is a sign of the times, according to Morton. “Certainly in hiring me and giving me tenure, the university has given me a mandate to put on multicultural programming,” says Morton, who has been at his post for a year. “And the audience is demanding it.”

Among the festival’s presentations are Texas performance artist Ruby Nelda Perez, whose solo piece, “A Woman’s Work,” dramatizes Chicana poetry; Chicano Secret Service, a young comedy troupe from Berkeley that Morton describes as a “Culture Clash clone”; and the groups Mascara Magica and Punto y Coma from San Diego.

Other highlights include two plays from Mexico--”La Hora de Las Locas” and “Juegos Profanos”--both of which are being sponsored by the Programa Cultural de la Frontera, an arm of the Consejo Nacional de las Artes, which Morton describes as “very interested in disseminating Mexican culture north of the border.”

Given the dramatic rise in California’s Latino population and the current debate--in academic, artistic and journalistic circles--about multiculturalism, “On the Border/Between Bridges” clearly is an event whose time has come. It did not, however, happen overnight.

Morton has been working with similar themes and intents for the span of his career. He is also a playwright, best known for his anthology “ ‘The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales’ and Other Plays,” published by Arte Publico Press. His second collection, “ ‘Johnny Tenorio’ and Other Plays,” is due out this year.

He started his theatrical career in California, including a gig writing for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Morton then spent 10 years in Texas, earning his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin before teaching at the university’s El Paso campus.

After El Paso, Morton spent a pivotal year at the National University of Mexico, during which he wrote a column called “Un Pocho en Mexico” for a Mexican newspaper.

That column, Morton recalls, was a personal reflection on his own cultural odyssey, experiencing the distanced relationships between Mexicans and Americans like himself, particularly in the form of anti-Chicano “racism” on the part of Mexicans.

“I looked at Mexican society, their racism (toward Chicanos) and things like the infiltration of English into their language and society,” says Morton. “After a year in Mexico, I realized how foreign we are to each other. The Chicano can never really go home again.”

Not one to be without his own modest proposal, Morton also raised a few eyebrows with his jocular suggestion that the capital of Mexico should be moved to San Antonio because “it’s closer to the malls” that Mexico’s middle-class shoppers like to frequent.

That provocative essay not only caused a stir, but gained Morton a key collaborator. Eduardo Rodriguez Solis, who works with Programa Cultural de las Fronteras, was the one with whom Morton first envisioned “On the Border/Between Bridges” and Solis now acts as the festival’s Mexican coordinator.

Now that their brainchild is well on its way, Morton says, the two continue to discuss even more ambitious ways to affect a cultural exchange between the two countries.

Most important, says Morton, “We want to have this festival every year, at a different site along the border. Eventually, we want to invite groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and (Vermont’s) Bread and Puppet Theatre. But, for now, we’re focusing on these groups from Mexico and the Southwest, to bring us together and to see if there is a Southwestern aesthetic.”