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The Tears of Oppression : Josefina Lopez bases her play, ‘Unconquered Spirits,’ on the ‘Crying Woman’ legend. But in the end, her characters’ fighting spirit prevails.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; <i> T.H. McCulloh writes regularly about theater for The Times. </i>

It is the stuff of legends. Particularly of women. And most particularly of Latinas.

Playwright Josefina Lopez, best known for her Emmy-winning play “Simply Maria,” always wanted to write a story about La Llorona, the “Crying Woman” of Mexican legend. Her play “Unconquered Spirits,” having its world premiere at Cal State Northridge’s Little Theatre, is partly based on La Llorona and partly on Latinas from other eras.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. May 19, 1995 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 19, 1995 Valley Edition Valley Life Page 13 Zones Desk 1 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Wrong name--An actor in a photograph of the play “Unconquered Spirits” at Cal State Northridge was incorrectly identified May 5 in Valley Life! The actor pictured was Anthony Catala.

“The crying woman comes from so many places,” Lopez explains. “You’d have to go back in history. There are so many crying women. I’ve been studying other cultures, Japanese, Chinese. The crying woman is in all of them. So where does she come from? From our fears, I guess.”

Anamarie Garcia, an assistant professor in CSUN’s theater department, is directing this first production of Lopez’s new play. She recalls: “I heard it when I was a little girl. La Llorona was used to scare us as children. They would tell us things like, ‘You’d better go to bed now and be quiet, or La Llorona will get you.’ She was a woman who had killed her children. She drowned them in a body of water. And, of course, we always had a river running somewhere near our home, so we were terrified.”

There are various versions of the story, but Lopez says the version she knew was a love story. During the days of the conquistadors there was a Spaniard and an Indian woman who fell in love, and they had children. He left her, and out of revenge she killed the children. That conquest of territory and women started Lopez thinking.

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“I looked back,” she says, “at the history of Mexico, the conquest, and how thousands of women were raped. That’s what it was. The conquest of one country by another in essence is the rape of all the women, because that’s what they do. Women represent property. So once you rape the women, you tell the other men, ‘Look, look what I’ve done to you. I’ve conquered the most valuable possession you have.’ I wanted to dispel this story, because it romanticized something horrible that happened in our history--this pretty little story.”

Bit by bit the play began to come together in Lopez’s mind, images from the 16th Century, from 1938’s pecan factory strikes in San Antonio, Texas, led by Emma Tenayuca.

It became a tale of women conquered but unbowed and able to stand up and face their futures.

“The story of La Llorona ,” Garcia says, “is manifested through several women, so you experience four different women, and they experience their crying woman within themselves, the story that happens to make them weep. You see that in different time periods.”

The play, which Lopez calls magic realism and refers to as “herstorical” drama rather than “historical,” uses a 12-foot tree as a centerpiece for the staging.

The tree revolves to indicate changes in place and time. Lopez did not write the tree into the stage descriptions. The idea came to director Garcia, and its imagery amazed Lopez. Coincidentally, in 1990 Lopez had made a drawing, a sacrificial symbol of a woman bound to such a tree.

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Lopez says, “The tree represents nature, nature being sacrificed, and nature lasting forever. You cannot destroy nature. It’s the most fragile element, but it’s also the strongest. That’s also what women are. It also represents a phallus, and it’s very militaristic, a cannon. There are many sides to it.”

While she was writing the play, Lopez read a book called “The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico.” She quotes a line from one of Cortez’s letters to the king, in which he asked the monarch not to send more cannons, but rather to send him more friars. That added new insight to Lopez’s dramatic mosaic.

Garcia explains: “Cortez wanted to conquer the people spiritually. If you can kill their spirit then they won’t fight. You don’t need cannon.”

Lopez adds: “If you can convince people they’re worthless, that they should suffer because that’s what God wants, they will never rise.”

Lopez found her own unconquered spirit as she was becoming successful. She couldn’t believe it was happening. She was making more money than her father.

“I just felt,” Lopez says, “that I didn’t deserve it. And then I started to realize that I was putting myself down. I thought, it’s because they beat us down, they broke our spirit. My spirit was conquered. I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ It was one of the spirits that was unconquered, because I realized what had happened. This has been happening for 500 years.”

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Just like the legend of La Llorona . Lopez says the legend has been passed down to oppress women. She says the play shows how people used these beliefs.

Although the play speaks plainly and strongly, the women Lopez is writing about have a fighting, an unconquered spirit.

“All these women that you see in the play,” Lopez says, “they release themselves from the chains of oppression when they realize that they can do something. They can resist. They have a fighting spirit that releases them.”

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Unconquered Spirits.”

Location: Little Theatre, Speech and Drama Building, Cal State Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 14.

Price: $9.

Call: (818) 885-3093 weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and two hours before curtain.

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