This panel considered the significance of representing Latinx and Latin American stories, temporalities, cosmogonies, movements, sounds, and bodies, on stages within the United States. Georgetown University Professor of Performing Arts and African American Studies Anita Gonzalez was joined by George Washington University professors Manuel Cuellar and Elaine Peña, along with Abel Lopez, the associate producing director of GALA Hispanic Theater. The conversation was moderated by University of Miami Professor Christine Arce.
Featuring
Anita González is a professor of performing arts and African American studies at Georgetown University and a co-founder/co-director of their Racial Justice Institute. Her edited and authored books are Performance, Dance and Political Economy (2021), Black Performance Theory (2014), Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (2010), and Jarocho’s Soul (2004). She directs, devises and writes theatrical works that focus on telling women’s stories and histories. She has written works for Boston Opera Collaborative, Chicago Dramatists, The Vagrancy, Brooklyn Tavern Theatre, and Houston Grand Opera’s Songs of Houston series. Her innovative stagings of cross-cultural experiences have appeared on PBS national television and at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, The Working Theatre, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, New York Live Arts, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and other national and international venues. Gonzalez believes the art of storytelling connects people to their cultures. Over 40,000 students have taken her massive open online courses Storytelling for Social Change and Black Performance as Social Protest on the Future Learn platform. She is a member of the National Theatre Conference and the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and sits on the board of directors of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Gonzalez advocates for beautiful art crafted for social activism and consciousness raising.
Manuel Cuellar is assistant professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx literatures and cultures in the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures (RGSLL) at George Washington University. He focuses on Mexican literary and cultural studies with an emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality. His research primarily engages questions of performance, especially as they concern dance, indigeneity, and Afro-mestizo imaginaries in Mexico, combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and studies of contemporary and classical Nahuatl, Mexico’s most widely spoken and written Indigenous language. Cuellar’s strong background in Mexican traditional dance has led him to explore dance’s role in Mexican national identity, indigeneity, and queerness in Mexico and the United States. His forthcoming book, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation (UT Press 2022), reveals how written, photographic, cinematographic, and choreographic renderings of a festive Mexico highlight the role that dance has played in processes of citizen formation and national belonging, from the late Porfirian regime to the immediate post-revolutionary era (1910-1940). His work has appeared in Performance Research, A Contracorriente, and Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature.
Elaine Peña is currently an associate professor of American studies at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. with Northwestern University in 2006 and accepted postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Yale University. Peña is the author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (2011) and ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the U.S.-Mexico Border (2020) and the editor of Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (2005). Her interdisciplinary research has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and has been funded widely, including by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy.
Abel Lopez is an associate producing director of GALA Hispanic Theatre and treasurer of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. He is a former chair of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and immediate past chair of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC). He is a past president of the Helen Hayes Awards, the Performing Arts Alliance, Leadership Washington, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Theater Communications Group, the national service organization for professional theaters. Lopez is also past chair of the Creative Communities Initiative of the Community Foundation of the National Capital Region. Lopez is also a member of the Boards of Directors of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, NALAC, In Series, and Black Women Playwrights Group. He is a member of the Kennedy Center community board, Latino Advisory Board of the Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, and Advisory Committee of the Playwrights Forum. He has directed productions at GALA, Horizons Theatre, DC Arts Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Source Theater, and IN Series in Washington, DC, as well as many other theaters across the nation. His productions have also been presented in Venezuela, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Cuba. In 1991, Lopez was named a Washingtonian of the Year.
Christine Arce (moderator) is an associate professor at the University of Miami in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and she received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008. She works on issues of gender, migration, and non-Western epistemologies in the cultural production of Mexico, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Her book, Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (2017), explores the long obviated contributions of women and Afro-Mexicans to Mexican culture and history; it has a dedication by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, winner of the Cervantes Prize. Mexico’s Nobodies was the recipient of the 2016 "Victoria Urbano" book prize issued by the Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies (formerly the International Association of Feminine Literature and Culture), the 2018 Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacks Prize for best book in Latin American studies, and garnered the honorable mention from the American Folklore Society for its contributions to the study of Mexican folklore. She has published in journals such as Callaloo, Chasqui, Aztlán on the role of the Mexican corrido as a counterhegemonic discourse in the U.S. Southeast, on the writings of Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN, as well as on the underlying indigenous cosmology in the novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. In fall 2017 Arce was invited to present her book in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, and in October 2018 she was invited to speak on her work on Afro-Mexican women at the National Museum of Anthropology in México City.