The Ecologies of Protest in the Theatre of Aztlán

This essay looks at the work of the contemporary Mexican-American woman playwright, Cherríe Moraga. It focuses on two of her plays which were produced during the mid-1990s entitled Heroes and Saints and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, although other plays from this period, such as Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto, also appear in the study. The plays are based on Moraga’s responses to certain environmental and historical events which took place in California during this period. I explore how each work stages environmental protest in ways that reinscribe gender, myth, and indigeneity. In particular, I explore how Moraga recreates on stage utopian and dytopian and past and present landscapes, and how she stages feminist protest in response to both the levels of pesticides used in large-scale agricultural farming and the exploitation of the workers.