A Theater Illuminates an Immigration Battlefield
Can a play called "What Killed Marcelo Lucero?" rescue suburban Long Island from its immigration agonies?
That would be a startling thing to promise, especially if you are a tiny, unknown theater company in Suffolk County and your play does little more than re-enact news events that Long Islanders have argued over to the point of raw exhaustion, if not despair.
The play's author and director, Margarita Espada, makes no promises, slyly warning in advance that she is offering no answers, no remedies, not even an ending.
But even so, the play somehow succeeds where so many speeches and editorials fail. It points, at least, to where deeper understanding might lie and how people might get there together.
I saw it earlier this month at Stony Brook University, a few days after the first anniversary of the night Mr. Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was set upon and stabbed near the Patchogue train station. The authorities say his attackers were teenage boys who had long made a sport of hunting and harassing Hispanic men.
The lights come up on a simple set, where two neighbor families in front of their houses are musing and fretting about their lives.
A white family plans a July Fourth party and complains about the noisy Hispanics next door. The Hispanics worry about finding boarders to help make the mortgage. Neither side talks to the other. The characters speak English or Spanish, but not both.
This is Suffolk, long a hot spot of anti-Latino resentment and poisoned immigration politics. But even there, Mr. Lucero's death was shocking.
Politicians, lawyers and activists clustered before cameras to broadcast sorrow and suggestions. The county executive, Steve Levy, thinking the fuss was all about him and his harsh immigration views, belittled the crime, then apologized.
A year later, the torrent of words has ebbed, but not much has changed. The suspects are in jail. Public meetings have chewed and rechewed the problems of racism and hate, inconclusively. Outside activists have come and gone. Mr. Levy has mostly kept a lid on his anti-immigrant oratory. He says he has been building bridges to immigrants, but he hasn't crossed them. Immigrants' lives are as silent as always.
Into this void has stepped Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja, Ms. Espada's company. Her actors, nonprofessionals from the neighborhood, play aggrieved whites and fearful Latinos, in vignettes of increasing ugliness and tension.
Misunderstandings build. Complaints become harangues. The two sides have no names for each other, just labels: border jumpers, invaders, racists, xenophobes. A politician makes belligerent speeches about the rule of law, the enemies of order. He is not named, but his words are Mr. Levy's.
First words, then hateful actions. We see young thugs raining insults, then blows, on silent Hispanic victims: a woman with groceries, a boy on a bike, day laborers looking for work. The police show up, ask for ID, shrug and leave.
Everybody talks, nobody understands. Then tragedy: Marcelo is stabbed, offstage. A circle of grief forms around his coffin, and then the sign holders are at it again: "Hop the border, break the law!" "Sí, se puede!" And then someone yells: "Stop!" The actors freeze, the lights come up.
It was Ms. Espada. "We don't have an ending," she says.
She invites anyone to offer one. Awkwardness. Silence. Then, one by one, audience members took the stage.
One had the enemies exchange signs. Another led them to pair off, two by two. A young Hispanic man stood up and said he had been attacked by white youths two years earlier. He berated the director for stepping up too late. "This has gone on for eight years," he said. Others had their hands up, but he would not stop talking. It was deeply uncomfortable. But people listened until he was done.
In that pained interval, amid the murmurs and grumbling, a glimmer of hope emerged. A statistic became a person. Humanity intruded on the evening, along with forbearance.
A woman then offered a lesson many people have never learned — about the need not just to speak, but also to listen and to be willing to change.
"You have to want to," she said.
Peter S. López, Jr. aka~Peta
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta51
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