Barrio Dreams

Selected Plays

By Silviana Wood; Edited by Norma Elia Cantú and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz

SERIES:

The University of Arizona Press

During the advent of Chicano teatro, dozens of groups sprang up across the country in Chicano/a communities. Since then, teatristas have been leading voices in the creation and production of plays touching minds and hearts that galvanize audiences to action.

Barrio Dreams is the first book to collect the work of one of Arizona’s foremost teatristas, playwright Silviana Wood. During her decades-long involvement in theater, Wood forged a reputation as a playwright, actor, director, and activist. Her works form a testimonio of Chicana life, steeped in art, politics, and the borderlands. Wood’s plays challenge, question, and incite women to consider their lot in life. She ruptures stereotypes and raises awareness of social issues via humor and with an emphasis on the use of the physical body on stage.

The play Una vez, en un barrio de sueños . . . offers a glimpse into familiar terrain—the barrio and its dwellers—in three actos. In Amor de hija, a fraught mother-daughter relationship in contemporary working-class Arizona is dealt an additional blow as the family faces Alzheimer’s disease. In the tragedy A Drunkard’s Tale of Melted Wings and Memories, and in the trilingual (Spanish, English, and Yaqui) tragicomedy Yo, Casimiro Flores, characters love, live, die, travel through time and space, and visit the afterlife. And in Anhelos por Oaxaca, a grandfather travels back in time through flashbacks, as he and his grandson travel through homelands from Arizona to Oaxaca.

Part of Wood’s genius is the way she portrays life in what Gloria Anzaldúa called “el mundo zurdo,” that space inhabited by the people of color, the poor, the female, and the outsiders. It is a place for the atravesados, the odd, the different, those who do not fit the mainstream. The people who inhabit Wood’s plays are common folk—janitors, mothers, grandmothers, and teenagers—hardworking people who, in one way or another, have made their way in life and who embody life in the barrio.

[Wood’s] work follows the long, proud tradition of Chicano and Chicana playwrights who incorporate political commentary, social commentary on race relations, bilingual dialogue and ample use of Chicano slang.’—Arizona Daily Star

‘[Wood] es considerada como una genio, pues su narrativa, que en primeras instancias parte de los eventos ordinarios, poco a poco va llegando a caminos inesperados, llenos de trasfondo, reflexión y sensibilidad.’—El Imparcial

Silviana Wood is a celebrated playwright and Chicana activist based in Tucson. She was a member of Teatro Libertad, a collective that emerged in the 1970s as part of the Chicano civil rights movement. Her plays have been performed both regionally and nationally.

Norma E. Cantú is a professor of Latina/o studies at the University of Missouri and a professor emerita at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the author of several books, including Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson's Art of Protest and Promise.

Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz is an associate professor in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Trinity University. She is the author of Wild Tongues: Transnational Mexican Popular Culture.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Chicana Theater and the Plays of Silviana Wood by Norma E. Cantú and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz

The Plays
1. Una vez, en un barrio de sueños . . . / Once Upon a Time in a Barrio of Dreams . . .
2. Amor de hija / A Daughter’s Love
3. A Drunkard’s Tale of Melted Wings and Memories
4. Yo, Casimiro Flores / I, Casimiro Flores
5. Anhelos por Oaxaca / Yearnings for Oaxaca

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