The Stage is on Fire: The Bronx is Burning in Firehouse and Happyland

• In Event: From Cafés to Conflagrations: Re/Mapping NuyoRico Beyond Los Barrios

Abstract

The radical gentrification of New York City, an emergency for displaced Latinos of once heavily dominated barrios, continues to serve as a rallying cry for Nuyorican Generation 3.0 playwrights. Situated as the last bastion of urban Latinidad, the Bronx is often dramatized as both post-apocalyptic wasteland and cultural signifier of latinized communitas. Dana Farrington has noted that “In the raging 1970s, New York City was dangerous, broke and at times on fire” while scholar Frances Negrón-Muntañer has described the city as a space where Latinos needed to “own and occupy the street.” The precarious plight of post 9/11 Bronx neighborhoods has become synonymous with the infamous insurance fraud schemes of the 1970s -- in short, “the Bronx is still burning.” In the plays Firehouse and Happyland, playwrights Pedro Garcia and Rob Santana dramatize Latino –centric neighborhoods as politically neglected war zones of spontaneous human combustion. Garcia’s Firehouse chronicles the stark realities of burnt out tenements and the Anglo firefighters who are “trapped” in a socio-economic battle for the neighborhood. Happyland, a reconstruction of the tragic events of the 1990 social club fire which claimed 87 lives, allows Santana to reflect on the exclusionary tactics of wealthy slumlords who devalue the life of recent immigrants to the borough. I argue that these Nuyorican Generation 3.0 playwrights depict “inferno” as a metaphor for the dehumanization of the Latino community by corrupt political systems and greedy real estate enterprise.

Author

• Jason Ramirez, SUNY - Suffolk