"Esquizofrenia Puertorricensis" by José (Papo) Márquez: A Response to the "Precariedad" of Being Puerto Rican

• In Event: Precarious Settings, Intervening Performances

Abstract

In this presentation, I will discuss the popular theatre practitioner, Puerto Rican playwright José (Papo) Márquez (1952-1988), whose trilogy, "Esquizofrenia Puertorricensis," "La terapia," and "Amordio," explores the economic, social, psychological, emotional, and linguistic "precariedades" that Puerto Ricans face inside of their colonized and marginal reality. Márquez's life and drug-related death from AIDS in 1988, at age 36, embodies the precariousness of living in contemporary Puerto Rico and its historical struggle to survive the Americanization process of acculturation and assimilation, where drug abuse is a tragic response to these daily pressures. Márquez takes his emblematic play, "Esquizofrenia Puertorricensis," a Puerto Rican "Marat/Sade," to the streets and towns of Puerto Rico, to its hospitals, union halls and school yards, as well as to El Barrio of NYC and theatre festivals in Spain and Portugal. Of particular interest is the audience response to seeing their own crushing reality enacted by inmates from a mental institution who dramatize Puerto Rican alienation through bomba y plena music. "La terapia" and "Amordio" explore the inherent violence in Puerto Rican society. We see societal violence depicted in "La terapia" when a young hoodlum therapy patient kidnaps his psychiatrist and finds that she has an arsenal of guns that rivals any criminal’s. We see social and psychic violence in "Amordio," where a love/hate mother/son relationship is portrayed as dangerous, transgressive, unstable: in a word, "precaria." Márquez’s theatre presents the possibilities that performance offers to reveal, denounce, combat and alter exclusionary and divisive forces.

Author

• Gloria F Waldman, CUNY Graduate Center, York College