The Rural as Sites of Political Agency: How the Chicana Literary Play and Women’s Organizing Practices Create Political Agency through Theater

• In Event: On the Uses of Political Theatre

Abstract

Rural space is often distinguished through its opposition with urban space, where the rural is seen as underdeveloped, lacking resources, empty of people and inhabited by nature. On the surface, rural space can be all these things, but the construction of the rural is a complex relationship of developmental processes in which women are key protagonists. To look at how the rural is transformed into a site of politics I employ the use of community theater and established playwrights to reflect on how women are leading political moments in rural sites. This paper looks to Chicana centered plays by playwright Cherríe Moraga in combination with community theater, as a community organizing practice, to examine where politics occurs while also considering how women are changing the spaces in which they are engaged when creating and participating in political acts. The use of female political protagonists parallels the many roles that women enact in their daily lives throughout California’s rural agricultural communities in which they are key leaders in affecting political change. Moraga’s work memorializes real events that occurred over a substantial amount of time in the early 1980s, yet the narrative presented is still relevant today. By bridging the actions of female protagonists within Cherrie Moraga’s rural California plays, to the organizing work of rural community women, I connect how theater informs and empowers female farmworkers and how the female characters in Moraga’s play engage in political acts by examining where in the rural environment the women participate politically. I look to Henri Lefebvre’s and Doreen Massey’s understandings on the production of space to look at how rural spatial formations occur in our modern society and how the inhabitants of the rural defy modernity’s spatial formations through the practices of every day life. Additionally, for the purposes of this essay I will be using Jacques Ranciere’s understandings on politics and political acts to examine the actions of the women throughout the play and the theatrical organizing practices that women engage in daily.

Author

• Erika Ramirez Mayoral, University of California-San Diego