Remembering Boyle Heights Runs Until December 16, 2018 at Casa0101
By Dale Reynolds
Everybody has a history of one sort or another. Sometimes long, counted over centuries; sometimes short. So when you live in the neighborhood where you were born, you’re bound to know something about the community that shaped you.
Remembering Boyle Heights Poster Designed by Soap Studio Inc
Take Corky Dominguez, por exemplo. He grew up in near Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles– in an ageing neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles– a large collection of blocks that can easily date itself to pre-Conquistador times when Native tribes such as the Tongva farmed the land near where the flowing rio de Los Angeles fed an agricultural society. Then when Spain conquered Mestizo-America, California was ruled by the military and the padres of México. That is, until the Anglo invasion allowed Southern California to become politically gringo, and the originally named Paredon Blanco (White Bluff), that was later renamed Boyle Heights when it incorporated in 1877. The name after the Irishman Andrew Boyle bought property on which he grew grapes for, as it turns out, a failing winery.
With that, many different cultures took root: East European Jewry, Southern Italian, Japanese farmers, Mexican workers, and Anglo and Slavic Christian shop owners.
Dominguez has worked with respected playwright Josefina Lopez, who founded a Latinx theater, Casa 0101, at First Street and St. Louis Avenue. She found a kindred spirit in Mexican-American Dominguez, an esteemed director, and collaborated on a vibrant theatrical piece of the area: Remembering Boyle Heights (which runs until December 16th, funded by current sporters: Actor’s Equity Foundation, The Herb Alpert Foundation, The California Endowment, The City of Los Angeles, The City of Los Angeles, Dept. of Cultural Affairs, The LA County Board of Supervisors through the LA County Arts Commission and Vernon CommUNITY Fund.
It’s not so much a theatrical play as it is more of a community project, using written and remembered personal histories of individuals and groups who made the neighborhood a flourishing part of L.A. from the late 19th Century until today, where economic changes – not unlike climate-changes – are roiling the established Latinx communities with threats of gentrification-galore.
Running approximately 90-minutes, as a theatrical “event,” Remembering Boyle Heights is inventive, amusing, historical and thoughtful. The play uses a mixture of community folk and professional actors, who interact with a standing audience in order to make the material as fresh and relevant as it can be for this iconic ingredient of East Los Angeles.
Director Dominguez, almost 60, is a fixture in the Latinx Theatre scene. He has co-written and directed many plays in Los Angeles, mostly for CASA 0101. Growing up with a mother who was deaf and a Latino father who was insistent that his children speak only English at home, he was, nevertheless, exposed to the various cultures that formed the area, especially within walking distance of Evergreen Cemetery. “We wanted this project to speak of the fine, personal, memories of the communities that developed here: the family-owned markets, bakeries, barbers, gas stations, etc.”
Remembering Boyle Heights developed over the summer from an outline, as a device that would be fleshed out by an ensemble of local actors. Starting with a table read of the outline, the company added stories that led to the researching and improvisations that excavated the past.
Dominguez had learned much of how to structure the piece from workshops he’d taken with Techtronic Theatre and the ideas behind Devised Theatre from others. “Those experiences helped us explore the basic elements of the material – the moment-to-moment business that shaped it. Then we added music, sound, and masks, to fully extend the mood of the piece.”
That process included an assignment to the Language Barrier Section that looks at young people connecting with their parents over with the difficulty of speaking English vs. their mother tongue. In other words, the language-barriers of the different immigrant families: English at school, native languages at home.
But also where language-barriers took place within the households themselves, where, for instance, a wife is Latina and the husband is Filipino. The child might then be lingually cross-purposes. Also, when a single Japanese mother has to deal with a daughter who brings home an African-American boyfriend for dinner, with the daughter not willing to speak Japanese in front of the young man.
And, take the Jewish families, where Yiddish was the home-language: what’s a boy to do when he wants to date a shiksa on a Friday night – the religious Shabbat?
The play deals with kids who are reluctant to use their native language at all, brought about by problems connected with assimilation. Problems that today don’t exist as most descendants now want to learn the language of their grandparents – encouraged by the schools and the culture as they are.
Dominguez lives in Boyle Heights for a number of reasons, specifically economically.
“I lived in Echo Park and was priced out. In spite of the fact that I don’t speak fluent Spanish, and I’m considered to be a coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside), or a pocho as Mexicans called assimilated Latinx. I’m a Chicano who grew up on the Eastside of L.A. and am gay to boot. But as we age, we move forward if we embrace the past. This production has taught me to celebrate my past – it’s all we know – and to not fear it.”
Lastly in the show, is the subject of gentrification – the buying up of poorer neighborhoods, fixing them up and selling them to outsiders, mainly Anglos.
“Josefina wanted to explore more of that, so we incorporated some pieces she had already written,” Dominguez added. “We’ve set it up as a Town Hall Meeting, where we include the audience. That way, we can look at the bickering and fighting that is currently going on – this allows us to invest in conversations, some aggressive, some accepting. We can be whatever we choose to do, but be informed about your stance. I want us to embrace whatever your community is. For me, the mom-and-pop panaderies, the Sunday dances at Mariachi Plaza, and the local cuisine. The celebration of all that is Latino!
”Hopefully, by accepting who we are as a community, we can fight the outsiders who want to gentrify. I fight by doing my art, by examining gun violence here, for instance. When I work with young people, I teach them about learning what their voices are and how to express them. That is art – the exact opposite of violent acts. And teaching them the value in voting, especially. I’m not discouraged. I’ll make art until I die. And I get to slip in those messages that with art, comes responsibility.”
To learn more about the history of the area, Dominguez visited Evergreen Cemetery and took dozens of pictures of the resting plots of the famous and the unknown citizens of the immediate area.
Actors Megumi Kabe, Ángel Michel Juarez and Raymond Watanga
“There’s always a history to be learned visiting cemeteries. I was astonished to see the departed being Russian, those who were Jewish, African-Americans, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and those with Latin backgrounds. Biddy Mason, a black millionaires, Isaac Hollenbeck and Lankershim, George Ralphs, Van Nuys family, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson are there, as well as tombstones from veterans from the Civil War. Visiting it is to reintroduce history to those who live unknowingly around it.” (Evergreen Cemetery, established 1877, lies at 204 N Evergreen Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90033, near 1st Street and Lorena Avenue.)
Single for the moment, Dominguez admits that his passions come more from being married to the theater, as well as teaching for the past thirty years at various educational schools, such Rio Hondo Community College, the Los Angeles High School for the Performing Arts, as well as interning at Center Theatre Group (CTG), working in their education department, under Gordon Davidson, Jose Luis Valenzuela, Luis Alfaro and Diane Rodriguez. And Dolores Chavez, now of Inner City Arts.
“I also worked in CTG’s costume and prop shop, which taught me a lot and has fed my art. I assisted-directed Jose Luis [Valenzuela] on Luis Valdez’s Bandidos, at the Mark Taper Forum. Now, all this has allowed me the freedom to work at CASA, where I can walk to from home. I don’t make a lot of money and I’m fine with living paycheck-to-paycheck. I’m not ashamed of that – my wealth lies elsewhere,” Dominguez unabashedly admitted. He has worked the last couple of years on the well-attended LGBTQ-related Brown and Out series of one-act plays and skits at CASA, including writing one of the plays.
He’s also more involved with expanding these LGBTQ stories into full plays. “In addition to the play about my friend who was gay who was prepared to kill himself – but didn’t – when I lived in West Hollywood. Inspired by the incredible Dan Guerrero, I want to include all the cultures captured by the letters, including the Trans community, who are finding that their stories are being accepted by the outside audiences, which reinforces for me the need to tell these stories. We must continue to root out these stories of our collective and individual pasts and write them up as serious drama. Always with humor, too, of course.”
Remembering Boyle Heights directed by Dominguez, who is also a co-writer of the show. Cast includes: Michael Berckart (of Los Angeles), Joe Luis Cedillo (of El Monte), José Alejandro Hernandez Jr. (of South Central), Yvette Karla Herrera (of Montebello), Ángel Michel Juárez (of Montebello), Megumi Kabe (of Sylmar), Marcel Licera (of Koreatown), Jackie Marriott (of Inglewood), Roberta H. Martínez (of Pasadena), Allyson Taylor (of Valley Glen) and Raymond Watanga (of Glendale).
Tickets are $20 per person for General Admission; $17 per person for Students and Seniors; and $15 per person for Boyle Heights residents. Discounts for Groups of 10 or more will be available at $15 per person. This show is recommended for all audiences. Casa 0101, 2102 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033. Box Office: (323) 263-7684
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