An Unexpected Chronicle: The «Other» Latino Theatre in the U.S.

Abstract

This essay focuses on the contribution to the Latino performing arts, in the United States, by members of «other» national groups (Venezuelans, Dominicans, Peruvians, Argentines and so on) who are breaking away from established patterns set by the production of the three major immigration groups: the Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans. The artistic productions of this «new» immigration group occupy a «sensorial space» where different grammars, representing some times dissimilar cultural markers, are intertwined in a juxtapositional manner. Mapping a geographic genealogy becomes complicated as it is evident that one cannot talk about «cultural discontinuities» among other things. Their work is constitutive of an alternative canon, which defi es any simplistic reading or efforts to classify them into a bounded national production, giving way, as we intent to do here, to a more «globalized» critical approach.