UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Colonizing and Decolonizing Latinidad with American Theatre

By Ricardo Ernesto Rocha

Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre and Drama

University of California, Irvine, 2019

Professor Daphne Lei, Chair

This study examines representations of Latinidad in American theatre that depict California’s mid-nineteenth-century, colonial transformation from a Mexican state to a US state. Conflicts between Anglo Americans and LatinXs, or individuals of Latin American decent, were sharpened by theatrical illusions of Latinidad, or Latin American culture at large, that portrayed of people of color as backward and vicious. Magical materialism is introduced as a theoretical framework to examine ideological constructions in American theatre that incite the containment and positionality of LatinXs. Theatre facilitated the dispossession of (land) resources from LatinX populations with racial fictions, as assessed with "Joaquín Murieta de Castillo, The Celebrated California Bandit" by Charles E.B. Howe (1858), via David Belasco’s "The Rose of the Rancho" (1906), and with the theatre diaries of Florence Hellman who witnessed Belasco’s Broadway production in 1907. These American plays provide dominant spectatorship with what Patrocinio Schweickart terms a positive

hermeneutic for a utopian, Anglo-dominant paradigm. Mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century formations of magical materialism reveals an antagonistic empathy for LatinXs that has manufactured their ontological status in the US. El Teatro Campesino’s 1981 adaptation of Belasco’s "The Rose of the Rancho" in San Juan Bautista, California, is explored as a cultural decolonizing production through its determination to give voice and interpretive power to LatinXs—a negative hermeneutic that dismantles colonial constructions of gender and race. As a bold contribution to American theatre, El Teatro’s adaptation embraces omnipresent LatinX interpreters and criticism to create theatre not reliant on magical materialist practices.