Paul E. Turtola
by Walter Kerr
Some points to consider, and questions to ask as you write your play. The author is a famous author, playwright and former theater critic for the New York Times.
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1. Write, don’t think.
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If you think about your work too much it will only make it more theoretical and analytical. Try to write down your images and ideas first, as many as you can, and then summarize them when you have finished.
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2. What do you want your play to say?
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Is it a problem play, that offers no solution?
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a thesis play, which answers a problem?
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or a propaganda play, which urges the audience to do something about the problem by accepting your solution?
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3. Is your play about specific details of particular characters, or are ideas more important than the people in the play?
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4. What events take place in your play that will make an audience sit up and take notice?
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5. Is your play based on someone else’s work, or were you influenced by a particular style of writing?
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6. Do your personal, moral or religious beliefs influence the content of your play, or are you neutral regarding the issues it contains?
Section 3: Immigrant Stories
The third portion of the course will introduce students to the stories of immigrants. It will present the struggles Puerto Ricans and other nationalities have to go through to achieve success in the United States. Time will be spent on reading about a particular immigrant’s account of their move to this country with focus on Chavez’s three phases, separation, transition and incorporation, mentioned earlier, and described in more detail, here.
Esmeralda Santiago’s autobiographical novel,
When I Was Puerto Rican
, is an excellent first person account of an 8 year old’s growth towards puberty, or
casi senorita
. Many students will enjoy reading shared experiences, from a remarkable individual, truly as strong a role model for kids as there could be. Esmeralda, or Negi, as her family calls her, struggles with seemingly everything, fighting with her sisters, listening to her parents argue, constant moving according to who was angry with who, an ever growing family. While her story includes seven children, she eventually would be the eldest of eleven! Many of these struggles are evident in today’s New Haven student, and the class should easily relate to Negi’s plight.
For non Puerto Ricans, the combination of Marques and Santiago’s works will shed a clearer light onto the culture and tradition of the Puerto Rican people. Both compliment each other in that they share images and events with very clear detail. An understanding of the food, climate, music, and way of living is represented very well in both novel and play.
By studying the Santiago piece, students may choose to write a play adaptation of the novel, or write their own play dealing with another set of experiences. Students may be able to conceptualize the plots of their play assignment from following the Marques and Santiago readings we do in class, but a freedom to create independent concepts should be allowed by the teacher. While realistic plays will be written by a majority of the class, there may be more abstract writers who grasp the material, yet interpret it differently. This manner of expression, though offbeat, should be encouraged, and students should be allowed to produce any style of play they wish.
As a guideline, teachers should encourage students to write along a three part, or three act form, using the lessons on Chavez’s three phases of territorial passage; separation, transition and incorporation. By this I mean his three elements of the immigrant’s process of moving. Seperation deals with reasons why a member of a family moves away from the home country, transition describes the hardships incurred in the actual move, and then the difficulties of becoming accepted into American society, or incorporation, as he states it caused by an immigrant’s status through the eyes of the community. Teachers should read the Chavez book, taking careful notes on the personal and social aspects of these passages.
The students’ plays should begin by introducing the main characters, relatives and friends. The opening act or scene should involve their decision to move away from their present home toward an eventual migration to the United States. The description of the characters’ feelings towards a decision to move should add tension and provide conflict to the work. Students should include the opposing views of those against any attempt to move away to provide confrontations that may clearly define the reasons to move to support their argument. The young playwrights should add other information to develop the plot and characterization by writing about economic status, religious beliefs, health, and other characteristics of wanting or needing to move, that the family may have. Was separation considered due to an attraction for the United States, or the repulsion of the present way of life in their homeland? Were the characters in the play willing voyagers to the US, or were they forced to pull up stakes and move, an action so many kids have experienced over and again? These questions should be introduced to the students as they conceptualize their projects.
In
The Oxcart
, the family separates for economic reasons. Facing eviction off their farm, Luis takes his family away from the land and seeks his fortune through technocratic forms of industry, a product of the American colonization efforts in the 1950’s. Esmeralda’s family, in
When I Was Puerto Rican
, moves from Macun to El Mangle, then to San Juan, back to Macun, then Sabana Grande for many reasons. Many of the moves were to upgrade economic conditions, but many were made as Mami attempted to escape from Papi (her names for her parents). The sometimes bitter parental feud ignites the need to migrate away from a life of sadness and poverty.
The need to improve and succeed in the United States has an enormous influence on future movers to this country. Separation becomes a force in the development of the family, for most members believe it will improve the conditions of their kin. Some family members though, feel differently, and thus conflicts may arise as the family begins their arduous migration to the new country.
Separation of a family may also have an influence on neighbors and friends who ponder such a move away from their village, or barrio. The success stories heard about the immigrating family may sway another to take the risk and move:
‘If things go well there, write.’
The clear implication of this refrain is that if things go poorly, the immigrant should not add this to the historical record and perhaps more to the point, should think twice before returning. In this way the successes of immigrants become mythologicized and serve to encourage additional immigration. By contrast misfortunes are frequently minimized, even buried.
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In
A Visa for a Dream
, Patricia Pessar writes a number of accounts dealing with separation of both legal and illegal immigrants, from the Dominican Republic to New York City. Some of her accounts of Dominicans may be helpful to those students who choose to write plays about other immigrants of other nations, particularly those who have the additional burden of entering the country illegally. Here are two accounts that may help students in their search for an immigrant story that uses the three phases learned from Chavez:
Gustavo, a restaurant worker in New York City, was considered both “a perpetrator and object of the myth of success.”
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After returning to his homeland, a parade was held, with the villagers honoring him as the town’s first immigrant, whose instant success in New York became an inspiration for all Dominicans considering a move there. It didn’t matter that Gustavo didn’t really own the restaurants he would tell people about (he worked in them, actually), for despite his stories he was deemed a legendary figure for his apparent financial windfall, while others continued their lifelong struggle with poverty. The fiction of success is then maintained so that others may be inspired by stories of fame and fortune; these serve to encourage others to move on and seek improvement to their own lives.
The story of Willy and Lidia is surely the makings of good drama, and should help students that wish to write about the adventures of undocumented immigrants and their tougher struggles to make America home. The story’s pioneer, Willie Ramirez, was a furniture store owner who, beset with debt from his creditors, and mounting mortgage payments for his middle class house, decides for the betterment of his family, to move to New York. The story describes how Willie buys an illegal visa, transfers all of his assets to establish credit, then begins his destiny to move his entire family to the US. His story is fascinating, because he must find a way to regularize his legal status in order to begin the process of sponsoring family members and obtaining visas for them. His “business marriage” becomes an ordeal, and sacrifices are made to ensure his family’s immigration to this country. He waits years before he can divorce, then remarry his Dominican spouse, and then slowly, he begins the process of bringing over his children.
These examples of different families’ separation, wanting a better life, leaving loved ones (and unloved ones), escaping from creditors, are all realistic choices that students may want to write about when they develop the plots of their plays. The students may select any of the accounts presented in class from our readings, to tell the tale of an immigrant’s move from one place to the next. These stories may either be read to the students aloud, or they may be handed out as reading assignments. The teacher should have an ample supply of stories that deal with separation from all types of sources, and freely read them in class or hand them out for home reading.
Once the students’ plays have introduced the characters and have presented their desire to separate, a large part of the content should cover the transition that occurs before any actual move is made to a destination.
In
The Oxcart
, the family suffers from their stay in La Perla, a rundown, dirty slum in Old San Juan, and it makes life unbearable for its inhabitants. Dona Gabriela, trying to keep her family together, struggles with her children’s exposure to the perils of urban life. She complains about her younger son’s laziness, his penchant for staying away from home, “to go to the movies” with money that comes from who knows where. She is ashamed of his unwillingness to go to school or contribute to the family financially, and finds out he smokes, to boot. She is annoyed at her daughter’s absence from the home as well, and disapproves of the time she spends at a friend’s home listening to the soap operas on the radio. Gabriela shows her weariness towards La Perla, its stinking ocean smells, noisy jukebox from the bar in the alley, and wishes for the day her son decides to move away.
In Santiago’s novel, she becomes frustrated also, by her painful situation. She endures the smell of the raw sewage that streams underneath her stilted San Juan house, and is repulsed by the vomit and urine that is found outside her front door each morning on the way to school, the product of that evening’s drunkards from the adjoining bar. She must also tolerate the jukebox music and raunchy singing of the bar’s patrons nightly.
Esmeralda’s transition is spent waiting for her mother to take her, and she is forced to live apart from her father and sisters in the home of her uncle and his family. This family of Evangelical followers, made her situation even more difficult when they forced her to work each day for the family’s market, and seemingly forced her to practice their religion by giving up the music and other niceities she was used to enjoying. She describes her transition as one of a loveless, distrusting time when she thought everyone had given up with her. She was certain her life was a failure, with little or no hope for success.
In Leo Chavez’s book,
Shadowed Lives
, the writer describes the very dramatic experiences that Mexican and other Central American migrants suffer in order to get into the United States:
Despite the bravado and joking that some (especially successful migrants) express about the experience, crossing the border is not a frivolous undertaking. The journey poses risks, the least of which is apprehension by the Border Patrol. Border crossers face the ever-present possibility of being robbed, raped or killed by a border bandit. . . . .And yet hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, take that risk to seek work or find relative safety in the United States.
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Many of the readings that students may use to learn about separation , transition and incorporation are available in Leo Chavez’ book,
Shadowed Lives
. Copies of the accounts should be made available to them, or the teacher may read different accounts piecemeal during classtime.
One of Chavez’s interviews recalls the transitional story of a married couple from El Salvador. Leaving her three young children behind, Maria Favala and her spouse embarked for the United States by treacherously crossing many borders before crossing the final one into California. She tells of how, after leaving a train that had taken them into Mexico, the police had stripped them naked, and at gunpoint, took all the money they had. While disheartened, the couple was still determined to finish their journey, and scrounged for food and received help from other travelers like themselves. After a series of freight train rides as stowaways, they arrived at the US border. With the help of a paid guide, or coyote, they made their way across the border, and into a camp to join her father in law, where they could begin working and earning enough to bring over the remainder of the family.
These varied accounts of transition will help students decide on how their plays will take shape, and provide the direction that their stories lead. Some may wish to write about the pain and suffering of the waiting periods of moving, and yet others may write about the arduous task of the eventual move itself. The second act or scene should contain the rising action and possibly the climax of their plots. It will be interesting to read which plays have the characters succeeding in their migration, or which ones have the families failing in their attempts, and face the consequences of the risk and danger.
The final act or scene in the writings will need to contain parts of the incorporation into American life that the family develops. Or if the family fails to incorporate, what they do about such a situation. Marques’ family in his play finds it very difficult to incorporate into the ways of the inhabitants of New York. They do not enjoy the cold, gray skies of a noisy metropolis, and find it disappointing to have to eat traditional foods from a tin can. While they earn more money, and spend it on items of comfort and luxury, they feel the need to leave when an offer to return to the farm is made. Of course the family’s decision is quickened upon the accidental death of their own pioneer, Luis.
Esmeralda Santiago, however, paints a much more positive story, and it is here that the two works differ, yet still compliment each other in our study of immigration. While we witness the failure of a jibaro family to easily mesh into an urban American lifestyle, we are also fortunate to be enlightened by a woman’s success story. Santiago incorporates into the American culture, and provides others with a pathway towards future Puerto Rican success stories. Her ability to seek opportunities and excel at her challenges are a marvel to experience. As she graduates from the High School for the Performing Arts and then Harvard University, we see a jibaro whose talent, determination and spirit conquers problems and difficulties and she achieves a high standard of living that remains a source of pride for herself and her family.
Finally, in Chavez’s book, he writes that incorporation of Mexican immigrants has two ends that are part of a continuum: those that leave the United States, like the Marques family, and those that stay, like Esmeralda does. He cites the reasons of people failing to incorporate as having to do with loneliness of a missing imprisoned spouse or absence of children, as well as a failure to grasp the use of English to communicate to outsiders. Many Mexicans do stay, learn the language fluently, befriend others, and form social networks that enable them to establish homes in Southern California. In time, these incorporated immigrants become part of the community, though looked on as outsiders, they still contribute to the community and are active politically as well as socially.
These important lessons describing separation, transition and incorporation will give structure to each student play, as well as teach them how many people share the situations they encounter on a nearly daily basis. By using the various forms of literature introduced in this unit, as well as other contemporary resources such as newspapers and the Internet, plenty of material may be presented to reinforce the ideas put forth in the creation of a written drama. Many options lay open to the student in terms of what their play should be. They may choose to follow the plots of the play we read in class, and write an adaptation of the novel, or a play may include elements of another immigrant group, with material from other available readings and research done in the library or at home. While the results of the course’s lessons on playwrighting and immigration will produce a written piece of dramatic literature, the process of writing such works will be emphasized. It will be geared towards the presentation of the various stories of immigration to this country we call the United States of America.
Classroom Materials
Students should be supplied with a copy of Rene Marques’
The Oxcart
and Esmeralda Santiago’s
When I Was Puerto Rican
. Copies of articles and chapters from other published books will be distributed when appropriate. It will be important for each student to keep a notebook so that over the duration of the course, drafts of the final project, a written immigration drama, will be produced.
