Building Community Through Art & Activism: An Interview with Quiara Alegría Hudes
An Emancipated Stories volunteer letter writing event at New Dramatists. Courtesy of Quiara Alegría Hudes.
Recently, I met with Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and writer Quiara Alegria Hudes in Washington Heights to discuss some of her exciting projects coming this fall, including a new theater production based on her memoir My Broken Language. Quiara took a break from the theater to write her memoir and our conversation revolved around key lessons she learned during this break, such as the importance of linking arts and activism, the power of community making among womxn, and why theater-making and making space is so transformative and necessary. She also shared an invitation to a month-long installation of her Emancipated Stories project addressing mass incarceration at the Signature Theater.
Arlene Dávila: Tell us about your new work and what are you most excited about in your new production in the fall?
Quiara Alegria Hudes: There's a few new things. Artists want to keep themselves challenged, and have variety, right? My book My Broken Language is a coming of age story. It starts with me as a very young child that ends right before I become a professional writer, in my late 20s, but my new play adaptation focuses in on my teenage years, when it's me and my very matriarchal family members, in living rooms together, in Lukumí ceremony together, in celebration together, and just meditating on matters of our bodies, matters of our spirit. And I don't mean that as a metaphor, I mean literally what were our bodies like? Readers connected with the audiobook, which (when I recorded it) almost felt like voicing monologues. So I thought, let me give this a try. The cast is going to be all Latinas who are female identifying. I haven't written a play that is only women, plus it’s multigenerational, multi-body shaped. The other new part is that I'm directing it. I've worked with amazing directors throughout my playwriting career, but the thought that I get to determine what a casting room feels like, and what a rehearsal room feels like is thrilling. I come from a lineage of women who are space makers. My mom's a santera, a living room practice and she made her altars stunning. She was also a reproductive justice advocate in the community; she created a bricks and mortar community center where Latinas could go and get the health services they needed and have the conversations they were curious to have about their bodies, their rights, city resources. Women like my aunt Ginny (Eugenia Burgos) created public gardens, trying to grow calabaza in abandoned lots in North Philly, and it worked! Because I inherit a legacy of women who made spaces, I feel well-trained to make space, not just on the page but actually in the room.
A: I love that. These are very personal characters of family and friends. How are you casting for these roles and are there any surprises in the casting?
Q: I started with the actors who are my artistic family. So two of my all-stars who have originated a number of roles in my work will be joining the cast. Additionally, our casting process begins soon. So I'll get to know lots of actors who I've never met before and see what they bring to certain roles. I don't want it to just feel like an insider's club; I want to know who's out there working now.
The matriarchs who schooled me in space-making. Clockwise from top left: Titi Margie, Titi Ginny, Tía Rosa, Abuela Yuya. Courtesy of Quiara Alegría Hudes.
A: That's fantastic. Tell us what you would say to new generations of Latinx theater writers and every person who wants to get into a business that as we have discussed numerous times is notoriously white and is in the midst of a reckoning. Any advice? What warnings or kernels of knowledge and wisdom would you share with new creators?
Q: For me, it’s two paths you have to walk at the same time. Because you're in an industry whose infrastructure is historically white you have to bring your own personal integrity and innovation into those spaces and while that can be invigorating, it can also take a toll. So you have to be in an ongoing practice of wellness. Even while in the industry’s main channels, you have to create new spaces that haven't existed before, physical gathering spaces for people that don't follow those well-worn industry models. Such work expands the possibilities for our artform. I do them both.
A: Can you provide some examples of how you have maintained balance and created wellness for yourself and others?
Q: During the Trump presidency, I was really unwell. I’m thinking, Am I alone? So I reached out to all the Latina artists that I know to get together and talk about wellness. I sent an email: Does wellness matter to anyone else? And the responses were overwhelming: yes, yes, yes. I said, Okay, I don't want this just to be people I know. So I asked them to invite all the Latina artists they knew too. And we all gathered, creating a new community specifically during that presidency, to talk about our strategies for staying well and not burning out. Turns out the main strategy was the gatherings themselves. We prayed together, we did throat singing together, we meditated together. Marta Moreno Vega came and talked about her work with museum curation and ancestral legacy.
You create spaces as you evolve, and that is where change and connection takes place. Even if I don’t run a space I take accountability for my energy in that space. I decide what energy I'm gonna bring into a room. I'm really intentional about that. I don't like feeling like a guest at someone's table. If I'm in a room, I belong in that room, and I'm going to bring the energy I choose into that room and not let their energy dictate how I'm going to be. That has been helpful to me as a strategy. I try to make it fun, make it a party, even the hard stuff, because that's how I saw my elders do it. They were fighting in Philadelphia, fighting racial profiling and brutality by the Federation of Police, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They were fighting terrible infant mortality rates in the community. These were life and death matters, but I was a kid in those meetings and they knew how to make those gatherings very energized and positive, too. And so I took note, and I try to bring that kind of positive and up energy even into spaces where we're dealing with extremely difficult matters.
A: I love hearing how you draw lessons from activism into the making of art spaces. All of us who are working in art, culture, and scholarship, trying to open up doors, can be inspired by your words. Oftentimes, arts and culture is bogged down by elitism and polite silences, as opposed to what you just described, which is a daring to turn these spaces into prime activism spaces with the energy you bring.
Q: It goes in two directions. We as artists can learn and grow from strategies of community activists, but also we can bring our art practice into activism spaces, like I do with my project Emancipated Stories.
A visit to my cousin Sean Ortiz where we began to dream up Emancipated Stories, pictured with my husband Ray. Courtesy of Quiara Alegría Hudes.
An Emancipated Story by Robert McCracken (written in a Pennsylvania SCI - State Correctional Institution). Courtesy of Quiara Alegría Hudes.
A: Yes, please! Tell us about it.
Q: The Signature Theater (on 42nd Street) has a lobby that's free and open to the public, which I love because theater often feels inaccessible and elitist to residents of the city it's in. Growing up in Philadelphia, I was like, I don't go to theater. Theater is not for us. That's for other people. But Signature’s lobby is free and has a public commons kind of vibe. So I decided I was going to do my project in the lobby. Emancipated Stories is a prison writing project. Incarcerated people write a letter, one page of their life story, and we get volunteers on the outside to write them back, bearing witness to their humanity. It’s an online gallery of all the pages, and every once in a while, we'll do events in person. It started because in the ‘00s I saw my younger cousin getting locked up. Mass incarceration is a huge problem nationwide and as an individual I felt so helpless. What skills do I have to make a difference? I don't have the skills. I don't know how to draft legislation, organize within criminal justice spaces. But it was affecting my life and affecting my family. I was like, the only skill I have is pieces of paper, putting words on paper. My cousin and I were writing letters back and forth, and every time he got a letter from me, I mean, there's my little cousin from North Philly. We never wrote letters to each other growing up. I could tell the letters were good for his mental health. It made his day (inside) easier to get through. And I asked him would other people like to do this? It was a little bit like the AIDS quilt where people around the nation contribute something. It's not a memorial project, obviously. But I grew up in the time of the AIDS quilt. So that was a bit of a model. I was like, I can curate pieces of paper! He was like, yes, that will be so great. So on the inside, he started getting people he knew to submit and it became nationwide. It’s an activism space that came right out of my art practice. And part of what I love about it is it has made me de-center an elitism that can kind of be almost invisible in theater, you know, because it's like, okay, this person, this formerly incarcerated author, they're gonna get up on stage and read a page and then I'm gonna get up on stage and read a page and then, Audience, is there someone who wants to get up on stage and read a page written by someone behind bars? Come join us. It is a communal action.
A: Thank you, Quiara, for your inspiring work and words.
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Emancipated Stories will be exhibited at the Signature Theater in New York City, no RSVP required, from June 29th through July 20, 2022.
For more details and to RSVP for free pop-up events, click here.
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and the geographies of inequality and race. These research interests grew out of her early work in Latinx art and culturally specific museums and spaces in New York City, and have developed through her continued involvement in Latinx advocacy and interest in creative industries across the Americas. She has authored multiple books among them, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics. Learn more here.