Meet the Director

SARA GUERRERO (she/hers), a Chicana native of Mexican and Mestizo ancestry, is a professional, versatile theatre artist and educator whose mission is to model, share, and create theatre-making opportunities for and with their community. As the founding artistic director of Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble (www.breathoffire.org), under her leadership, the organization serves as an incubator for voices that have been historically excluded in theater by providing free programming in the guidance in the art of storytelling. Guerrero and the ensemble are artists-in-residence of Grand Central Arts Center of California State University of Fullerton, in downtown Santa Ana. A CalArts alum, she’s been recognized as a "People to Watch'' (American Theatre Magazine), “Best [Artistic] Director” and “Person of Interest” (OC Weekly), As a playwright, her recent coming-of-age, abortion play "Have to Believe We Are Magic” is a finalist winner for Panndora Productions New Plays Festival, Women’s Theatre Festival Occupy 2022, Teatro Vivo's Latinx New Plays Festival, and available through newplayexchange.org

Guerrero, as a freelance director, works all over the country for the professional stage and in higher education. More information, visit: teatroguerrero.com

A little about how the play came to be:

In an interview [1] playwright Luis Alfaro shared with Daniel A. Olivas how he came to write Electricidad. Alfaro, “Someone offered a story about a young woman who had killed her mother because she had put out a hit on her father, who was a drug dealer in the community.” This was through a story circle workshop Alfaro offered and facilitated with teens in a correctional facility through a community based theatre in Arizona. The very same night, at a local bookstore sale, Alfaro purchased a collection of 10 Greek plays which included Electra, the story of a young woman who murders her mother to avenge her father’s death.

“The parallels were amazing. Here is a story over a thousand years old and we are still living in its themes and ideas today. I decided to adapt it as best I could, using most of the same beats, and see if I could bring not only my Chicano self to it, but also a sensibility around L.A. that could live in the play… I grew up in Downtown Los Angeles. In an area called Pico-Union. A very poor and violent neighborhood butting up next to the Convention Center. I was trying to make sense of who I was. I believe a play does that. It allows you to ask questions, like the Greeks do, and the audience has to wrestle with the answer. I always come to a play with a question, a fact, an obsession and then build on my need and desire to answer it for myself in some way.”

The play has been performed in venus and college campuses across the country and now for the first time at California State University of Long Beach.

We hope you enjoy the show.

[1] Four Questions for Luis Alfaro Regarding His “Greek Trilogy” by By Daniel A. Olivas -LARB: Los Angeles Book Review

History of the "chola"

“The “chola”... forged by the marginalized Mexican American youths of Southern California. It embodies the remarkable strength and creative independence it takes to survive in a society where your social mobility has been thwarted by racism. The chola identity was conceived by a culture that dealt with gang warfare, violence, and poverty on top of conservative gender roles…. To understand the significance of the chola subculture, you have to look back at the history of systematic oppression and discrimination that plagued Latino communities in the US. From 1929 to 1944… [the] Mexican Repatriation, the US government forcibly removed around 2 million people of Mexican heritage from the country—more than 1.2 million of them United States citizens… people were snatched from their homes and workplaces and illegally deported. The government's campaign against Mexican Americans continued throughout the century, as 300-plus acres of land known as the Chavez Ravine owned by generations of Mexican Americans were slowly stolen from 1951 to 1961 by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority. The residents were forced to sell their land and their houses were burned as practice sites for the LA fire department. (The land was later used to construct today's Dodgers Stadium.)

It was during the time of Mexican Repatriation and WWII that pachucas, the forebears to the cholas, started to appear on the streets of Los Angeles. Pachucas were the female counterparts to pachucos, the Mexican American teenagers who wore zoot suits with high-waisted pegged pants and long suit coats. Pachucas also had their own nonconformist style of dress. They were a rebel subculture that rejected assimilation into the white, hyper-patriotic spirit of WWII. The pachuco and pachuca style became a signifier for a racialized other and was therefore considered un-American.

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, citywide brawls known as the Zoot Suit Riots took place across Los Angeles and Southern California as white military servicemen began attacking pachucos, who were deemed unpatriotic due to the extra fabric needed to make their clothing, and deviant because of their racial difference. That year, the press called "cholitas" the "auxiliaries of the zoot suit gangs." As depicted in Luis Valdez's 1991 film Zoot Suit and Edward James Olmos's 1992 film American Me, pachucas were also victims of physical and sexual violence during these clashes. Instead of repressing the pachuco culture, these attacks only strengthened the pachucos' desire to resist assimilation into a jingoistic white America that treated brown minorities like second-class citizens. In addition to claiming a non-white womanhood, pachucas also defied gender norms by wearing slacks and sometimes even zoot suits.

…The transition of a predominant pachuca style to a more gang-inspired chola look happened in the 60s and 70s. The chola, the female counterpart of the cholo, was a "working-class, young Mexican American female from the barrios of the southwest with a very distinct aesthetic, style, and attitude.”

The chola aesthetic is the result of impoverished women making a lot out of the little things their families could afford. Many of the early cholos and cholas were the sons and daughters of farmworkers, a group of people exploited at high rates because of their lack of education and their vulnerability as undocumented people. In 1965, the United Farm Workers organization was fighting for a mere $1.25 hourly wage, so expensive brands were not a part of this style. Instead the girls wore cheap stuff like wife-beaters over baggy pants by brands like Dickies, a workwear label sold for cheap at local supermarkets. The style also evolved from sharing clothes with brothers and feminizing the cholo gangster look. Cholas wore their eyebrows thin, their eyeliner thick and black, and their hair teased or feathered, sometimes with tall bangs made stiff with hairspray. They also accessorized with gold jewelry: door-knocker earrings and nameplates or chain necklaces.” [2]

[2] The Folk Feminist Struggle Behind the Chola Fashion Trend by Barbara Calderón-Douglass - Vice April 12, 2015