Immigration Stories Play Out in La Víctima
Story by Elizabeth Gonzalez

Last Friday night I walked into the Mexican Heritage Plaza to actually watch a play for the first time in a few years, I embarrassingly admit. The evening started with a panel discussion on immigration entitled, “Today we March, Tomorrow we Vote: The Human Impact of Immigration and Trade Policy.” It was a good entryway into a powerful evening of personal testimonies and cultural history.

Panelist included: Saul Verduzco, an undocumented graduate student; Secundino Cristobal, member of Comite Cesar Chavez; Leticia Bayona, student at University of California Santa Cruz; and Patty Diaz, Executive Director of Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network (SIREN).

They began by sharing their personal stories of what motivated them to get involved in the struggle for immigrant rights in the United States. Secundino, a cook at the Hayes Mansion said that he saw all the injustices and how other workers at his job were unfairly treated. Saul told the audience that his senior year in high school, he was stuck. “While other students were applying to universities I didn't know what to do,” he says. Luckily he had a counselor that helped him get into SJSU, where he got involved in working for the DREAM ACT and he became unafraid to share his undocumented status with other people. Leticia Bayona said she had always wanted to do something, but really realized “how unfair things were” when she interned with SIREN while she was a student at Evergreen Valley College. Patty Diaz shared the history of how SIREN got started as a coalition after IRCA was passed in 1986 to educate the community about the new law and inform new policies in the face of anti immigrant propositions and attacks.

The conversation of moving forward centered on getting eligible residents to become citizens, get voters registered and informed on the issues because Latinos are still lacking in these areas. Saul stressed that the slogan “today we march, tomorrow we vote” was a call to action and that adults need to reach out to the younger generations who were out in the marches, but that might need direction.   Leticia reminded the audience that this isn't just an immigrant issue. In closing she added, “They chip away at immigrants rights because it is the easiest, but then they are chipping away at our civil liberties; it does affect us all.”

I was glad that these folks had a chance to tell their story and I know that conversations like this have an impact and need to reach a wider audience, especially when my friend who attended was inspired to register to vote. He's 27 and a Latino US citizen who never bothered to vote before.

The play was conducted right after the moving panel discussion. Entitled “La Victima,” it is a classic of Chicano theater; developed in 1976 as a collective creation by the Santa Barbara based Teatro de la Esperanza and was one of the first Chicano plays produced internationally. The play is about the journey a Mexican family takes to reach a better livelihood. It follows Amparo Villa as a young girl, leaving Mexico for the first time with the Mexican Revolution pushing her family out. She starts her own family in the states and then is forced to return to Mexico. She is back in the States as an old woman with grown children and encounters the son that was left behind during her repatriation in the 1930's.   The story personalizes the impact of policy and attitudes toward immigrants portraying a family ripped apart by US and Mexican immigration policies that impacted over three million migrants in the Southwest. These are pressing themes that are still relevant to the present time.

Although the play is set in a time before mine, I could recognize the characters as part of my own family. I saw my own mother as a young woman arriving in the states, my father looking for work as a recent immigrant, my uncles picking in the fields, and my own grandmother giving me “la bendición” -- blessing me before any trip. It reminded me of those things that I had forgotten even though it has only been a few years since I've heard them. The play was full of sayings I only hear at home with family and to hear the audience laugh along and shake their heads in agreement left a powerful feeling like they know these characters intimately, too. It made me feel connected to this play in a way that I don't feel when I watch other theater of characters very unlike me.

My favorite lines of the play were spoken from Amparo to her children who are on opposite sides of a union strike. She said something like this, “Your father used to tell me, God loves poor people so much that's why he put so many of us here on earth. But why are the poor like this, separated? And not like this, united?” -- as she brings them closer and places their hands together. It felt like a symbolic point in the play that points to our current situation where there are a lot of slogans of a united people, but we're not quite there yet. I encourage everyone to watch this play for it's valuable content, powerful performances, and support our local community based Chicano theater.

For more information visit our events page or teatrovision.org

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