Que vivan los muertos!

Que Vivan Los Muertos! Was developed after a series of workshops with Latino immigrant students and emerging artists who inspired the style and the aesthetic proposition of the play.
Our goal was to open a space for emerging Latino artists, the Latino community in general and others interested in Latino culture and its relationship with U.S. culture to explore and debate social and historical issues in a poetic celebration of diversity and of the struggles of immigrants for freedom.
The Play is an exploration of the songs and stories that are behind immigrants that cross the border every day persecuted by oppressive political realities like police brutality, army sponsored death squads, or simply of those escaping from hunger and poverty. The play relates the adventures of Francisco Villa, (a fictional son of the legendary Pancho Villa), in the town of Malasangre (Bad blood) in the Mexico/U.S. border right before World War II and his struggle as a union leader against foreign economic interests and banks that in complicity with a corrupted Mexican government and rural police profit from workers' exploitation.
The story begins when Francisco, escaping from the Malasangre police jail, seeks shelter in the house of Doña Lupe who is an old "soldada" (female soldier) from the Mexican Revolutionary times, and an ex-lover of Pancho Villa himself. In his journey Francisco falls in love with Doña Lupe's goddaughter, Rosita, and encounters incredible characters like the "payasas ladronas" (Thief jesters) who sing a very bad opera impersonation of Queen Isabel of Spain in the public square and ridicule the ruling classes' taste for European art in a grotesque act of revolutionary feminist clowning. The story unfolds in many directions, exploring issues of gender and others like rural religious superstition, folklore, and indigenous traditions. In the end Francisco is killed by Mr. North, and Doña Lupe's goddaughter, Rosita, who is also Francisco's "novia" or fiancé, escapes from the Police to cross the U.S. border as a "espalda mojada" or "wetback".
Que Vivan Los Muertos! Was written in rhymed verse and uses the language of the rancheras (a popular form of Mexican folk song) to build a style that can best be described as "circus-theatre-ranchera ". Although the story itself is fiction, it is inspired by the experiences of thousands of immigrants that have faced and still face inhuman working conditions like those of the Maquiladora ("Sweatshop' workers in the so called "Free” Trade Zones that emerged as a consequence of the NAFT A. (Many maquiladora workers are still not allowed to form unions, and are obliged to work 12 to 16 hours a day at 0.36 cents an hour in prison-like facilities that recreate a modern version of institutionalized slavery.
The play uses humor and magical realism to ridicule and expose the inconsistencies of the discourses of Mr. North and Sargento Malanoche which respectively represent foreign business interests and the Mexican Government. Rancheras have been traditionally used to tell the untold stories, the "History" from the perspective of oppressed people, and in many cases is used as a tool to denounce injustices and abuses that can't be talked about otherwise (a kind of clandestine oral newspaper). In that sense our goal was to recreate some of these popular strategies of resistance as tools to question and debate "post-modem" imperialist practices and Neo-Colonial practices that are still pervasive in our societies allover the Americas.