Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt: Watsonville: Some Place Not Here and Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto

by Cherríe L. Moraga

This third volume of plays by Cherrie Moraga confronts the changing California landscape of the 1990s, as anti-immigrant, anti-youth, and English Only legislation sweeps across the farmworker towns and multi-racial urban communities of the state. Both plays were developed through interviews conducted with residents in the two towns of Watsonville and East Palo Alto. Both towns stand in the shadow of the first world culture of the University: East Palo Alto is a poor neighbour of Stanford University south of San Francisco, while Watsonville, further south, has seen the University of California at Santa Cruz devour the nearby Pacific coastline. These plays document the incursion of the white world of power and authority into poor, racially mixed communities. But they are more than reports of the times. In vividly realised drama, Moraga shows the communities mounting their own bold resistance to cultural domination and the threat of economic enslavement. The indigenous and feminist consciousness of the two communities brings them together to struggle against their oppressors, from within and without.

Genres: Plays, Fiction, School, Theatre

175 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2002

About the author

Cherríe Lawrence Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at Stanford University in the Department of Drama and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her works explore the ways in which gender, sexuality and race intersect in the lives of women of color.

Moraga was one of the few writers to write and introduce the theory on Chicana lesbianism. Her interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. There are not many women of color writing about issues that queer women of color face today: therefore, her work is very notable and important to the new generations. In the 1980s her works started to be published. Since she is one of the first and few Chicana/Lesbian writers of our time, she set the stage for younger generations of other minority writers and activists.

Moraga has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award, from the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983, a group which did not discriminate against homosexuality, class, or race. it is the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.

Moraga is currently involved in a Theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award Her plays and publications have won and received national recognition including a TCG Theatre Residency Grant, a National Endowment for the art fellowship for play writing and two Fund for New American Plays Awards in 1993. She was awarded the United States artist Rockefeller Fellowship for literature in 2007.In 2008 she won a Creative Work Fund Award. The following year, in 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[dreamingreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[Brooke Baurer]

Literally no stars- stupid play I had to read for class but it was over 130 pages so I’m counting it as a book

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watsonville is a sequel to Heroes and Saints. While Heroes and Saints deals with pesticide poisoning and health issues, Watsonville follows a cannery strike in the aftermath of a Prop 187-like bill. I can't wait to teach these 2 plays together.