We, The People

This is the time of year when many journalists publish their "Top Ten" lists. For some, this ritual involves taking the time to look back on the year's events to decide which performances impressed them the most, which movies they really loved, which events stood out for their political and/or social importance, and which people did the most spectacular job of publicly humiliating themselves.

It's also the time of year when morbidity and mortality take center stage. Flu season takes its toll, severe weather causes unexpected deaths, and newspapers and nonprofit organizations run fundraising drives to help the needy. As with year-end "Top Ten" lists, many media outlets create a segment dedicated to celebrities, artists, athletes, and politicians who died during the calendar year. Some might classify such lists as "a dark and dirty job, but someone's got to do it." Other, more cynical souls, may view the exercise as a way to build a column throughout the year that they can schedule for publication after they head out for the holidays.

In many cases, a person's death leaves people wondering about the secrets that may have accompanied the decedent to the grave or crematorium. In others, a frustrating lack of information may be the result of protective publicists and family members, or a person who aggressively protected their privacy. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda stressed the importance of who gets to tell the story that will become the default interpretation of a person's life or the history they created.




Thanks to the dramatic power of magical realism, some fictional characters get to speculate about how, when, and where they will meet their fate. For selfish, fearless libertines like Mozart's Don Giovanni that might not be a big concern. But for people who went through life trying to micromanage their public image (or those subject to a deathbed conversion), wondering how they will be remembered can be a troublesome thought.



For those who remain in awe of how long they managed to survive and how wondrous an experience their life has been, there is a sense of magic in celebrating their journey from cradle to grave.


In an age when authenticity, privilege, and accountability drive some narratives, two tales of minority characters (one real, one fictional) recently took on added dramatic weight.

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Ninety years have elapsed since the February 23, 1929 premiere of Redskin, a film directed by Victor Schertzinger (a former concert violinist and composer of film scores) based on a story by Elizabeth Pickett Chevalier. For technical and sociological reasons, the film was way ahead of its time.

• The sheer physical isolation of some Navajo and Pueblo settlements during the 1920s allowed the filmmaker some spectacular location shoots. Although it was originally planned to film Redskin entirely in color, the cost-cutting decision to film scenes set in the white man’s world in black-and-white highlighted the stark differences between desperate and greedy white men and native tribes with a strong cultural tradition. As a result, nearly 75% of the film was shot in Technicolor while the remaining scenes ended up with a sepia tint. The final six minutes of Redskin were originally shown in Magnascope (an enlarged-screen projection novelty that boasted a synchronized film score and sound effects).
• Locations for the school shots included the Chinle Indian Boarding School near Canyon de Chelly and the Sherman Indian Institute in Riverside, California.
• Following hot on the heels of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's groundbreaking 1927 musical, Show Boat (which featured an interracial marriage), Redskin's romantic subplot focuses on the love affair between Wing Foot (Richard Dix), a Navajo male who grew up on tribal land in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, and Corn Blossom (Julie Carter), the Pueblo woman he meets while attending an Indian boarding school. Because she grew up on the mesa of the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico (and the Navajo and Pueblo Indians are bitter enemies), their love is considered taboo.

Poster art for 1929's Redskin

Compared to many Westerns that followed the silent era, Wing Foot’s backstory is remarkably rich. His mother died during childbirth because her village’s medicine man, Chahi (Bernard Siegel), refused to let her be treated by a white physician. Because Wing Foot is the son of Chief Notani (George Regas), he has been kept hidden by his family in order to protect him from being taken away to an Indian boarding school where he will be taught “the white man’s ways.” When a villainous white man named John Walton (Larry Steers) finds the boy hiding under some blankets, Chief Notani relents and tells his son (who has been tutored in tribal customs by Chahi) to return to his village as an Indian when he finishes school.

Wing Foot gets off to a rough start at the boarding school when Walton orders the boy to join his classmates in saluting the American flag. After the child refuses to obey, Walton (a stern disciplinarian) opts to break the boy’s spirit by publicly whipping him, which earns Wing Foot the embarrassing nickname of “Whipped One.” Walton’s fiancée, Judith Stearns (Jane Novak), is so repulsed by what she has witnessed that she tells Walton she wants nothing to do with him until he understands how wrong he was to whip the boy.

Poster art for 1929's Redskin

Several years later, Wing Foot is a university student back East who, having rejected tribal medicine, is studying the “white man’s science” so he can return to his people as a physician and improve the health of his fellow Navajos. After his skill as a long distance runner makes him the star of his college’s track team, Wing Foot is rudely reminded that his [white] fellow students only tolerated him because he was considered to be a valuable asset for the school.

Upon Wing Foot's return home, Chief Notani rejects his son for adopting the white man’s ways. After being banished from the village, Wing Foot becomes an outcast, living alone in the desert where, as fate would have it, he’s sitting on top of an oil field. When two white prospectors arrive (with Walton as their guide) and try to jump his claim, Wing Foot runs to the claim office. The impressive plot twists which allow Wing Foot to wed Corn Blossom, bring peace to the two warring tribes, and facilitate Walton’s redemption end the film on a much happier note.

Richard Dix stars as Wing Foot in 1929's Redskin

While much progress has been made in recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples who populated North America long before Europeans began to settle on our shores, it is only within recent decades that the brutal aggression against Native Americans and governmental attempts to destroy their indigenous cultures have been subjected to media review. Resistance to the fossil fuel industry's efforts to run the Dakota Access Pipeline through tribal lands containing ancient burial grounds on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian reservation made headlines through much of 2016-2017 (the pipeline was seen as a threat to drinking water, historic cultural sites, and indigenous sovereignty). In his program note, Scott Simmon explains that:

“By the late 1920s, debate about the relationship of Native Americans to the dominant society was reaching a turning point, as reflected in the 900-page Interior Department report published in 1929 as The Problem of Indian Administration (as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that year, Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy, another story of the troubled effects of civilization on a Navajo). Government policy since the end of the Indian Wars in the 1880s had been unwaveringly in support of ‘amalgamation’ of Native Americans into mainstream white society, alongside ‘allotment’ of tribal lands to individual Indians -- a policy that culminated in the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. But after the horrors of World War I (in which some 17,000 American Indians fought), a contrary view was also rising in which European civilization had evident limits and tribal groupings had values worth preserving, if under a modern corporate governance model.”

Poster art for 1929's Redskin

“The Problem of Indian Administration acknowledged an idea previously heretical in government reports: that some Indians did not wish to integrate into white society but instead sought to ‘preserve what they have inherited from their fathers.’ New possibilities for saving tribal cultures found federal support when President Hoover did what he rightly called a ‘thorough house-cleaning’ of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the spring of 1929, shortly after the release of Redskin. Central to the film is the choice between assimilation and separatism that all Indians, as newly recognized U.S. citizens, faced especially in these years. In Redskin, Wing Foot’s education makes him rootless in two cultures.”

Richard Dix (Wingfoot) and Julie Carter (Corn Blossom)
in a scene from 1929's Redskin

With live accompaniment from the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Redskin proved to have much greater depth than the Westerns that filled cinema screens during my youth. You can watch the entire film in the following video:

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In June of 2015, when Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States, he claimed that “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Although the blazing bigot who recently became the third American President to be impeached made no mention of young Mexican boys aspiring to become poets, playwrights, performers, and go-go boys, San Francisco's Epic Party Theatre Company has gone all out to fill the gaping void with the world premiere of Love in the Time of Piñatas. Written and performed by Baruch Porras-Hernandez and directed by Richard A. Mosqueda, this show deals with immigrant guilt, customized donuts, and the challenges of negotiating a truce between a precocious queer adolescent and his macho Mexican father.

Corey Baker, Baruch Porras-Hernandez,
and Christopher Garay-Perez in a scene from
Love in the Time of Piñatas (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

This show is a superb match between a strongly self-identified artist and a nonprofit arts organization that seems custom made for this kind of storytelling. As Epic Party Theatre Company’s mission statement notes:

“We are a family of artists who identify as POC (people of color) and aim to create exceptionally memorable and hyper-theatrical presentations that resemble one of the craziest, dare we say, EPIC parties you have ever attended. We seek to highlight stories that actively resist a homogenous, normative narrative. We actively seek to dismantle the inherent elitist nature of the theater and entertainment industry. In other words, we are eager to celebrate feminism, queerness, body positivity, cultural pride, and gender identity.”

Poster art for Love in the Time of Piñatas

“As an entirely POC-identified producing team, we seek to create a unique space where artists of color will always be prioritized, nurtured, and factored into all aspects of our creative conversations. We are actively negotiating how to expand the boundaries of what a play can be and ensuring that we do not distance or demean the audience, but rather invite them to join the party. Our theater is a theater for all.”

Baruch Porras-Hernandez in a scene from
Love in the Time of Piñatas (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

Before Porras-Hernandez makes his glittery entrance, an offstage voice narrates the sad tale of a fat, pink-and-green piñata cursed with seven spikes, low self-esteem, and the nagging fear that no one would ever want to have papier-mâché sex with her. But when a Dora the Exploradora piñata confesses that she’s heard a rumor that a chubby Mexican immigrant’s Mission District apartment is also the home of a piñata sanctuary, an evening filled with magic realism is off and running.

Christopher Garay-Perez in a scene from
Love in the Time of Piñatas (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

Advising theatregoers that one of the reasons he’s performing this show is "for the fetishists in the audience who are really into chubby men," Porras-Hernandez isn’t shy about bellowing “ICE can suck my dick!” Backed by two sexy go-go boys (when framed in a red jockstrap, Corey Baker’s beatifically buoyant butt cheeks could pump new life into the art of genuflection), he lays down a simple rule for the evening’s bawdy jokes and painful memories. “Yes, it’s gonna be THAT kind of a party -- and NO, there is no safe word!” With an opening number entitled “I’m Here To Take Your Jobs,” he takes equal pride in reciting a poem he wrote about the ghost of Frida Kahlo entitled “Gently Resting On Her Unibrow.”


Looking back on his troubled past as a melodramatic five-year-old growing up in Toluca, Mexico who wanted to dictate the theme of his birthday party, whose favorite color was purple, and whose parents gave him a Rainbow Brite piñata covered in glitter, Porras-Hernandez easily segues into his poem entitled “Lover of the Deep Fried Circle” in which he describes donuts as “sexy sugar holes that remind me of three wonderful things: mouths, butt holes, and glory holes.” In order to share his love with the audience, Porras-Hernandez’s go-go boys generously distribute sweet and tasty Baruchadors (his favorite) from Dynamo Donuts.

Love in the Time of Piñatas was initially part of the 2017 National Queer Arts Festival (collections of Porras-Hernandez’s poems have been published by Sibling Rivalry Press). He has performed with Radar Productions, LitQuake, Quiet Lightning, and participated the 2019 Sister Spit queer poetry tour. Not only is Baruch the chief organizer of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? (a Latinx literary performance series), he is also the lead artist in a multidisciplinary project aimed at creating new Queer Latino comic book superheroes with MACLA, (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana) in San Jose. In a segment entitled “Just Keep Rimming” he asks:

“Have you ever been face down in a man’s ass and suddenly gotten very depressed? One minute you’re tongue deep in his butt hole, the next minute you’re thinking: What is the meaning of it all? I’ve never wanted to use a man’s butt cheeks to wipe away my tears, but I’m an immigrant, I have a job to do, and immigrants get the job done!”

Baruch Porras-Hernandez in a scene from
Love in the Time of Piñatas (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

While there is a great deal of raucous fun (the severed head of a Donald Trump piñata gets tossed into the wings), Love in the Time of Piñatas also focuses on the challenges of growing up gay while watching your parents’ marriage disintegrate. After Baruch officially came out to his father, the two men stopped communicating for several years. “I came to this country when I was nine years old," he explains. "My parents risked everything to try to make it in a place where they might be safe, where they might thrive. When people think about immigrant stories, there is so much focus on the pornography of suffering. But I like to focus on the days when my parents were still together and didn’t fight.”

With choreography by Nikki Meñez, costumes by Pat N Leather, lighting by Grisel Torres, and sound design by Chris Sauceda, Love in the Time of Piñatas offers some nice parallels to the wit and wisdom contained in Justin Sayre's video clips from meetings of the International Order of Sodomites.


Porras-Hernandez closes his show with the following heartfelt statement:

“Whenever I research my queer artistic ancestors, I get frustrated because it feels like they were also saying the same thing all over again. They wanted freedom, the end of borders, the end of wars. They were all weird and queer, made art against what seemed like an unstoppable monster. It is so depressing to think that 100 years from now people are still going to keep fighting some ignorant, disgusting, unstoppable monster. But you know what cheers me up? What gets me out of bed? Knowing that 100 years from now, if there is still some horrible, unstoppable monster, there are also going to be some bad-ass, amazing marginalized people; some party-crashing immigrants, some highly organized queers wearing makeup, fishnets, and heels who are there to tell the unstoppable monster to fuck off and die.”

Baruch Porras-Hernandez in a scene from
Love in the Time of Piñatas (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)