CURRENT RESEARCH
América Tropical: Constructing a Latine Musical and Reclaiming a Whitewashed Past
This text explores the creation and ongoing development of América Tropical: The Musical and chronicles its creative evolution as both an artistic endeavor and a case study in the systemic challenges facing Latine musicals. It situates this production within the broader post-In the Heights landscape, where Latine stories struggle to move beyond “immigrant” tropes to achieve the full backing of regional and commercial theaters. Little-known facts and new historiographic interpretations are mobilized to reveal how the musical engages not only with David Alfaro Siqueiros’s censored 1932 mural, América Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos, but also with the larger political, aesthetic, and institutional histories that shaped its creation, suppression, disappearance, and restoration. By tracing the musical’s development, this study examines how the production negotiates the tension between historical specificity and theatrical accessibility, between radical political content and the demands of musical theater
A Frank Conversation: The Birth of the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement
An academic article based on months of recorded interviews with Chicana/o Arts icon, Frank Romero, covering the founding of Los Four, early days of the movement, his life, and his work. To augment this research I have conducted ethnographic research on the Chicana/o art scene with collectors, activists and regular people who were there, but have never before been officially interviewed about how it all went down. The ultimate goal of this project is to archive the 1960s and 70s Chicana/o art scene with an eye to preserving stories never before archived or published.
In the Shadow of the Towers
This monograph-length project explores Nuestro Pueblo the famous monument putatively known as The Watts Towers. It seeks to move beyond the existing research and scholarship on this monument and reframe it as a secreted milieu de mémoire for the Chicana/o community and adumbrate a performance of erasure upon a Chicana/o signification of this monument. This project will further problematize the process fueled by a type of ethnocentric cultural elitism through which individuals and institutions have successfully relegated Chicana/os to a silent and passive part in Nuestro Pueblo’s historiography that facilitates an occlusion of the monuments Chicana/o identity.
