Luis Alfaro (born October 9, 1963)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Luis Alfaro (born in Los Angeles in 1963) is a renowned Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist. His plays and fiction are set in Los Angeles's Chicano barrios, including the Pico Union district, and often feature gay and lesbian and working-class themes. Many of Alfaro's plays also deal with the AIDS pandemic in Latino communities. Noted plays include "Bitter Homes and Gardens," "Pico Union," "Downtown," "Cuerpo Politizado," "Straight as a Line," "Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner," "No Holds Barrio" and "Black Butterfly." Many of these plays have also been published as stories or poetry.

Alfaro has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur "Genius" Foundation Fellowship in 1997, and the 1988 National Hispanic Playwriting Competition Prize. His writing, both sole-authored and collaborative, is collected in numerous anthologies. In 1994 his spoken-word CD, Downtown was released. His short film Chicanismo was produced by the Public broadcasting Service and released in 1999. He also contributed to the 1995 film Pochonovela, a collaboration between the Cuban American performer Coco Fusco and the LA-based Chicano performance ensemble, Chicano Secret Service. This mock telenovela explores and sends up Chicano activism and assimilation in a sardonic exploration of working class barrio life.

In 2010, his play Oedipus El Rey, a Chicano retelling of Oedipus Rex, had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Alfaro


Luis Alfaro, 1994, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1123720)

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)

Further Readings:

Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture (Future of Minority Studies) by Daniel Enrique Pérez
Hardcover: 212 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (November 24, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0230616062
ISBN-13: 978-0230616066
Amazon: Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture

In this book, Daniel Enrique Pérez examines the various ways queer identities are represented in Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural texts. Through a gender, ethnicity, and sexuality lens, he demonstrates that queer Chicana/o and Latina/o identities are much more prevalent in cultural production than most people think. He argues that the representation of queer identities goes well beyond gay Chicana/o and Latina/o stereotypes: maricones, jotos, and marimachas. Macho men, the Latin lover, Pocho, Real Women Have Curves, Selena, and several other characters and texts are also queer. By claiming such a variety of characters and texts as queer, he erases that infamous forward slash that tends to be drawn between the terms straight and gay while expanding the breadth of queer representation in cultural production.

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices