Drama on the Border

A feisty Arizona theatre dives headlong into the immigration debate

By Kerri Allen

We're not going to seal the border—we can't. When I hear congressional and media people saying, "Shut the border," I think to myself, "They've never seen the border." You can't possibly have been to the Arizona-Mexico border and believe that is possible.
—Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, June 2006

Geography, they say, is destiny. Borderlands Theater of Tucson, Ariz., sits a short 63 miles from the line that divides the United States from Mexico. Nogales is due south, past the saguaro-studded Santa Rita and Huachuca mountain ranges; the dry and forbidding Sonoran Desert stretches west into Baja California and south into the Mexican state of Sonora. The small but prolific Borderlands takes its unique geography to heart: "the 'border,' both as physical and social landscape," its mission proclaims, "is a metaphor for Borderlands's work." Suddenly, in 2006, that metaphor has taken on a new urgency, as the 20-year-old company finds itself at ground zero in the contentious battle for what the nation should do about illegal immigration.

It's a challenge Borderlands has been preparing for, in a way, since its inception in 1986. I traveled in late September to Tucson (and points south, where I was able to cross the U.S.- Mexican border unimpeded and unobserved) to discover how Borderlands is coping with the intense national focus on immigration issues, and how the debate is playing out both on stage and in the hearts and minds of southern Arizonans. In the process, I got to know three outsized personalities—two of them theatre artists, the third an activist on the front lines of the controversial Sanctuary movement—whose experiences cast a fascinating light on the politically volatile yet all-too-human struggle over America's southern boundaries.

The occasion of my visit was the kick-off event of Borderlands's 21st season, a workshop production of Visitor's Guide to Arivaca (Map Not to Scale), a new play by Los Angeles-based writer Evangeline Ordaz, the first of my significant new acquaintances. The second was Borderlands founder and producing director Barclay Goldsmith, who commissioned and directed Ordaz's drama. He grew up in Tucson and has a sophisticated knowledge of Latin cultures. The third, for the record, was my companion on the surreptitious trip across the border—gadfly humanitarian activist Mike Wilson, a Native American upon whom one of the central characters in Visitor's Guide is based.

Although there were only two performances scheduled on Sept. 23 and 24, more than 650 people converged on the Leo Rich Theater in downtown Tucson to see Visitor's Guide. Those who arrived with a one-dimensional view of the immigration problem had their tunnel-vision dispelled in short order.

It was a few months before President Bush signed the 2006 Homeland Security Appropriations Act that Evangeline Ordaz gave Barclay Goldsmith some of her plays to read. The timing turned out to be perfect, as Goldsmith had been yearning to find someone who could capture the hubbub of contemporary opinions about immigration and voice them on stage. "I kept looking for a playwright who could really grasp the topic," Goldsmith, 69, explains over pricey fish tacos at Café Poca Cosa, a hip restaurant around the corner from Borderlands's modest offices. "There was something in her writing, in her dialogue, in the way she wrote the characters—she had a voice for the Chicano and for the new immigrants."

Goldsmith commissioned Ordaz to craft a timely story about the border, and Ordaz came back with a two-act play about a married couple in their twenties, Linda and Valente Sanchez. While their dangerous trek north through the tiny town of Arivaca, Ariz., to Tucson is the central action of the play, the Sanchezes share focus with 14 other characters whose lives are affected by immigration. Directing this piece, Goldsmith brought a lifetime of knowledge about the subject to the rehearsal room.

A white-haired man with a slow gait and a deliberate drawl, Goldsmith's grandfatherly demeanor belies his inner passion. Educated at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, he spent three years in Mexico where he learned not only to speak Spanish but how to interpret the ins-and-outs of corrupt Central American politics. Goldsmith and his family also spent time in Argentina, where he says art was more deeply connected to current events than it has traditionally been in the U.S. "That connection seems to happen only periodically, while in Latin America it's a constant way of life. I saw a lot of what the French call l'artiste engage, and was inspired by the Living Theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I really wanted to run away and join the circus." What he did instead was return to his home town to teach drama—and to parlay his rich stock of cultural experiences into the bedrock of a new theatrical career.

In the 1980s Goldsmith became involved with the faith-based Sanctuary movement, committed to sheltering Central American refugees from the agency called the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "I would go to the detention centers in California and interview [Salvadoran] refugees as documentation for attorneys," he says. "That part of what I did was not illegal."

Other activities were more suspect. In 1986, Goldsmith and a number of fellow activists, many of them church leaders, found themselves under FBI investigation. "I did go down into Mexico and pick up people who were high-profile—members of labor movements or religious protests—and bring them across. It was a very vulnerable thing for me, and for them, to do. On one of the trips I worked with a guy who was an FBI infiltrator, and I became part of a grand jury investigation. I was—what do you call it?—an 'unindicted co-conspirator.'"

That same year Goldsmith founded Borderlands, which started as an outgrowth of a larger Chicano theatre collective inspired by Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino. "The theatre reconnected me, as an artist, into this community. When we started, it was more collective than collaborative, but there's been a constant reexamining of the structure," Goldmith says. "We've been transitioning away from the collective into the unknown territory of a traditional regional theatre structure."

With support of the Latino/Chicano voice as a core element of its mission, Borderlands has nurtured such emerging playwrights as Luis Alfaro, Bernardo Solano and Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, and has commissioned or developed more than 50 plays under the aegis of its Border Playwrights Project. Goldsmith was invited in 2003 to direct Rascón Banda's trilingual play La mujer que cayó del cielo (The Woman Who Fell from the Sky) at the Teatro Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and after its great success there he remounted it this past summer for a tour of Mexico and South America.

Unlike Goldsmith, playwright Ordaz has always lived in the U.S., but that's not to say she knows nothing of internationalism. "My father came here in the 1950s," says the blue-eyed attorney-turned-writer as she sips her margarita on the rocks and remembers. "He walked from Tampico, Mexico, to Brownsville, Tex., with no problem. Things weren't like they are now." Although both of her parents emigrated from Mexico, they did not take to the U.S. in the same way. "My dad was definitely more 'Mexican' than my mom—he had this big sombrero that he hung up on the living room wall. He's light-skinned, like me, so he can pass [for an Anglo], but the minute he opens his mouth, it's all over."

Ordaz writes primarily for television, but she has a history as a spoken-word performer and has performed on National Public Radio and at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the law school at the University of California–Berkeley and spent time as a lawyer for the Humanitarian Law Project, documenting human rights abuses after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The stage, she believes, can be more powerful than the courtroom. "That's not to say you can't be really effective as an attorney, but you can give the big picture with a play. They're different ways of getting at the same thing."

So when Goldsmith called her with his idea for a border play, Ordaz was ready. The uninflected text of a 2003 tourism brochure from Arivaca gave her an ironic, ready-made prologue:

The people of Arivaca welcome visitors and want you to enjoy your stay. A few things to remember during your stay. This is the desert so remember to take plenty of water with you, wear a hat in summer and watch out for rattlesnakes and scorpions. Let someone know where you are going if you are traveling alone. Many of the two-tracks leading off road may look promising at the beginning but often get very rough and turning around might be a problem. Know where you are going. If you leave your vehicle to take a walk be sure to lock it, we are very close to the border and walkers may try to "borrow" it. Arivaca has remarkable natural beauty, enjoy!

Visitor's Guide to Arivaca (Map Not to Scale) is loosely based on the true story of Shanti A. Sellz and Daniel M. Strauss, two volunteers with the organization No More Deaths/No Más Muertes. They were arrested in July 2005 for driving three illegal immigrants out of Arivaca to a medical clinic. According to No More Deaths, the migrants were severely blistered and dehydrated and had in their desperation drunk water from a tepid cattle tank. Sellz and Strauss were charged with two felonies and faced up to 15 years in prison. The high-profile case was dismissed this September, just before their scheduled court date on Oct. 2. The motto of No More Deaths, "Humanitarian Aid Is Never a Crime," is seen on signs all over Tucson.

Ordaz represents Sellz and Strauss sympathetically in the play (as the eager pair Rita and Sam), but she also offers the opinions of American ranchers, Minutemen, Native Americans, immigration lawyers and even polleros ("coyotes"), those who help people cross the border for a fee. The playwright dances a fine line and successfully avoids weighting the arguments on one side or another. While the audience is rooting for Valente and Linda to make it to Tucson, they learn that the Sanchezes' story is not only about migrants but about all who are affected by the issue. Interestingly, Goldsmith chose his cast of 13 from various walks of life, mixing theatre professionals with locals who had limited acting experience.

Mexican actor Angelica Rodenbeck, 35, who played heroine Linda Sanchez (described in the script as "stubborn and self-possessed, if a little naïve"), emigrated from Mexico City to Tucson in 2001 to take a technology job, and she says she identified strongly with her character. "When I came to this country, I was pursuing a dream that was unreachable in my country. We have this image of immigrants causing trouble or smuggling drugs, but they come to work." Rodenbeck earned her B.A. in theatre at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and now takes occasional courses at Pima Community College to brush up on her craft. "I don't want to be rich. I don't want to be famous. I just want to be on stage and to bring a message to audiences."

Another foreign-born actor took the role of Valente Sanchez. Robert Encila left the Philippines in 1980, drawn by a full scholarship in performing arts from the University of Arizona. The 46-year-old can easily pass for 30, and he also passes for a Mexican, with his Filipino and Spanish heritage. Like Rodenbeck, he dreamed about coming to America from an early age. "As a child, I looked at the United States with reverence. I gave up a budding film career in the Philippines to come here," he recalls. "I felt like I was living the dream for the first two or three years, but then the disillusionment set in!" Because of the difficulty of finding good roles, Encila has spent most of his career as a director—but he started a relationship with Borderlands in 1990 (followed by an hiatus and 2005 return) and has been the lead in four productions there.

One of Rodenbeck's favorite exchanges in the play comes between the rancher Iris (played by Roberta Streicher) and an out-of-work auto plant supervisor, John Lambert (Roger Owen), who is explaining why he signed up with the Border Keepers, Ordaz's version of the Minutemen:

JOHN: Figured I could address the unemployment situation from a different angle—really get at the root causes, you know? If immigrants weren't willing to work for so cheap, there might be a job for me out there.
IRIS: Why? Do you pick lettuce?

Rodenbeck isn't the only one who responded viscerally to that line. At both performances, the audience's applause after Iris's retort momentarily stopped the show.

To help Ordaz incorporate a Native American perspective on immigration into her script, Goldsmith put her in contact with Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation. Wilson calls himself an "urban Indian," but he is also something of a rabble-rouser. After a 21-year military career that included specialized work as an advisor during the El Salvador civil war, Wilson spends his time now as a humanitarian activist and a Presbyterian pastor. Or, as he puts it, "I've gone from warrior to social-justice advocate." (In the play, he appears as George Johnson, played by Robert Ybañez, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.)

For five years, Wilson has maintained rudimentary water stations for migrants passing through Tohono O'odham lands, a place where groups like Humane Borders cannot go. The stations hold blue plastic barrels filled with 100 gallons of water, with the word agua stuck onto the side of each one. "This was literally our backyard on the reservation and no one was doing jack," Wilson asserts. "Migrants were literally dying in our backyard. People think we have the monopoly on spirituality—that we're mystic and mythic beings—and a lot of Indians hide behind that. I want to be held up to the same moral stance as the U.S. government."

In fact, neither the Arizona attorney general's office nor the tribal leaders support efforts like Wilson's. "My battle is with the Tohono O'odham government, not my people. A lot of the tribal members have a worldview no wider than the reservation, but we are not exempt. When it comes to human beings dying, there is no exemption."

At one point, Wilson received calls to cease and desist from both the attorney general's office and the Nation's superintendent of public safety. "They probably thought, 'We're going to scare this Indian to death,'" he says wryly. But Wilson promptly did what any savvy American would do in the situation—he alerted the media. The attention gained him support, especially when one local channel caught people destroying the water stations. Wilson flashes a proud smile and says, "Don't fuck with the pastor."

In Act 2 of Visitor's Guide, Wilson's surrogate George Johnson struggles to win the support of District Tribal Council leader Jose Olivas (played by Jose R. Matus), who does not see eye-to-eye with him:

JOSE: My morality obligates me to our people here on this reservation. Two million dollars of our Health Service funds went to treating the migrants. We can't afford to take care of our own and now you want us to take care of somebody else's?
(Jose takes George's water tank from its stand and puts it in the back of the truck with the other previously confiscated tank. George restrains himself physically but cuts loose at the mouth.)
GEORGE: They are our own, separated by an imaginary line only 100 years old, cutting in half tribal lands we've lived on for thousands of years. Half the O'odham lands in Mexico, half in the U.S. How does that law make sense. And remember 267 of those migrants died before they even made it to one of our clinics.
JOSE: You keep this up without approval of the District Council you're subject to banishment. We do it to the meth-heads. We'll do it to you.

Having only walked over the border once into Nogales to have lunch and buy some ceramics, I ask Wilson if he will take me to the border by way of the reservation. I need to see the situation free of political spin, unencumbered by theatricality. So, on a late Saturday afternoon in September we hop into his green pickup truck and head south through the reservation's Sehuk Toac District. (I am not allowed on tribal lands since I am not a member of the Nation. Basically, I'm an illegal immigrant.)

Wilson's silver-streaked black hair reaches to the middle of his broad back. It's pulled into a ponytail by a silver hair-clip with the Tohono O'odham symbol of I'itoi, Man in the Maze, etched into it. A large silver cross with a turquoise stone bounces on his chest as the truck trembles over the desert's rocks and ditches.

He's explaining that it's rattlesnake season in the desert as a coyote runs across Route 86. During the 90-minute drive south from Tucson, I count at least two Homeland Security buses full of migrants being hauled back to Mexico. We pass a Border Patrol processing and detention center near the O'odham capital, Sells.

Wilson pulls off at mile-marker 127 to check on four of his water stations, which he has nicknamed Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I hop down from the passenger seat, kicking up desert dust. Unfamiliar with the proper protocol, I ask him what to do if I see a rattlesnake. "Just step back—don't kick it," he advises with a laugh.

As we drive deeper into the Baboquivari Valley, some 17 miles north of the border, Wilson puts on a Juan Gabriel CD and tells me that human skeletal remains were recently found by mile-marker 121. Someone literally baked to death in the desert sun. "It could be an O'odham, but more likely it's a border crosser," he says. This is an unseasonably cool day for Tucson in September, but I know that summer temperatures out here often exceed 100 degrees. "You cannot capture the intense heat on stage," Wilson says.

The sun is beginning to set and I'm wondering how we will ever get to Mexico and back in time for the post-performance discussion. Wilson stops the truck again and points out some great taco vendors in the distance who are clearing out for the day. Another water station is nearby. I ask why we stopped, considering the late hour. "Oh, we're in Mexico now," he says.

I look around. The only indication I have that I've left the United States is a short stretch of barbed-wire fence, originally used to keep livestock from wandering. It doesn't work for people.

The Border Patrol estimates that in recent years along Arizona's 350-mile-long border with Mexico—of which this is one of the most desolate stretches—more than 6,650 people were attempting to cross into the U.S. every day, and an estimated 4,000 were succeeding. In early October, the Associated Press reported 199 migrant deaths in Arizona over the past year. The state's death toll accounted for nearly half the national tally. Statistics like these are one reason nothing can stop Wilson or groups like Borderlands from working to keep immigration issues at the fore.

On our way back, the Border Patrol stops us. A handsome young officer ambles over to us. I doubt he's older than 25. "What's a Puerto Rican kid doing all the way out in the Sonoran Desert?" Wilson asks amiably. The agent inspects the truck bed as Mike explains that he was checking on his water station for the migrants. The agent, sincerely concerned, asks, "Is the water okay?" Maybe Ordaz was right to insist that her play convey the widest possible diversity of perspective.

The next morning I open my hotel room door to find the complimentary Arizona Daily Star shouting its verdict up at me: "It Won't Work." The subhead reads, "Canyons, rivers and shifting sand—plus a multibillion-dollar price tag, more violence and less business—make sealing the border all but impossible." I see why.

The Tucson community is heated about the immigration issue—it's personal to nearly everyone. Visitor's Guide is a developmental production with little advance publicity, but its two public performances are packed (despite, it's worth noting, stiff competition from The Lion King, performing simultaneously in the same civic complex). About 60 audience members stay for the Saturday night post-performance discussion, where Wilson, Shanti Sellz and representatives from the community organizations Humane Borders, Samaritans and No More Deaths are on the panel. A well-informed and intelligent audience asks probing questions. One lifelong Tucsonan says the play was a call to action to him: "It makes me want to get more involved in a hands-on way." Another thanks Ordaz (who is sitting in the audience) for voicing the more unpopular sides of the issue, including his own—he's heartened to see the Minuteman figure John Lambert portrayed as good-hearted, if misguided.

What immigration legislation will eventually mean for this border community remains to be seen. As for the future of Visitor's Guide to Arivaca, Goldsmith and Ordaz are working on a new draft, and Borderlands has a Spanish translation in the works for a production at El Círculo Teatral in Mexico City. It might be difficult, but they're determined that this story will make it across the border.

Arts reporter Kerri Allen is a 2005-06 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.