Kathleen Cruz (University of California, Davis)
Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (updated version, 2016) presents a dramatic interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that explores the relationship between Chicanx and Mexican experiences at the geographical/political border between the United States and Mexico. In this paper, I explore how Treviño Orta’s play finds adaptive value in the Antigone through its narrative ability to vivify the corporeal conflicts of Chicanx (and Latinx) experience. Following this, I situate Woman on Fire among the evolving discourse surrounding Latinx adaptation of ancient drama (cf. Andújar and Nikoloutsos, eds. 2020 for a recent example). I argue that Woman on Fire provides a striking argument for the value of identifying classical reception of a specifically Latinx kind, as understood through both varieties of social constructionism in current theories of racial identity (cf. Haslanger 2019 and Jeffers 2019) and arguments for Latinx agency in the development of said identity (cf. Mora 2014).
To do so, I investigate two of Woman on Fire's central conflicts surrounding its protagonist Juanita, a light-skinned Chicana woman living near the United States-Mexico border in Arizona with her husband, a Border Patrol agent. Throughout the play, Juanita is haunted by the apparition of a Mexican woman named Paola, who died attempting a border crossing and whose corpse remains unburied. Paola’s fervent belief that Juanita must bury her exposed body stands as a critical problem. Notably, Paola grounds her arguments in her past and present corporeal identity. It is through Juanita’s denial and Paola’s vivid and recurrent appeals to the physical state of her corpse that Woman on Fire inverts the traditional Antigone narrative; this “Antigone” does not want to bury a body, and so the body must make its case. Critically, contemporary study of the corpses exposed at the border suggests that the survival of Paola’s body is a rarity; the majority of the abandoned dead are quickly consumed by scavenging animals (De León 2015). The possibility of giving Paola proper burial is, therefore, a significant opportunity – and Juanita’s refusal, sustained for most of the play, is thus especially striking for an “Antigone.”
Juanita and Paola’s antagonistic relationship introduces the play's secondary conflict of interest surrounding Chicanx/Latinx bodies. As I unpack and Paola herself argues, Juanita is both related to and estranged from her. On the one hand, Juanita’s Chicana identity connects her to Paola’s own as a Mexican woman; on the other, as a White-passing citizen of the United States, Juanita has escaped Paola’s fate through the arbitrary circumstances of her birth. From Paola’s perspective, then, Juanita owes her burial; to Juanita’s initial distress and eventual acceptance, their bodies present mirror images of one another, inherently bonded and yet separated by the circumstances that impact bodily autonomy and dignity.
Through these debates, Woman on Fire throws Chicanx and Latinx bodies both alive and dead into stark relief. In doing so, Treviño Orta’s play presents a strong argument for discussing Latinx adaptation of classical material as an individual kind, rooted in the specific questions and trials of culturally-mediated bodily experience.