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Over the last three years, my artistic practice has wrapped itself around the past, or the past has wrapped itself around it—I’m not sure which. But I’ve come to realize that history, collective or personal, refuses to be left alone. Its limbs break through and reach beyond any notion of distance, space, and time to remind us that we’re the culmination of multiple pasts, lives, and struggles… Throughout this process with the Civilians’ R&D group, I’ve decided to embrace the past rather than be haunted by it. It’s easier. I no longer wish to convince myself that the past is a place to abandon. The future is now and I long for the things that are no more.
I left my hometown in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain for New York City in 2017, shortly after receiving my Employment Authorization card in the mail. Two months after graduating high school, four years after my father’s incident, and thirteen years after being forced to leave our home in Uriangato, Guanajuato, Mexico. In 2023, I was granted permanent residency. Five years from now I will be eligible to apply for citizenship; though now I am not sure that I want it or that it’ll be worth any of the pain and loss. In my adolescence, I envisioned that the future would arrive with everything we lacked in the present and missed of the past. I told myself that the years of stand-still living would soon be compensated with the abundance of opportunity in the form of legality, education, and resources but the future is not something that arrives—it is filled, shaped, and hardened by the culmination of the now & then.
Am I looking for someone to hold
accountable for so much loss?
Is that person me?
When speaking about legality and a path towards citizenship, all illegalized people hold onto the hope that someday, near or distant, it’ll be their turn and they’ll be led by some great illuminating force of change down the path where endless opportunity will open itself up upon arrival… I used to have this same kind of unwavering hope before I obtained ‘legal’ presence in the country—I anticipated that all of my family’s hardships would be resolved when the flickering lights of opportunity lit up for me, but if F. Scott Fitzgerald taught me anything in high school, it is to be wary of glowing green lights in the horizon. They only signify the unattainability of the American Dream.
For me, that flickering light in the distance came from a parking lot that sits on the edge of a nature preserve in South Carolina. This temporary home for people’s vehicles used to house me too. Before it became a weekend activity for local joggers and cyclists, it was a trailer park. It’s where I grew up, where I came to be, where so many of us came to be from various communities beyond the southern border. All hoping to be the exception to a crushing reality… but to obtain legal presence in this country is to cooperate with the same system that deemed your presence illegal to begin with.
I’m a recipient of a U3 Visa, which in short means, I am the child (at the time a minor) of an “illegal alien” who was a victim of a violent crime. The facade of opportunity through the U visa process revealed itself to me with distance & time as it has for many others. The temptation for a better, easier, and ‘legal’ life makes you overlook the reality that the exchange of a signature on the state’s behalf can come at the expense of the people and places you call home. The clause of cooperation slowly turned into a heavier police presence in our neighborhood, then came the criminalization of my neighbors and friends, eventually the departure of many, and finally the investment of revitalization from a city on the cusp of change. I have no way of knowing whether my legality, my father’s incident, his burden, his cooperation in exchange for a process lead directly to the hyper-policing of our community. Or if it was something that was bound to happen in a place that was beginning to shift rapidly due to gentrification. Is there a correlation between the two? An unhappy incident? Am I looking for someone to hold accountable for so much loss? Is that person me?
I no longer wish to convince myself
that the past is a place to abandon.
On the Edge of Preservation (the parking lot play) is a personal and at-times-fictionalized investigation of a community that slowly ceased to exist. As the sun sets over Conestee’s Nature Preserve, its vacant parking lot becomes a site of concern for an estranged group of childhood friends, who have unexpectedly gathered to discover that the last remaining resident of this used-to-be trailer park is missing. The group fills Winston’s absence with guilt when they dig up a twenty-year timeline that haunts them all. As Gwen Stefani sounds in the distance and the asphalt widens its jaws, these former residents must grapple with the consequences we inherit, the resentment that we harbor and the love that we withhold. A play birthed from a system that promises opportunity, but demands bloodshed upfront.
The process of developing this play with the Civilians R&D Group was a balance between the real and the inspired. What did I want to hold onto and what demanded to be released? Through different iterations of the piece, I experimented with verbatim text from interviews with former members of the community that I grew up in, inspired dialogue around topics discussed within those interviews, and characters derived from lived experiences. All in an attempt to fill the one constant thing in the process—this parking lot on the edge of a nature preserve as a playscape. The vastness was intimidating because it simultaneously needed to be filled and demanded to be broken. The difference between those two things continues to be a question, but over the last few months, through the encouragement of the cohort, I was able to interrogate what it means to return to a place you called home, especially when that place is paved over. Claimed for another purpose. Is this a gravesite? And if so, what or who are we visiting when we return?
The mourning is for the version of ourselves
we can never become.
Ultimately, through the characters, it became evident that the visitation, the mourning, is for the version of ourselves we can never become. For Winston, his refusal to leave this place despite its revitalized purpose as a nature preserve by the city is a declaration of self. They can take his mental and physical well being, they can revoke his legality, but his home and its continued presence implies a sustained reality. When an unavoidable eviction eventually threatens his mode of self-preservation, Winston’s last bit of agency is threatened and he must grapple with what comes next. This confrontation with the present, and one’s circumstances within it, is something that the rest of the characters are forced to grapple with as well. The past and all its guilt have caught up to Xavi. Paola is bitter at the present. Steph is stuck on what could have been. Victor is making up for lost time. And Omar feels like he’s just existing. So much time has been spent trying to decipher when things went wrong. When did they abandon the versions of themselves they once hoped to be? Or was it taken from them? The inability to distinguish between the two has become the foundation for the draft of the piece that will be presented at the Finding Series this summer.
This play has been selfish. I think the Civilians understood that when they invited me to be a part of the cohort after reading my proposal in 2023. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve become a permanent resident… I haven’t gone home to Mexico despite that. Two decades is long enough to lose plenty. Or have it taken from you. I’m not sure which. This play has become a lesson on self-resilience. Preservation is more than just the calcification of the soul. Sometimes, it requires that we admit that something is gone. Something is missing. And in its absence we have changed.
Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
