After a moment of silence, I hear small footsteps quickly coming down the church aisle as the trumpet and guitar begin to play “Días y Flores” by Silvio Rodríguez. The figure of a little girl about five or six years old, wearing a red T-shirt and blue jean shorts, emerges from the darkness as she nears the front of the church. Her face is determined. She thrusts her arms forward and backward, running toward her father, who stands in the yellow spotlight in front of the pulpit. The father, who wears his long locs wrapped in an olive-green turban and a gray suit with a black polo and pink tie, joyfully gestures her to keep running forward. As she gets closer, he bends down, stretching his arms toward her and lifts her high into the air in one fluid motion. Smiling, he looks up into his daughter’s eyes as they spin together. The father sets her down and the girl’s mother stands from the shadows in the pews, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She walks toward the pulpit to embrace them with a hug. It is a reunion of sorts, though it is unclear how long they have been apart. Then, three more girls stand from the pews to join the multiracial family. The preteen to teen-aged girls bashfully giggle as they walk toward the sanctuary-turned-stage.Footnote 1 Each of them wear ceremonious dresses and gowns, symbolizing significant moments in their lives: first communion, quinceañera, and high school graduation.
Happily, hand-in-hand, the Black and brown family march down the aisle to exit the church, which was converted into a theatre with dramatic lighting, visual projections, and performance.Footnote 2 The audience breaks into applause, signaling what they believe is the end of the play. As the applause decrescendos, a woman in the pews stands and acoustically sings, “Danos un corazón.” The audience turns to face her as she continues, “Grande para amar/Danos un corazón, fuerte para luchar.”Footnote 3 The catholic hymn is amplified by the church’s high ceilings and the words ring as a final prayer, pleading for communal love and strength. Little Central America, 1984: A Sanctuary Then and Now concludes its premiere at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, DC.
The play was written and performed by Elia Arce, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist from Costa Rica and the United States, and Rubén Martínez, an esteemed Salvadoran and Mexican American writer and performer. Following community theatre practices, the duo has traveled across the United States, creating the play with, and presenting the play to, local audiences in Los Angeles (2019), Houston (2022), and Berkley (2024). With the support of GALA Hispanic Theatre, the play came to DC Summer 2023. GALA, which stands for Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos, was founded in the nation’s capital in 1976 by artists in exile from the Southern Cone. It is among the earliest Latinx theatre groups in the United States. Unlike Chicano theatre in 1960s California and Nuyorican theatre in 1970s New York, GALA identifies itself beyond a singular ethnic identity. This commitment to pan-ethnicity reflects the DC area’s Latinx population, where there is not a majority ethnic group. Although there is no majority Latinx group, the DC metropolitan area is home to the third-largest Central American diaspora in the States, making it a necessary site for Little Central America. Footnote 4
In late 2022, Arce and Martínez began searching for a field producer to help them cast a show with local community members in DC. This is where I came in.Footnote 5 I am the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants and was born and raised in DC’s inner-ring suburbs, where the majority of Central Americans reside.Footnote 6 As a Central American cultural worker and scholar, I was intrigued by the possibilities of being a part of a theatrical production that was made possible by local artists, activists, and everyday Central Americans like the neighborhood kids, the local food vendor, the nurse at the public clinic, the custodian at the school, or the restaurant worker downtown. I had never produced theatre and have not seen much of it. However, I have curated exhibitions, which equipped me with the ability to organize different community members to create something together. I remained hesitant for several reasons nonetheless.
First, Central Americans are often discussed in the context of crises, particularly dealing with war and migration. How do we tell a story that accounts for both state-sanctioned violence and moments of communal joy that shape our lives? Second, DC is unlike Los Angeles and Houston, where Little Central America premiered beforehand. Central Americans in the DC area are deeply informed by African American history and culture. How do we adhere to the region’s specificity and sense of relationality? And third, the anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity among many Central Americans are as present in the diaspora as they are in the isthmus. Central Americans are all too often imagined as mestizas/mestizos.Footnote 7 How do we avoid the recapitulation of a mestiza/o narrative that erases Blackness and Indigeneity and prevails in Latinx discourse and performance? Upon accepting the field producer position, these questions remained at the center of my work in the production.
US Central American studies is a growing field, yet the relevance of public humanities to the field and community is seldom discussed.Footnote 8 While cultural works about and by Central Americans are sources of growing interest, how these works widely engage Central American publics is not a concern. Community-based theatre’s form enables an examination of the performance and the public it intends to serve. Through an analysis of Little Central America, I argue that community-based theatre is necessary for enacting, processing, and understanding Central American pasts, presents, and futures in the United States. Moving across various temporalities, Little Central America reimagined the contours of sanctuary for Central Americans. This form of sanctuary exceeds the religious space and invites the creation of an artistic sanctuary. Moreover, as a production grounded within a particular place, it challenged performers and spectators to reenvision dominant racial ideologies among Central Americans and Latinxs, suggesting a way for pan-ethnic identities like these to be more expansive and inclusive. Lastly, Little Central America showed that the lives of everyday Central Americans mattered. Community-based theatre like this provides a useful structure for multi-generational performers and audiences to grapple with diverse Central American experiences and make ways for belonging.
1. Central Americans and the Sanctuary Movement
Central American migration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 9 More permanent communities formed in the mid-twentieth century and later grew with the mass migration of Central American refugees fleeing civil wars, as well as other forms of state-sponsored or state-condoned violence across the isthmus in the late-twentieth century. As a result of various waves of immigration, Central Americans created “Little Central Americas” in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, DC, Miami, and New York. As young people in Los Angeles, Arce and Martínez directly witnessed Central Americans seeking refuge and how allies across the city responded in solidarity, participating in what is now known as the Sanctuary Movement. In the mid-2010s, another wave of Central American migration was gaining significant political attention and media coverage. While Central Americans—many of them women and children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—sought asylum due to structural and interpersonal violence in their countries of origin, the Obama and Trump presidential administrations criminalized refugees and immigrants. Under Obama and Trump, the United States increased the militarization of the US-Mexico border and Mexico-Guatemala border, surpassed deportation records, and made life-threatening changes to asylum and immigration policies that deny refuge to Central Americans.Footnote 10
Seeing the parallel between Central American migration in the 1980s and the 2010s, Martínez conceived of Little Central America. With Arce’s theatrical direction, artists, organizers, and community members at large came together to shed light on the Sanctuary Movement and its contemporary implications. To tell this story, Arce and Martínez collaged a Spanish-English narrative that relied on personal memories, as well as a range of music and projected visuals to compliment the dialogue, song, poetry, and testimonio shared. In between these montages, a father would walk to the center of the make-shift stage at the church and share a dance with his daughter as she transitioned through different moments in her life. The play was not linear and moved back-and-forth through time. While this temporal movement could be disorienting, it required the audience to stay present and find moments of connection in the collage of a performance. Martínez noted, “Little Central America is about making connections—across generations, across regions of the country. The ideal of sanctuary is what ties it all together…When people say, ‘safe space’ today, they are invoking some of that ideal.”Footnote 11 Little Central America, therefore, set out to perform a historical moment committed to providing refuge for Central Americans and recreating that sense of safety in the present; however, momentary safety might feel.
The Sanctuary Movement was a transnational effort that emerged in the 1980s with interfaith groups, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals.Footnote 12 Throughout the twentieth century, US political and economic interests shaped foreign policy in the isthmus, leading to the displacement of many poor, Black, Indigenous, and mestizx Central Americans. During the Cold War, the United States supported violent right-wing governments that waged war and repressed its citizens in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, leading to their migration. However, the US government denied asylum to the overwhelming majority of these Central Americans seeking refuge and classified them as illegal immigrants.Footnote 13 In response, the Sanctuary Movement drew on ancient practices and beliefs within Abrahamic religions to transport and safeguard Central American refugees in religious quarters, providing for their basic needs.
In the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, sanctuaries were sacred places for the divine where nothing and no one should be harmed.Footnote 14 This generally agreed upon norm brought those who were accused of crimes, societal outcasts, political exiles, and enslaved people seeking freedom to find safety within these sacred places.Footnote 15 In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the notion of providing refuge is also central to the stories of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed, each of whom sought safety from governing rulers’ persecution. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the ancient practice of sanctuary was relegated to the church, which safeguarded fugitives despite the state’s rule.Footnote 16 Therefore, sanctuary was a practice that relied on sacred spaces to defend and intercede on behalf of those being persecuted by the state. Sanctuary articulates all people’s right to life.
All Souls Church Unitarian, which is located in DC’s historic Latinx neighborhood, was among a network of religious institutions to shelter and protect Central Americans fleeing violence in their countries of origin and persecution at the hands of US immigration officials in the 1980s. The dramaturgical decision to perform Little Central America within a religious and political sanctuary informs the play’s narrative, as well as how it is understood by the audience. It was a play about sanctuary in a sanctuary. Performing in a political and religous sanctuary spatially materialized a not-so-distant past. Lilo Gonzalez, a local artist who participated in the play, remembered seeking refuge in All Souls after fleeing direct violence in El Salvador. Other cast and audience members were also familiar with the church for its role in the Sanctuary Movement and social justice organizing broadly. The location in which Little Central America was performed, therefore, localized and personalized sanctuary.
The use of the church for theatre also has greater resonance with Latinx audiences because it creates a sense of familiarity. For many Latinxs, going to church is a more common practice than going to the theatre, whose audiences remain approximately 84% white.Footnote 17 While there are important Latinx theatre groups in Washington, DC, they remain overshadowed by larger companies and theatre houses like the Arena Stage and the Kennedy Center. Productions in such locations have entirely different missions. They are largely not connected to Latinx cultural production, nor the Latinx communities with whom they share a city. Placing a play in a church embedded within the community ensured that the Central American and Latinx audience Arce and Martínez created the play with and for were present. In doing so, Little Central America also reconfigured understandings of Central Americans and sanctuary. While Central American sanctuary has been associated with religious institutions, the placement of this production introduced an understanding of Central American sanctuary as an artistic practice. The play encourages activists and artists to consider how sanctuary could be (re)created and (re)imagined during times of need.
2. Community-based theatre and casting in Washington, DC
Arce and Martínez wrote and directed Little Central America as community-based theatre. Community-based theatre aims to create with and perform for a group of people with a shared identity whose experiences are reflected in the production.Footnote 18 This participatory practice has been a part of Arce’s repertoire since 1986. In the United States, community-based theatre was developed to critique the structural inequalities people of a shared identity experienced.Footnote 19 Some who participate in community-based theatre have a background in the craft, however, most do not because theatrical expertise is insignificant to a production’s goal. Rather, the goal of community-based theatre is to build relationships, educate, and organize politically through performance.Footnote 20 To accomplish this, there needs to be a deep understanding of not only the people but also the location in which a community-based production is taking place.
As the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, and its surrounding metropolitan area are simultaneously shaped by international affairs and the politics of the American South. The region’s demographics reflect this and is home to a historic and large African American population, as well as migrants, refugees, and exiles from across the global south. While the plot of Little Central America remained the same city-to-city, the performance itself was distinct in each location. Community-based theatre requires a mutual give-and-take relationship between directors, writers, and performers, allowing the production to be transformed. Little Central America used the narrative structure to express the experience of witnessing and seeking refuge. At the same time, the performance was made unique by where it took place and who participated in it. As a field producer embedded in the community, I was tasked with grounding it in its specific site, ultimately casting a play unapologetically based in DC.
Little Central America in DC featured Central American and African American artists, activists, and educators, who through their work have made the region a better place for Central Americans. This included singing performances by Luci Murphy and Lilo Gonzalez, an original poem by Quique Aviles, and poem readings by Ada and Oneyda. There was also a heartfelt testimonio by Sonia, a survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, revolutionary fighter, refugee, and local activist. In addition to these performances, key characters within the play were that of the father and daughter(s). As mentioned, they appeared in moments between dialogue, testimony, poem, and song. The father, who was played by Tim, remained the same, while at each scene, the girls got progressively younger.
The father and the daughter were meant to represent Salvadoran migrants Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly two-year-old daughter Valeria, who drowned in the Río Grande as they attempted to migrate to the United States in 2019. Had they survived, Valeria would have been about five or six years old in 2023, like the young girl who concluded the play by running into her father’s arms. Tim and the girls performed an alternative life for Oscar and Valeria, one in which they lived to celebrate milestones in a parent and daughter’s life like high school graduation, quinceañera, first communion, and the mundane day-to-day. Therefore, the play envisioned an alternative future for Oscar and Valeria. While Tim and the girls’ respective performances of Oscar and Valeria enacted a future, their embodiment also challenged perceptions about Central Americans.
Oscar and Valeria were brown Salvadorans. Yet, Oscar was played by Tim—an Afro-Panamanian born and raised between DC and Panama. Valeria, on the other hand, was played by Black and brown girls. They were all raised in the DC area and had ancestral roots in Guatemala or Panama, in addition to Black America, Peru, and Hawaii. The multiracial cast embodying Oscar and Valeria forced the audience to reckon with who they consider to be Central American. Time and time again, spectators saw Tim, a dark-skinned man with locs, stand and welcome his daughters, who differed significantly in their appearances. Despite their phenotypic variety, audience members came to see the father and daughter as a Central American family because of their consistent presence on stage while dancing together.
In the context of Washington, DC, Tim’s role as the father also figuratively reminded the DC audience that Afro-Panamanians were among the earliest Central Americans to make the region home, many arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. This history gets overshadowed by the mass migrations of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans, who are often imagined being non-Black. By accepting this role, Tim also grappled with his position as a Black Latino, who throughout his childhood in the city had to proclaim his Latinidad because it was denied to him by many of his peers. Playing the role of the father allowed Tim to assert his Black Latinidad and, specifically, Black Central Americanness to a public audience. Similarly, one of the young actresses expressed she felt affirmed in her Black Central American identity by her peers and the public as she danced in a quinceañera dress. Through their participation in this play, she and the other girls were exposed to an understanding of their Central American and Latina identities as expansive.
Central Americanness and Latinidad as embodied in the casting of Little Central America, are not constrained by mestizaje, which strives toward whiteness.Footnote 21 Rather, the casting intended to embody intersecting subjectivities and make visible Blackness within Central American identity and Latinidad, more broadly. Given the social history of Washington, DC, as a majority Black city reckoning with Blackness in, and adjacent to, Latinidad was necessary. By using community-based theatre’s form and focusing on the local specificity of DC, we could re-envision dominant racial ideologies that have obscured our understandings of the past and imagine an assemblage of Central American and Latinx futures that are inclusive and evolving.
3. Valuing Central American life on and off stage
Little Central America communicated the inherent value in Central American life on and off stage by providing a space for performers and audiences to acknowledge one another’s plight and triumphs across time. Ana Elena Puga has argued that fictional and nonfictional stories of Central American migration stage suffering by adhering to the narrative structure of the melodrama.Footnote 22 According to her and Víctor M. Espinosa, one of the key components of melodramas includes deeming the protagonist virtuous through enduring violence.Footnote 23 As such, the only way Central American protagonists garner meaning for audiences is through their pain. Across various forms of cultural production, Central American life is only deemed valuable through their proximity to death. In Little Central America, however, this is not the case. While there is an articulation of the structural violence Central Americans have both lived through and died in, this is not the only—or even the primary—focus of the work.
The production’s nonlinear narrative is mainly driven by Arce and Martínez’s dialogues and monologues, through which they share their memories of Los Angeles, the United States at large, and Central America. As they guide us through the past, the characters of Oscar and Valeria move us from the future to the present. Little Central America opens with Valeria graduating high school, circa 2033, imagining and performing what her life could have been like. She greets the incoming audience at the entrance of the church, welcoming them to her graduation party. From the start, the play is a celebration of Valeria’s life. As the play progresses, she continues to get younger and younger. However, we do not return to her death. We only arrive at the present with five-to-six-year-old Valeria reunited with her family. This occasion is not marked by a milestone (e.g., graduation, birthday, and first communion). Instead, the girl’s red T-shirt and jean shorts suggest it could be any day. Here, the quotidian is worth commemorating. While Oscar and Valeria’s deaths are recalled and remembered in the opening lines of the play, their characters are not submerged in the violence they endured nor defined through their death. With Oscar and Valeria dancing their way from the future to the present, the play symbolically intervened in their life and expressed that they mattered beyond their proximity to death. In theatrically representing their inherent right to live, Little Central America performed the ideals that guide sanctuary.
Touched by their tenderness and joyfulness, the father-daughter dances between Oscar and Valeria endeared spectators. Through the representation of their life, Arce and Martínez intended to evoke hope among the audience. However, these were not the only modes of affect conjured and circulated between the play’s spectators. A heartfelt testimonio by Sonia brought about much more difficult feelings. Accompanied by projected archival images of local newspapers referring to Central American immigration and their prescribed illegality in the background, Sonia shared her testimonio as if she were casually speaking to a friend in private. “Yo me vine en 1981. Fijáte que yo no me gradué de enfermera,” she begins and then goes on to outline how she got involved in the revolution, why she needed to flee El Salvador, and her journey to the United States.Footnote 24
Whereas migrant melodramas engage in an exchange of suffering for spectator sympathy, oftentimes in place of political action, the struggle Sonia aired in Little Central America solicited and circulated feelings among audiences differently.Footnote 25 The audience member’s emotive response depended on their positionality. While some spectators felt for Sonia, many others felt with her. Because the audience was mainly composed of Central Americans and Latinxs, the testimonio functioned less as an auditory spectacle of violence and more like a mirror for Central Americans to see their experiences reflected. One spectator shared how she was moved to tears in hearing Sonia speak because it reminded her of her difficulty fleeing Central America as a woman in the ‘80s. How many other women can she name who experienced similar conflicts? Sharing and listening to the testimonio was a form of recognition and witnessing one another’s struggle. The spectator’s emotional response reinforced how alive Central American history is. Central Americans in the United States still bear the implications of the past politically, economically, and emotionally. Yet, there is seldom public space for the community to intentionally engage with and process their pasts. Little Central America offered the space and time to do so.
It is unkown whether the range of emotions Little Central America inspired led audiences to direct political action. Nonetheless, the play did pay homage to those who were active in creating safe spaces for Central Americans to prosper. In other words, Little Central America commemorated those who valued Central American life. Before the end of each show, we honored Central American and Latinx community members like Arturo Griffiths, a lifelong Afro-Panamanian organizer in DC, the late Hugo Medrano, co-founder of GALA Hispanic Theatre, and ’Mama Teresa’ of the International Mayan League. The honorees sat on the make-shift stage in ornately carved, dark wooden chairs made for regal clergy as they watched the play unfold. Although distinguished from other audience members, the honorees were also spectators. That is until the near end of the play when one-by-one participants read aloud an honoree’s contributions to the community. After each guest of honor, the church resounded in applause celebrating their life’s work.
For some, this might have been the first time they were honored publicly. Little Central America, however, took seriously the many ways people created a sanctuary for Central Americans. While churches and other institutions were important to the Sanctuary Movement, individuals and collectives also played—and continue to play—an important role in safeguarding Central Americans escaping the violence condoned or executed by the state. This form of safeguarding includes providing for material needs like housing and food, as well as intangible needs like care and affection, education, and creative outlets. Across generations, many audience members also partook in these forms of sanctuary work in one way or another. Little Central America celebrated them for that. As much as the audience bore witness to the performers, performers also bore witness to the spectators, each being seen by their community. Bearing witness to one another like this has the potential to transform people.Footnote 26 It makes them feel seen and encourages them to continue providing safe spaces for one another, whether in the home, in the church, or through art.
Little Central America offered a transformative experience for performers and audiences alike. In using community-based theatre to enact, process, and understand the past, present, and future of Central Americans we can reconfigure how we relate to ourselves and one another. In this case study, theatre was an important site of refuge where racial ideologies were contested by performers, and the lives of diverse Central Americans were deemed significant. While I have discussed the impact this community-based theatrical production had on performers and spectators, I have not communicated the impact it had on me: a novice field producer. As a field producer, I came to appreciate the porosity of community-based theatre. At times, there is no clear delineation between on- and off-stage, performer and spectator. Throughout the play, I was a simultaneous producer, viewer, and performer who was a part of the off-stage community embodied on stage. This porosity highlights how dynamic community-based theatre can be and how we can actively co-create Central American, as well as Latinx identity through performance. Put differently, community-based theatre highlights the impact a theatrical stage can make on the world stage. In a moment during which people of color, immigrants, and cultural institutions in the United States are under acute attacks from the federal government, community-based theatre is an imperative tool that fosters a radical imagination for being and living otherwise.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: W.R.H.; Writing – original draft: W.R.H.; Writing – review & editing: W.R.H.
Open access
