Mojada by Luis Alfaro

“There is no sign, no line, no welcome. We are in the other America.”— Luis Alfaro, Mojada

Plot

In Luis’ Alfaro’s play Mojada, Medea, her husband Hason (Jason), their son Acan, and Tita (nurse), a woman who is a servant for Medea’s family have fled from Mexico to America due to tragic circumstances, and have settled in Los Angeles. Living already for a year in Los Angeles (when the play opens), Medea finds it hard to assimilate being undocumented and traumatized by their flee. She stays at home sewing whereas Hason is eager to become a member of their new world. He soon advances from a day-labor worker to a contractor’s assistant who works long hours and is not home frequently. He eventually engages in a relationship with his boss, Armida (played by Marlene Forte), also an immigrant, but with a much less traumatic journey to America. The plot line is very close to Euripides’ tragedy but Alfaro twists it in such a way that renders Medea’s ancient story a stepping-stone to talk about the experience of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles.

Luis Alfaro: Writing for the Community

Luis Alfaro, a Chicano writer, theater director, and social activist was born in the 1960s in Los Angeles. For Alfaro, the son of Chicano farm workers, the major goal as a playwright is to find a way to bring his community into the modern theater and render his people part of the classical heritage. Two critical questions drive Alfaro’s plays: “How do I bring my community into the modern theater?” and “How are we part of the classics, too?” (Pollack-Pelzner, 2019)

These two questions lie at the core of Alfaro’s Greek trilogy (Electridad, Oedipus el Rey, and Mojada) which sets mythic stories in a contemporary background and sheds a heroic/mythic light to 21st century Latino figures. His latest Greek-inspired play, Mojada, is a re-imagining of Euripides’ Medea in which the protagonist is a young indigenous seamstress from Mexico who followed Jason across the border to the other America. Alfaro has claimed that “Medea may be the hardest Greek tragedy for modern audiences to understand” and thus he tried to make it more accessible to the contemporary immigrant-Mexican and American spectator.

“I call myself a citizen artist, because one of the things I do is try to get my playwrights — especially my graduate playwrights — interested in the world. It’s about how you connect art to culture and community here and now, and how we are vital to the expression of our community.” — Luis Alfaro, The Artist as Leader: Luis Alfaro

Medea the Immigrant

Euripides’ Medea is not from Greece. She is an outsider, an immigrant who struggles to find her place in the Corinthian society just like Alfaro’s Medea, and many immigrants across the world. Euripides’ Medea is a barbarian, a foreigner in Corinth, without a paternal family or home to return to since she killed her brother.

“Medea: But your story and mine are not the same: you have a city and a father’s house, the enjoyment of life and the company of friends, while I, without relatives or city, am suffering outrage from my husband. I was carried off as booty from a foreign land and have no mother, no brother, no kinsman to shelter me from this calamity.” - Euripides, Medea 252-258

Alfaro’s Medea followed Hason (with whom she is not officially married) in his pursuit of the American dream and the chance to seize the good life in Los Angles.But like Euripides’ protagonist, she lives almost isolated being an undocumented immigrant in a place she does not feel that she belongs.

“Medea: I am pathetic. I am a wetback, una mojada.” - Luis Alfaro, Mojada

In the framework of the fifth century Athenian society, Jason’s betrayal and marriage to the princess of Corinth leaves Medea with no formal status as women were completely dependent on their husbands or fathers. Medea is now facing ostracization and abandonment, the loss of her children, and the perilous state of being an unmarried foreign woman.

“Medea: In my case, however, this sudden blow that has struck me has destroyed my life. I am undone, I have resigned all joy in life, and I want to die. For the man in whom all I had was bound up, as I well know—my husband—has proved the basest of men.” - Euripides, Medea 225-229

Similarly in Mojada, when Hason marries Armida and she announces that they are taking with them Acan and Tita, Medea is left all alone threatened to be taken to court and be deported. From the beginning of the play, Euripides’ Medea finds herself in a critical situation because of the circumstances of her departure from Colchis which are now combined with Jason’s marriage to the princess. Medea is in “a state of utter isolation, epitomized by her exile decreed by Creon” (Hopman, 2008). Likewise, Alfaro’s Medea lives in near isolation deeply attached to her Mexican values refusing to assimilate. This emphasis on the state of isolation and “foreigness” of both Medeas accentuates both Euripides’ and Alfaro’s critique of the status of the ‘other’ within a society.

The Relevant Medea: Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles

When Luis Alfaro started “revisiting” Euripides’ play in 2013, he was encouraged by Chay Yew, director of Mojada’s production at the Public Theater to gather stories from undocumented immigrants to make Medea’s story more fathomable, relatable, and relevant to the experiences of immigrant communities in the United States (especially the Mexican ones), and to better contextualize Medea’s journey in modern-day America. The Colchian Medea, who immigrated to Corinth following Jason, became in Los Angeles, a heavily culturally Mexican city whose immigration population is largely comprised of Mexican immigrants, a Mexican woman driven by her struggle between home and the new land, tradition and assimilation, haunted by the cost of coming to a country that exploits her labor but rejects her culture. Euripides’ Medea brought on the fifth-century Athenian stage a foreigner woman who voiced the hardship of the social status of females, foreigners/non-citizens, and outsiders; Alfaro’s Mojada is a 21st century retelling of the similar hardships that Mexican immigrants face in the United States.

“On the contrary, he (Euripides) seems to exploit the theme of Medea’s foreignness in order to emphasize her vulnerability and isolation and also to make a searching analysis of the nature of civilization and barbarism, a deep preoccupation of this play…” — P.E. Easterling

“Alfaro is writing about immigrants and their assimilation, or lack thereof, and the pressures the dominant white culture exerts on their choices.” — Deborah Klugman

Sources

Easterling, Patricia Elizabeth. “The Infanticide in Euripides’ Medea.” In Greek Tragedy, Yale Classical Studies 25, edited by T. F. Gould, and C. J. Herington,77–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Hopman, Marianne. “Revenge and Mythopoiesis in Euripides Medea.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 138, no. 1, 2008: 155–83.

Kramer , Rob. “The Artist as Leader: Luis Alfaro.” UNCSA, August 16, 2016.

Klugman, Deborah. “What Do Greek Tragedies and the Latino Experience in L.A. Have in Common?” LA Weekly, May 22, 2019.

Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel. “Rewriting Greek Tragedies as Immigrant Stories.” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 12, 2019.

Recondo, Juan. “Turning Medea into a Telenovela.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, September 5, 2019.

SCS Annual Meeting (2019) - Luis Alfaro Keynote Address.