Sitrep 6: Mar. 9, 2025: The Audience of Patricia Ybarra

               I found Patricia Ybarra’s article on how to read a Latinx play a helpful primer. Ybarra asserts that the article targets non-specialists and also those who teach plays (50), so I consider myself to be among the intended audience. Their synthesis of themes and topics within Latinx plays, such as family structures and dynamics, legacies of generational violence, the infrastructural resources (and lack thereof) of the barrio, and the quest for cultural belonging help situate these plays while pointedly resisting the frequent homogenization of Latinx plays in educational framings that often unintentionally tokenize and reinforce the notion that Latinx works are lumped into a culturally ‘other’ experience for readers (49).

Reconsidering her article now, I’m thinking about the specific content of the article, but also why it feels particularly effective or relatable to me personally when so many articles introduce me to an idea that I feel receptively distanced from – often the articles I read contain an idea/ideas that I can intellectually consider but am left feeling like I don’t have enough framework, ability, or experience with which to fully engage. This has me thinking more critically about audience reception in a pedagogical sense. At a fundamental level, I speak no Spanish, have read very few Latinx plays, do not necessarily regularly interact within Latinx communities, and have never traveled to a predominantly Latinx country. Yet my familiarity with Hudes’ Water by the Spoonful and In the Heights, as Ybarra suggests many in her audience will have, certainly helps me to feel she has corroborated her points well. Additionally, Ybarra’s discussion of formed and extended Latinx family structures recalls my own lived experience residing within an almost completely Latinx community in Jersey City Heights, an experience that, until recalled by the description in the article, I sometimes forget that I’ve had. I also find myself relating to the way Ybarra describes a character trope in Latinx plays as the one who has ‘educated herself out of the neighborhood’ (51). I realize I am risking appropriation in order to relate, but I have also educated myself out of the rural midwestern ‘barrio’ of my upbringing by virtue of travel, formal education, and simply experiencing and living in communities that are quite different from my hometown for the majority of my adult life (51). Like Ybarra describes, I often feel myself straddling cultural and identity borderlands (49) in which I have lived and that have shaped me – am I a New Yorker? Probably not. Am I Canadian? No, not exactly. Do I feel like one of the community when I step into a cornfield or a hay barn in rural Ohio? Not really. I’ve been gone too long. But can one ever really leave the ‘barrio’ in which they were raised? Ybarra’s article then, works on me in ways many articles don’t, by not just introducing me to a topic in which I can intellectually accept, but appealing to me more deeply through layers of lived experience. I’m reminded how as pedagogues, we are so often just one layer of a student’s educational journey, and how so much of the way a student experiences resonance or discomfort/unfamiliarity with a topic of instruction is beyond our influence or control. It is one reason I find the impersonal structures of mass education problematic. How does one effectively teach a student without relationship, without some sense of a student’s lived experience? Ybarra, who obviously has no idea who I am as a reader of their work, demonstrates teaching prowess by at least thinking about their audience reception and carefully choosing what examples to include in their article. Perhaps it is Ybarra’s experience as a director and theatre practitioner that shapes their writing in this intentional way, though I suspect it is more that their intentionality as a person makes them concerned with their audience/s, and likely strengthens their teaching, directing, writing, and scholarly ability.