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For acclaimed playwright Luis Alfaro, whose parents were farmworkers and whose family roots run deep in Delano, California’s Central Valley is a place of contradictions.
Its fields are extraordinarily fertile, yet the land can be punishing to the people who work it. The abundance and hardships are inseparable there, and it has been the setting for some painful family history, and a setting he’s returned to repeatedly in his work.
Alfaro’s grandfather, who had built a local Pentecostal church in Delano, was killed with two of his sons when they were struck by a train while engulfed by the region’s notorious, blinding “Tule fog.”
“There’s something so profoundly powerful and hurtful about the land,” Alfaro said, “and then there is the juxtaposition that it feeds us and nurtures us. It’s all about the growing and the picking and the hard living of it.”
The Chicano playwright, and winner of a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant,” returns to the Central Valley in his newest play, “Speaking in Tongues,” which premiered Oct. 17 with the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Through drama and comic banter, the play explores a crisis of faith in a town unsettled by poverty, immigration enforcement and a changing climate.
In the play, Alfaro draws on another part of his inheritance, the Pentecostal faith that shaped his upbringing, by exploring what happens when a community begins to lose its grip on the beliefs and traditions that once sustained it. The play also features immigration raids that profoundly shake the local agricultural community, while some younger family members choose to leave for a secular life in Los Angeles.
“There’s a meditation on stage with these folks who are wondering what their future is,” Alfaro said. “Also, because the Central Valley is about to carry the brunt of climate change, it goes from drought to flooding to drought to flooding. And it really affects agriculture for the entire nation and a lot of the world too.”
The story unfolds at a church beside a cornfield in Earlimart, a small Tulare County community where a pastor has gone missing, leaving behind the gifted wife (played by Evelina Fernández) who had secretly written his sermons.
The title “Speaking in Tongues” has multiple layers of meaning within the story. But at its core, it refers to the charismatic religious phenomenon of spontaneous speech that Alfaro calls “elevated language that’s created by spirit, meaning it’s built in absolute faith.”
“It comes to you because you’re open enough to accept it and it moves through you,” he explained of the belief behind tongues. “Part of the journey of this play is that not everybody gets it, not everybody has it, but there’s a woman in this play who has always had this gift for the language. But in Pentecostal religion, because it’s so conservative, women are not allowed to be the preachers. So here’s somebody who possesses the ancient language and is not allowed to practice it.”
For Alfaro, the inspirations behind the play include more personal losses, including the recent deaths of his parents, and his brother’s passing from cancer.
When his father was dying, he instructed his survivors to bury him in the Indigenous Nahua tradition. Part of that meant no casket, which his family objected to. But the larger desire to return to an ancestral spiritual path was honored by his family, and the funeral rites were largely performed in the Nahuatl language.
“My dad let go of his Catholicism and his Pentecostalism and all of that organized religion, and he was really like an Indio,” Alfaro said. “He really went back to his Indigenous self, and I think about that a lot.”
Alfaro’s parents relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. He was born and grew up in the dense, urban neighborhood of Pico-Union, but he spent many summers back in Delano with his family. “Speaking in Tongues” is his fourth play set in the area.
“Because I was raised in the middle of downtown L.A., I’m always at odds with the big open landscape and how it feels so small and choking to me — which is the opposite of what it really is. But it’s a land of great possibility.”
The human connection to the land is profound, he added.
“There’s a notion in the play that when someone thinks about their past, they’re not thinking about the 1970s, they’re thinking about 939 years ago,” he said, “and the 22 generations that it took to get me here today.”
The play is directed by José Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of Latino Theater Company, which commissioned the Alfaro work.
Valenzuela said he encouraged Alfaro to draw on recent events and personal family crises for the play. He said the work is part of the company’s mission “for the people of Los Angeles … to provide our community with artistic growth.”
The play is part of the company’s larger effort to explore culture, immigration, displacement and political fear through one of the city’s most prominent theaters. “Speaking in Tongues” is the ninth of 11 plays developed through its Circle of Imaginistas program. Another play in the series, “Yamel Cucuy,” which premiered earlier in October, combined live drama, puppetry, Indigenous percussion, Mexican folklore and modern horror to tell the bilingual story of a young woman hunted by immigration agents.
“‘Yamel Cucuy’ is the boogeyman, and they create this beautiful parallel between Yamel Cucuy and the immigration department and ICE,” said Valenzuela.
Aside from the play’s questions about faith and community, “Speaking in Tongues” is also fueled by contemporary images of aggressive immigration enforcement, and its damage to families. Alfaro, an associate professor of dramatic writing at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, has grappled with these issues before.
“It’s hard to use such dramatic words,” Alfaro said, “but there’s a horrific insensitivity going on in the entire culture — the kind of racism, the rise of white supremacy, and how it works in the culture and in the government, and how you can mistreat people so badly, especially through what we’re seeing from ICE.”
Alfaro said he’s been determined to weigh in on the big issues of the day in his work throughout his career.
“So much of my early art life was about politics — direct politics, like getting arrested, and protests and all of that,” he said.
“Nobody ever said to me, ‘Oh, Luis, you can be an artist.’ My parents were like, ‘You have to choose something that you can survive in that’s going to allow you to live in this country and not starve.’ And then you’re like, ‘Well, that’s not what I am.’”
Over time, he found a path toward pursuing his art as a writer and performer, while also wrestling with complicated cultural and political struggles, themes that continue to emerge in his plays.
“Every choice I make, and everything that I do,” Alfaro said, “is built around how I make my art and how I live my art.”
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