I will not soon forget the scene in "Quixote Nuevo" in which a U.S. Border Patrol drone collects videos of Americans on the ground in a fictional West Texas town. El Paso-based playwright Octavio Solis portrayed characters grimly resigned to the use on U.S. soil of technology that most of us associate with the war on terror in far-away Iraq or Afghanistan.
In the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, some reporters have been focusing anew on the militarization of the border, a consequence of portraying as an invasion the northward flows of people fleeing political or criminal violence or simply seeking economic opportunity. Even before Uvalde, a colleague at Reuters who is based in the US southwest had told me of Americans living with the constant buzz of helicopters overhead, and of those Americans who happen to be brown taking care to drive to places they could easily walk, to avoid being confronted by heavily armed men in camouflage who assume anyone on foot who looks Hispanic is undocumented.
By coincidence, I was in the midst of Cristina Rivera Garza's "Autobiografía del algodón" the night I saw "Quixote Nuevo" at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, where the play closes June 12. Rivera Garza's deeply researched nonfiction book informed by her imagination is, like Solis's work of fiction informed by current events, set along the US-Mexico border and portrays personal stories of love, loss and family amid larger political and historical events. My Spanish isn't quite up to "Autobiografía del algodón", but it's good to stretch yourself. And whatever my Spanish shortcomings, I was able to understand and appreciate Rivera Garza's love of language and literature, and see that that is something else she shares with Solis, whose characters speak both English and Spanish. Rivera Garza draws on a world of literary sources, including James Agee, Camille Flammarion, José Revueltas, Tarfia Faizullah. Solis contents himself with just one, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose "Don Quixote" serves as a frame for the play.
"Quixote Nuevo" has music and humor, but it's no "Man of La Mancha." Solis avoids romanticizing his seventeenth-century source material. His main character, Quijano, is a failed Spanish literature professor who is losing his memory and confusing himself with a beloved fictional icon. Quijano sets out into the desert to try to redeem a betrayal of his youth, and to stand up for the uninsured, the unemployed, the undocumented, the impoverished and the oppressed. Quijano even brings down a dragon, in the form of that drone.
You don't need to keep up with the headlines or read Rivera Garza or Cervantes to find "Quixote Nuevo" engaging, especially with the lavish treatment it is given by the design team for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts production. But context added nuance to my evening at the theater.
Playgoers, like readers of the Cervantes novel, are asked to consider what is more absurd: Quijano's imagined chivalry or society's all-too-real cruelties. In the end, Quijano's Sancho, a gentle paletero man named Manny, shows how desperately we need the inspiration of the former to try to gird ourselves for the fight against the latter.