A REHEARSAL FOR THE REVOLUTION
Under ICE crackdown, Mexican workers bring theater of resistance to Hollywood
All photos by Peter Tomka / via New Theater Hollywood
On a rainy Sunday in January, anti-ICE activists with walkie-talkies and megaphones slung from their hips patrolled the sidewalk outside New Theater Hollywood, squinting into the mist. The 49-seat black box theater usually stages experimental and one-off shows; its founders Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff previously ran a divey watering hole in Berlin called TV Bar, and have similarly turned New Theater into a critical convergence point where the audience is always a scene. Previous productions have starred queer filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, virtuosic vocalist Colin Self, and nepo baby Kaia Gerber, with casts of it girls and artists performing mostly for their friends.
“The boundaries between truth and fiction are slimmer in a small theater,” said Henkel. She and Pitegoff practically live at the venue, and that afternoon, they were up in the rafters, adjusting a projector light that displayed subtitles for the upcoming show. “The actors are often people you know or care about, and there is a built-in empathy to who is in front of you,” Henkel continued. “You are forced to listen. To be present together. It is very close to love.”
That weekend’s play, titled “La Madre Patria,” (or “Motherland”) centered on themes of motherhood, ancestry, and resilience. It featured a cast of ten Mexican and Indigenous women, many of whom spend their days cleaning houses and working on farms in Sonoma County, a fertile region in Northern California equally known for its vineyards and history of labor organizing. The women are part of a theater collective called Teatro Almas Libres that tells immigrant stories from their own perspectives; plays are often rehearsed in public parks, office spaces, or friends’ garages, and created collaboratively with Jackie Katz, a drama teacher who has been directing their works since 2022.
“ICE arrested and detailed someone a block away from here yesterday,” said Katz, explaining why volunteers were stationed outside the theater. Katz noted that some of the theater collective’s members are undocumented workers, and staging this play in LA, a “hot” city where ICE has had a heavy presence for the last eight months, was no small task. “We didn’t even want to advertise this play on social media too much,” she said. “These women are taking on a lot of risk to be here.”
Katz led me backstage where the women were getting ready, clutching worn copies of scripts while muttering lines to themselves. Their young daughters, who had come with them to participate in the play, swished around in wide ruffled dresses while weaving ribbons into their hair. Socorro Draz, a member of the collective, told me that many women have not seen their mothers in over two decades—ever since they chose to walk over the border. Enacting parts of their lives on stage, she explained, constituted a “healing process” that allowed them to express feelings long buried by the immigrant experience.
While the anti-immigrant crackdown in the US continues to escalate following the killing of Renee Good, inside the theater’s walls, the atmosphere felt warm and almost sacred. Flowers and medicinal plants like sage and rosemary lined the room, while giant portraits of the women’s mothers hung on the walls like altars. Backstage, the women stood in a circle as Katz led a prayer, chanting “Sí, se puede!”—a common rallying cry for labor unions and civil rights organizations that means “Yes, you can!”—as the lights dimmed.
The play began with the children performing traditional folkoric dances, ruffled skirts flashing in blurs of turquoise and red. Then the women took turns dedicating emotional homages to their mothers, some breaking down in tears of gratitude and longing. In one climatic scene, a cast member draped herself in the bulleted vest of Adela Velarde Pérez, a famous soldadera who fought and supported troops in the Mexican Revolution, while saluting her as a symbol of female strength. Then the women brought out a giant puppet used in Oaxaca and Michoacan folk traditions to bring happiness in times of darkness, gleefully waving its hands with wooden stilts.
In the audience, many people sang along to familiar songs in Spanish, while hooting and cheering for the women at every opportunity. Activist Jesse Sanes from the LA Tenants Union told me that at the previous day’s show, some members of the crowd included Mexican laborers from a nearby Home Depot, who’d heard about the play and been given free tickets. Sanders said that “La Madre Patria” reminded him of similar grassroots efforts, such as film workshops and communal lunches, that have sprung up at Home Depot parking lots and other frontlines of LA’s ICE raids. “These are ways for workers at the front lines to claim and assert power over their territories,” he said. “A lot of self-reflection happens here.”
Katz situated the group’s work within the longer tradition of theater as a tool for raising political consciousness, drawing parallels to Soviet communist agitprop and Italian street theatre in the 1600s, and framing “La Madre Patria” as a contemporary response to Trump’s immigration crackdowns. Constructing a scene, she said, requires examining how to quickly communicate and convince the audience of a message—and get people to truly listen. Quoting Augosto Boal, the Brazilian pioneer of political theater, she said, “Theater is not the revolution. It is a rehearsal for the revolution.”
POETICS AND PLANT MEDICINE: STATES OF EUPHORIA
I am in the Bay Area this week to speak at the inaugural edition of Poetics and Plant Medicine, a series of conversations between writers, scholars, journalists, and artists that interrogates the psychedelic experience beyond familiar narratives and pure advocacy. Co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, and supported by the University of Berkeley, part one is titled “States of Euphoria,” and will take place at 7pm on Thursday, Jan 15 at Bathers Library in Oakland. I am joined by my sis hannah baer—a meme lord who is one of my favorite queer rave writers—as well as scholar Arun Saldhana, whose canonical book Psychedelic White unpicked the racist undercurrents behind the Goa trance scene, and was a foundational text behind my essay “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”
Here’s the organizers’ description of the event:
“Long imagined as a site of utopian possibility, the dance floor offers a fleeting glimpse of freedom and psychedelic transcendence—if only for the night. As these three writers show, the liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits? As baer writes: “If we agree that we do not like the way things are, we must ask over and over again, are we subverting them?”
If you’re in the Bay Area, come through! The event is free, and you don’t need to RSVP—just make sure to come early, as space is limited.