CLARA: This is Story Behind the Story. I'm Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is Luis 'xago' Juarez, author of reAlisal, a play about the history of East Salinas, told as a series of vignettes each based on interviews with actual residents. Inspired by the work of Anna Deavere Smith and the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, reAlisal is part of a growing movement in documentary theater, which seeks to center underrepresented voices. Xago Juarez, welcome to Story Behind the Story. XAGO: How are you doing? CLARA: You got your start in theater through a summer workshop at El Teatro Campesino, right? XAGO: Yes. CLARA: Tell me about that experience. XAGO: Quite some time ago. I'd just graduated from high school. This is 1990. No other number after that, just 90, and it was right after, yeah, I graduated from Alisal High School. That was where my political and cultural, social education began. Just in that one summer, I learned so much in that one summer. And to learn it in a theater was pretty impactful. CLARA: What were the kinds of things you were doing during that workshop that gave you that education? XAGO: One of them was this exercise around memorizing los veinte pasos. The first 20 passages in the Mayan numerical order. If I can remember how it went, [xago lists off 20 Mayan numerals]. CLARA: Good memory. XAGO: I think I just did 1, 2, 3 all the way from 1 to 20. And I'm sure there's probably some listeners out there that can correct me very quick, would be quick to correct me. I remember the instructor breaking down the first one to five steps and connecting that back to the approach of the Teatro Campesino and their work based upon their history, the legacy working with the United Farm Workers in the mid '60s, and then moving from the protest theater that they were born out of into telling more stories that were going to speak to our experience, the history, culture and the society at large. The one that Chicanos were existing and growing and surviving and thriving within at the time from the '60s, '70s. XAGO: And then up until the '80s, it appeared that the founder of El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez, was able to make waves into the film industry. And for us growing up at that time, this is again 1990, La Bamba had already been presented in 1987, and to be attending this theater company that was just right over the hill from the east side of Salinas, going over to San Juan Bautista, it was like this great blessing and a great just fountain resource for me to connect my passion for theater with my identity. CLARA: Were you interested in telling the kinds of stories that Teatro Campesino was telling before then or did it really shape the way that you- XAGO: The style, the approach, the audience, the message. In terms of the style, like this agitprop form of eliminating the formal structure of a stage, curtains, light, sound, you don't need that. You just need an audience. And where do you go for your audience, your audience, you live with your audience. That's your family. Your audience is right next door. It's the neighborhood, and that's what I walked away with, understanding I don't have to chase after this idea of success where you have to travel far from, you have to leave your home, leave your community- CLARA: Be separate. XAGO: ... be separated. Yeah. At the time, it felt as if you had to cut your ties, at the time, right, for me, and embrace these so-called professional industrial spaces where you'd have to follow a form that would be directed towards an audience that you're going to find in a big city or that you're going to find through a film studio or a film audience, whatever audience that was deemed an 'audience' by the dominant culture, none of that was relevant. The Teatro Campesino showed me that we have that. We've had that since the dawn of time. And so, yeah, that was a decolonizing of sorts for me. CLARA: Yeah. Well, I mean, you see that in your work too, right? I saw this reading that you did that you put on of reAlisal in a community center in Salinas. You said you graduated from Alisal High School, right? That is very much of the community. I guess what I am interested in hearing from you is why it's important to you to tell these kinds of stories, the kinds of stories that you hear in reAlisal, and that do come out of these communities. XAGO: Whenever you put those two words, East Salinas together, East Salinas, because the Alisal was annexed to the city of Salinas in 1963. Originally a community of farm workers. A lot of them that came from the Midwest escaping the dust bowl. Many were of Italian descent, Portuguese, Filipino, African-American and Mexican. After it was annexed, there was still this stigma that this community had of laborers that had their own culture and their own way of being that they didn't vibe necessarily with the gentry from Salinas proper, right? It's interesting too. If you look at, I think it's East of Eden, John Steinbeck described Salinas as somewhat of I guess the equivalent of a white gated community, whereas Monterey was a Mexican town, the wharf, that part of Monterey. XAGO: I find it fascinating that this reversal of identities has happened, and East Salinas having even a bigger stigma because of the last ... Since that annexation, so many factories have shut down. It used to be a factory town. There was a Firestone tire plant, Nestle's chocolate factory, Shirlene's, Spreckels Sugar Company, and several more. CLARA: Yeah. A lot of industrial factories. XAGO: My father came as a bracero, and he was fortunate enough to get a factory job in 1963, and he worked there till 1995. He retired. I grew up in the '70s. I was born in '72. I experienced somewhat of a middle class, working class background. I didn't have the ... I was really fortunate enough to not have to worry about if we had enough money for medical, if we had enough money for food on the table, or if we had enough money for rent. We had so much provided for us. But once we started seeing all these factories were shutting down, our neighborhood had more and more criminal activity. And from that, you saw the trafficking of drugs making its way into because factory shut down, job opportunities drop. What are you going to do? You're going to supply a need or you're going to hustle. You're going to try to make some way of survival, right? XAGO: So that criminal element as a tool for survival I guess is generated or it starts to grow and it has its reputation from through the '80s into the '90s. And for me, I think I silently had ... I just resigned to that too. I never questioned it. And so it took some time for me to realize ... Actually it wasn't until ... I mean there was a pride that was there and we had it, especially in the '90s, but again, I wasn't challenging the narrative. We weren't questioning the dominant narrative that was going on. It wasn't a part of conversation. We weren't going to talk about it. We just kind of accepted it until finally you get to see examples, right, like where he had mentioned some of my inspiration to see the reclamation of narrative, to see someone being able to practice and control a narrative in the form of theater. And it's like, yeah. XAGO: A grant comes along from the California Humanities and it's this California Stories grant. This was 2009, 10 years ago. It's offering this opportunity to collect stories from your communities that have been silenced to some degree or whatever. And I see it and I just like, oh, this looks like an opportunity. Let's do this. And that was when I got to really learn about my neighborhood. I met Italian folks, I met the black families, Okie, Filipinos, families-- Mexicano families that all that had that same love for the neighborhood. Even my own unconscious acceptance of that dominant narrative, it just evaporated. Here I am feeling like, how did I not know about you? You lived here and this is what you- CLARA: So you were learning for the first time about these stories? XAGO: I was learning for the first time. Yeah. Because you just see your neighbor. You don't know who this person is. But now you get to actually ... you're actually talking to this person and they're actually sharing some intimate moments of their life and these milestones living in the community, and I'm just an audience. I'm their audience. So what then do I do with this? How do I process and how do I interpret what has just been told to me, and to do it with all my heart, right? And inviting my brother and another partner, Javier Tamayo, who is now one of the leading coordinating directors at the Alisal Center for the Fine Arts. My brother, Jesus Juarez, who's a UPS driver. We had collected 40 interviews. Yeah. From those 40, we pulled 14 stories and it was just the three of us. CLARA: Tell me about how you did that, because it must be very different to write a play like that that's based on interviews. I mean, I'm interviewing you right now. When you talk to people in interviews, they're not always giving you one clear narrative. How do you go about pulling that apart, deciding what to include, figuring out how to turn them into these theatrical stories that sort of make sense in a narrative structure? How do you do that? XAGO: There were some stories that had to be left out. It really comes down to just saying, okay, well, how will your audience -- who's the audience, right? The audience is the neighborhood. What do you do with all of this? There's all these moments, all this history, all this detail. Pretty much what we felt we had to do after recording, transcribing, going over the notes and then trying to find -- identifying which part of it, it helped me. It geared me up for the next project that we did around the Acosta Plaza town homes where as an audience, where as a listener of a story, you record it, you write it all down and get all the details, but you ask yourself, which were the highlights, right? What were the highlights of it? XAGO: We've all played that role of storyteller when we see a movie or we saw something and now we're explaining it to whoever, right? Suddenly we find ourselves in performance mode. And then the car came in and it pulled out and the guys jumped out and they started doing ... CLARA: Right. There's the point in the story when you get going. XAGO: Yeah. Yeah. It's really focusing on the essence of those stories, pulling the essence from that. Celebrating these moments, right, as best as possible. And you have so many stories so you don't have that much time. And I don't want to -- I'm not here to bore anybody. If I were in the audience, what would I want to see? How would I want to see it presented to me? I had to keep asking. You had to keep asking yourself that, because there's these ideas of, well, it's a documentary theater place, so you're committed to the word and to the detail of that presentation. Yeah. I could see that like Anna Deavere Smith, but there's this thing called artistic license, and that's where you had to pull it out. And you don't know. You're not going to know if it's a hit or not until the audience comes in and sees it, and especially when that interviewee is in that audience sitting with all the other neighbors and they're watching this. It's going to be at that moment that you're going to see if you succeeded or not. CLARA: Tell me about the name of the play, reAlisal. XAGO: re and Alisal, upper case A, reAlisal, it's a play on words, on the Spanish word of realisando, realisar, to realize something, to see something, to recognize something through this narrative that is created and cultivated and perpetuated by people from outside of the community for that truth to be told and to be celebrated and presented by people from the community. This was that, right? CLARA: We're being seen. XAGO: Yeah. We're going to come in and see the Alisal, these stories from the east side of Salinas. We're going to see them, we're going to experience them. And that's what I feel is what's important. You have to experience these stories. The idea of the white flight. The idea of white flight seeing the neighborhood, right? After this project, it was like, okay, but there are still some okies on in this side of town. There are still people here that don't speak Spanish, right, who aren't from Mexico. Regardless of how much they probably have complained, something is keeping them here. I'm not going to say, why am I going to be the one to explain why that is. I know for most of them it's most likely economic reasons, right, but it is something to save. It's something saved for that. It's something to be said for those Okies that are still there. XAGO: It's like, no, nobody's going to tell me where to go. Nobody's going to push me out of here. Okay. Cool. Right? Everywhere you go, it's a pretty Mexican community. You can hear it, you can smell it, you can taste it everywhere you go. Maybe to some degree I'm thinking there was a surrendering or a respect that they were able to ... a boundary that they were able to keep. I think that's special. I think that's a special thing. Maybe that's just me, but it was such an education for me sitting through these interviews and getting to know these people, and them seeing that I'm listening to them. CLARA: The interviews with the ... XAGO: For that first project, the reAlisal project. I'm picking up so much and there's so much in between the lines. So much is being said in between- CLARA: What do you mean? Can you give me an example? XAGO: The racial makeup of the neighborhoods. It's like, across the street, there's this family. Over there was that family, and not Spanish or names, right?. Somebody who was telling the story. It was a real Okie neighborhood. Some of them were able to kind of explain, well, once the '80 started coming in, suddenly they all kind of appeared. They all, right, Mexican immigrants. They're not going to look at the leadership of that time and put the responsibility on the President, Ronald Reagan, right, who had signed an Amnesty Act in 1986 which was like, from that point on, there was a shift. There was a demographic shift, a significant demographic shift. It had already been kind of shifty, but I do kind of feel like that was part of it. XAGO: The organizing that the UFW had done in the early '70s, it was a cultural shift. Suddenly there was a different identity. There was a different identity for the workers there. They were perceived differently now. Workers meaning the Ag workers. There was somebody there looking out for their best interests. It wasn't like the good old days. The good old days were changing. There wasn't conversation about a critical analysis of the diminishment of an Okie population and then the growth of this Mexican population. CLARA: People weren't looking at the structural influences- XAGO: No. They weren't looking at that or the economic policies that were in place that were going to create these conditions. None of that. I'm not asking, I'm not looking, I'm not in that place to do so. By leaving that out, right, I have to because I'm a resident there, I grew up there, so then I can make up my own mind around it. And that was my advantage, I guess you can say. That's what gives me a little bit of -- rather than some outsider coming in. CLARA: Right. It's not academic to you. XAGO: No. Right. It's not. It's for through a lived experience that I had, and understanding the shutting down of factories, the policies that were in place that opened up the doors, the Reagan policies, right, and even up until NAFTA, right? What took place in the early '90s with the passing of NAFTA, it created conditions that were harsh, harder conditions for people who worked and lived in agricultural communities in Mexico to survive. We saw throughout the '90s it just get even more Mexican, right? If you hear enough from as many corners as possible, and what I mean by hearing from as many quarters as possible from this place, you will find your own story in there. You will find a story. You will be able to connect your own dots. I will never be one to be like, well, this is the final word. I'm the one with the -- I'm not the authority, right? CLARA: You're sort of breaking down that idea of authority in a lot of ways too. XAGO: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I think this is what we all have the capacity to do. And if these plays or these series of plays or the plays that we continue to cultivate out of the east side of Salinas, if it can inspire or if it can give somebody ... light the idea for folks to understand that everybody's story has enough weight and enough power and has enough of an audience, I think there is an audience for every story out there. If this project helps to provide an example of that, then boom, then that's the realization, right, that's the realisando of it. CLARA: I like that. Were there particular stories that stood out to you in your interviews or themes that you found you kept returning to when you were trying to translate these into theater? XAGO: I think the themes that came up the most were this is a great place to raise kids, right? It's a great place to grow up in. And what were the elements that were in place that made this a good community? There was a police officer who spoke about his time growing up, and he had mentioned how the change came for him, where he saw that impacted the change was the passing of Prop 13. CLARA: That was actually one of the stories that stood out to me was Pat Bobby and PD are the characters who are talking about all the courses they can take at Alisal High, which includes aviation courses, and how all the money for that comes from taxes. And then there's the sort of contrast with news footage from Prop 13. So yeah, sorry, tell me about that. XAGO: And I remember as a child, too, playing the trumpet in the music program at Alisal Elementary School, and suddenly the program's gone. This is the early '80s into the mid '80s ... early '80s. There was no space for a conversation around it. All right. That's just the way it is. It told me how important the villages in providing that space for the youth to grow. But if the village is not equipped-- CLARA: It doesn't have those resources. XAGO: It doesn't have those resources, there's going to be more strain put on other areas. It gets to a point where you had the passing of Prop 13, you had the outsourcing of these factories, people losing their jobs and then suddenly there happens to be more drugs on the street around the time that the Just Say No campaign was being ushered. You kind of make your own connections. CLARA: Well, and it's interesting you talked about those things being about at the same time because you're taking away the long standing resources, the tax resources that feed into these great social programs and into schools and into all sorts of other things and then you have this other program, this Just Say No program that's like, oh, well, the responsibility for saying no to drugs, for getting rid of drugs, it's all personal. It's not institutional. None of these things that we're taking apart matter. I don't know. That's the narrative I'm putting together in this room. XAGO: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's how it felt, I feel like, for my generation. The mattering, by the end of the '80s into the '90s, it was like, oh, you begin to make up your own mind and see what really matters. And for a country like ours, suddenly ... Obviously through your own education, you start learning, you start reading other texts, other perspectives. Your critical lens start to form. You can't help but feel a certain way like you've just been lied to, and that distressed or the dismissal of everything that we learn. You just, it's like, wow, that was all for what? We're seeing how far this is all going. And what I mean by this all going is this American dream. XAGO: The fact that this region, this ag region that provides food for ... I mean there's no other place on the planet where you can grow the kind of greens that grow here. CLARA: Especially long-- XAGO: For nine months out of the year, it's going to be here. The other three months you go to Yuma. What has kept this ... What keeps us going, what has kept us going for at least the last 120 some odd years, this Ag industry, where the architects of that industry or the facilitators of that industry don't need to show up at city functions or city hall meetings, don't have to address what is happening to the children of their workers. You begin to see, Oh wow. You would imagine the people are recognizing it now, but growing up, why was it that so many of my generation wanted to leave? Why was it that there was no room for advancement, like social economic advancement? CLARA: What's your answer to that question? XAGO: This is a plantation. The industry here, all this region needs are farm workers. And there's no room for ... Yeah. You'll get educators. Now there are a lot more political representatives, but it still feels like the smartest people in the room are not in the room. And what I mean by the smartest people, I mean those who have the most influence on policies around this valley. We're not able to see how an industry like this, how this economic structure is not sustainable enough for residents to live here. In the '90s, it wasn't like, oh, we're going to be gentrified in another 20 years. But it felt like you were not a part of it. You were just not ... you were going to be alienated from it. There is no engagement with you. There is no relationship with you. And I'm not saying that you have to have an intimate relationships with every resident here, but the dynamic of your representatives, this power structure, the industry, the economy of this region, what it provides for the rest of the world. XAGO: My mind was blown when I was in India and eating at a restaurant, and as I was walking out, I'm walking by the trashcan and I see this plastic packaging of Tanimura & Antle. And I'm like, wow. One of my neighbors actually picked something and it was packaged and it ended up at somebody's digestive system over here on the other side of the planet. They touched it first. Why do we not take care of those hands? CLARA: I think this begs the question, do you consider your work political? XAGO: It can be interpreted as such. It's story. It's coming from my perspective. It really depends on how it's taken. How I deliver it, I want to deliver it like a story. How it's received can be political. What happens after that if there's a young student in there that like, Oh wow, I learned about this movement that took place at Alisal High School. Their first year that they had Cinco de Mayo, they only gave them like 15 minutes, and now I've seen how far it's gone, right? However they take that in, if it's political, it's political. CLARA: Early on in reAlisal, one of the characters points out that when outsiders tell stories about east Salinas, they often focus on stories about violence. And you mentioned this a little bit earlier. In general, the stories you tell in reAlisal have a very different focus there about a lot of different sort of mundane aspects of living in this community and the history of it. But there's one story toward the end about a guy who was robbed two days in a row after he starts a new job at a fast food restaurant. I just kind of wanted to ask you, tell me about that story and why did you decide to include it? XAGO: Laughter is the best medicine. Laughter heals. When these things happen to us, they could be pretty traumatic. This was a story that was told by a friend of mine who had a friend, a friend of a friend. You're getting to share a part of a culture. A culture that can see something that's traumatic as that as funny. Now, I'm sure there's listeners out there that have a hard time with that. So much so that we come ... There are different layers of culture, right? On the surface level or at a certain level or on a certain platform or in a certain arena, we interact in a culture where we are going to all agree upon a reaction, Oh my God, you got robbed two days in a row. Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Did they ever catch them? What happened to you? Are you okay? And when was this? Okay. You're from the east side of Salinas and you're working. It is like, okay. I'm wearing the manager shirt. CLARA: Right. Because he's not actually the manager. XAGO: He's not an actual manager. He's like, I guess. All right. And then he gets robbed. Like, ah, man. All right. He pulled a gun out on me. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. I grew up here. You're not going to say no to this. We get it. Happens again the next day, right? It's like, wow, all right, this is really happening. Okay. For him to be able to ... What's great is that the guy was still around and he was able to share it, right, tell a story. This is a culture where it's like our people have been through a lot of pain, and when there's crime that's within their community or between neighbors, and then there's been crimes that have happened from the past that has been passed down through ... those experiences have been embedded in DNA, right, there's something inside us that's told us that we've been here before and it's actually not that bad. We're still alive and we still have what we have. XAGO: The fact that I even have a job, or if I'm working at Wendy's or if I'm working at wherever, because maybe my parents or my other family members are working out in the field, there's a lot to be grateful for. So unconsciously, I like to say that there's these coping mechanisms. Laughter is one of them, right? And it's again, back to this culture, but then you have the dominant culture confusing cultures that they're not a part of for intelligence. Confusing culture for intelligence. I believe that was demonstrated like this is how we do. This is how we deal. If you don't find this funny, then you probably don't live here. CLARA: I understand that this isn't your first really reAlisal play. There are a few in the series. Are you drawing from the same material? Are you exploring different themes in each of them? How do they relate to each other? XAGO: There was one called reAlisal, Your Neighbor's Story. That was in 2011. And then in 2014 there was one called reAlisal, Stories from Acosta Plaza, which focused on the Laurel town homes because the east side already has the stigma. The east side already has the stigma. Acosta Plaza was even deeper, right? After that, we had taken a documentary theater approach to other projects that followed. XAGO: One was the story of Virginia Rocca Barton, a school was named after her, found out that she was a daughter of Italian immigrants. She was one of the first female superintendents, woman superintendents in the state of California. She started working in 1941 and became a principal within two years in a world dominated by men, right? She proved herself effective and within I think maybe says six, five, I don't know how many years. It was a short span of time where she became the superintendent of the school district. XAGO: I heard stories about how she opened up a school in this labor camp, and she opened it up ... This was in the '50s. She addressed the audience. She addressed the parents in Spanish. She had learned Spanish I guess in high school or in college. This was something that we did for the Virginia Rocca Barton School. It was a project that we came to the school with, and we spent the year there in their after-school program and trying to bring this play up. Not trying, but towards the end, the kids did their best. The kids that were part of the program did their best to present this life story of Virginia Rocca Barton. And there's more detail to it. There's a lot more detail. May she rest in peace, Virginia Rocca Barton. She passed away a year ago. Was it a year ago? Maybe this past year, I think. XAGO: reAlisal I guess would be our branding for documentary theater, specifically with stories around the neighborhood. And I feel like for any future pieces that we would do, would have a ... The Virginia Rocca Barton piece does have a reAlisal approach, but it's focused on her. reAlisal really would take multiple stories, the vignettes, right? I want to continue being able to shift focus, look at different themes. If we were to do one that just focused on the Okies, right, if we were to do one that just focused on the Filipino community, the black community, there is so much ... A dream of mine would be to do one for a different take on the elementary schools. XAGO: For the Virginia Rocca Barton piece, it was about her story. What we would like to do is go back and do research about everything from past administration, past teachers, past students that have gone on to contribute something to the world, right? And even go so far as the actual land, right? What was there before this school was there? CLARA: What was there before? XAGO: I mean there's 12, 13 schools in the Alisal school district. I want to know what was there. I want to know what was at each of these schools before. It is obviously just fields, or a lot of it comes down to recognizing that the tribal land of the SLN nation, what happened there. What land deeds were issued out when the Spanish controlled this land, when the Mexicans controlled this land, and then when the Americans took over, right? There is documentation. There's definitely documentation. And even if you look at a map as early as 1910, there are some maps that are available, there are so many Spanish surnames throughout the valley. Understanding what was the story. What happened there? XAGO: California was a bilingual state when it was founded. Spanish was a recognized language. The constitution was written in both English and Spanish. And there were several state senators or congress ... several representatives that were monolingual Spanish speakers. That was at the onset. That was at the beginning. What do we do with that understanding? How did we get to this place where in 1998, Proposition 227 was passed, right, English only, which was repealed a year ago, or this past year. I want to understand how these decisions are made. CLARA: How those shifts happen. XAGO: How those shifts happen, right? The voting population, who gets to vote? Okay. Those who are citizens, right? Everything that's attached to that. The culture of voting, right? How loud is our voice, and how loud does it have to get till we get heard? CLARA: Well, and I think that's an interesting question in the context of some of these things that we're talking about, and part because there have been all these shifts, but in the sort of dominant narrative, those shifts don't exist. Or sometimes the dominant narrative is saying that those shifts are going in the other direction. How do you break that down and apart for people? XAGO: The more we practice commitment to sharing these stories, because there are so many stories. There are just so many stories, so many athletes, so many artists, so many business folks, and it can appear mundane. Oh yeah, I got this store. I bought the store, or I had to do this, I had to do that. But now I'm hearing that we have a home now, and we sell this, or we've been able to succeed. All these success stories, we don't celebrate them enough. And I think it's in the celebration, right, that's where that resistance can be demonstrated. CLARA: I think now's a good time to play a clip, and the clip I'm going to play is from a public reading of reAlisal from last year, and it's the scene with the three Lasoya sisters. NARRATOR: Act one, scene nine, Lasoya sisters. SISTER 1: Are you guys ready? SISTERS 2 & 3: Yes! SISTER 1: Alrighty, because they're here. SISTER 2: Who's here? SISTER 1: The interviewers. NARRATOR: They all take a collected look out to the audience. The audience are the interviewers. TODAS: Hi... SISTER 3: Welcome, welcome, please have a seat... SISTER 2: It's nice to have you over. Make yourselves at home. SISTER 3: We do this all the time. SISTER 2: What? Talk and eat? SISTER 3: So where should we start? TODAS: Camp McCollum! SISTER 2: Which is now called San Gerardo. SISTER 1: It was housing for low-income folks. TODAS: Farm workers. SISTER 2: Our dad used to work for the ranchers. SISTER 3: He supported my mom, SISTER 2: Seven sisters, SISTER 1: and two brothers. SISTER 3: We'd walk almost a mile to the bus stop. SISTER 2: And that bus would take us to- SISTER 1: Alisal Elementary School. SISTER 1: Virginia Rocca Barton was our principal. SISTER 2: We couldn't speak Spanish in school in those days. SISTER 3: They would reprimand us on the bus and at school. SISTER 2: But that didn't stop us from participating in stuff- SISTER 1: like sports. SISTER 2: I was good. SISTER 3: We were good. SISTER 2: These were the late '40s. SISTER 1: Right after the war. SISTER 2: The good old days. SISTER 3: I remember times when I felt embarrassed because in those days people wouldn't eat burritos. SISTER 2: Still, that's what my mom would pack us for lunch. SISTER 1: Remember when Ernie introduced the burrito to his classmates? SISTER 3: That's our younger brother. SISTER 2: They had never seen a burrito before in their lives. NARRATOR: '50s school yard. KID 1: What are you eating? ERNIE: Burrito. KID 1: What's in it? ERNIE: Stuff. You want some? KID 1: Yeah! NARRATOR: They move closer to the burrito, sniff it, and take a bite, making their eyes pop from the deliciousness of the experience. SISTER 1: Ernie eventually stopped trading as burritos and started selling them. My mom would take his orders in the morning before school. NARRATOR: La mama empiece a arreglar los burritos. MAMA: A ver Ernie! Cuantos burritos vas a querer mijo? SISTER 1: And he would go six! ERNIE: Ocho! SISTER 1: I mean eight! NARRATOR: Ernie is setting up shop at school. ERNIE: Burritos! Come and get 'em! NARRATOR: Kids rush to him. SISTER 1: And he made a little bit of money on the side. ERNIE: Fresh off the comal people! Limited supply! Act now. KID 1: I'll take two! KID 2: These burritos are super! KID 1: Is this gonna make me speak Spanish? ERNIE: Well, do you know what they're called? KIDS 1 & 2: Burrito! ERNIE: Wa-la! SISTER 1: We were poor but we didn't know it. SISTER 2: Until we were reminded. SISTER 3: Like whenever somebody in my class go some new clothing to wear, that was hard for me. TEACHER: Okay class, settle down now. Look boys and girls, Jill's got a new sweater. Okay Jill. You know what we do whenever someone gets something new to wear, right? JILL: Yes ma'am. NARRATOR: Jill steps up to the front of the class and begins strutting up and down showing off her new sweater as the kids begin to chant. TEACHER: Okay. Ready? STUDENTS: New sweater! New sweater! Jill's got a new sweater! SISTER 1: Other kids always got new clothes. We always got the hand me downs. SISTER 3: But that didn't stop me from getting on the runway! NARRATOR: Sister three grabs a pair of old shoes and begins thoroughly shining them and putting them on and stepping into her class, walking slowly enough so that the teacher would take notice. TEACHER: Oh my, well, shut my eyes wide open. Oh look posing girls. Hopie's got new shoes. Go on Hopie, show off those new shoes. Ready? STUDENTS: New shoes! New shoes! Hopie's got new shoes. JILL: Your shoes are a real gas, Hopie. SISTER 3: Thanks. I know. JILL: Will your parents let us have a sleep over at your place tonight? SISTER 3: Sure. SISTER 3: Everybody wanted to spend the night at our house, because it was always so much fun. JILL: Wow! That's so neat! SISTER 2: What? JILL: Your curtains match Hopie's blouse! NARRATOR: The sisters stop suddenly and looked at sister three. SISTER 3: Oh yeah. My mom likes for us to match. JILL: Oh, please tell me where you shop. I just got to tell my mom. SISTER 3: The fabric came from a big ol' sack of flour. SISTER 2: Remember the Alisal movie theater? SISTER 1: And what they would charge for admission? TODAS: Three 7up bottle caps. SISTER 1: I got my three. SISTER 2: I found a whole bunch. SISTER 3: Oh, can I have one? SISTER 1: Hey, they're supposedly to play at the Alisal. TODAS: Let's go. NARRATOR: They march to the Alisal movie theater handing in three bottle caps each and taking a seat. The sisters dance in the aisle along with the film. "Jailhouse Rock" finishes and the next feature starts. As the sequence runs, they get up and cheer for the cowboys. SISTER 2: That's right make those Injuns run. Teach them not to mess with the best. NARRATOR: The sisters freeze. Sister 2 interrupts the time sequence. SISTER 2: Looking back at those times, I can't help but feel guilty because I would root for the cowboys without ever feeling like, well, our mom era indigena. SISTER 1: Dad was too. SISTER 2: Indios Mexicanos. SISTER 3: So I guess that makes all of us indigena, right? SISTER 1: That was something we didn't understand at first. SISTER 2: At least not until I took the class in Native American Studies at Hartnell Community College where I got to read books for the first time on their history -- my history -- that changed my whole perspective. It changed me. I hope I don't offend anyone when I say this, but I don't root for the cowboys anymore. Thank you. CLARA: I think the scene is really representative of the style and construction of stories in reAlisal, because it starts by introducing these characters, these three sisters showing off their personality and their energy, like you said, but then they start talking about camp McCollum, which first is a place of historical importance, but for like half a second. And then it very quickly becomes about the personal importance of this place to them. And before long, it's really just a story about them, about their families and their lives in Alisal in the '50s and their changing understanding of those everyday experiences as they grow up. How do you write a scene like this? I mean I imagine there was a huge interview. I imagine these parts were not all strung together initially. How do you figure out how to string it together? And what do you want people who see it to take away from it? XAGO: It's coming back to the first take that I brought up earlier. Imagine yourself like, yeah, I met these sisters and they used to live over here, and then they started going over here, and then they went to the movie theater. You know the movie theater. That's actually a movie theater. It's like in that excitement, in that exchange, there's this excitement like you're discovering. This discovery, you're panning for gold. That approach for that care that, okay, I have to [inaudible 00:50:59], we're looking for it, we're looking for, oh, there it is. This is the jam. And you get enough of them and then you link it all together. Those little moments where it's like ... and you notice, so you pay attention when they tell these stories, what comes up for them. And then they're coming back to what wasn't said, right? XAGO: Any of these silences, any of those moments of where there is hesitation, they had to find different ways of wording things sometimes. Not just them, but just in general, that's part of the revelation of it all. We can recognize a story as ... you don't have to explain how complicated things are, how complicated things get or were. The basic and simple way of doing this is by showing it. The person can explain, oh, we had a great time. We went to school here and it was okay. Really? Was it okay? CLARA: But we couldn't speak Spanish even on the bus. XAGO: We couldn't speak Spanish in school. There was another story that I picked up from a Filipino family, didn't make the cut. And she was traumatized. She had grown up, she was maybe 10 years younger than the Latoya sisters. And she spoke about a time that she saw a child who spoke only Spanish and was beaten right in front of everybody in the classroom, beaten and was crying. They held onto that. The women now are like in their 60s and 70s. How are you just going to forget that? They obviously didn't. So the silence reveals, right, the expression, that's all a part of the details to each of the stories. How do you put together a play like this is like, and you want to keep your audience, you always got to keep your audience in mind, especially when you're editing it, right? Just cut through the chase, get to the good part, right? That's basically it. CLARA: One of the things that struck me about the performance in general when I saw it, and I think you hear it again in the clip, is the enthusiasm of the actors and the quality of the actors, many of whom are high school students, so that they have very little in the way of actual experience at this point. What made you want to work with kids? XAGO: This was an opportunity that I got to collaborate with Artists Ink. Artists Ink have held a cohort, a team of high school actors and performers. And with that team specifically, there was already a dynamic. I wanted to just hand it off to them, see how they would interpret it, right? It's that type of energy and their own discovery of it, and how they interpret it, they take ownership of that story and present it in the best way they know how. CLARA: Did they ever surprise you? XAGO: Yeah. No. Definitely. Oh my goodness. It's surprising, impressive and exciting. I'm excited for them. I'm hoping that they commit to grow it in that field. Yeah. I can make a case for each of them to continue moving in that direction. Shout out to Emily, Morales, Ortiz, her partner Andres, the Artist Ink team for their commitment to looking after these youngsters, this young crew of performers from Alisal High School, from the east side of Salinas. They have something special. Not Everybody has it. I'm willing to work with whoever, but I feel everybody has a part, and they showed the capacity to play as many parts as possible for the people from their own community. CLARA: In this whole process of collecting these interviews and turning them into this series of plays and getting them performed and working with the community, what excited you most? XAGO: Every story. What excited me most was, this is what I know about my community. And what you know about my community is wrong because it's been told by people from outside of the community. I'm not here to fact check the number of homicides, break-ins and whatnot. But you're wrong to think that that's what we're all about or that's the only thing that's going on here, because that's the only thing that they're saying or they've heard said. XAGO: What I'm looking for, everything around me, for every new story that you'll hear, every negative new story that you hear about the east side, there's going to be a thousand stories to counter that. A thousand positive stories of struggles, survival stories, funny, sad, tragic, triumphant, stories that have a human complexity, right, that you can only experience. It can't be explained. CLARA: Xago, what's next for you? XAGO: What's next, we are producing a play written by Crystal Gonzales called La Cortina de la Lechuga about the housing crisis here in the region and how it's impacting our families, our more vulnerable families. The hardest working families are farm worker families. That will be running from July 16th through the 21st. It's an actual tour. It's going to be presented in different locations on each day starting at Alisal High School, Soledad, Castroville Watsonville, the Labor Council or the Labor Hall, the Teamsters Hall at the corner of Market Street in Sanborn, and then the Breadbox Theater Company. We really want to try to reach out and actually go get as close to our community, get closer to the residents as much as possible, meaning not having to just set up shop in one location and expecting people to come from all over, but really- CLARA: Go to them. XAGO: ... go to them. Yeah. Do our best to go to them as much as possible. CLARA: Well, I think that sounds great. Xago Juarez, thank you so much for joining me today. XAGO: All right. Thank you, Clara. And yeah, our stories are important, and the more control that we have over our stories, the better. CLARA: The play Xago's producing with Baktun 12 about the housing crisis plays on July 16th at 7:30 PM at Alisal High School. Don't miss it. Next time I'll talk to Santa Cruz author Andy Couturier about The Abundance of Less, his highly acclaimed book about life in rural Japan. I hope you'll join us. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.