The play “that drive thru monterey” opens Friday at the ASNMSU Center for the Arts for two weekends. It explores a Mexican-American woman’s journey from first love to heartbreak during a turbulent time in U.S. history. The woman is portrayed by NMSU theatre student Daniela Galloso, who along with the play’s director, Eva Cullen, discussed the play and its themes with Scott Brocato.
Scott Brocato:
Eva, talk about "that drive thru monterey”.
Eva Cullen:
So "that drive thru monterey” is about a young Mexican-American woman named Monterey living in east LA in 1971, and the play is about her experience as a Mexican-American woman: getting her education and just existing in the world that is the U.S.A. in 1971. It's also about just her life, and not totally focusing on her being Mexican-American. It’s also about her love and her loss and her family.
But I think there's a lot of really interesting parallels that we can find analyzing the story of this Mexican family. There's a lot of a lot of things, especially with our world right now, that you can kind of compare and kind of see how far our world has come and kind of the ways that we haven't gone as far as we might have thought.
Scott Brocato:
For example?
Eva Cullen:
For example, Monterey’s sister, Lydia, she is really into political activism. She's heavily involved in the Chicano movement, which was kind of born in East L.A., and she talks a lot about Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and how she ran to be president. She talks about something that Chisholm said about, “I hope that they can vote for a candidate that's qualified. Not because she is not a man or because he is not white.” And that line really resonates with our time now, just having had a woman of color as vice-president and also running again for president. And yeah, things like that.
Monterey's parents are immigrants as well. So taking that back to kind of our current climate today, you can see how hard this family has worked to create these opportunities for their daughter. And I’m just hoping that this starts a conversation, or some sort of compassion for lives that are different than yours.
Scott Brocato:
Well, let's turn it over to you, Danielle Galloso. You play Monterey. How do you see the character?
Daniela Galloso:
I see a lot of her in me personally. I moved here when I was around six years old, and I think that there's a lot to say about that opportunity of education, because a lot of Monterey’s character centers around how she's going to college and she wants to be a nurse. And I think that that's something that's really important, especially in a family of immigrants, that a lot of the reason why people come here is not only to have a better climate, but to be able to find an education. Because some women aren't allowed to study in different countries, in different parts of the world. And I think that's a really big part of Monterey, that she gets the opportunity to get an education and to build a life for herself.
Scott Brocato:
Well, one of the subjects--and Eva Cullen, we’ll ask you about this--is machismo.
Eva Cullen and Daniela Galloso:
Yes.
Scott Brocato:
It's a theme of the play: how it's passed down from fathers to sons. Talk about that.
Eva Cullen:
Yeah, definitely. Well, along with just her identity as a Mexican-American, there also is that identity of her as a woman. Especially in Mexican culture, women kind of have a particular role. Sometimes it can feel like women in this culture are kept in a box and they're asked to, you know, be quiet and listen: listen to their husband, to their fathers. And that's kind of explored in the play as well, because Monterey meets two very different men, the first being Maximiliano, who kind of fights against that machismo stereotype that many Mexican men can fall into.
And then there's Lazaro, who almost fits that sort of machismo perfectly, and trying to see how the machismo of their culture kind of affects them and their children following. If you come to the play, you'll be able to see that Monterey’s path kind of gets shifted from how she thinks. And a lot of her conflict in the play is knowing if her sons are going to grow up to be good men, if they're going to grow up embracing the machismo culture, or if they're going to grow up and respect the women in their family and respect what they have to say.
Scott Brocato:
Eva Cullen, as a director, what do you want to see people take away from the play?
Eva Cullen:
I hope that people can come and watch the play, and you come and see the show and you can see parts of yourself in these people, and seeing yourself represented on stage. Which doesn't really happen all the time, being able to see yourself represented on stage as a Mexican person. But also being able to see how someone who is different from you, has similar experiences--still goes through grief, still goes through love and, you know, family issues; and just being able to watch the story and feel something, and be able to spark empathy for people who have different lives than us.
And I think our world right now is just so divided, and I hope that this play brings people together. Although there are some political issues in it, at the core of it, it's about people and their relationships to each other. And I hope people can just leave the play and want to be nice to the people around them.
