Abstract

Guillermo Reyes is a Latino playwright who has negotiated for himself a fragmented identity which allows him to simultaneously be part of different communities. He is a Latino/ Latin-American playwright in the U.S. who writes mainly in English, and his plays deal with the identity of the Latin-American immigrant communities and the Latino communities in the US, while they explore gay identity inside and outside those communities. His work questions the cohesive identities that both the center and the subaltern communities have invested in creating and maintaining in the United States. This paper analyses the ways in which Deporting the Divas by Guillermo Reyes questions the alienating tendency to classify individuals according to their sexual preferences, ethnic background, economic position or profession. It questions this type of cohesive identities because they are ideological constructions that are falsely represented as able to encompass a large number of individuals and/or communities. In Divas, what we find is a resistance to definition and an alternative to this type of essentialized identities. Transvestism, or transformation, which in the play extends itself beyond the limits of gender, is a sort of drag performance within the performance that allows for the denaturalization of all categories. Through a game of shifting stereotypes, nationalities, immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation, the characters, far from being forced into a defining category, are able to negotiate a flowing hybrid identity that makes it possible for them to simultaneously belong to a variety of spaces of difference and/or to shift from one space to the other. Historically, community activism has been able to achieve a certain level of visibility in the public space by constructing somewhat rigid identities. This can be perceived as we analyze the gay identity's traditional allegiance to the center, white, middle class American (to which we might add U.S. citizen). Obviously, this has significantly changed in recent years, yet, for a long time the gay community in the United States was mostly insensitive to issues of gender (in its exclusion of the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender perspectives), class (in its exclusion of the lower-class gay experience), and ethnicity (in its exclusion of minority perspectives about the construction of gay identity). In the same way, the Latino/Chicano communities in the United States constructed their identity by often turning to traditional cultural values that united them as a group of people. The cultural production of the Latino/Chicano communities shows a return to indigenous theological and cultural models in the search for a shared identity. This diminished the importance given to gender and sexual preference issues or any other issues that could divert attention from the most pressing matter: survival. Deporting the Divas presents a range of possibilities for the negotiation of a hybrid identity through which an individual can be part of different spaces at the same time, even spaces that are contradictory or incompatible among themselves. The significance of Divas is that it enables the spectator to critically read and to question the validity of cohesive and rigid identities which attempt to describe both the individual and the community as it opens up new possibilities for the emergence of a dislocated consciousness in its characters and for the construction of a hybrid identity where difference—in its varied forms and combinations—can thrive.