'A vision of female mercy, resistance, and solidarity' - Chicago Reader

On a platform, a scaffold indicating two towers. In one stands a worker, Elvira (Alma Pauleth), looking straight ahead. In another, a dancer (Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks) feathered in white, a bird or a bride, with an ornate mirror around her neck gleaming like a Catholic medal, who begins to move with fluttering gestures in the area between them, in rows of folding chairs. She leaves the mirror behind.

In the U.S., 47.8 million people, or about 14.3 percent of today’s total population, are immigrants. From 1840 to 1919, around 90 percent of immigrants to the U.S. came from Europe. After changes to immigration law in 1965, roughly half of immigrants came from the same side of the ocean—Latin America—and half of them were from Mexico alone. At present, people born in Mexico are the largest group of immigrants, both with and without documents. About 8.3 million workers, nearly a third of the immigrant workforce, are undocumented.

Elvira
Through 10/26: Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat 3 and 7 PM; Saint Augustine College, Charlie Chaplin Hall, 1345 W. Argyle, clata.org/en/productions/elvira, $25 ($20 students and seniors), presented in Spanish with English subtitles

In August 2006, under threat of deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, undocumented immigrant Elvira Arellano took sanctuary in Adalberto United Methodist Church in Humboldt Park. With a determination that led to recognition as a Time Person of the Year, she remained there for a year, advocating for the rights of the undocumented, before she was arrested and deported for attending a rally in Los Angeles. Cofounder of La Familia Latina Unida (the United Latino Family)—which petitioned Congress to keep undocumented parents in the States with their U.S.-born children, such as her own son, Saul—Arellano returned to the States in 2014, seeking asylum that has not yet been granted.

In Elvira, written by Raúl Dorantes, directed by Mark Litwicki, and premiered by Colectivo El Pozo at Saint Augustine College’s Charlie Chaplin Hall as part of the seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, Arellano’s story begins on an airplane. She is not a passenger, but a worker cheerfully cleaning the aisles between flights, fantasizing about the father of her son, a Christian farmworker in Wapato, Washington, who blames her for the pregnancy. Elvira works weekends, so she hasn’t yet baptized her son—fellow worker and friend Yadira (Mayra I. Echevarría) offers her own church if Methodism is OK. “Dios entiende de estas cosas,” she says (“God understands these things”). A small change in denomination is surely less uncanny than a fast friendship between a Mexican and a Puerto Rican brokered through common custodial labor at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

It’s September 2001, and on the table is the immigration policy that Jorge Castañeda Gutman, Mexican secretary of foreign affairs at the time, calls “the whole enchilada,” which would legalize all unauthorized immigrants from Mexico. It’s September 2001, and airplanes are grounded in the wake of airline hijackings that ignite the explosive collapse of two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Though the 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally on student, tourist, and business visas, post-terror anxiety led to restrictions on all immigration in the name of national security, as well as general xenophobia toward all those perceived as foreigners.

“No encuentran al Bin Laden, pero me hallaron a mí” (“They didn’t find Bin Laden, but they found me”), says Elvira to Yadira when she’s arrested during a search of O’Hare’s workers. They even took her shoelaces, she laments. Faced with deportation, she chooses the church led by the pastor who founded unauthorized immigrant advocacy group Centro Sin Fronteras (Emma Lozano, not named in the play, played by Aida Palma Carpio). “Have you fed the pilgrims? Have you dressed the poor. Have you helped women in need?” asks the pastor, who declares her church in service of those deemed poor, ugly, and illegal.

As Elvira becomes a face for the 600,000 unauthorized immigrant parents of the three million U.S.-born children like her son, her opponent is embodied in Sistema (Armando Villegas), a white man who spouts anti-immigrant rhetoric (“To me, all of you are Mexicans. And the worst Mexicans are the Puerto Ricans”), egged on by a reporter (Juanjo López) whose primary function seems to be to stir the pot. But Elvira is adamant about her innocence as a mother and a worker who pays taxes, and her supporters—her pastor, her friend, and the figure of the dancer who leads her into a dance of flight and freedom—are also a vision of female mercy, resistance, and solidarity in a world mismanaged by men.

Elvira’s story is told with the simplicity of an allegory, by a small ensemble that deftly shape-shifts from reporter to legislator to Arellano’s relatives in Mexico. Projections that include footage from the 2009 Javier Solórzano Casarin documentary, Elvira, ground the work in historical images, while original music directed by Juanfra Dimas and dreamlike dance sequences offer glimpses of heart.

On opening night, Arellano appeared with a crimson bird emblazoned on her chest, addressing the audience after the performance. Calm and radiant, she spoke of change, lit from within by possibility.