Academic Publications by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance, 2024
This chapter examines how Luis Valdez via his work with El Teatro Campesino (ETC) has engaged the... more This chapter examines how Luis Valdez via his work with El Teatro Campesino (ETC) has engaged theater and performance to bring about critical consciousness (concientización) demanding and enacting much needed changes in American society. Valdez's artistry and ETC have morphed and remade themselves throughout the course of changing centuries and evolving discourses about Chicanx identity and politics. Yet fundamentally, this legacy has been about the power of claiming and reimagining space. First claiming public space at outdoor rallies on the picket lines, they later built the first permanent Chicanx theater home in Northern California's San Juan Bautista (a historical nexus of multiple colonial encounters) and went on to stage Zoot Suit within the bastion of whiteness that has always defined Broadway. At each of these sites, Valdez and ETC have insisted on the value and import of the presence of Chicanx bodies and their stories. By claiming space for their bodies onstage, they have also reclaimed a place in US history.
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The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance, 2023
It is widely known that urban day laborers – this text will refer to this group by the name they ... more It is widely known that urban day laborers – this text will refer to this group by the name they use for themselves, jornaleros – provide the American economy with the dicult labor necessary to keep some low-pay and high-risk industries going, such as construction, landscaping, and sanitation. What is not as widely known is that jornaleros are also increasingly hired to perform other unconventional, bizarre, and even illegal jobs. Such jobs are becoming so prevalent as to account for one out of every ten jobs a jornalero performs.
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The Lowrider Studies Reader , 2024
A standard definition of a lowrider is any aesthetically modified vehicle lowered to within a few... more A standard definition of a lowrider is any aesthetically modified vehicle lowered to within a few inches off the ground that is often equipped with a hydraulic suspension system. It is also now a term used to describe the adornment of not only cars but other objects such as: home furnishings, clothes, art, and even toilet seats.
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Cambridge Opera Journal, 2023
Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance ... more Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance that sought to bring opera into various communities in Los Angeles, many of which were economically disadvantaged. In the process, this opera set off a firestorm of protests that ultimately resulted in confrontations with community members, protests that would test the very premise of the dissemination of opera and performance outside spaces of privilege and in communities of colour. Informed by the concept of transit-oriented performance, this article analyses some ways in which neoliberalism is distorting opera's modern-day resonances.
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Dissertation, 2021
Through a critical examination of mobility as a social, cultural, and historical concept in and t... more Through a critical examination of mobility as a social, cultural, and historical concept in and through Chicana/o communities in Southern California, Transit-Oriented Performance Through Chicana/o Spaces in Southern California argues mobility to be a consubstantial element in Chicana/o subject formation. It scrutinizes transit-oriented performances (TOPs) and their entanglements with history, space, memory, and identity. At the heart of this dissertation is an autochthonous philosophy informed by the earliest civilizations of the Americas (Olmec, Inca, Maya) that influenced the Mexica. In this way the relationship of mobility—the movement of people, objects, and ideas—and the shifting social, political, and cultural borders that they constitute will come into focus. Following the Mexica, this work acknowledges mobility, movement, and motion as autopoietic aspects of lived Chicana/o culture and argues them to be not only cultural markers of Chicana/o experience, but as a means through which Chicana/os become and are made conscious of their culture and identity. This postulation enables a robust analysis of subaltern subjects and their negotiations inside of the perpetual motion in Los Angeles’ Chicana/o communities. This dissertation studies the specific ways that site-based theory and praxis construct meaning in public space, and centers on the historiography and contemporary signification of Los Angeles through three instances of TOPs: Hopscotch, a mobile opera; lowriders; and loncheras (Mexican food trucks). Through a critical analysis of these performances held inside or through transportation vehicles, the dissertation highlights the ways these performances operate as a dynamic palimpsest that constructs important but undertheorized significations of and in motion.
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Aztlan, 2019
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Theatre History Studies, 2019
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Pedagogical Publications by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
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Alan D. Levine Center for Jewish Studies Digital Exhibit, 2021
"In the 1930s, Boyle Heights—with its main throughway, Brooklyn Avenue—was home to some 10,000 Je... more "In the 1930s, Boyle Heights—with its main throughway, Brooklyn Avenue—was home to some 10,000 Jewish households, about a third of the Los Angeles Jewish population and the highest concentration of Jews west of the Mississippi... This vibrant Jewish community emerged in a multiethnic context, in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles called home by thousands of Mexican, Japanese, Armenian/Turkish, Italian, Russian, and African American families. Using archival materials shared by a variety of museums, libraries, and community partners, this digital exhibition aims to locate Boyle Heights’ Jewish histories within this multiethnic context, revealing both the diversity of Jewish experiences in Boyle Heights and the ways those experiences coincided with, and diverged from, those of the other diasporic communities that settled there."
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Book Reviews by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2024
Unlike many Western-born aesthetic methodologies, Chicano theater traces its emergence to one art... more Unlike many Western-born aesthetic methodologies, Chicano theater traces its emergence to one artist: Luis Valdez. His Theatre of the Sphere: The Vibrant Being is a long-awaited and most welcome addition to the field of Latinx Theater for many Chicano theater scholars, students, and artists. Organized in a four-part format, the text functions as both a Chicana/o theater history book and an acting manual. The text offers an addendum to Yolanda Broyles-González’s comprehensive explanation of the theater of the sphere in her groundbreaking book, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (University of Texas Press, 1994). By following Broyles-González’s first published articulation of this concept, Valdez seeks to explore “the principles that underlie his innovations as a playwright, teacher, and theatrical innovator” (i). The book’s main features include a brief history of El Teatro Campesino (ETC), an adumbration of the theater of the sphere, a discussion of Indigenous culture, and an actor-training program—the Vibrant Being Workshop—all backdropped by the context of Chicano political, social and artistic movements.
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Ecumenica, 2022
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Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques , 2021
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Theatre Annual, 2019
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Aztlan, 2020
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Academic Publications by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
Pedagogical Publications by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez
Book Reviews by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez