The title of Mary Gallagher’s play De Donde? is taken from the Spanish phrase meaning “Where do you come from?” It’s the first question that U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents ask Hispanics they suspect of being illegal aliens.
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Gallagher wrote De Donde? over a period of two years–including time spent “in the field,” researching the situation of Hispanics applying for political asylum while in detention in southern Texas. “I went out with the border patrol–an interesting experience, but really upsetting,” she says. “I toured a detention center in Port Isabel. And I visited Proyecto Libertad, a nonprofit law firm that works with refugees trying to help them get political asylum. I interviewed refugees, read hundreds of affidavits, spent time with the lawyers. Then I left the valley area and went to Houston, where I went to asylum and deportation hearings, interviewed more lawyers, and visited another detention center.” Her visit to the center, dramatized in an encounter between a nun and an INS official who tells her transparent lies, “could be a whole play in itself,” she says. “It’s unbelievable, the things that people say to you and expect you to buy. Or maybe they don’t expect you to buy it, but it’s their job to say it, so they say it.”
Her silence, it develops, suggests an intriguing but risky defense–the constitutional guarantee of freedom from self-incrimination. While Extrana waits, the lawyers debate: Should she tell her story to expose the American-backed atrocities in Central America, even if it means she may be deported? Will her case–that of a woman subject to rape and torture because of her brother’s political activities–justify her application for political asylum? Will her silence defense–and its underlying, uncertain assumption that immigrants are entitled to the same rights as citizens–hold up all the way to the Supreme Court?
“You can’t really separate human problems from politics,” Gallagher maintains. “Chocolate Cake is about the images that are force-fed to us and how trapped we become in them.”
De Donde? appears at Stage Left Theatre, 3244 N. Clark, through April 22. Tickets are $7-$10; call 883-8830 for further information and tickets.
