Introduction to José Cruz González’s Invierno

[print edition page number: 163]

When Chicano playwright José Cruz González was commissioned to adapt The Winter’s Tale for the Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA) in Santa Maria, California, he and the company’s artistic director, Mark Booher, were committed to creating a play that was deeply rooted in place. Set in California’s Central Coast, Invierno toggles between the twenty-first century and a period of time leading up to the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico that would end with the Mexican cession of more than half of its territory to the United States in 1848. With its hybrid generic features, geographical and temporal incongruities, and spiritual elements, Shakespeare’s late tragicomic romance opened opportunities to explore the concerns of the Central Coast and to account for the many ways in which its multilayered and often obscured histories continue to shape the present. González’s Invierno, which was first produced by PCPA Theaterfest in 2010, offers an appropriation that embraces The Winter’s Tale’s themes of resilience, revitalization, and repair in order to consider how the past reverberates in the current moment.

The first words uttered in Invierno are not in Shakespearean English or even in nineteenth-century Spanish but rather in Samala, the language of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, on whose ancestral land PCPA’s theater is situated. The Prelude’s opening lines are sung in the form of a lullaby by the play’s Paulina character, a Chumash healer woman who functions as a storyteller, a bridge between past and present, and a voice of Indigenous resistance and protection throughout:

Weʼ weʼ kiceʼ (Sleep, sleep little one)
Ksuyuwanin (I love you)
Ma kʼayapis i piʼ (You are my heart)
Weʼn a čʰoho (Sleep well)
Weʼ weʼ kiceʼ (Sleep, sleep little one)
Ksuyuwanin (I love you)
Ma kʼayapis i piʼ (You are my heart)
Weʼn a čʰoho (Sleep well) [164]

To incorporate this lullaby and other elements of Chumash culture into Invierno, González, Booher, and the cast collaborated with the tribe’s cultural director, Nakia Zavalla, who shared Chumash traditions and contributed a seashell necklace that became an important symbol in the play. During this development process, they also consulted with linguist Richard Applegate, who had recently worked with members of the Santa Ynez Chumash to begin revitalizing their language by creating a dictionary, pronunciation guide, and educational program for learners of all ages.^[1] To speak and sing the Samala language within the context of an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale, then, becomes a way of registering the deep resonances between past and present that can occur when what was thought to be lost is found again.

Drawing inspiration from the “wide gap of time” (5.3.154) between the third and fourth acts of The Winter’s Tale, in which the action skips forward sixteen years, Invierno intensifies the temporal instability of Shakespeare’s play and actively challenges Eurocentric chronologies. By adding a pair of young contemporary characters who fall back in time and bear witness to the political and personal conflicts unfolding within the colonial rancho system of nineteenth-century California, González resituates the drama within various moments of fissure. Invierno thus mobilizes Shakespeare’s play toward a “decolonial imaginary,” a mode of storytelling that as Chicana historian Emma Pérez theorizes, brings into being “a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history.”^[2] It is only when we attend to the interdependence of the past and the present, González’s play suggests, that healing from the traumas of colonialism becomes possible in the future. Indeed, this multitemporal orientation is one of the defining characteristics of Borderlands interpretations of Shakespeare’s works, which necessarily draw on cultural hybridity and palimpsestic histories to explore what Ruben Espinosa describes as the “temporal borderlands of Shakespeare.”^[3]

Invierno’s decolonial approach to dramatizing the dynamic relationships among the past, the present, and the future begins to crystallize when Paulina comes upon the young couple in a state of crisis standing before an oak tree on a [165] sacred site. “Carved into the tree,” the stage directions explain, “is the shape of a woman” who we will later learn is Hermonia, the half-sister of Paulina. She died of grief after her husband Don León accused her of having an affair with his best friend, banished their newborn infant Alegría, and thus caused the grief-stricken death of their son Maximino. The Young Woman, a Latina teenager named Aly who has discovered that she is pregnant, attempts to hang herself on this tree but is stopped by the Young Man, a light-skinned teenager named A.J. who struggles to process the news that his girlfriend has apparently “been with somebody else.” Just when the Young Man begins to strike the tree with a knife in anger, Paulina appears, identifying herself as “Wind Woman,” first in Samala and then in English. As she invites the distressed teens to join her on a journey to the past so that they can learn from the traumas that transpired on this land, she welcomes them and the audience into a space ungoverned by a linear sense of time: “Sometimes,” Paulina says, “there are tiny cracks, small openings, allowing the past to live differently in the present and the present to become truthful because of the past, joining us together in ways we never thought possible” (Prelude). Working within the decolonial imaginary that Pérez describes, this temporal frame disrupts colonial timelines, worldviews, and stories in order to create space to live and think otherwise.

When the Young Woman and the Young Man enter the world of the California ranchos approximately sixteen years prior to the U.S. war against Mexico, they find that the conflicts around issues of land, race, and reproduction unfolding before them resonate in unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable ways with their contemporary situation. They are quickly disabused of their assumption that they will be mere observers to the past, moreover, when Don León, a prominent Californio and el gran don del Rancho Las Mariposas, picks the Young Woman up and places her in a wheelchair, casting her in the role of his ill son Maximino. Just as Leontes does in Shakespeare’s play, Don León asks Maximino to affirm that he is indeed his child, but the stakes of that question become even higher in the fraught colonial context of nineteenth-century California and in light of the Young Woman’s own pregnancy and the Young Man’s suspicions about it. As a pregnant Hermonia enters with Don Patricio, an Irishman and close childhood friend of Don León who runs Rancho Los Molinos, Don León asserts the importance of continuing the colonizer bloodline through his son, declaring, “You are my blood. De sangre de conquistadores. A proud lineage going back to Spain!” (1.1). His bombastic paternal self-assurance quickly descends into paranoia, however, as he suspects, erroneously, that Hermonia is pregnant with his best friend’s child. [166]

Indeed, Don León’s suspicions about Hermonia’s fidelity and the paternity of his children are bound up with his tenuous claims to the territory as a beneficiary of the land-grant system that began with the Spanish crown and was continued by the Mexican government after independence from Spain. Don León first expresses his concerns about faithfulness in racial and linguistic terms when he laments that the mestizos—that is, people of mixed Indigenous and Spanish heritage—come to work on his rancho without sufficient knowledge of the Spanish language, thereby limiting his ability to surveil and impose demands on them. “How do I even know they’re faithful to me?” he worries, foretelling the ways in which he will also come to question whether or not his mestiza wife has been faithful to him (1.1). When Hermonia attempts to allay his concerns by assuring him that the mestizos of which he speaks are “of [her] blood” (1.1), we begin to see how Don León’s paranoia is that of a colonizer who feels entitled to but ultimately insecure about his control over the land and those who labor on it.

As she is in Shakespeare’s play, Paulina is a fierce defender of Hermonia’s honor in González’s reimagining, but the dynamic between the two women is complicated by the colonial politics that have shaped their kinship ties. Paulina reminds her sister that, while they share a Chumash mother, Hermonia’s own birth was the result of rape, an act committed by her Spanish conquistador father who murdered their mother’s first husband. In Paulina’s view, Hermonia has perpetuated the erasure of their people by abandoning them and marrying Don León. From Hermonia’s perspective, a viable future necessitates leaving “the old ways” behind in order to preserve the “pieces that remain” and to pass on “what’s important” to the next generation (1.3). But for Paulina, to live under colonial rule is to experience a slow death. Reproduction that involves intermarriage with colonizers is, to her, an insufficient—if not counterproductive—approach to sustaining Chumash life. Survival is not possible, Paulina maintains, without the ways of knowing, being, and doing that have long sustained their ancestors on this land.

As the modern characters become increasingly involved in the play’s nineteenth-century action, they reach new realizations about their own circumstances. Like that of Hermonia and Don León, their relationship has been poisoned by fears of infidelity heightened by a pregnancy, and they too find themselves unable to communicate or trust in a moment of crisis. But what the events of the past ultimately bring to the surface is a deeper truth about the intergenerational impacts of trauma. Such legacies manifest most clearly in Hermonia’s decision to give her baby the name Alegría after Paulina insists, in a departure from Shakespeare’s version of the story, that the infant “must have one” (1.3). However, what is initially an act of hope that Hermonia’s “joyful little one” will be the thing [167] that brings her family back together soon becomes a poignant marker of loss as her happiness—her Alegría—is quite literally stripped from her. Stepping into the roles of Perdida/Alegría and Florentino within the nineteenth-century storyline, Aly and A.J. not only help to facilitate the reunion at the end of the play but also begin their own healing journeys as a result. As Aly’s name begins to take on new, or perhaps old, meaning in light of her encounter with the tragic past, she recognizes that she has a clear purpose to reclaim and guard her own happiness as she looks toward a future that has not yet been written. Following her realization that she has more control over the future than she understood, Aly is finally able to confide in A.J. and reveal that her pregnancy was not the result of a consensual encounter but rather an outcome of the sexual abuse she has suffered at the hands of her uncle. Her alegría—her happiness and her sense of self—was stolen from her too.

The intergenerational fracturing and healing that we see in Invierno take place against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in the region. The play depicts the wide range of people living in nineteenth-century California, featuring not only the Chumash and Californios, but also Irish and Russian Jewish settlers, as well as a cast of agricultural laborers who are primarily Indigenous and Mexican. The comic subplot features an interaction between Vaquero, a sheepherding cowboy who found and cared for Hermonia’s lost infant, and a bandido named Afilado, who identifies with the legendary Mexican bandit Joaquín Murrieta as he repeatedly steals from Vaquero. Like Shakespeare’s Autolycus, Afilado sings ballads, but in this case his songs are corridos about defiance and survival in the Borderlands.

In the gap of sixteen years that transpires during the first scene of the play’s second act, the United States has officially declared war against Mexico, and a small group of Euro-American settlers has mounted a revolt against Mexican authorities. “California is under attack,” a frantic Californio lancer informs the young couple. “American immigrants called the Bear Flaggers are marching against our homeland” (2.2). Named after their makeshift flag featuring the image of a grizzly bear and lone red star, the Bear Flaggers took inspiration from the Republic of Texas and aimed to seize Mexican territory in order to establish their own republic rather than becoming citizens of Mexico. In the context of this multitemporal reimagining of The Winter’s Tale, the bear flag and the violence it represents resonates with the gruesome death of Alejandro, González’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Antigonus, whose untimely end engendered the famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” It also gestures toward the greater ursine threat that continues to loom over the land: although the flag of the California Republic was replaced by the American stars and stripes when the [168] U.S. Army invaded the territory soon after, a version of this symbol of settler violence currently flies over the land that is known today as the state of California.^[4] By the time the play reaches its conclusion, the war has ended and “Los Americanos” have won, seizing half of Mexico’s territory and creating an uncertain future for those living in Alta California as a result.

Following the tragicomic trajectory of its Shakespearean source, hope and reconciliation emerge in Invierno even from this intense personal and collective trauma. Haunted by the loss of his wife, son, and daughter, and by the American conquest of California, Don León reconsiders his colonial perspectives. Where he once saw the future as full of endless financial opportunities and potential profit to be extracted from the land and its people, he comes to see just how destructive such ideas really were. While other Californios are horrified by the potential loss of land, he poignantly admits, “It was never truly mine. My grandfather was deeded this grant by the Spanish crown. And that piece of paper determined the fate of thousands. Now, I am witness to the destruction that has come to this place and its people” (2.6). As he loses his desire and his capacity to own both property and persons, he begins to take responsibility for his actions, including those that harmed his family. Indeed, it is only when he truly accepts the consequences of his actions that the statue of Hermonia—in this case, carved by Don León himself into the oak tree of the opening scene—comes to life and finds that Alegría has returned to her.

González’s reimagining of The Winter’s Tale demonstrates the power of storytelling to bring about healing, with the modern characters undergoing their own transformations as the play reaches its conclusion. Having both witnessed and shaped the events of the past, Aly and A.J. are better equipped to break generational cycles and move forward together. “I don’t know about the future,” Aly declares in the Epilogue, “but I’m going to walk through it knowing I can.” A.J., for his part, offers to accompany her on this journey. Invierno’s ending, which is not an ending so much as a continuation of the story unfolding on this land, suggests that revisiting the tragic ruptures of the past can help to illuminate a path forward.

–Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos