Juventino Rosas’ waltz “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves) is perhaps the most famous song of its generation. Now, more than 130 years after it was written, the tune still feels immediate—sweeping, dreamy, and above all, supremely sure-footed. Every note is both rooted and soaring, coaxing even the wallflowers to dance and sway. It is easily on par with his contemporary Johann Strauss Jr.’s masterwork “The Blue Danube”—to the point that Strauss Jr. is often mistakenly credited with having composed “Sobre las Olas.”

Why is this so? Is it simply because Strauss hailed from Vienna, the very center of the waltz craze? Or is there something else, conscious or not, that has kept Juventino Rosas from his rightful place among the great melodists, then and now?

I wrote Ghost Waltz, a new play receiving its world premiere on May 4 at the Los Angeles Theatre Centre (LATC), to recover the composer’s story. This excavation into Rosas’ life follows a tune that has been haunting me throughout much of my career: Why whitewash so many artists of color? Why bury their names? Why divest the art from the artist? Why erase the rich history of who we are?

Rosas was Indigenous, dark-skinned in his photographs, and young. Proudly Otomí, an ancient people known to be great warriors, he and his family played music for coins on the street in Mexico City in the 1880s. It was a time of great change: The French and Austrian attempt at colonization had failed in spectacular fashion, but vestiges of European culture were everywhere. Beer and polkas became core to the Mexican identity. Rosas embodied this moment in time. Yet, even as his famous waltz took the world by storm, he found himself having to prove his authorship. Losing the battle for the song’s royalties was just one indignity of many to come. In his own epoch as much as ours, Juventino did not fit the frame of the composer of “Sobre las Olas.” How could someone like him have written something so elegant, so graceful, so very Viennese?

There is precious little historical information to be found on the man himself. Part of a musical family, he was a violin prodigy who studied for a short time in conservatory before joining the world-famous Mexican Marching Band. Besides his famous waltz, he composed popular salon music, seductive polkas, and mazurkas for the piano.  The wife of Mexican president/dictator Porfirio Diaz gifted him a grand piano for his genius, and his music was played throughout the Americas and in Europe, then and now.

For perhaps the same reasons he had to prove himself constantly to a disbelieving world, Rosas did not merit a biography in his day. His was also a generation before recorded music, and photographs were a relatively new technology. For Ghost Waltz, all I had were the compositions and how they made me feel.

Sometimes a play can get closer to the heart of a character than data or documentary. Listening to “Sobre las Olas” and other Rosas compositions over and over, I began to see past the darkness and locate gestures and contours of the 1890s—bits of politics, romantic dalliances, and the youthful desire to create something immortal, timeless. In an epoch rampant with economic inequity, crippling labor strikes and violent assassinations, not to mention enforced colorism and racial discrimination, this is music full of hope and joy, even when tinged with heartache and loss.

I was also able to locate Rosas in others. He was the same age as Scott Joplin, the undisputed “King of Ragtime,” a Black man whose musical oeuvre was similarly buried or forgotten alongside his life story until the 1973 movie The Sting used his song “The Entertainer,” and an expectant generation of music lovers recovered his ocean of rags and waltzes (one of which quotes a Rosas melody). How wonderful it was to discover that both Rosas and Joplin were both in Chicago in 1893 for the World’s Fair! Two young men of color, musical virtuosi, at the beginning of their heroes’ journeys, undaunted by the odds against them, with visions of as-yet-unwritten operas and symphonies dancing in their heads.

An opera singer originally from Mazatlan named Ángela Peralta, another of Rosas’ musical colleagues (and a possible love interest), also helped open up his story. Known to the world by her nickname the “Mexican Nightingale,” she was brown-skinned and Indigenous like Rosas. Unlike Rosas, she hid her dark complexion beneath white face powder.

In many ways, Peralta was the opposite of Rosas: elitist, self-conscious, Eurocentric. A soprano, she played La Scala and other European opera houses, as well as toured the Americas—always under the mask of whiteness. Yet, despite her different philosophy of dealing with casteism and racism, the “Nightingale” ultimately endured the same fate as Rosas: Their names and exploits buried, at home and abroad, their brownness whitewashed, erased.

After many decades of writing plays, I’ve concluded that there is no good reason to write about the past unless you’re trying to work out the problems we confront in our own everyday present. When I go back into history, my main thrust is to open the mystery in a historical moment, and by mystery, I mean what is unknown—as of yet. This history/mystery rhyme is vital to my artistic intentions, and the way I set about building the world of the play. There can hardly be one without the other.

The new play “Ghost Waltz” tells the story of Juventino Rosas, one of Mexico’s most significant composers. Image courtesy of author.

As it happens, this play began in dream form. I knew nothing about Rosas until the Latino Theater Company presented his story as one potential commission idea for the Circle of Imaginistas writing circle. Here was an Indigenous forebear, someone who might have influenced and inspired generations of native-born Americans on either side of the border, but whose story was silenced, lost. The presentation made an impression on me, but I was hot about another project, so Rosas found himself on my back burner.

Then I had a dream: Rosas in huaraches and white cotton, dancing to the waltz in his head, while the world circa 1890 was crashing all around him. Despite the tumult, he danced with calm and purpose, as if following the tune toward an as-yet unrevealed destiny. When I woke up, I went to my laptop and wrote a page or so, trying to catch not only the images but the dream’s feeling.

Many years ago, I wrote the libretto for an opera called America Tropical about the great 1932 mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros on Olvera Street in Los Angeles that was literally whitewashed by the all-white city council and town fathers for its political content. Not only was the image taken forever from us, but the artist was deported, never to return. The center figure of the mural? A 14-foot-tall Indio crucified on a double cross, facing City Hall, foretelling the fate of his violent erasure, the double injustice of past and present bigotry.

Today, the “America Tropical” mural lives in a liminal state. Years of California sun beating down on the whitewashed wall have thinned the cover-up, destroying the mask, allowing Siqueiros’ original images to ghost through. Between two worlds, living on the fringes, the mural’s story now is both the original punch of provocation and the counterpunch of effacement, deletion from history. Thesis and antithesis leave us forever on the borders unless we can find a way to synthesize the experience, see beyond the false front, and reconcile the mysteries of our relation to both the artist and the silencer of art.

As a playwright, my job is to shine a light on these layers of whitewash hiding the lives of Rosas and so many others like him. The damage cannot be undone, but there is a chance at recovery and a story to tell in the ghosting through of our history, and our mystery.

Not everyone has forgotten Rosas. There is a town named for him, along with a statue, in the central east region of the state of Guanajuato where he was born and where the Otomí continue to thrive. One day I’ll pay my respects. But I write to bring the dead to life.

Juventino Rosas deserves to be heard and seen. Because when we see him, we see ourselves. When we hear his music, he lives again.

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The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is a 64-year-old Canadian repertory theater company known for its productions of Shakespeare and other classic plays, Broadway musicals, and new work. We are, by most measures, pretty far from Suchitoto, El Salvador, an ancient town of 25,000 on a hillside, in a country still struggling with the aftershocks of a 12-year civil war and the fallout from a vicious, ongoing territorial battle among rival drug gangs.

We started the Suchitoto Project in 2009, about three years after meeting with representatives of Canadian University Student Overseas (CUSO), a highly respected aid agency that sends volunteers to help countries around the world. CUSO representatives saw parallels between Stratford and the city of Suchitito, which had begun holding a music festival and had plans to renovate a theater in order to expand its economy, create jobs and offer a better future to its young people through the arts.

As it happens, that’s exactly what the town of Stratford, Ontario, did in 1952. When the divisional rail shop announced its closure here, the local community decided to save the economy by opening a Shakespeare Festival. And, as crazy as the idea sounds, it worked.

After initial meetings with CUSO, we decided to share the Stratford dream and went down to El Salvador with our mayor, developing a tripartite agreement between the city, CUSO, and the Stratford Festival. Since that time we have raised money from corporations and individuals; we have put together a group of volunteers (currently run by festival scenic carpenter Mark Smith); and together with CUSO, we have sent more than 50 people to Suchitoto to work with young people to develop a wide variety of theatrical skills, many of which are transferrable, and to mount a number of productions.

When CUSO came to us about this project, we did not realize all the challenges ahead. We thought, “Oh, we’ll go down there and we’ll put on some plays!”—with a kind of sunny, imbecilic optimism. But there was great power in that, because that’s exactly what we did.

The Festival Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Richard Bain. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Suchitoto, despite being photogenic and tourist-friendly, has serious problems that Stratford does not. During the bitter 1980-1992 civil war between El Salvador’s right-wing government and the leftist guerrilla opposition, Suchitoto’s population leaned right-of-center, but the surrounding area was left-of-center. So the town was really caught in the middle. The guerrillas surrounded the entire area, and yet there were government troops in the city. It was a time of extreme violence and residents were even afraid to pick up the remains of the dead in the streets, lest they be targeted next.

The civil war is now ancient history and, with the average age in El Salvador quite young, the struggle has changed. Now gangs fight for control and are enlisting young people, funneling drugs and people through the country, and really acting as a government unto themselves.

When our volunteers travel to the area, they continually have to go through gang-held parts of the highways. Shortly before our first group of volunteers arrived, seven teenagers were assassinated. At one point our volunteers got a call from Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino asking: “Are we sure we’re still committed to doing this?”

And we were, because we are optimists. We helped them develop and mount their first project, Voces de Los Cerros or Voices from the Hills, a reimagining of a Mayan folk tale. After the opening night, we had a huge party with hundreds of people celebrating with us. We were surprised to see pockets of people who were just weeping and holding onto one another. We didn’t understand the significance of this until the mayor of Suchitoto told us that those people hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly 20 years because they were on opposite sides of the civil war. But now, because their children were working together, it was leading them to put their differences behind them.

 So far we’ve had 12 full-scale productions. Five of those were classics, including some Shakespeare and Moliere plays and others from the Golden Age of Spanish drama. They did a production of Lope de Vega’s 1619 play Fuente Ovejuna, which is about a town besieged by warlords, and instead we made it about gangs. The local police chief was really taken by it. At first he wondered why the young actors were all dressed up like gang members–but then he came around! The kids also like writing their own work, especially based on their own experiences and observations with such issues as gang violence, poverty, and homelessness.
 
A large number of Festival staff have gone down to Suchitoto, including teaching artist Edward Daranyi who, since the project’s inception, has spent many months each year training and directing the young actors. We have sent propmakers, wardrobe people, electricians, lighting and sound technicians, actors, coaches, designers, administrators—people from every corner of the organization. And we have had people from the program here to North America—to Stratford, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

Performers involved in the Suchitoto Project. Photo by Tito Hasbun. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Estela Abrego was in our first group. She was a single mother and her family wasn’t happy that she wanted to enroll in the program. Seeing no merit in the arts, they thought her decision showed a lack of responsibility and were threatening to take away her young son, who was eight or nine, if she persisted.

To solve the problem, the artistic director at the time in El Salvador offered to let Estela’s son join the program along with his mother, even though he was younger than the adolescent age group we target. Fast forward, he’s now a budding young star and he came up for the International Festival of Children’s Theatre here in Stratford last year. Estela is one of the leaders in the program now; she writes plays and is the vice president of the governing board.

While tourism is growing in Suchitoto, we haven’t yet developed the infrastructure for consistent performances that would generate revenue among the tourism base. But that’s on the economic front.

For us, the real miracle has been in human-development and youth-engagement—giving them options as they move forward in life. Their advancement doesn’t always have to do with the arts. They have developed reading and writing skills, as well as critical thinking, and the hard skills that are part of what we do, such as carpentry and electrical work. It’s enough to spark interest in these students to imagine their lives differently.

One student is now a recording artist. Another has gone into design and is a student in the University of El Salvador’s new costume design program. She is making all kinds of costumes and wedding dresses in the community.

Some of the youth involved in the project are now writing their own plays and have formed an acting company. They’re being hired by different NGOs in-country to write plays that are socially responsive to things that they face, like anti-violence, gender equality, youth inclusion, and teenage pregnancy.

I think our greatest joy is that we’ve invited the youth in the program to teach us and we’re learning with them. We’ve brought our skills down and they’ve taken us up on the challenge, and now they’re the ones that are dictating the way that we go. We’re always inviting the question, “What do you want to do now?”

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But gaining outside recognition never has been the primary goal of Casa 0101, the 99-seat community theater, art gallery, and learning center that my husband Emmanuel Deleage and I founded and operate in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“Community” is a powerful concept for me, as it is for many residents of Boyle Heights, a heavily Latino area that once was home to large populations of Japanese Americans and Eastern European Jews, and today is struggling to cope with a wave of gentrification.

Josefina López, an actor, director, playwright, novelist, screenwriter of the feature film Real Women Have Curves, and artistic director of Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and came to the United States with my migrant parents. Although my parents immigrated legally, five of my siblings and I were undocumented for a long time because we’d been born in Mexico. Part of our mission at Casa 0101 is to take the stories of families and of our community—including the pain and the shame—out of the darkness and into the light, by dramatizing it.

I’m an actor, director, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter (and a painter, and a cordon bleu chef—but those are other stories). But what I’ve realized over 20 years is that doing theater is about being a shaman, because we know that theater evolved out of religious ceremony and spiritual rituals. As a shaman or as a curandera (healer), I help the community to exorcise its ghosts, confront them, then collectively let them go. We’ve done that with shows like my odd couple comedy-drama Detained in the Desert, and an adaptation of Tattoos on the Heart by Father Gregory Boyle, the priest and founder-director of L.A.’s Homeboy Industries.

A lot of the community that I have built has been as a result of hearing people’s suffering. I had a couple of writing students who were gay, and they talked about how hard it was for them because they were supposed to be “perfect” immigrant sons and take care of their parents. But then at night they were engaged in really destructive, risky behaviors. And I said, “We need to create a program or something that tells people it’s okay to be gay; you don’t have to divide yourself, you can be whole and be gay.” So that’s how we started an LGBT workshop.

We had a show about rape two years ago, and the challenge was how do we talk about rape for 90 minutes and make it engaging. And we did it. Instead of blaming the victim we looked at other ways to present it. When you dislodge the shame and neutralize it, people leave the theater lighter.

We have an ongoing presentation called Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme, which arose several years ago from my perception that although we were trying to tell women’s stories and Latina stories, we didn’t have enough women directors and producers. We started to identify other women directors, but we knew only two. So I decided to teach a directing class for women directors, and to develop women’s stories in our playwriting group. Eventually we made an evening out of it, and the women brought out all their family and friends, and it was a big success. Some of the plays were clunky here and there, but for the writers and directors this was like a dream come true. The first time we did this we had eight or 10 shows; the last time we had 21, because we had so many women who’d done it before and loved it so much that they stayed on.

At Casa 0101, we set high artistic standards. When people think of community theater, they always think of really bad acting and bad sets. We say, No! To us, what’s at stake is to tell our stories to the community, and for the community to feel reflected back—and vice-versa. Helping people bond through art gives them pride in the community, so they want to stay in their community, and the community keeps growing.

The exterior of Casa 0101 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Casa 0101.

Our community of Boyle Heights has changed a lot. When I was growing up, the area was troubled by gang violence. Today, Boyle Heights is seen as this hot neighborhood that’s been revived by the Metro Gold Line, and it’s attracting real estate speculators and new businesses aimed at hipsters. Nobody liked the gangs and the violence and all that. But now we’re caught up in a kind of economic violence. And it’s funny, because when I started the theater, I wanted people on the Westside to see how nice it is. I just didn’t think that people would want to come and live here! I’ve thought, “Oh no, did I accidentally help gentrify the neighborhood by making it nice and cool?”

So I’ve started a performance art troupe called Comfort: Disturb, which is an artistic response to gentrification. If all we do is protest and we get angry, then the narrative gets changed and suddenly we’re the bad guys. Now there are artists coming in from outside the community, who say they’re trying to “bring art to the people.” But our response is, “No, can’t you see? There’s already theater, there are already galleries, there’s all this history, and you’re whiting it out and pretending like this canvas doesn’t exist.”

I think the only thing you can do now is to raise the conciencia. I did a play last year about gentrification, Hipsteria, and it was set about 20 years in the future. The last building from Boyle Heights is being condemned, and this lady has been fighting to stay and she gets kicked out, and these hipsters move in and they’re going to turn it into a dog hotel. And she refuses to leave; she decides to live on the street and just keeps paying the parking meter to occupy that space. She wants the hipsters to know that her home was neglected so that the landlord could invoke the Ellis Act, condemn it, and then sell it at a huge profit. And it was a true story: In Hollywood there was a lady who organized the mothers against gang violence, and got kicked out.

Then we did another play called Sideways Fences about a guy who fixes cars and his wife is pregnant and works in a 99-cent store, and they’re being pushed out of their converted garage.

So it’s really about raising consciousness. We can’t point the finger at the people who want to move here, or open businesses here. Really the bad guys are the developers and the city officials who allowed the neglect to happen over 20 years. So to point fingers now only adds to the shame, and that will not build community. We can’t do to others what was done to us, because it only perpetuates the shame and the oppression.

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