Fronteras Americanas: American Borders

Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence, and wit, Fronteras Americanas recreates one person’s struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simón Bolívar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor’s travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; La Bamba and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American drug-war movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and clichés, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing.

However, even as the ungovernable and surrealistic Fecundo Morales Secundo, or “Wideload,” edifies us about how sex between a “Latin” and a “Saxon” can be “a mind-expanding and culturally enriching experience,” eloquently quoting Octavio Paz and Federico García Lorca in direct response to contemporary struggles and injustices, he also transcends his role of “estereotype,” reaching a place beyond maps that are only metaphors where borders are more than divisions between countries and take on the most outlandish properties.

In Verdecchia’s preface to the new edition, when examining his reasons for bringing forth a “refried” form of Fronteras Americanas in the 21st century, he indicates:

There are, after all, people all over the globe living, crossing, resisting, defining, and defending linguistic, cultural, racial, gender, psycho- geographical, cartographic, political and other borders. While the world has changed in many ways since I first wrote and performed it, the processes of migration, displacement, and globalization that informed the play’s creation have only accelerated. Some of us may lead more networked lives now, but the Border is alive and well and living all over the globe.

Cast of 1 man.