Around the time I began my application to the Gish Jen Fellowship with the Writers’ Room of Boston, my Tía Monica sent me an old photo she had of me as a child. It’s blurry and somewhat dark. It shows me in my grandma’s backyard back in El Paso, Texas. I’m chasing, or maybe laughing, at a flock of pigeon’s mid-flight away. My grandma’s home sat beneath a highway overpass and you can see the support columns in the photo with the old textile factory just beyond them. There’s a couple things you can’t see in the photo though, like the train tracks behind the brick wall. Or, the canal just past the tracks where viejitos used to fish up crawdads. Or, the boarded up hole in the ground that I always assumed was for an old well. A great many things are missing from this photo, but perhaps the most important is what was right down at the end of my street. The U.S.-Mexico Border, a stone’s throw away from where I grew up.
As I write these words, “U.S. and Mexico and Border,” I think of immigration, deportation, and family separations. But, I also think of home. High School dances, late night drives, the Christmas tree lighting in the placita. Lately, these two feelings, of home and fear, have become inseparable. For all my life, a bridge meant home to me, pigeons roosting and cooing just above my head, but just last month US Immigration officials in El Paso chose to house hundreds of immigrants beneath a bridge in an outdoor detention camp. Home has become a great many things to me, but for those seeking asylum, “home” is much more complicated.
I bring all this to my current project with WROB, a play titled Wilder. Set far away from the border, the play takes place in an apartment here in Jamaica Plains. A young woman has moved back into her childhood home, a place she hasn’t set foot in since her parents were deported, with the intention of starting a foster family. The titular Wilder is a young victim of this administration’s child separation policy. The two come together during a time of heightened attention on the border, but, for these two, the border has always been a part of their lives. Two generations affected by the policies of two different administrations, each of them coming into this play with their own definitions of home.
As I’ve started work on this play, I’ve begun reading a number of books about the border and all those affected by it, but I’ve also been thinking of home. Of homemade tamales and chain link fences. Of baseball games and border checkpoints. Of family members and asylum seekers. Home is complicated, but it makes us who we are. Wilder, I hope, will help audiences explore what home means to them as these two characters try to redefine the term for themselves in a country that so desperately wants to define it for them.
A few books I’d recommend for those interested in exploring the topics I’m researching while writing Wilder:
Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli.
We Built This Wall by Eileen Truax.
In the Country We Love by Diane Guerrero.
– Andrew Siañez-De La O, 2019 Gish Jen Fellow
