Elaine Romero: The Border Trilogy: Wetback; Mother of Exiles; Title IX

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Elaine Romero is an award-winning and prolific Latina playwright with a career spanning more than thirty years. In her Border TrilogyWetback, Mother of Exiles, and Title IXshe presents a striking and prophetic vision of life along the US-Mexico border. Her plays tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time, including debates on undocumented immigration, gun safety and schools, and gender discrimination in the workplace. The heroines of the trilogy are Latina educators caught in different moments of political upheaval as they attempt to negotiate the crevices between the personal and the political. Wetback charts the intertwined fates of an accomplished Latina principal, a Chicana activist journalist, a Mexican undocumented worker, and a white supremacist superintendent and his two children. Mother of Exiles features an Ivy-league educated Latina who returns to teach theatre in her hometown, only to find that it is the moment the state has decided to arm teachers as the frontline of defense against school shootings. Title IX begins in 1972 when a teacher hesitates to use the law when she is sexually harassed in the workplace; the second part takes place in 2016, when her adult daughter seeks help through Title IX in a similar situation. All three plays interrogate race and gender in a society (and system) still struggling to see how the world we have created/legislated differs from the world in which we live. In this, the first anthology of her work, Elaine Romeros plays introduced by Jimmy A. Noriega who contextualizes the plays alongside her remarkable life and achievements .

Author Bio

Elaine Romero is an award-winning U.S. playwright whos plays have been presented across the U.S. and abroad. Romero has been the fortunate recipient of the TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist-in-Residence grant, the NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Program, the Blue Ink Playwrights Award, the Sprenger-Lang New History Foundation Award, the Chicano/Latino Literary Award, and many others.Romero is a Steering Committee Member with the Latinx Theatre Commons. She, also, serves as the Southwest Regional Rep for the Dramatists Guild of America. She has had the good fortune of being a member of NBCs Writers on the Verge, the CBS Writers Diversity Program, and the NHMCs Latino Writers Program. She previously taught film and television writing at Northwestern University. Romero is an Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, and the Playwright-in-Residence at Arizona Theatre Company. RomeroFest features her work at theatres nationally and internationally. Jimmy A. Noriega is Professor of Theatre at the College of Wooster and President of the American Society for Theatre Research. He is the co-editor of Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas (2018) and Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (2022). He is the founder of Teatro Travieso/Troublemaker Theatre.