ABSTRACT
In 1996, we decided to create a performance that dealt with Latin women, food, and sex. We started from our own stories. Nao is from an immigrant farm worker family that was involved in the Chicano political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. She grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, a region that at one time produced more fruit and vegetables than any other in the world. Coco's family is from Cuba, a country that gained a reputation in the 1950s as an international whorehouse and which, in response to its present economic crisis, has reverted to sex tourism as a strategy of survival. In the course of writing STUFF Coco traveled to Cuba to interview women in this burgeoning industry. Then we both went to Chiapas, the center of indigenist culture tourism in Mexico, and the site of the 1994 Zapatista insurrection. We spent several weeks in conversation with women and children whose livelihoods are linked to their daily contact with foreigners.
