ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2013, Cornerstone Theater Company is making a play, Plumas Negras, by Juliette Carrillo, in the Alisal neighborhood of Salinas, California. In the scene we are rehearsing, two cast members, playing Concha, the ghost of a migrant farm worker who died in an accident, and Perla, her now-adult daughter, enact a scene in which Perla confronts Concha with her anger and anguish at being abandoned-abandoned first when Concha left her behind in Mexico to find work, and again when she died far away from home. Concha responds, trying to justify the choices she made, confronted with the terrible challenges of poverty and misogyny. Perla migrated to the United Stages herself when she was very young, and is torn between two cultures, two languages, feeling a part of neither one nor the other.