ABSTRACT

Guillermo Reyes is a United States citizen born in Chile. He is therefore part of the great masses of immigrants and exiles of our times. As a playwright, he has negotiated a space that allows him to be part of different communities. He is a Latin American playwright in the United States who writes mainly in English, and his plays deal with the identity of both the Latin American immigrant communities and the Latino communities in the United States. And yet they also explore gay identity inside and outside those communities. This has made it difficult to classify Reyes as a Latino playwright, or as a gay playwright, or even as a Latin American playwright. His work questions the different identities that both the center and the subaltern communities have undertaken to create and maintain in the United States. This traditional concept of identity as a cohesive and complete definition of the individual becomes a limitation when we read Reyes’s plays. His position is that

in the new age of e-mail, cellular phones, faxes and satellites, the modem writer may belong everywhere at once, his words and his message crowding a universe awash in sensations not always verbal and yet ever in need of writers to bring it together and punctuate meaning on the runaway run-on sentences of modern satellite culture. The writer therefore could belong to all his groups, his subgroups, and yet be universally American or Americanly universal.

(“The Latin American Writer” 113)