Differential Epistemologies in Minoritized Theatre: Latina Teatro on San Antonio’s Southside

Differential Epistemologies in Minoritized Theatre: Latina Teatro on San Antonio’s Southside: A Differential Barrio Epistemology provides a framework to champion differential minoritized epistemologies. While the focus here is Latina Teatro on San Antonio’s Southside, the framework is applicable and scalable in other minoritized communities. Using the framework builds capacity to make systemic social change to champion justice, equality, and access. This way of knowing expands the notion of what is valued to build capacity; here, specifically, the focus is theatre, but it is also applicable to other modes of cultural production. The playwrights I examine for this dissertation are: Marisela Barrera (RUBY REDS, BIG BIRDS Y BURRAS and Tejana Rasquacha: All Texas Roads Lead to San Antonio); Anna De Luna (The AIDS Lady); and Amalia Leticia Ortiz (The Canción Cannibal Cabaret). Each work offers a distinct, novel approach to storytelling, which offers their communities an opportunity to see themselves represented positively. Each engages in an ethic of representation that champions positive social change and social justice. Finally, each site of inquiry, examined through performance and dramaturgical analysis, contributes to the development of a differential barrio epistemology framework for our community, which I argue comprises six principle tenets: 1) a staunch antiracist and antimisogynistic world view; 2) value for history, specifically a reclamation of the past as basis for positive social change; 3) development of local knowledge; 4) positive representation/confounding the status quo; 5) bilingualism as a subversion technique; and 6) an exposed artifice in the storytelling conducive to a pedagogical schema.