Performing Dominican transnationalism in P.A.R.G.O.: Los pecados permitidos by Waddys Jáquez - Rutgers University

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Performing Dominican transnationalism in
P.A.R.G.O.: Los pecados permitidos by Waddys
Jáquez.
Stevens, Camilla
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Stevens. (2008). Performing Dominican transnationalism in P.A.R.G.O.: Los pecados permitidos by
Waddys Jáquez. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures , 61(4), 255–265.
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CAMILLA STEVENS

      THE POLITICS OF ABJECTION IN P.A.R.G.O.: LOS
       PECADOS PERMITIDOS BY WADDYS JÁQUEZ

ABSTRACT: P.A.R.G.O.: Los Pecados Permitidos (2001) by the Dominican
playwright, director, and actor Waddys Jáquez has resonated with diverse
audiences across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean because
it presents a tragicomic vision of the interchange of people, capital, and
culture between the north and the south. The author argues that the abject
immigrant characters in Jáquez’s darkly comic play perform the exclusion of
transnational subjectivities from orthodox national imaginaries. In the play,
four supposedly rehabilitated Latinos in New York City resist the normalizing
action of a support group session—read here as assimilation—and display a
politics of abjection that exposes the unremitting “ontological discomfort” of
their transnationality.
Keywords: abjection, Dominican diaspora, dominicanidad, Dominican the-
ater, Waddys Jáquez, performance, transnationalism

ALTHOUGH THE INTERCHANGE OF PEOPLE, capital, and culture between the
United States and the Dominican Republic has been a significant feature of
national life since the 1960s, Franklin Gutiérrez, president of the Dominican
Commission of Culture in the United States, notes a historical lack of support
for writers of the diaspora:
   No es un secreto para la mayoría de los estudiosos de la literatura, que
   en la década de los 80 y parte de los 90, el escritor dominicano resi-
   dente en el exterior era visto como una especie de despatriado, como
   una especie de traicionero que abandonó la patria, que estaba haciendo
   una literatura que no le interesaba mucho ni a la intelectualidad ni al
   mercado local. (n. pag.)
A shift in island politics in the new millennium has turned a new tide, how-
ever, and an increase in intellectual production dedicated to the study of
the Dominican diaspora reached a high point at the 2005 national Feria del
Libro, which included and celebrated scholars and artists residing abroad
for the first time.1 The absence of migration in traditional narratives of
Dominican national identity has produced something akin to what Arcadio
Díaz-Quiñones called in Puerto Rican historiography a “broken memory”
produced by U.S. colonialism (46, 59). In the case of the Dominican Repub-

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256 SYMPOSIUM                                                      Winter 2008

lic, the twentieth-century legacy of the Trujillo and Balaguer dictatorships,
coupled with U.S. military intervention, stifled dialogue on topics such as
racial prejudice, religious practices, sexual orientation, and migration that
might reveal Dominican identity as culturally heterogeneous and in conflict.
My objective here is to consider how, in the recent call for a more inclusive
understanding of dominicanidad, performance fills these absences by enact-
ing identities that reject territorial and essentialist nationalisms in favor of
transnational subjectivities.
    Since the 1990s, Dominican playwrights and performers such as Josefina
Baez, Frank Disla, Waddys Jáquez, Elizabeth Ovalle, Claudio Mir, María
Isabel Bosch, and Pedro Antonio Valdéz have produced a diverse corpus
of performance texts addressing the experience of migration. The new,
transnational subjectivities embodied in some of their texts and perfor-
mances unsettle the relationship between nation and identity and challenge
hegemonic notions of citizenship and national belonging. Transnational-
ism, according to one succinct definition, constitutes “a process by which
migrants, through their daily life activities and social, economic, and politi-
cal relations, create social fields that cross national boundaries” (Basch,
Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 22). The intense economic, political,
and cultural transnationalization of Dominicans in the 1980s and 1990s
has problematized notions of collective identity in ways that refuse facile
celebrations of hybrid identities and interstitial spaces.2 Sociologist Luis
Guarnizo argues that the hybrid identities embodied by Dominican trans-
nationals are “subaltern to and excluded by the dominant cultures in the
nation-states involved” and that they “are perceived as foreigners in both
societies: Dominicans in New York, dominicanyorks in Santo Domingo”
(52; emphasis in original).3 On a broad level, this article posits the work of
Dominican playwright, director, and actor Waddys Jáquez as a site of trans-
nationalism that engages with the complex realities of binational identifica-
tions. I argue that the abject immigrant characters in his darkly comic play
P.A.R.G.O.: Los pecados permitidos (2001) perform the exclusion of trans-
national subjectivities from orthodox national imaginaries. In the play, four
supposedly rehabilitated Latinos in New York City resist the normalizing
action of a support-group session—read here as assimilation—and display
a politics of abjection that exposes the unremitting “ontological discomfort”
of their transnationality.4
    Jáquez has lived and worked in New York City since the 1990s, but he
has consistently returned to the Dominican Republic to premiere his artistic
projects and to collaborate with artists on the island. He is a transmigrant
theater practitioner whose creative process and vision is embedded in a
field of relationships that simultaneously links him to two nation-states.
In one interview, he states simply “Soy un dominicano, punto, que vive en
Nueva York, punto” (qtd. in Martínez Tabares n. pag.). This transnational

Stevens                                                    SYMPOSIUM       257

state of being evidently befuddled the New York Asociación de Cronistas
de Espectáculos (A.C.E.), who assumed that Jáquez did not live and work
in the United States and named him “Actor Visitante más Destacado” for
P.A.R.G.O. in 2003 (Álvarez).5 Jáquez’s engagement with his resident
country is functional in the sense that the United States is a source of job
opportunities, creative freedom, and international exposure.6 Studies of
Dominican transnationalism show a pattern of transmigrants using the host
nation-state as a resource while maintaining an emotive and cultural con-
nection with the home country. They are not prone to adopt an “American”
identity and settle permanently in the United States; therefore, they are in
constant negotiation with the discourses of identity in both locations. As
uncomfortable as the struggle for inclusion in two national imaginaries may
be, the simultaneous access to the identity discourses of race, class, gender,
and sexuality in different cultures nevertheless informs how Dominican
transnationals articulate their concepts of self and society and opens up
reductionist models of dominicanidad.7 The positive reception of Jáquez’s
work in different contexts—within the Dominican Republic and the United
States and beyond—speaks to his bifocal method of producing theater,
which clearly resonates with communities across various national borders
anxious to address issues of migration and transnationalism.8
   The repugnance and attraction that the abject immigrant characters in
P.A.R.G.O. presumably generate in their audience signals the anxiety of
the sending and receiving societies in claiming them as subjects, as well as
their personal struggle in claiming a space in their resident country. In his
reading of Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, Puerto Rican critic and
creative writer Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez posits his sick, gay Latino body as
“the ultimate embodiment of abjection” (“Politicizing” 313). If abjection is
described by Kristeva as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules” (4), then Sandoval-Sánchez’s body repre-
sents a contaminating threat to symbolic systems of order. “Expelled from the
national body politic,” he wrote, “the unclean and improper other is translated
as an alien, as a monster, an excess or lack that provokes anxiety, horror, and
disgust” (“Politicizing” 317). The politics of abjection Sandoval-Sánchez
proposes, however, exploits the boundary space of exclusion and integration,
and he suggests that “[t]he abject Latino gay subject in this liminal zone of
abjection is capable of transgressing borders and hence of making possible a
certain subversion and emancipation” (317). In P.A.R.G.O., Jáquez uses his
queer, black Latino body to transform into four immigrant characters—three
Dominicans and one Puerto Rican—in what might be seen as an exemplary
space hovering on the boundaries of social exclusion and integration: a ficti-
tious support-group meeting run by the charitable organization P.A.R.G.O.,
which stands for Patronato de Recuperación Global Organizado. Abjection
and migration are linked in that the ontology of the abject is concerned with

258 SYMPOSIUM                                                       Winter 2008

place. In Kristevan terms, the abject is an exiled “deject” that asks “where”
rather than “who” (15).
   The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself),
   separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of
   getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a
   sense, and not without laughter—since laughing is a way of placing or
   displacing abjection. (Kristeva 15)
Laughter is central to creating the possibility for subversion in the space of
social rehabilitation.
   The play consists of four monologues linked by interventions by a mistress
of ceremonies and a male ballet dancer. One by one, María Cuchívida, a home-
less and mentally unstable crack addict; Papichío Domínguez, a handsome but
lonely ex-alcoholic matatán; Zaza, an ex-prostitute turned P.A.R.G.O beauty
queen; and Pasión Contreras, a drug-using transsexual, take to the stage to tell
their stories. Some have been associated with the institution for over a decade
and none have been truly “renovada” according to of Marimba Cepeda, also
known as “La señora del Busto Prominente,” who serves as the meeting’s
presentadora. In fact, each painfully funny monologue underscores the many
ways in which these characters continue to operate in an unassimilated space
of abjection. As María puts it, “Años van y años vienen en esta recuperación
de la que nadie se recupera” (9). María refers not necessarily to their various
addictions but rather to their status as immigrants, or, in my view, transmi-
grants, becauseit is evident that their loyalties and social networks go beyond
their residence in one nation-state. To recuperate would be to assimilate, and
their outrageous postures, idiosyncratic modes of expression, and tragicomic
tales of survival are all signs of their marginalized position on the edges of
mainstream society.
   Perhaps the most therapeutic outcome of participating in P.A.R.G.O.,
then, is to inhabit a space where they can perform a narrative of the self, a
persistently abject subjectivity productive in maintaining difference. Papi-
chío, Zaza, and Pasión are invited to “testify” at a support-group meeting
that resembles a variety show. Each character has a special relationship with
El Licenciado Betances, the director and founder of P.A.R.G.O., and each is
connected through the diva Zaza: She introduced María to prostitution in the
Netherlands, she was once Papichío’s lover, and she is a friend and neighbor
of Pasión. Paradoxically, however, it is the disintegrative quality of their lack
of bearings and sense of dislocation that joins them as an abject community
more than their evident personal links and shared addictions.
   María and Papichío’s translocality is evident in their obsession with the
past. Their method of arrival in New York and their familial stories of origins
haunt them. Excluded from the chain of migration formed by her nine brothers
—a trauma from which she has never recovered—María makes her own

Stevens                                                     SYMPOSIUM        259

journey to the United States. En route, she works in the Netherlands as a
prostitute, or, as she tells the folks back home, as a “niñera,” tending to boys
from ages twenty to fifty, until she steals a U.S. passport from an unsuspecting
Mormon that enables her to reach the Statue of Liberty. Although Papichío
has been in “Nueva Yol” for fifteen years, he continues to relive his departure
from home: “miro pa’atrá y el tiempo no pasa, todavía veo a la vieja depidié-
ndose de mí” (11–12). 9 Papichío’s body language and repeated amendments
to his migration story add levity to the tale of his nightmarish nine-week
journey to the United States in a merchant ship: “Todo comenzó hace 15 años
cuando este chamaco salió de Quisqueya la bella en un balco mercante . . .
Digo en un furgón que estaba dentro de un balco mercante . . .” (13). On the
surface, Papichío exudes style and sexuality—in his words, “carisma tropi-
cal” (12). He arrived in the United States poised for stardom, but the reality
of depressing factory work and hard luck in love and with the law add up to
nostalgia, loneliness, and alcoholism, leading Papichío to admit “Maldigo er
día en que yo me monté en el barco mercante (en el furgón que taba dentro
del barco)” (15). He is just another marginalized hustler on the streets, but at
P.A.R.G.O., Papichío’s abjection allows him to become the temporary star of
the show. Likewise, the compelling “pornografía verbal” that was María’s life
story once made her popular at P.A.R.G.O., but now, on the brink of madness
and death, she has reached a level of abjection beyond P.A.R.G.O.’s charitable
interests and is no longer invited to perform as a model of recovery. Instead,
she crashs the meeting by pushing her shopping cart onto the stage and cap-
tivates the audience through her aura of homelessness, terrifying appearance,
and stinging comments about her fellow P.A.R.G.O. participants.
     Zaza and Pasión also radiate a repellant magnetism, and through their
bodies, they display part of their diasporic discomfort. In the stage directions,
Zaza makes her entrance as “[p]utona, putísima, pelucona, peluquísima,
coronada y todo, como una pantera en celo”; her grandmother describes her
as “una bomba de sensualidad tropical, un aborto de la naturaleza” (16).
Pasión also draws stares, for her contrary male-female passions prompted a
surgical sexual crossover that has left her looking like a “truco mal hecho”
(20). With the help of artist Hochi Asiático, the foam-padded costumes worn
by Jáquez display the grotesquely exaggerated physical merits of a Caribbean
beauty queen and the failed quest for beauty that has left Pasión with an ugly
exterior that only she knows harbors the beautiful soul of a Venezuelan Miss
Universe (22). These monstrous, alternately excessive and ambiguous immi-
grant bodies perform a certain abject power that threatens the boundaries of
homogeneous identities, systems, and order, in this case, both the Dominican
and U.S. national body politics. It is worth noting that, as in other important
narratives of Caribbean identity, Jáquez imagines the “queer” identity cat-
egories of a transsexual Puerto Rican as embodiment par excellence of the
contradictory cultural, economic, and political realities of the transnational

260 SYMPOSIUM                                                        Winter 2008

Caribbean subject. Like Pasion’s category-blurring sex-gender migration,
Puerto Rican history and culture constantly problematizes dichotomies, such
as island/mainland, nation/colony, black/white, and Spanish/English and thus
has been theorized as “queer” by numerous scholars. As Lawrence LaFountain
-Stokes eloquently explains:
   Puerto Ricans are a queer bunch: simultaneously Afro-Diasporic, Carib-
   bean, Latin American, Hispanic, Latino/a, and American, at least since
   1898; insular, migratory and translocal, with United States citizenship
   and passports since 1917; speaking Spanish or English or sometimes,
   perhaps rather often, some variation of both; living here and there and
   sometimes in several places at once. (275)10
By these terms, Jáquez’s play underscores how the transnationalization of
Dominicans since the final decades of the twentieth century has also produced
an increasingly translocal and “queer” collective identity.
    In addition to their transgressive bodies, Zaza and Pasión’s enthusiastic use
of scatological (“caca,” “vómito,” “diarrea”) and vulgar language (“cocaína,”
“coño,” “puñeta”) are at constant odds with the institution’s goal of present-
ing an inspirational discourse of rehabilitation. Similarly, Zaza’s voice-over
farewell speech ending her reign as P.A.R.G.O. queen parodies the charitable
projects organized by pageant winners by proposing a manual for performing
“happy suicides” and a plan for the elderly to build their own caskets (19).
Even Marimba, la Señora del Busto Prominente, who should represent the
official discourse of P.A.R.G.O. as emcee, frequently betrays propriety and,
in reference to herself, drunkenly shouts “Desampará, borracha y emigrante.
¡Un éxito!, ‘recuperarse es caminar el resto de la vida en una cuerda floja’, me
cago en la teoría y le regalo a la doctora González la práctica” (19). Ironically,
this institutional maxim referring to the unsteady balancing act of walking
the tightrope of recuperation is suggestive of the irrepressible bodies of the
performing characters. One of Jáquez’s great accomplishments is expressing
through his body what Martínez Tabares calls the “gestural essence” of each
character—María’s teetering between madness and lucidity, Papichío’s rhyth-
mic strut, Zaza’s self-consciously unhurried beauty queen gait, and Pasión’s
edgy energy. Each exudes an uncontrollable vitality that exceeds the normal-
izing efforts of the support-group session.
    Indeed, the authority figures and their attendant medical, psychoanalytic,
and self-help discourses one would expect to frame and control the event do
not appear to have much hold on the presenters. Betances and his medical
staff never appear on stage; they are characterized solely by the characters’
allusions to them, which generally ridicule and undermine their moral author-
ity. The P.A.R.G.O. organizers, for example, hope to censor the content of the
life stories shared by their model clients, and when they are not in the wings
encouraging the performers to highlight the good episodes in their lives and

Stevens                                                     SYMPOSIUM       261

to check their obscene language, they are frantically trying to remove María
from the stage. At one point, Betances attempts to curb the torrent of “malas
palabras y leyendas urbanas” spewing from María and shuts off all the lights.
Later, he tries to drown out her voice by playing on the sound system, of all
songs, the urban anthem “New York, New York” (9). In the end, Papichío
takes over the situation and calmly counsels: “¡Betances! cojá el bastón pa
que no se caiga, déjeme esto a mí que soy experto en improvisación, quédese
en la puerta de que esta gente me encargo yo porqque lo mio es el carisma”
(11). All of the supposedly rehabilitated characters retain their non-normative
qualities throughout, which might be perceived as a failure from the point of
view of the P.A.R.G.O. organizers, but as a source of empowerment for those
who used the forum to become a speaking subject and to assert their distinct
subjectivity.
   Moreover, the P.A.R.G.O. performers interact with the audience in such a
way that positions them as abject actors rather than simply objects of the eve-
ning’s spectacle or the institution in general. Spectators are incorporated into
the fiction of Jáquez’s play and stand in for attendees of the support-group
session.11 The play casts a critical eye on the work of social service agencies
by hinting at Betances’s suspect relationships with his female clients and by
emphasizing the pleasure the audience takes by listening to the misfortunes of
others.12 Papichío, for example, cheerfully says, “Testificaré, pues quién soy
yo para evitar que utede se divieltan con la degracia ajena” (12), and Pasión
has been asked to return ten times over the past year because of the demand for
her “horribles narraciones” (20). Apparently, the speakers, their audience, and
the institution gain something from this arrangement, whether it is therapy,
pleasure, or economic profit. This problematic relationship among clients,
support-group members, and the management is not lost on the performers,
however, and Pasión speaks bluntly to the audience: “Ustedes con esa carita
de: ‘Mira nena, te perdono y te acepto’. . . ¡Hipócritas! No vinieron aquí por
solidaridad vinieron porque le gusta el can, la chercha sincronizada o porque
en el fondo quieren sentir que son buenos” (24). However, the institution
deflates any feelings of superiority on the part of the spectators by videotap-
ing everyone who attends the event, therefore destroying their reputation and
creating more business. As Marimba points out, “Si usted está sentado ahí es
porque oculta algo y Viciosos Incorporados lo quiere ayudar. Querido com-
pañero, que no te de vergüenza tu debilidad, mas bien afróntala, afróntala,
afróntala. . . . ¡Afróntala coño!” (2).
   In the final analysis, semantics might provide a clue to the social work
performed by the Patronato de Recuperación Global Organizado. P.A.R.G.O.
is not only an acronym. “Para los que no dominan el término real,” explains
Pasión, “pargo es el nombre que se le da a un encuentro casual, sexual pre-
meditado con fines de lucro” (23). The solidarity meetings, therefore, might
be seen as a profitable “pargo”: The organization’s administrators prostitute

262 SYMPOSIUM                                                                     Winter 2008

their star clients, who lure in clients who may turn out to be future luminaries
of the show. The administrators, performers, and audience members exploit
each other. If social agencies are to cure societal ills, within the conceit estab-
lished by the play, P.A.R.G.O. should operate to purge or to assimilate what
is perceived to be alien to the national body politic. On the contrary, for better
or for worse, the fictitious support group cures nothing and instead maintains
a self-sustaining space of marginality in which its abject clients can bask in a
spotlight of difference rather than slip away into the anonymity of sameness.
P.A.R.G.O. disrupts models of Dominican identity that demand allegiance to
one nation-state at the same time Jáquez’s transnational artistic method por-
tends a new direction for Dominican theater. He is representative of the most
constructive sectors of Dominican migration who “retorna al país rompiendo
silencios para traer en sus maletas las cosas aprendidas” (“Resurrección”).
The artist’s rapidly growing popularity with audiences in both New York and
the Dominican Republic attests to his unassimilable transnationality and a
more receptive climate for examining the burden of negotiating identity under
conditions of transmigrancy.

Rutgers University

   1. Leonel Fernández, elected president in 1996 and again in 2004, was born in Santo
Domingo, but he spent his formative years in New York City. Fernández reached out to the
diaspora community, partly to court its vote (Dominicans with dual citizenship voted for
the first time in national elections in 2004; an estimated two-thirds of the votes from abroad
went to Fernández), but also to develop social and economic projects mutually beneficial to
resident and expatriate Dominicans. In the cultural arena, the Fernández government created
the Dominican Commission of Culture in the United States, an organization dedicated to sup-
porting Dominican artists in the United States in the hopes that they promote national values
and become a force among other Latino communities (see mission statement to Comisionado
Dominicano de Cultura en USA Web site). Recent transcultural activity related to the diaspora
include inaugural Dominican book fairs in New York City and Lawrence, Massachusetts, in
2006, and the publication of numerous studies, such as New York-based Daisy Cocco de Filip-
pis’s Literatura dominicana en los Estados Unidos: presencia temprana, 1900–1950 (2001)
and Desde la diáspora: A Diáspora Position (2003). Voces de ultramar: Literatura dominicana
de la diáspora (ed. Acosta) anthologizes the authors celebrated at the 2005 Feria del Libro,
and Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (ed. Torres-Saillant, Hernádez, and
Jimenez 2004) compiles essays presented in a collaborative, two-part symposium held in New
York and Santo Domingo in 2001.
   2. Significant numbers of Dominicans began migrating in the 1960s, with a marked increase
in the 1980s and 1990s. The economic and political woes under the Balaguer regime (1966–78)
pushed Dominicans to leave the island at the same time that the 1965 U.S. Immigration and
Nationality Act increased the number of Caribbean migrants who could enter the country each
year. This legacy, “coupled with new transportation and communication technologies, have turned
more than one million Dominicans into transnational migrants” (Sagás and Molina 11). This
means that one in nine Dominicans lives abroad, a reality that has affected all facets of national
life (Martin, Midgley, and Teitelbaum 2002). For overviews of the history of Dominican migra-
tion, see Sagás and Molina; Levitt; Pessar, A Visa; and Aparicio.
   3. Until the late 1990s, Dominicans had a relatively low rate of naturalization. Many scholars
attribute Dominicans’ slow sociopolitical and economic advancement and lack of assimilation in

Stevens                                                                     SYMPOSIUM            263

the United States to their “permanently temporary” transient mentality nurtured by transnational
social and economic networks, high density residential clustering, and low levels of English
acquisition (Singer and Gilbertson 5). Paradoxically, although migrants proudly assert their
dominicanidad in New York and reproduce many of the cultural practices brought from home,
when they return to the island they are often stigmatized by island residents as unauthentically
Dominican and as social climbers with ties to criminal activities. See Guarnizo’s study docu-
menting the many ways returnees suffer discrimination, such as their exclusion from prestigious
business and social associations.
   4. I borrow the term ontological discomfort from Torres-Saillant, who wrote: “Occupying
the space of the diaspora has not come without a measure of ontological discomfort, stemming
most likely from the sense that one has lost a homeland without necessarily gaining another.
The listless, circular, transnational mobility that many scholars have been pastoralizing since the
1990s may in the Caribbean case result from this ontological discomfort” (An Intellectual History
231).
   5. The premiere of P.A.R.G.O. helped launch Jáquez’s career. In addition to the A.C.E. award,
Jáquez was named Best Actor by the Hispanic Organization for Latin Actors (H.O.L.A.) dur-
ing the 2002–03 season. The play has been performed more than two hundred times in various
theaters in the Dominican Republic and played in cities such as New York; Washington, D.C.;
Miami; Havana; Buenos Aires; and Mexico City. Jáquez has produced more than ten shows and
has become a visible presence in both the commercial and noncommercial performing arts world
of the Dominican Republic.
   6. Jáquez addresses what I am calling his transnational artistic method in an interview with
Ronzino.
   7. In general terms, Sagás and Molina describe how transnationalism affects Dominican
identity:
  The crossover of norms and values between countries or societies permits migrants to
  expand and integrate, without reservation, other people’s reality and culture into their native
  one. For Dominicans, the exchange has influenced their understanding and acceptance of the
  “other” world. It is a means to alleviate the burden of a strong, absolutist, oppressive cultural
  patterns and ideologies imposed upon them. (8)
   In particular, exposure to different forms of racism and racial politics in the United States has
opened discussions on this formerly taboo topic in the Dominican Republic. See, for example,
studies by Pessar (“Transnationalism”); Silvio Torres-Saillant (“Tribulations”); and Duany.
   8. As Jáquez notes, P.A.R.G.O. represents “La historia universal de soledades, esperanzas
y desamparos. Por eso es capaz de tocar a todos los emigrantes en cualquier parte del mundo”
(“Waddys Jáquez”).
   9. Jáquez reproduces Caribbean variants of Spanish pronunciation throughout and even distin-
guishes Pasión’s Puerto Rican accent and vocabulary from the Dominican characters.
  10. For more on the “queerness” of Puerto Rican identity, see the fall 2003 issue of Centro
Journal, which is dedicated to the analysis of transnationalism and transvestitism in the Puerto
Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres’s popular novel Sirena Silena vestida de pena (ed. Sandoval-
Sánchez, 2000) and the journal’s excellent 2007 special issue on Puerto Rican queer sexualities
(ed. Aponte-Parés et al.).
  11. The incorporation of the audience into the fiction of the play is one of the many links
P.A.R.G.O. shares with Quíntuples (1984) by Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez. Similar to
the support group context in P.A.R.G.O., spectators become the audience for a conference on fam-
ily affairs in Quíntuples. Both plays feature tour de force, multiple-role, solo performances (one
actor plays four roles in P.A.R.G.O., and two actors play six roles in Quíntuples), they share an
atmosphere that borders on a circus-like parading of freaks, and they both bombard the audience
with references to popular culture. Finally, although Jáquez is best known as a performer and a
director and Sánchez as a writer, the stage directions in P.A.R.G.O. (like Quintuples) are miniature
narratives in their own right and contain amusing information not available to the viewers. Like
Quíntuples, P.A.R.G.O. is meant to be read as well as seen in performance.
  12. Jáquez has mentioned in an interview that P.A.R.G.O. was inspired in part by his observa-
tions of the relationship between health workers and their “clients” and interviews he conducted
with marginalized people whose stories are never told (see Bass).

264 SYMPOSIUM                                                                   Winter 2008

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