About the Play:

Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works is a collection of three full-length dramas by Carmen Aguirre. With perceptive, unflinching wit, these three early plays from the award-winning Chilean Canadian writer document the hardships, horrors, and heartache of exile, revealing the far-reaching effects of dictatorial violence and terror. Her funny, poignant, and biting explorations of refuge and recovery are as pertinent now as when they were first written. Highlighting the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society, Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works also provides essential context for her more recent plays.

Chile Con Carne is a darkly comic, semi-autobiographical monologue on the theme of exile, culture shock, and internalized racism from the point of view of a child torn between two worlds. Manuelita, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, desperately wants to fit in with her white, middle-class Canadian peers. But she's also keenly aware that she's an outsider, with parents who speak only Spanish, regard Canada as just a temporary haven and devote all their energies to opposing the military dictatorship of Chile's Pinochet regime that sent them into exile in mid 1970s Vancouver. (Premiered in 1999 at Factory Studio Theatre in Toronto; Cast: 1 woman)

What people say:

"Carmen Aguirre's witty, semi-autobiographical monologue about growing up as a refugee of Chile's Pinochet regime, vividly captures the feelings of a child torn between two worlds." — The Globe and Mail

"Aguirre is well worth catching in this one-act beauty." — Vancouver Sun

¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh? is the title of a play that deliberately mixes its English and Spanish to make a point about Vancouver's Latin-American community, asking "What's up with our race, eh?" Based on the experiences of the young people in The Latino Theatre Group, with whom it was co-written, the play looks at the stories of six people, each from a different Latin American country, as they cope with issues of sex, love, cultural identity, deportation and poverty after their arrival in Vancouver's eastside, including a young woman who must decide how to confront the man she recognizes from her childhood in Guatemala – one of the secret police members who "disappeared" her parents. (Premiered in 1999 at Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver; Cast 3 women, 3 men).

What people say:

"When we think about the culture of Las Americas, con acento, Canada rarely comes to mind. However, the recent moving premiere of ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh? by The Latino Theatre Group, located Vancouver, British Columbia on both the cultural and geographical map of Nuestra America." — Theatre Journal

In a Land Called I Don't Remember is an autobiographical piece that takes place entirely on a bus in the Andes mountains, crossing from Argentina into Chile. In her first play, written at the age of 22 while she was attending theatre school, the author explores her dual identities of Chilean and Canadian, personified by two female characters who were the same age and sit next to each other. (Premiered in 1995 at Studio 58 in Vancouver to critical acclaim; Cast: 4 women, 6 men)

About the Playwright:

Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean-born Canadian author, actor, and playwright who has worked extensively in North and South America. The founder of the Latino Theatre Group in 1994 and more recently a co-founder of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition, she is now a Core Artist at Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre. She is a prolific playwright whose works include The Refugee Hotel and Anywhere But Here. As an actor, she has over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits.