Centuries ago, even before the first captured Africans were brought to the shores of Virginia, an African slave in Mexico had already organized and led a successful rebellion against the Spanish Empire.
In the 1570s, Gaspar Yanga and some 500 followers fled into the highlands near Veracruz. They eluded and fought New Spain's militia until they established a permanent, free Black settlement. Their town still stands. It bears his name: Yanga.
Gaspar Yanga has been called El Primer Libertador de las Americas, the "first liberator of the Americas," but many people — even in Mexico — have never heard of him. That's a major reason Cara Mia Theatre and Soul Rep Theatre have collaborated to present the English-language premiere of the Mexican play, Yanga, by Jaime Chabaud. It opens Saturday [Feb. 17] at the Latino Cultural Center.
In a Dallas interview, Chabaud spoke mostly in Spanish; his answers were translated by David Lozano, executive director of Cara Mia.
Over the years, there has been an opera about Yanga, videos and university theater productions as well. But it's not so surprising that the first free Black leader in North America doesn't get mentioned much in history textbooks. Documentation is spotty. Chabaud pointed out that, over the years, one archive has burned — three times.
And the information that remains is often contradictory. Sometimes it's Yanga as an old man who's leading his fellow runaways; sometimes it's his son.
But this neglect of Yanga is more than a matter of lost documents. There's the history of Latin America and slavery.
It wasn't until 2019 that the Mexican Constitution finally was amended to recognize Afro-Mexicans. Since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the national identity was officially fused into "mestizaje" ("of mixed race") a term that recognizes mixed-race ancestry but does not specifically acknowledge three centuries of African slavery by the Spanish — and the color-based prejudice it left behind.
There are around 2.5 million Afro-Latinos in Mexico, about 2% of the population. In the United States, it's estimated there are around 6 million, also around 2% of the population.
It was in this context that Chabaud and his wife, director Marisol Castillo, established their Mulato Teatro company in Mexico City. As the company's website states, its mission is to make visible "the past and present of the cultural and racial mixtures of Mexico."
In 2018, Yanga was the company's inaugural play and helped establish its identity. Cara Mia's Lozano learned of the Mexico City production online and inquired about bringing it to Dallas.
But COVID-19 intervened. Then, in 2022-'23 in Dallas, the African American Museum, the Latino Cultural Center and Southern Methodist University's Meodows School of the Arts presented an exhibition about Yanga from the Latino Arts Project, co-curated by Jorge Baldor.
It was Baldor who suggested to Lozano that he look into commissioning a translation of Yanga. Last year, Cara Mia won $25,000 grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and TACA to underwrite an English translation of Yanga as well as Dallas workshops with Chabaud. The show is being directed by Soul Rep's Anyika McMillan-Herod.
It's a miracle, Chabaud said laughingly in English referring to the various delays and funding sources that brought Yanga to North Texas.
Chabaud is a prizewinning playwright who's written more than a hundred stage dramas, plus telenovelas and screenplays (including ones for the Sony TV spinoff of El Mariachi, the hit film by Texas writer-director Robert Rodriguez). He is also the founder and director of the theater publication, Paso de Gato (Catwalk).
In Yanga, some of the characters — like Yanga or like Don Pedro González de Herrera, who's determined to defeat Yanga — are based on real people. They're found in documents of the Spanish Inquisition as well as official letters from the viceroy of the region. The colonial government was determined to crush the rebellion not simply because these were escaped slaves. They were an economic threat. In order to survive, the rebels repeatedly raided the royal caravans that ran between Mexico City and Veracruz.
But Chabaud is straightforward about the invented nature of some of his play's characters and events.
It's fiction, he said in English, referring to the dramatic struggle over Yanga's wife, Santiaga. She may be pregnant with Yanga's child or Don Pedro's.
There simply isn't enough recorded material, Chabaud said, to create anything like biographies of these figures. Besides, drama is not scholarship. Chabaud has based other plays on history, he said, the better to explore the complexities of those eras and their events by dramatizing them.
In this case, it's the collision of race, power, sex, colonial commerce — and the fierce desire for freedom.
- Yanga, presented by Cara Mia Theatre and Soul Rep Theatre at the Latino Cultural Center Feb, 17-March 3.
Got a tip? Email Jerome Weeks atjweeks@kera.org. You can follow him on X (Twitter) @dazeandweex.
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