As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.
Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces.
The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.
In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.
“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”
The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.
The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.
The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.
Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?
Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later.
Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world.
It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed.
You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?
Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history.
APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here.
Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.
Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?
It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?
Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?
As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.
Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.
The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.
