The Pocho Project

Photos: Mike Strong from a Work-in-Progress showing of The Pocho Project

Moreno’s current project,The Pocho Project is an interdisciplinary dance/theatre piece that merges choreography and scholarship with video, spoken word, and music. It explores and performs how immigration, cultural assimilation, and cultural “gatekeeping” are embedded in the ways we move, talk, and write. (“Pocho” is a Spanish term traditionally used to denigrate assimilated Mexican-Americans, implying they are “cultural traitors.”)
 
The Pocho Project works to both enlighten and complicate existing debates around Americaness and immigration, while reinvigorating concepts of human connection and allegiance. The project’s method is in part auto-ethnographic, requiring that I examine my position and experience as a Midwestern, working-class, third-generation assimilated Mexican-American. By performing the recovery of “pochismo” The Pocho Project acts as a vehicle for examining the broader political terrain on which people and groups claim and refute national and cultural identities.  
 
The Pocho Project is highly collaborative. Dramaturgs include Ben Chappell, Cruz Medina, and Cynthia D. Bond. Bond will also write text to be spoken in the performance. Set and lighting design will be by Rana Esfandiary. The Pocho Project will be presented in New York City and Chicago in 2020.