The Pocho Project

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

“The Pocho Project” is an evening-length performance that brings together choreography, devised theater techniques, spoken word texts, and original video and music to examine how immigration, assimilation, and “cultural gatekeeping” are embedded in the ways we move, talk, and write. (“Pocho” is a derisive Spanish word used to describe assimilated Mexican-Americans, implying they are cultural traitors.) “The Pocho Project” engages questions of nation and belonging, using the embodied acts of speaking and writing as metaphorical scaffolding upon which to create movement and theatre.  The project is research-based, while mining Moreno’s experience as a Midwestern, working-class, third-generation assimilated Mexican-American.
 
“The Pocho Project” asks its artists, performers, and audiences to examine how we are complicit in and resistant to narratives that reify two purportedly immutable subjects: the citizen “American” and the non-citizen. The project envisions national and cultural identity as fluid, comprised of diverse scraps of movement language, discourse, and experience.
 
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 cast will consist of five-ten Chicago-based dancers and actors. The Pocho Project will premiere in New York City in 2021/2022 followed by shows in Chicago and Detroit.