Hopelessness in Lote Bravo

Sometimes, while hacking away at the endless and ever-renewing pile of papers to grade, I run into a student analysis that makes me re-think a play I thought I knew. I'm going to ramble through some thoughts here.

The play in question is The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis. Set in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the play tells the story of a mother, Juanda, searching desperately for her lost daughter, the 15-year old Raquel, whom she calls "el toro bravo," the brave bull. Actually, as the play starts, the audience sees Raquel dying in the deserts outside of CD, her body beaten, her hands bound. She's met there not by her mother but by La Santa Muerte, the Holy Lady of Death in Mexican Catholic culture, patron diety of sinners and desperate people. Raquel asks for release; Santa Muerte offers only presence and some comfort, telling Raquel the story of Juanda searching for her.

The play unfolds from there in nested flashbacks. We see Juanda, a malquiladora (American-owned factory) worker, appealing in vain to Pedro and Roberto, corrupt police detectives, to help find Raquel. She spills her frustration and desperation to Camille, a co-worker at the malquiladora. Camille insists that Juanda pray to La Santa Muerte, giving her an icon of Lady Death. Scandalized at first--Juanda insists she is a good Catholic--she nevertheless takes the figure.

At home, as her young sons sleep, Juanda prays to La Santa Muerte, who enters in a supernatural flash. She scorns Juanda's ignorance (the proper prayer to her involves offerings of tequila), demanding payment in exchange for Juanda's request for knowledge. Juanda promises anything. La Santa Muerte presses her:

La Santa Muerte: Are you a virgin?
Juanda: I have four children.
La Santa Muerte: Were you married before you let a man fuck you?
Juanda: I don't like you accusations or your language. It's disgusting.
La Santa Muerte: You can't even answer me honestly.
Juanda: I was...I've prayed for forgiveness. I've confessed.
La Santa Muerte: Confessed what?
Juanda: Eduardo and I did the honorable thing. We married before I was showing . . . Raquel was born in wedlock
La Santa Muerte: You're a very good Catholic woman.
Juanda: I try . . .
La Santa Muerte: I've never liked her. Your holy virgin. I've never understood why anyone prays to her. A virgin knows nothing about the sins a woman must endure for survival. Get her out of my sight.

Raquel, La Santa Muerte informs her, has prayed to the Lady Death since she was five. It's Raquel's prayers, not Juanda's that lead her here. La Santa Muerte demands the Mary statue Juanda has. She gives it. La Santa Muerte takes her into Raquel's past. We (along with Juanda) see Raquel meet a young wannabe tough, El Reloj ("the clock"), who promises her a job at the bar where he works. Both he and Raquel, Santa Muerte says before departing, pray to her.

From there, the play consists of scenes where Juanda purchases--and then steals--ever more expensive alcohol--and finally her own blood--for her ritual entreaties. Each time, La Santa Muerte shows here a bit more of Raquel's past--her growing relationship with El Reloj, her work selling her body for money, their plans to escape Ciudad Juarez, El Reloj's fear of his gang's boss. Ultimately, after an unsuccessful duel (a bullfight) with Reloj's boss (the Man in the Black Hat), Raquel is beaten. Reloj, struggling to get her away, is stopped by Pedro, the police officer who we learn is both his own father and in the service of the gangs. to spare the rest of his family from reprisal, Pedro says, El Reloj must end Raquel's life, and Pedro must end his. This happens. Pedro and Roberto then dump the bodies in the desert.

Thus we rejoin La Santa Muerte comforting the dead Raquel as Juanda enters. Cradling her daughter, she narrates a tale of her and her sons' escape over the Rio Grande into the USA.

The student's paper suggested that the action pattern for the script is pillaging the light, stealing away hope and replacing it with hard, dark, pragmatic survival. At first I objected. Action patterns in plays generally do not describe merely the starting conditions of the script; they must account for the arc of the play. The play starts in hopelessness, I said, with light already pillaged. What's left for the play to do? The student, however, argued effectively that the play takes us through that loss of hope, the replacement of idealized fantasies (the Virgin Mary) with crimes of survival and, finally, with blood. The play ends just as it began, in the desert, with a woman crooning a tale to a corpse.

It is a grim play, a play where a religion that preaches hope gets supplanted by a religion of gritty reality. "I was a naive child once," the Man in the Black Hat says as he begins to duel Raquel, "filled with dreams of escape." Juanda's ending vision, which I originally read as prophecy, now seems like a kindhearted dream, a final comfort to a daughter who died for nothing.

The real antagonist, Bettis suggests, is the world itself, a NAFTA-created world of exploitative factory work and violence-ridden gang life, all for the benefit of invisible Americans. (The factory Juanda and Camille work in makes USA flags. At one point Camille catches her finger in the sewing machine and without missing a beat wraps her bloody finger in a flag so that she can keep working.)

In an interview, Bettis says she wanted to write a play that would make white Americans, upon watching it, start rooting for Mexicans to cross the border illegally--do anything to escape that world. In this, I think, she succeeds.

But I'm caught by the odd sort of hopeless hope represented by La Santa Muerte, the one everyone in the play--antagonist and protagonist alike--prays to.

At one point, a desperate Juanda steals a bottle of añejo to summon La Santa Muerte.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Shit. This añejo, this bottle…So many mouths that have tasted this have called my name. Desperation. Loneliness. And yet a lingering taste of hope. Subtle. If you didn’t know what hope tasted like you’d miss it completely.

JUANDA: La Santa Muerte…Forgive me. I…I’ve never stolen anything in my life.

LA SANTA MUERTE: That guilt just eats away at your insides, doesn’t it. You should know by now that I don’t forgive. I listen.

JUANDA: What good does that do…

LA SANTA MUERTE: Whose sin is worse. The one who sins to pay or the one who pays to sin?

JUANDA: I don’t…I don’t know anymore.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Good.

"If you didn't know what hope tasted like you'd miss it completely." 

I'll have to think more on this.