by Anne F. Nothof


The Canadian response to the political, cultural, and social crossing of American borders in Amigo’s Blue Guitar by Joan MacLeod and Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia is shown as self-defensive, even though most Canadians have in their own histories negotiated a border.

Amigo’s Blue Guitar shows how members of a Canadian family fictionalize the experience of a political refugee from El Salvador whom they have sponsored, in order to authenticate or express positive self-images. Fronteras Americanas interrogates the “Latin” experience in North America, exploding stereotypes constructed by the media, and questioning the way self-identity may be constructed in response to the dominant “Saxon” culture. However, both plays also imagine the possibility of “dancing” in a space which precludes borders, of playing “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.”

The imposition of borders is an attempt to demarcate a secure and identifiable place for the validation and nurturing of a sense of self in terms of the shared values of a cohesive community. This totalizing of a national culture comprises a wide dissemination of values through which are constructed fields of meanings and symbols associated with national life (Worthen 118-19). Border zones, however, are contested spaces, where “two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, in which one culture assumes dominance, and may gradually subsume the others” (“Preface”), according to mestiza feminist poet Gloria Anzaldua, who explores her own Spanish/Indian, Mexican/American heritage in a collection of poetry and prose entitled Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza:

     In the Borderlands
     you are the battleground
     where enemies are kin to each other;
     you are at home, a stranger,
     the border disputes have been settled
     the volley of shots have shattered the truce
     you are wounded, lost in action
     dead, fighting back;
     (“To Live in the Borderlands means you” 194-95)

Anzaldua believes that borders are experienced primarily as psychological conflict, and those who wish to negotiate them experience “a kind of dual identity” (“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” 63). She insists on the possibility of deconstructing borders, however, because they are without correspondence in the natural world: “the skin of the earth is seamless./ The sea cannot be fenced,/ el mar does not stop at borders” (“The Homeland, Aztlan” 3). In fact, the U.S.-Mexico border region has become “a symbolic (and historical) foundation of the dynamic of Chicano/a subjectivity” (Worthen 102). Hence the importance of inhabiting “the necessarily agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future” (Brown 164). This is the project of two Canadian plays – Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia, and Amigo’s Blue Guitar by Joan MacLeod – which dramatize the fraught conditions of the border zone, and entertain some possibilities for imaginative investment in syncretism.

The demarcation of border zones in the social psyche of Canada has been conditioned by an attempt to establish a sense of place and self–defining what Canadians are in terms of what they are not. This has been a predominantly internalizing project, undertaken through a re-visitation of history as a determinant of national identity. The project of validating a dominant Canadian narrative, however, has occluded other disparate narratives which have crossed Canadian borders. These are either resisted or displaced, viewed as an “ethnic” other which is either diversionary or threatening. Canada’s border with the U.S., however, has proven to be particularly porous, perhaps because there is no radical clash of ideologies or politics. Nevertheless, this border is still reified as a social and cultural line of defense against the hegemony of American popular culture. The border which divides North and South America is perceived as more consequential, as Carol Fuentes suggested in a lecture entitled Latin America: At War with the Past, presented in Toronto in 1984. Fuentes explored the ramifications of the border which divides North and South America in geographic, political, economic, and psychological ways:

     Latin America begins at the Mexican border….
     It is the only frontier between the industrialized and the developing worlds.
     . . .
     It is the frontier between two cultures: the Protestant, capitalist, Nordic culture, and the
     southern, Indo-Mediterranean, Catholic culture of syncretism and the baroque. (7-8)

Ironically, in this Massey Lecture Fuentes conflates Canada with the United States as the northern side of the border zone, assuming a commonality of attitudes and practices which have been interrogated within Canada itself. Amigo’s Blue Guitar and Fronteras Americanas examine the cultural construction of the North/South border zone as a way of authenticating or expressing positive self-images, or of reinforcing popular culture stereotypes of the “Latino” or the “Hispanic” in order to establish a distance and a difference from them. As Bill Worthen points out in his examination of Chicano Theatre in the U.S., “while it is possible to consider borderlands . . . as a productive arena for cultural experiment, the ‘border’ remains a zone for the political appropriation or exploitation of subaltern identities and cultures” (103). Stereotyping is one way of demeaning through parody and ridicule, reducing complex social or cultural differences to a simplistic caricature. In an attempt to resist objectification effected by naming, different groups have organized a form of “oppositional consciousness,” which “provide[s] repositories within which the subjugated citizens can either occupy or throw off subjectivities in a process that at once enacts and yet decolonizes the various relations to their real conditions of existence” (Sandoval 10-11). One strategy of resistance to colonization is self-naming–individuation through a more accurate descriptive term; for example, mestizo/a to denote an individual of mixed Spanish and Indian descent, or Xecanisma in reference to Chicana feminists. Guillermo Verdecchia begins his play, Fronteras Americanas, with naming. His narrator, who embodies the collective stereotyping of the “Latino” by the “Anglo,” aggressively differentiates those whose language is a variant of Spanish or Portuguese or English:

Des terms, Latino and Hispanic, are inaccurate because dey lump a whole lot of different people into one category. For example, a Mayan from Guatemala, an eSpaniard from eSpain and a Chicano who speaks no Spanish might all be described, in some circles, as Hispanic. And de term Latino could include people as different as right-wing Cubans living in Miami, exiled Salvadorean leftists, Mexican speakers of Nahuatl, Brazilian speakers of Portuguese, lunfardo-speaking Koreans in Buenos Aires, Nuyoricans (dat’s a Puerto Rican who lives in New York) and den dere’s de Uruguayans – I mean dey’re practically European.

To demonstrate the offensive homogenizing effect of stereotyping to his Anglo audience, the narrator applies the name “Saxon” to those who come from Europe–all non-Latinos, in effect, and characterizes them just as broadly as “Latinos” have been characterized by “Northern” cultures, with similar ludicrous implications. In MacLeod’s play, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, the political refugee from El Salvador also resists stereotyping by the members of a Canadian family, who see him primarily in terms of their own psychological needs and deficiencies.

Both plays premiered at the Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, a small theatre space which since the 1970s has supported the development of new Canadian plays – Amigo’s Blue Guitar in 1990, and Fronteras Americanas in 1993, before predominantly Anglo audiences. Both plays have been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Drama – a prestigious Canadian drama prize which originated in British colonial politics. Guillermo Verdecchia, who was born in Argentina, and whose family emigrated to Canada when he was ten, played the role of the El Salvadorean refugee in MacLeod’s play, and assisted with the Spanish-English translations – and there are important correspondences between the two works: both attempt to explore the implications of stereotyping, and suggest that there are ways of inhabiting a “border zone” which is neither exclusive nor inclusive – but as Fuentes suggests in his Massey Lecture, through a bridging of differences “without denying them”(9).

In Fronteras Americanas the border zone is imagined as a positive space, in social and in personal terms, celebrated by those who inhabit it as what Anzaldua calls an exhilarating “alien” element (“Preface”). Through a deconstruction of “Latino” stereotypes, Verdecchia shows just how a polarization of “North” and “South” cultural characteristics has precluded a meeting on the border. Quoting Simon Bolivar at the beginning of the play, he suggests that although dissimilarities may be significant and they must be acknowledged, they can also be bridged. In his deconstruction of a “Latin” identity, he is also working through his own sense of just who he is, and where he belongs: in Argentina, where he was born, or in Canada, where he has lived for most of his adult life? He also questions just how many of the “Latino” characteristics as portrayed in the media he has internalized.

Fronteras Americanas is a one-man show – but the “man” is subdivided into two personalities: the first is a straight man named Verdecchia, who tells a story of how he got “lost” crossing the border because he attempted to accommodate the expectations of Canadian society, to the extent that he changed his name to “Willy” as a young boy, and still auditions for any perceived “Latino” role, whether or not it perpetuates a negative stereotype; the other persona in the play is a grotesque parody of Latin machismo named Facundo Morales Segundo, who has assumed the “Saxon” name of “Wideload” McKennah, since he is given a wide berth by most people he meets. Dressed in a bandito costume, he announces his lineage as an amalgam of political and popular culture: “I am a direct descendent of Tupac Amaru, Pancho Villa, Dona Flor, Pedro Navaja, Sor Juana and Speedy Gonzalez” (23), and he considers marketing the stereotype of cultural difference by building a “third-world theme park”:

You know, you drive up to like big barbed wire gates with guards carrying sub-machine-guns and you park your car and den a broken-down Mercedes Benz bus comes along and takes you in under guard, of course. And you can buy an International Monetary Fund Credit Card for fifty bucks and it gets you on all de rides.

And as soon as you’re inside somebody steals your purse and a policeman shows up but he’s totally incompetent and you have to bribe him in order to get any action. Den you walk through a slum on the edge of a swamp wif poor people selling tortillas. And maybe like a disappearing rain-forest section dat you can actually wander through and search for rare plants and maybe find de cure to cancer and maybe find . . . Sean Connery.

This Latino ghetto is rendered harmless through its entertainment value, safely contained behind barbed wire as a tourist destination and an object of curiosity, with no possibility of cultural interaction or exchange. The barrio is staged as “a distant, fictive landscape, an exotic foreign country – perhaps most emphatically when the barrio is just down the street or around the corner” (Worthen 120).

Wideload acts out an enthusiastic portrait of the Latin lover, defined as “an archetype of masculinity built for pleasure” (45), and embodied in the Spanish actor, Antonio Banderas (a.k.a. “Zorro”), with which he contrasts the stereotype of the “Saxon” lover as someone who has no rhythm either on the dance floor or in bed. Theatre is an accommodating medium for the construction of such parodic “characters,” since it facilitates an objectification of perceptions and attitudes with which to confront an audience. In fact, near the end of the play, Wideload does challenge a pervasively “gringo” audience to examine its responses to his “comic” routine. Does this comic routine reconfirm the portraits of Latinos which the audience has absorbed in an unexamined way through the U.S. media, or does it explode these stereotypes by satirizing them?

In contrast to this grotesque, Verdecchia offers a persona who approximates himself. He provides a history lesson on the diaspora of “Latin” peoples, their similarities and differences, which he counterpoints with a “European” history to show the ironic interactions, and the degrees of “civilization” at corresponding times; for example, in 1812 Goya paints “Execution of the Citizens of Madrid,” Beethoven writes Symphonies 7 & 8, and a war breaks out in North America. In 1867 Mexico’s Austrian emperor is executed, volume one of Das Kapital is published and The Dominion of Canada is established” (31). After constructing an historical context for himself, he recounts his experiences when he went “home” to Argentina. But he travels as a tourist, with his Fodor guide in hand. Only in his dreams can he imaginatively experience the landscape of South America, conjuring up the Spanish names of his family’s home like a mantra:

I dream of Mount Aconcagua, of Iguacú, of Ushuaia and condors, of the sierras yellow and green, of bay, orange, quebracho and ombu trees, of running, sweating horses, of café con crema served with little glasses of soda water, of the smell of Particulares 30, of the vineyards of Mendoza, of barrels full of ruby-red vino tinto, of gardens as beautiful as Andalusia in spring. I dream of thousands of emerald-green parrots flying alongside my airplane – parrots just like the ones that flew alongside the bus as I travelled through the interior.

Through naming, he reinscribes the landscape with personal cultural value, and restores a vital history. In a dream he has in Argentina while sleeping in his grandmother’s bed in her home in Buenos Aires, the Verdecchia persona reclaims the disparate parts of himself which he has lost in the places he has travelled through, but which he has never fully lived in:

These vestiges, these cells are slowly crawling towards each other. They are crossing oceans and mountains and six-lane expressways. They are calling to each other and arranging to meet in my sleep.

That this erosion of frontiers and borders is both a personal and a political condition is demonstrated on one of the many slides which punctuate and comment on the performance in Fronteras Americanas. On this slide is a quotation from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who, as the author explains in an endnote to the published text of his play, is “a vital contributor to the U.S. debate on ‘multiculturalism,’ urging a rigorous appraisal of terms such as assimilation, hybridization, border-culture, pluralism and coexistence”:

The West is no longer west. The old binary models have been replaced by a border dialectic of ongoing flux. We now inhabit a social universe in constant motion, a moving cartography with a floating culture and a fluctuating sense of self.

In Fronteras Americanas, this border dialectic is imagined in another dream, in which Verdecchia improvises a tango played on an accordion, and which his grandmother “recognized after only three notes as a tango from her childhood”(73). Like the song played on the blue guitar in MacLeod’s play, the music can be played and remembered on both sides of the border. Choice is not a necessary condition for living in the borderlands: “to choose/ is to go wrong” (74), or, as Anzaldua concludes in her poem “To Live in the Borderland means you”:

     To survive the Borderlands
     you must live sin fronteras
     be a crossroads. (194-95)

All those who live within the country may also inhabit the borders, interacting without subsuming, dancing together, in effect. The narrator’s invitation to a communal experience of differences at the beginning of Fronteras Americanas would be realized in the larger community: “Here we are. All together. At long last. Very exciting. . . Here we are.” (19)

In Amigo’s Blue Guitar, the metonym of music is similarly evoked as a way of hybridizing cultures constructed on either side of the North/South border, but more in social and political than in personal terms. Joan MacLeod’s own heritage bridges the internal borders in Canada, although she could be identified as “Celtic” rather than “Saxon” in her ancestry. Her parents are from Glengarry County, a farming community between Ottawa and Montreal on the Quebec border, which, according to MacLeod, is half Scottish Presbyterian and half French Catholic (Rudakoff and Much 194). She sees all her work as political: the motivation behind Amigo’s Blue Guitar was the appalling refugee policies in Canada, which she personally encountered while involved with refugee sponsorship programmes in Toronto. Like her other plays, Toronto Mississippi, for example, it is about imagining the possibility of crossing psychological borders to effect a transformation. As Jerry Wasserman points out, MacLeod’s plays assume that “reality is something neither innate nor absolute” (4). It can be reimagined.

Amigo’s Blue Guitar is set on one of the Gulf Islands which border the waters of the United States, an island, which according to the description of the set, “conveys a feeling of being on the edge of the ocean” (10). Typically, these islands have been a refuge for those seeking solitude, tranquility, or anonymity – artists, retirees, draft dodgers. They were first named by Spanish explorers, but not colonized; and they have retained their original Spanish names, providing a link with South America which intrigues Callie, the daughter of the Canadian family which lives on one of the islands. Like “Verdecchia” in Fronteras Americanas, she conjures the places through a recitation of their evocative names: “Gabriola, Cortes, Galiano, Valdez . . . Saturna, Texada . . . the names of these islands. Like a piece of lace dropped over the same old rocks and trees” (61). In this case, the naming points to an historical anomaly: these Spanish names do not imaginatively transform the landscape or inscribe it with the values of the conquerors. For Callie, however, they evoke an aura of romance and exoticism, which she then transfers to Elias, a refugee from the political realities of El Salvador. She sees Elias as an heroic figure, who has survived torture, who has risked his life for his beliefs. After a series of “worthless” boyfriends, she believes that her love for Elias is more worthy because of his suffering. His attraction is not only his difference, but his history, which both disturbs and excites a young woman who desires a more vivid world than she currently inhabits. As Elias realizes, she loves the terrible things he remembers (53).

Her brother’s response to Elias is similarly compromised by his self-serving motives: to deflect attention away from his own lack of achievement, and to enable him to posture as Elias’ “saviour.” He has a very naive view of “border crossings,” which assumes a rapid transition from one culture to another at someone else’s expense, and with no effort required to understand the distances or the differences:

Right now I could take the 10:15 to Vancouver, Highway 99 to the States, then the I-5 all the way to Mexico then BANG! We’re there – El Salvador, Guatemala. I think about taking Dad’s truck and his Esso card and driving right inside those places. There are these soldiers everywhere and these Indian women making tortillas or pounding silver or something. I talk to them in Spanish and they understand exactly what it is I’m saying.

Sander’s patronizing view is an indicator of the paternalistic mind set of a privileged society towards the “emerging,” politically “primitive” societies of Central and South America, and his concept of Central America is not far removed from Wideload’s “theme park.” He believes that his sponsorship of Elias is “an act of mercy,” defined by the Jesuit priest who has inspired him as occurring “when those in power act with kindness and compassion” (33).

Sander’s father, Owen, has crossed his own political and psychological borders when he came to the Gulf Islands from the United States as a young man to evade conscription during the Vietnam War. In his need to validate his actions in terms of an heroic political stance, he attempts to find some correspondence between his “refugee status” in Canada and that of Elias, seeing it as a rite of passage, a coming to complete manhood, when his values were clearly defined:

There was just this time, this time between getting my draft notice and coming to Canada. Everything was very sharp, defined. Instant overview. Made the food taste better and women . . . man. You put all that on top of really getting to know women for the first time and it was incredible.

Ironically, in this story Owen portrays himself as an all-American Hemingway hero. Elias, however, who can never return to his country, prefers not to tell his story: it is too real.

The family member who crosses the border regularly, who inhabits the border zone, is Martha, Owen’s mother. She is the “common mother” of all the “children” in the family, the embodiment of the fading slogan inscribed on the Peace Arch which straddles the Canadian-American border. She listens and sympathizes, and refrains from judging, but she refuses to be deluded by the self-justification of the other family members. For her, Elias is an “amigo,” a friend; she uses absolutely ingenuously a Spanish word which has been inflected by cross-border stereotyping. And she sings the Kitty Wells’ country and western song, “Amigo’s Blue Guitar,” without irony. In this song, “Amigo,” an American stereotype of a Mexican musician, plays a melancholy tune on his guitar the night before the lovers part:

     Tonight they’re singing in the village
     Tomorrow you’ll be gone so far,
     Hold me close and say you love me,
     While Amigo plays his blue guitar.
     Aye yi, Aye yi the moon is so lonely,
     Tomorrow you’ll be gone so far . . . (24)

For Martha, who sings this song to Elias on his arrival, the song is “Spanish. Or some of it anyway. Mexican. . . . it’s from south of the border” (23). For her, borders are nebulous constructs, conflated by popular culture. But for Elias, who does not entirely understand the English words, “Amigo’s Blue Guitar” has a more painful and literal resonance: it is a sad song about his own exile from those he loves. In the play, the blue guitar functions as a metonym for personal “blues,” a melancholy mood which also characterizes Pablo Picasso’s painting of the old, blind beggar bent over his guitar from his “blue” period, reflecting Picasso’s despair after the suicide of a friend, and his compassion for the outcasts of Paris, with whom he then associated. Both Martha and Callie are aware of the “sadness” which pervades the lives of refugees – the displaced, the lonely. But in the end, they can only console each other; they can change nothing.

The “borders” in Amigo’s Blue Guitar are also imposed by differences in language. Understanding the stories of others is precluded when there is no common vocabulary. As Elias tells the inquisitive Callie in Spanish: “If you want to know my story, you can learn my language” (36). Yet Elias, as has Sander, cuts his English classes, or sleeps through them, suggesting that he is not interested in learning the stories of others. He uses his difference to keep Callie at a distance, even to mock her. His language is also a means of self-preservation through isolation – keeping his private history from the interloping curiosity of others. Even with a common language, however, there may be psychological borders which preclude communication, as Sander discovers when he suspects that he does not understand the motives of anyone in his family.

Callie, Sander, and Owen finally feel betrayed by Elias, because he does not conform to their stereotypical image of a defenceless political refugee. Elias subjects Sander to a mock interrogation, using physical violence to intimidate and to shock him into the reality of his persecution in El Salvador. He tricks Callie into applying for refugee status for the woman whom he has loved and left behind in El Salvador. Moreover, he denies Callie her illusion of redeeming, selfless love by describing their physical relationship as another manifestation of “colonialism”- the exploitation of Central and South America by the North. He uses her body as a map on which to show the political relationship of the parts of the continent: her head is North America – “the thinking. The strong part,” telling her legs to work. Her legs and feet are South America, “underneath and working. Working for the top of [her].” Central America corresponds to her hips – which he calls the “asshole.” And he concludes his geography lesson with the caustic remark, “Everyone very happy to screw Central America” (40). Elias refuses to acknowledge Owen’s posture as hero/victim, or to follow his advice on how to integrate himself into Canadian society. Owen’s “charity” is another form of personal and political exploitation.

There is in Amigo’s Blue Guitar, however, the suggestion that borders may be crossed – for good or for ill: the ash from volcanoes near St. Helena in the United States and Izalco, El Salvador, which Elias tells Callie is called the “lighthouse of the Pacific,” has drifted over continents; an earthquake, “something that happened thousands of miles away made [the family] rowboat land in the garden” (41), as Martha observes; the ocean washes against the Gulf Islands, against the west coast of the United States, and against the coast of El Salvador, sometimes bringing in the “brown crud” of pollution from what Sander speculates must be an American tanker; the fish which Owen tags to establish their national identity have no nationality, as Elias points out. Moreover, even Sander, a young man limited by ignorance and prejudice, and whose name is perhaps an ironic etymon for “Sandinista,” has tried to find ways to cross borders: as a child he wanted to sail as far south as he could go, “to visit the people that lived underneath the world” (62). Borders are also obviated through the imaginings expressed in songs and stories, and in dreams, the desires of the human heart. Elias has nightmares, but he also dreams of inhabiting a place of his own which he will share with the woman he loves – one of the “disappeared” who lives only in his imagination:

     What I sleep is my own.
     I am in my bed, in my room and there are no countries.
     There is no language to sleep.
     This is a true thing to all peoples.
     Do you see the girl in my bed?
     It is too dark. You must touch her to see her.
     Her arms break, her eyes close.
     She is gone. Desaperecido, disappeared.
     Do you want it?
     Do you have a place to put her story? (63)

Elias’ final words echo the words he speaks to the audience in the Prologue, in which he refuses to share his nightmare, because then he will exist only in terms of how others imagine him, not on his own terms. In the Epilogue, however, he reveals his hopes and desires, also directed at the audience as a kind of plea or perhaps a challenge. The important question remains unanswered: can there be a place in which stories are shared and understood, or are they inevitably appropriated and misunderstood?

Like Verdecchia, however, MacLeod suggests the possibility of an imaginative transformation of reality, which remains grounded in reality, as Wallace Stevens suggests in his poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

     The man bent over his guitar,
     A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
     They said, “You have a blue guitar,
     You do not play things as they are.”
     The man replied, “Things as they are
     Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
     And they said then, “But play, you must,
     A tune beyond ourselves, yet ourselves
     A tune upon the blue guitar
     Of things exactly as they are.” (73-74)

Like the man with the blue guitar, both Elias and “Verdecchia” confound the stereotypes and resist the “rotted names” imposed by others:

     Throw away the lights, the definitions,
     And say of what you see in the dark
     That it is this or that it is that,
     But do not use the rotted names.
     . . .
     You as you are? You are yourself.
     The blue guitar surprises you. (Stevens 80)

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Co., 1987.

Brown, Wendy. “Injury, Identity, Politics.” Mapping Multiculturalism. Eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Fuentes, Carlos. Latin America: At War with the Past. CBC Massey Lectures. Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1985.

MacLeod, Joan. Amigo’s Blue Guitar. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1992.

Rudakoff, Judith, and Rita Much. Fair Play: 12 Women Speak: Conversations with Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1990.

Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 2-11.

Stevens, Wallace. Poems by Wallace Stevens. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Vintage, 1959.

Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas. Toronto: Coach House, 1993.

Wasserman, Jerry. Modern Canadian Theatre: A Telecourse in Twelve Acts. Unit 7. Burnaby, B.C.: Open Learning Agency, 1994.

Worthen, W. B. “Staging America: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre.” Theatre Journal 49: 2 (May 1997): 101-120.


This essay first appeared on the Theatre Research in Canada website in 1999.