There was an immigration raid last night at a small Latina-owned garment factory just off Times Square in mid-Manhattan. The workers hid in the dark listening to la migra (or ICE) take away the people next door — it was terrifying.
I can’t tell you what happened after — but I know there’s another raid planned for tonight. Actually, six nights a week, and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Those raids are fictional — they are a key plot point in Broadway show Real Women Have Curves. It’s a musical set in Boyle Heights, the Chicano neighborhood in Los Angeles. And although the show says a lot about immigrants in the 1980’s, it says just as much about immigrants today.
Joy Huerta (of Grammy-winning duo Jesse & Joy) co-wrote the Tony-nominated score with Benjamin Velez. She is the first Mexican woman nominated for a Tony award in a composing category for Broadway (disclosure: she’s also a friend and client). She packed a ton of immigrant reality into her songs: generational solidarity and conflict, workplace drudgery and exploitation, young women’s dreams — some extinguished, some still burning bright. It’s a show about finding your place, chasing the future, flying high. But with the constant fear that it could all come crashing down with someone pounding at the door.
I know that story well. I am the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala and I hold all of those struggles and fears deep in my heart. It’s no wonder that I cried at least five times watching this musical—as I watched my story and the story of other immigrants and children of immigrants play out right in front of me.
This isn’t a review or a plug. It’s a call to action. This year, this week, today, real federal agents are brutalizing real people in the real Boyle Heights — and in cities and neighborhoods all over the country. Workers are being dragged from their jobs into prisons. Citizen children are being caught in the middle.
At a time of dehumanizing language and rampant violence against immigrants, Real Women steps up to its moment. It isn’t afraid to shine a pro-immigrant light into Trumpian darkness.
But on this country’s vast stage, that light is comparatively tiny. You can see this literally the minute you leave the show, at the James Earl Jones Theater. Turn right and in 250 feet, you’re at the headquarters of Fox News, which dominates the corner of 48th Street and Sixth Avenue, its digital news zipper blaring all the latest disasters from Trumpworld.
Talk about immigration fiction.
Fox is ground zero for the kinds of vicious lies about immigrants that Trump has been spewing on the presidential stage for a decade. (He launched his first campaign by slandering Mexico as a nation of rapists on June 15, 2015.) And the MAGA megaphone is colossal, while this hit Broadway show can reach only about a thousand people a night.
We need more and louder pro-immigrant voices and defenders. We need more Joy Huertas. More performers like Tatianna Córdoba, Justina Machado, Florencia Cuenca and the other cast members just as wonderful who bring Real Women to life every night. Imagine being these women, in this moment, being able to choke back tears as you perform the realities of our communities night after the night.
We need recording stars like Snow Tha Product and Ángela Aguilar to summon the courage to say and sing out loud: Stop attacking immigrants. ICE out of L.A., out of N.Y., out of everywhere.
The war on immigrants is devastating and lawless and needs to stop.
It’s a simple message that happens to be true. Immigrants are hard-working people just trying to make their way. Like the Irish, Italians, Germans and others who had their stories told on Broadway back in the day. If Joy Huerta had written a show about the Boyle Heights of a few decades earlier, it could have been a Californian “Fiddler on the Roof” — that’s how Jewish Boyle Heights used to be.
A lesson the U.S. keeps learning and forgetting is that immigrants are us. They love, fight, bleed, suffer, weep like everyone else. They deserve justice, as we all do.
Real Women Have Curves didn’t set out to be a musical for the Trump era. But it is. And now it needs backup. It’s closing on June 29. We need more songs, more voices, more artists.
Yes, it’s scary. High profiles make big targets. Artists who stick their necks out can lose revenue. Some can get detained and deported. But millions of regular people, many of them vulnerable immigrants, conquered their fear and took to the streets last weekend.
Who in the entertainment world will join them, to keep this struggle going?
Entertainment attorney Marjorie García is partner at King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano.
