Sometimes a person’s true legacy emerges only after they’re gone. When the drawings and personal journals of Rocío Alvarado Lockwood were discovered by her daughter and husband two years after her death in 2015, revelations emerged.
Theater artist Georgette María Messa brings her mother’s revelations to life in La Flaca Calaca, a one-person play to be performed Thursday evening at Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex accompanied by an exhibition of Alvarado Lockwood’s artwork.
As Messa describes in an announcement about the play, “This is a border story of an eleven year old girl coming from Chihuahua, México to El Paso, Texas in the 1970s. A story that was kept secret until she passed away of pancreatic cancer in 2015.”
Alvarado Lockwood kept the traumatic experiences of her childhood locked tight, and by learning about them through her journals, Messa was able to better understand how that trauma affected their relationship.
Turning the story around
Messa had taken a break from theater work to earn an education degree, but during the coronavirus pandemic took a virtual course on creating solo theater. That led to a personal narrative workshop at Jump-Start Performance Co., followed by a Jump-Start incubator grant and a Department of Arts and Culture individual artist grant.
And with all that preliminary work behind her, the one-person theater piece she’d long dreamed of creating is now becoming a reality.
The title La Flaca Calaca translates to “the skinny skeleton.” Messa read in her mother’s journals that as punishment, Alvarado Lockwood’s mother would withhold food from her child, then compound the injury by shaming her daughter with the derogatory nickname.
Later in life as a bilingual education teacher, Alvarado Lockwood would use La Flaca Calaca as a lighthearted character to help children translate between English and Spanish.
The character “was a little secret self-portrait… and she turned that story around for herself,” Messa said.
In the play, Messa adopts her mother’s voice to go along with her own, in a dual role that shifts back and forth between generations and perspectives.
In one scene, Rocío says that she was about to enter 6th grade in her school in Ciudad Juarez, but was placed in 4th grade in the El Paso school. And when her teacher found out she didn’t speak English, she was sent to a class for students with developmental needs.
“Imagine being that kid,” the present-day Georgette asks, relating to her mother’s difficulties. This revelation brought understanding to Messa why she was discouraged from embracing her Latina heritage due to her mother’s “inherent fear of xenophobia and discrimination.”
Healing generational curses
Messa delivered her first child in August. Becoming a mother changed Messa’s perspective and necessitated some major edits to the work-in-progress.
“I’m realizing how hard motherhood actually is,” she said. “Being able to have that perspective of those very, very, very difficult, self-sacrificing moments with my child, it is very easy to see how my mother could have had a really hard time, especially if she didn’t have any kind of healthy examples to follow.”
Messa describes the play as “a story about healing generational curses,” and said, “I have a whole new perspective of compassion and respect. Because she really was doing the best that she could.”
The Una Voz Desatada: The Art, Writings, and Trauma of an Immigrant Child exhibition of Alvarado Lockwood’s drawings initiated by Messa’s father, Dean Lockwood, at Bihl Haus Arts in 2019 will be revisited and expanded upon for the La Flaca Calaca event at Brick.
Messa invited designer and illustrator Rodrigo Castro of Archive Studio to create animations from her mother’s drawings, to be projected on a “three-dimensional cube projection screen” created by her husband Gregory Messa.
The animation is another way to bring her mother’s art to life, Messa said. “I’ve always wanted to make her art dance and move and come alive in the same way that I experienced it in my brain.”
Though Messa was not able to resolve her issues with Alvarado Lockwood during her mother’s lifetime, the play will “begin to build a bridge between the generations,” she said.
“So we are able to connect through the spirit world,” Messa said. “Even though this is a conversation we cannot have now, through this theatrical piece we can cross the veil between the living and the dead through art.”
The Una Voz Desatada exhibition opens at 7 p.m., with La Flaca Calaca starting at 8 p.m. A plática and reception will follow from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tickets are available by donation through Eventbrite.
