Privileging the Oriental in Paco Bezerra's El señor Ye ama los dragones

ABSTRACT

Paco Bezerra's 2015 thriller-comedy El señor Ye ama los dragones destabilized the immigration narrative that often appears in Spanish theatre by creating a story in which Chinese immigrants are the focus, thus giving visibility and agency to a community that is little discussed in Spanish cultural production. Throughout his play, Bezerra inverts the common approach to immigration drama in which the Western is privileged in structure and in plot. Rather, in this play, the Oriental is privileged on a structural and narrative level, and the play concludes with the triumph of Xiaomei over her white Spanish counterparts. I propose that the Dantesque structuring of the play, the epistemological shift toward Chinese cultural norms, and the resolution of the play's mystery serve as a critique of the national narrative of multiculturalism and integration, which can be summed up in the common, yet ironic, Spanish phrase, “No somos racistas.”

KEYWORDS:

• Paco Bezerra
• Chinese immigration in Spain
• El señor Ye ama los dragones
• power dynamics

Notes on contributor

Jeffrey K. Coleman is an assistant professor of Spanish at Marquette University. His research interests include immigration, race, and other sociopolitical issues in contemporary Spanish and Catalan theatre. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Shockwaves: Immigration and Its Racial Reverberations on the Contemporary Spanish Stage, which will examine the representation and racial hierarchization of Spain's most visible immigrant groups (Latin Americans, North Africans, and sub-Saharan Africans) in plays dating from 1992 to the present.

Notes

1. See the Observatorio Permanente de la Inmigración's report Extranjeros residentes en España: A 30 de junio de 2016.

2. The word immigrant is in quotes because Xiaomei was born in Spain but was perceived as an immigrant (22).

3. This phrase is derived from and legally defended via Article 14 of the Spanish Constitution, which states, “Los españoles son iguales ante la ley, sin que pueda prevalecer discriminación alguna por razón de nacimiento, raza, sexo, religión, opinión o cualquier otra condición o circunstancia personal o social” (“Constitución española”).

4. Paco Bezerra (Almería, Spain, 1978) is one of Spain's most award-winning playwrights younger than the age of forty. He has won the Premio Nacional de Literatura Dramática 2009, the Premio Nacional de Teatro Calderón de la Barca 2007, the Mención de Honor del Premio de Teatro Lope de Vega 2009, and the Premio de Teatro Jóvenes Creadores de la Comunidad de Madrid 2005, among other awards. He studied dramaturgy at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Madrid, under the tutelage of playwrights like Juan Mayorga. He currently has eight plays, including the play discussed in this article: Ventaquemada (2003), El piano de la bruta (2005), Dentro de la tierra (2007), La tierra de las montañas calmas (2010), Grooming (2010), La escuela de la desobediencia (2012), Ahora empiezan las vacaciones (2013), and El señor Ye ama los dragones (2015). Interestingly enough, he has another play about immigration, Dentro de la tierra, which debuted for the first time in Spain at the Teatro Valle-Inclán in Madrid on October 11, 2017. This play, which Bezerra described as a “thriller rural,” explores the exploitation of immigrants who work in the greenhouses of Almería.

5. As Marco Kunz lays out, “La adopción acrítica e indiferenciada o la reproducción semiconsciente de ideas estereotipadas, negativas o positivas, es uno de los defectos principales de la representación de la problemática inmigratoria actual en la literatura española contemporánea” (113).

6. In my interview with Bezerra, he stated that Dante's work was not an inspiration for his play but that the connections are clear.

7. In the performance, the words “la abeja reina” appear on the screen above the stage as the stage lights illuminate Magdalena.

8. The beehive as a metaphor for Spanish urban society also appears in Camilo José Cela's 1950 novel, La colmena.

9. There has been an unfortunate trend in Spanish theatre for Spaniards to play the roles of immigrants through the use of exaggerated foreign accents and costume design aimed at making obvious the origins of the immigrant character. This tendency can often result in creating a caricature of the immigrant and thus detracts from the sociopolitical message of the play.

10. The representation of these characteristics as superior to that of Spaniards is also the root of the more problematic representations of the Chinese in Spain present in various works. For more information, see Donovan.

11. China won 53 of the 100 Olympic medals awarded in table tennis from 1988 to 2016.

12. In “Infierno,” Magdalena says that Xiaomei speaks as if she were not Chinese, to which the latter responds, “[s]í, porque no soy china” (22).