Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works

Three early plays from influential Canadian Latina playwright, Carmen Aguirre. The plays, Chile Con Carne, ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, and In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, deal with the experience of exile – the hardships, the heartache, and the horror – as well as revealing the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society. Written in the 1990s, all three plays explore the far-reaching effects of the violence and terror the regime of now-ousted dictator Augusto Pinochet, still in power during the plays’ composition, inflicted on the Chilean population, both at home and abroad, effects explored in many of Aguirre’s award-winning later plays. These are impacts refugees cannot escape even when they manage to flee to physical safety; the plays’ explorations of refuge and recovery are as pertinent now as they were when they were first written.

AUTHOR

Carmen Aguirre

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and co-written twenty-one plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger, The Refugee Hotel, and Blue Box. Her first non-fiction book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, was published in 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre in Canada and Granta/Portobello in the United Kingdom and is now available in Finland and Holland, in translation. Something Fierce was nominated for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the international Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 BC Book Prize, was selected by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the National Post as one of the best books of 2011, was named Book of the Week by BBC Radio in the United Kingdom, won CBC Canada Reads 2012, and is a number-one national bestseller. Aguirre has more than sixty film, TV, and stage acting credits, is a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, and an instructor in the acting department at Vancouver Film School. She received the Union of B.C. Performers 2011 Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, the 2012 Langara College Outstanding Alumnae Award, and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. Aguirre is a graduate of Studio 58.