Elaine Romero: The Border Trilogy

Elaine Romero is an award-winning and prolific Latina playwright with a career spanning more than thirty years. In her Border Trilogy—Wetback, Mother of Exiles, and Title IX —she presents a striking and prophetic vision of life along the US-Mexico border.

In this, the first anthology of her work, Elaine Romero’s plays introduced by Jimmy A. Noriega who contextualizes the plays alongside her remarkable life and achievements . Her plays tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time, including debates on undocumented immigration, gun safety and schools, and gender discrimination in the workplace. The heroines of the trilogy are Latina educators caught in different moments of political upheaval as they attempt to negotiate the crevices between the personal and the political.

Wetback charts the intertwined fates of an accomplished Latina principal, a Chicana activist journalist, a Mexican undocumented worker, and a white supremacist superintendent and his two children. Mother of Exiles features an Ivy-league educated Latina who returns to teach theatre in her hometown, only to find that it is the moment the state has decided to arm teachers as the frontline of defense against school shootings. Title IX begins in 1972 when a teacher hesitates to use the law when she is sexually harassed in the workplace; the second part takes place in 2016, when her adult daughter seeks help through Title IX in a similar situation. All three plays interrogate race and gender in a society (and system) still struggling to see how the world we have created/legislated differs from the world in which we live.