Who We Are and What We Owe: Reading Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire as a Latine/x Antigone-Story

Abstract

AbstractMarisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (2016) tells the story of a Chicana U.S. citizen haunted by the ghost of a Mexican woman who demands burial after having died attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. In this paper, I demonstrate how Treviño Orta’s play presents a uniquely Latine Antigone-story through its investigation into the realities of living and dead Chicane and Latine bodies. Woman on Fire’s emphasis on bodily physicality and how such mechanisms affect Latine experience situates the drama both among and away from the numerous Latin American adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone noted and studied by scholars. While the play’s focus on the crisis surrounding the Latin American dead and disappeared connects Woman on Fire to that greater tradition, both its exploration of an “Antigone” who refuses to participate in an available burial as well as its use of the body to interpret the complexities of Latine identity and experience breaks new ground in the reception of the Antigone-story.