As deportations rise, Suncoast theater gives voice to immigrant fears and hopes

On Monday evening, Perla Avalos, 46, stood at a music stand in a small rehearsal room, practicing lines from a monologue of a local immigrant woman.

Reading through round tortoise shell glasses, Avalos took on the voice of a woman whose son had been charged with a DUI after a party and subsequently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since then, he’d been transferred to ICE facilities in Texas and Colorado. Despite him being a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, the woman feared her son would be deported to Mexico.

“En este momento no tenemos esperanzas de que salga,” Avalos recited. We currently have no hope for his release.

As Avalos spoke, her castmates in Voces de Inmigración 2 listened from a row of conference chairs and glanced at their own scripts. The show is a production of CreArte Latino Cultural Center that features true stories of immigrants living in the Suncoast. It will be performed in Spanish with English surtitles at CreArte Latino’s performance space on Northgate Boulevard in Sarasota next weekend.

Voces de Inmigración 2 follows a first iteration of the show last November but with all new stories and a different cast.

After last year, many people asked Carolina Franco, CreArte Latino’s co-founder and producing artistic director, if the nonprofit would do the show again.

“Part one was so successful and so impactful, so powerful, that I’m still hearing about it a year later,” she said.

The need to hear immigrants’ real experiences feels even more pressing now.

Since his second term began, U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed for mass deportations in cities and states across the country. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has jumped at the challenge, requiring all county sheriffs to cooperate with ICE, opening the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility and ramping up immigration arrests.

Between Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration and late July, nearly 4,000 people were deported following ICE arrests in Florida — more than triple the same period last year, according to a Suncoast Searchlight analysis of federal data. Among those who were deported, 96% were from Latin American countries, and less than half had criminal convictions.

“Obviously, with the situation, we had to do something,” Franco said. “We had to tell more stories.”

While the first Voces de Inmigración depicted the diverse journeys that 14 immigrants took to the United States, this year’s monologues focus on how current immigration policy is affecting people, as well as key institutions, such as schools, churches and the media.

“We wanted to (show) what’s happening in all the sectors,” said Elvira Sánchez-Blake, a co-director of the production.

Don’t miss stories like these: Sign up for Suncoast Searchlight’s free weekly newsletter

Hear, listen, feel

Avalos portrays two characters in the show. There’s the mom whose son was detained and a professor who is navigating the risks of teaching topics related to diversity.

Avalos relates to both women.

She is a Spanish teacher and the mother of a 17-year-old boy. She worries about her son going out in Bradenton and Sarasota with his friends. Like other young people, he wants to experience the newfound freedom of having a driver’s license. But even though he has legal status in the U.S., Avalos fears what could happen if he encounters the police as a young Latino.

“So I feel the same as this mom,” she said.

The cast and directors of Voces de Inmigración 2 hope to inspire those kinds of connections with the audience, too.

“Just hear the stories. Listen. Feel,” said Avalos, who was a professional actor in Chile before moving to the United States fourteen years ago. “The people, our eyes (are) probably the same as the mom.”

In addition to theater, CreArte Latino offers dance and music programs, English classes, a Spanish book club and a variety of other activities for kids and adults. But as Florida’s immigration crackdown intensified earlier this year, CreArte’s leaders reckoned with the organization’s role.

“It’s been a tough year, and at some point we even questioned, do we continue to do events?” Franco said. “Because we knew the Hispanic community were so scared to be at a place where a lot of the Hispanic community was at.”

She heard from people not only about their fear of gathering, but also of reluctance to drive places — even with a valid license — and of a rise in hateful messages in public and online.

Scholarship requests for CreArte Latino’s youth programs also increased, as families sought to save money for emergencies, whether they were undocumented or not.

Ultimately, the organization carried on, knowing that the community needed a place to enjoy themselves and that “there were so many people hungry for this, for the connection,” Franco said.

Juan Pablo Salas, a co-director of Voces de Inmigración 2, said that 10 years ago, “If we, if anybody, would ask for a play like this, it would be a celebration of that dynamic community, or group of communities, that come together and are called immigrants.”

Now, it’s much heavier.

He doesn’t know, for instance, what will happen next in the lives of the people he and Sánchez-Blake interviewed for the monologues. Will the mom played by Avalos get to see her son again?

“When we are presenting, is he free? Or has he been deported?” Salas said. “These are lives that are right now in the middle of big decisions. Those decisions don’t necessarily depend on them, and their lives may be transformed from one second to the next.”

Stories as bridges

Voces de Inmigración 2 is part of a broader series that centers first-person narratives around specific themes. The shows have minimal stage and costume design: just true stories, gathered through interviews and performed by volunteer actors.

“When something is being read, there are no distractions,” Franco said. “We’re honoring those words, because that’s gold.”

While CreArte Latino had always produced traditional dramas and comedies, the Voces series sprung from a desire to tell stories tied to the people and place the center serves.

“We were certain we (wanted) to tell the stories of the local Hispanic community in Sarasota, in Bradenton, in Manatee County, about different topics,” Franco said.

The first Voces show focused on motherhood. One earlier this year addressed mental health.

These shows open conversations about issues that might be taboo in the Hispanic community and invite non-Hispanic residents to get to know them better, Franco said.

Each show features a bilingual “talkback” with the audience at the end. Salas said it’s the most important part of the event.

“What CreArte wants to do is create bridges between the communities,” he said.

Franco agreed. A chill shivered through her as she described the powerful dialogue after the first Voces de Inmigración.

She recalled a woman who said the production made her realize she didn’t even know if her children’s babysitter had kids of her own. Another woman later told Franco that the show inspired her to try connecting with the people who maintained her yard, asking questions about their lives and practicing Spanish.

For non-Latinos in the audience, the immigration-themed shows are a window into the lives of people who are often ignored, said Sánchez-Blake.

“The Hispanics are invisible in this society,” she said. “They are the people who are in the restaurants, who are in the hotel industry, and they don’t see them. And people who do the garden, do the construction things. And you see that they do a lot, but nobody pays attention to them.”

But the show is not solely designed to educate non-Latinos or non-immigrants. For Latinos, it reflects and affirms their experiences.

Franco said that last year most of the people who gave testimonies for the show attended the performance. Some cried.

“Hearing their life experience from someone else touches them in a different way,” she said. “(It) makes them realize how brave they have been, but also the negative, like how judged they have been.”

María Angée, a 62-year-old accountant and grandmother, will play three roles in the upcoming show: a Mexican woman who became a farmworker advocate after escaping sexual abuse by her boss, a Cuban woman who does not feel affected by current immigration policies and a mother afraid to drop her kids at school because ICE can make arrests there.

Though the stories deal with sad realities, Angée said joining the cast has been fulfilling. The actors and directors are committed, she said.

“I felt CreArte Latino is like a family.”

Kara Newhouse is an investigative data reporter at Suncoast Searchlight. Reach out to Kara at at kara@suncoastsearchlight.org.

IF YOU GO: CreArte Latino Cultural Center will present Voces de Inmigración 2 at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 17-18, and at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 19, at 1913 Northgate Blvd., in Sarasota. Tickets can be purchased for $25 at creartelatino.org/events.