{"id":137237,"date":"2026-01-17T04:21:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T04:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/137237\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T04:21:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T04:21:08","slug":"this-is-not-an-immigrant-story-is-actor-and-writers-invitation-to-find-common-ground-and-maybe-think-about-your-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/137237\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This Is Not an Immigrant Story\u2019 is actor and writer\u2019s invitation to find common ground, and maybe think about your mom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reza Salazar<\/a> has been a working performer for pretty much his entire life. After his parents divorced, his mother took 5-year-old Salazar with her, moving from place to place around South America, and performing as clowns to make money.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was ashamed of it for many years because it\u2019s how we survived\u2026I think, when I was little, I didn\u2019t know any better and was just happy to be with my mother. When I started to get into the teenage years, I started to be a little bit more embarrassed about what we were doing. I didn\u2019t want my friends to know that\u2019s what I did on the weekend, that I dressed up as a clown,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He kept diaries that start in Spanish and transition to English when he and his mother arrive in the United States when he was in high school, documenting the moments of their lives together and the work they had spent so many years perfecting. He\u2019s sharing his story in his play, \u201cThis Is Not an Immigrant Story,\u201d<\/a> part of The Old Globe\u2019s Power New Voices Festival<\/a> at 4 p.m. Sunday. The festival is a play reading event that features new plays by emerging and award-winning playwrights, including local artists, and continues through Sunday. Tickets to all readings are free and require reservations.<\/p>\n

Salazar \u2014 who\u2019s based in New York City and work includes Broadway, off-Broadway, film, television, and teaching\u2014says the theater is his laboratory and sanctuary. That, in this upcoming performance, \u201cI\u2019ll offer a theatrical manifestation of my life story, the magical, realistic reconstruction of my memories. You can laugh, allow yourselves to be moved, be challenged, celebrate our shared humanity, and think about our mamas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: What was your familiarity with the Powers New Voices Festival and why did you want to participate in it?<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0To be honest with you, I wasn\u2019t familiar with the festival, per se. I was familiar with the institution. In New York, you hear of theaters across the country, like The Old Globe and Berkley Rep and the Goodman in Chicago. Those are institutions that I always dreamed of working at, but I didn\u2019t know how that was going to happen because they seemed so unreachable to me,\u00a0but I dreamed of getting there somehow. The Old Globe was one of those theaters that I\u2019ve seen in pictures that I would hear some people talk about, and I just didn\u2019t know when and how I was going to be able to get there, but I dreamed. Imagine being in a place where you get to focus on your work. You get to get out of your house or your city and go somewhere else and just think about your work. What a luxury to be given that opportunity because even if I\u2019m in New York, the grind never stops. So, the idea of leaving and being able to get a place to stay, and the resources and the support to be able to work on your projects, just sounded like a dream, so it\u2019s a bit of a dream come true for me.<\/p>\n

Writing is not a new thing for me because I\u2019ve been a secretive writer for most of my life, but it is new in the sense that I\u2019ve just really opened it up. My first residency was in 2021-2022 with a media production company in New York when I was still working on a TV project for the play that I\u2019m writing right now. That was the first time I would say I officially put the writing forward.\u00a0After that, little by little, little doors and windows are starting to open and I applied to other things and got another little residency with the New York Theater Workshop, and then with the Berkeley Rep last summer, and it was great. Even giving myself permission to write, how do people do it because I\u2019m always grinding and surviving. With writing, you need to think; I\u2019m busy surviving, so how do you do this? Who pays for that? Who supports that? I know what it is to work as an actor, and when I\u2019m working as an actor, I feel like I\u2019m working and I\u2019m getting paid for my work. I\u2019ve been doing it most of my life and that makes sense to me and I can do that. As a writer, I didn\u2019t know who was going to support me sitting down at a desk. You know, sometimes there are days where I just write one page, so I was thinking, \u2018Gosh, how do people do it?\u2019 So, we hear about these residencies and things.<\/p>\n

When I found out about Powers New Voices Festival, the idea is a festival more focused on the presentation, but this is not really a residency. It\u2019s more like you get your team and you sort of work the piece. It\u2019s very much focused on the work in progress. It is a reading and very minimal lighting and sound, which I like. I\u2019m still there with this piece, I\u2019m still moving things around and adding and editing, but the idea of the presentation focus is that it is meant to be presented to a group of people. Other ones I\u2019ve had have really been up to the artists whether you want to open it up to an audience or not, so this is the first time I\u2019m going to be doing it for the public. That scared me and excited me at the same time, especially because I\u2019m out of my city. This is like, \u2018Oh, my God, it\u2019s a very South American-New York story, and I\u2019m here in paradise. In San Diego. Are people going to care? Are they going to get it?\u2019 I\u2019m very curious. It\u2019s the first time I\u2019m taking it out of this habitat and putting it somewhere else with a community I don\u2019t know as well, with a different rhythm, a different vibe. So yeah, I\u2019m very excited.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0Your play is about your experience as a young child traveling through different countries with your mother, taking up street performing as clowns to make money. When did you decide that you wanted to share this part of your story in this way? Why was this something you wanted to write and perform in this format?<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0I never thought I will be sharing the story, but I\u2019ve always written things down. For some reason, since I was very young, I still have my diaries since I was a kid. I kept moving to all these countries and brought them, even to the states. They start in Spanish and they transformed into English when I moved here. Even if I didn\u2019t write them down, I have memories that I\u2019ve kept, little details of life. I don\u2019t know if that comes from always moving, so I had to retain certain things because I had the fear of things getting lost all the time. That could be one explanation I have. The other one is just that the type of nomadic, impulsive life my mother and I had, my mother was very young when she had me, so we grew up together, figuratively and literally. I guess my young brain was trying to make sense of what the hell was happening, so I had to write it down. Like, \u2018Someday this will make sense.\u2019 I was very aware that there were certain things that I couldn\u2019t discuss with my mother, that she didn\u2019t have the capacity to have that conversation, so I had to write it down, I had to remember it. I\u2019m like, \u2018Some day, I will go back to this. I will revisit this moment.\u2019 So, I had this archive, I guess; mental archives and writing diaries.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know what this was going to be, but for a few years now I did start to have the urge of wanting to do a one-person show. I\u2019ve always been a fan of one-person shows \u2014 John Leguizamo, David Cale, Spalding Gray. I just love the simplicity of the storytelling that a one-person show could bring. There\u2019s someone just sitting on stool with a microphone and telling you a whole story, or offering a play with nothing but a stool and microphone, and somehow you see everything. As an actor, I\u2019ve been fascinated by the power of just one human being on stage making a play, so that\u2019s something I held on to. In streets of Latin America, you see a one-person show, a stand-up comedian in the plaza, just someone surrounded by people telling jokes. That\u2019s very common in Latin American and I grew up watching the power of that, of bringing people together with one person, no props, no lights, no sound, just charisma, magnetism, and a compelling story. I guess I\u2019ve been fascinated with that very minimalistic, bare bones power of a story. That\u2019s on the professional level. Then there\u2019s the urge of telling the story recently on a more, maybe spiritual sense. At some point we start thinking about our parents as human beings, as men and women, and I\u2019ve been going through that myself. That has been very inspiring, just to see my mother as a woman, as a human being. There\u2019s something about going back to those stories and those thoughts and memories, and making sense of them.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0Why isn\u2019t this an immigrant story? What comes to mind for you when you think about how stories about immigrants are typically told\/portrayed, and how is your story different?<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0The mother-son relationship has always been the essence of it, the engine, but the rest of it, I didn\u2019t know where the piece was going to take me. I didn\u2019t want to write something chronologically, that was very clear to me, so I go between present and past. And, immigration is very much on my mind and in my heart right now, and it\u2019s always been. I\u2019m an immigrant, my mother\u2019s an immigrant, the people around me, the people I love are immigrants. That narrative is very tangible to me, but I didn\u2019t want my piece to be an \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d story because I felt like that puts us in a box, in a way. It just distills it to a very one-dimensional place and I feel like immigration is a lot more complicated, messy, and more beautiful than that \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d way. Without getting too political, immigration is more complicated than just wanting to come here to fulfill your American dreams. People are persecuted, people come here because of the stuff that America is doing to other countries. I think it\u2019s human, as well, to want to move. It\u2019s very human and normal. We\u2019ve always done it, humans have always moved around, so we\u2019ve done that. Young people want to go and explore the other side of the world, and that\u2019s normal to me. The other side is you do it because you have to, not because you necessarily want to. So, to me, there are a lot more complexities to it. There\u2019s also a sacrifice that is being made when you leave your hometown or your country. There\u2019s a big sacrifice that you make. People come to create some sort of material stability, but there\u2019s other factors to life\u2014family and emotional stability, mental health, all of these other things that we sometimes sacrifice for this economic stability.<\/p>\n

Even though I started writing this piece before all of this was happening, the way immigration is looked at right now is influencing my piece because I always felt that, as immigrants, we become this one-dimensional being when we come here. We just become immigrants. I remember when I was 13, I was so scared that all of that life that my mother and I had before we came here was just going to be lost and we were just going to be immigrants now. That this is our new title, \u201cimmigrants.\u201d All of those adventures and all of the stories, we\u2019re now just going to forget about them in this new place. I always call this \u201cThis Is Not an Immigrant Story\u201d to be a little cheeky, in a way, I just wanted to shine light on immigration in a way that is a bit more complicated than just the category that it falls into. These are human beings like anyone else. They happen to immigrate here, but they have all of the complexities and difficulties and celebrations and beauty and colors of any other human being. I just had to word it like that, \u201cThis Is Not an Immigrant Story,\u201d because this is a story of a human being who happens to move to this part of the continent, happens to think in two different languages. My piece is somewhat bilingual; not that I take pride in Spanish myself, I don\u2019t. To me, Spanish is also not my language, it was another colonizer language.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0What do you want to say\/communicate to audiences in \u201cThis Is Not an Immigrant Story\u201d? Has the contention and hostility from government agencies and legislation toward immigrants here informed the things you want to say or the ways that you want to say them?<\/p>\n

A: Part of me being an actor wants to allow the audience to feel whatever they want to feel because my job as an actor is to tell the story-to tell it well, to tell it truthfully, and then whatever the audience gets from it, hat\u2019s not my concern, in a way. I don\u2019t want to dictate what the audience feels. I want to leave room for discovery when I\u2019m up there on stage. When people laugh, when people when people are moved, when people are quiet, when they laugh in unexpected places, when they\u2019ll laugh in places that I thought were funny-all of those things are part of that journey.<\/p>\n

The writer part of me wants to be able to, if I can, contribute something. I\u2019ve got to be honest with you, something\u2019s happening right now that really makes me freaking sad. It\u2019s just heartbreaking. Not that it\u2019s ever been good for us, it\u2019s always been America, an experiment. It\u2019s never been great, but I find myself counting how many people of color are in the room, looking at where the exits are and if I\u2019ve got to run out? Walking out of spaces sometimes because I don\u2019t feel comfortable there? It\u2019s heartbreaking and I think it\u2019s unjust for all of us, including White people because I think that I feel like most people are good, I really do. I think most people do have goodness in their hearts and we learn and we mimic all of this stuff, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes through isolation. There are so many devices that are doing a great job at keeping us isolated, divided. It takes more work now to be able to be more aware of those devices. So, part of me does not want to dictate and wants to discover because I am a storyteller, first and foremost, so my job is to tell you the story. The other part, and I don\u2019t know if this sounds cheesy, but my contribution is \u2018Can you see me? You\u2019re going to see a brown man on that stage, telling a story; can you just see a human being? Can you see the commonality of our humanity? Is it possible?\u2019 So, that journey of seeing just a human story, just being able to see the humanity of a brown man who\u2019s an immigrant and who may or may not speak Spanish, he\u2019s telling you this story. Can you still just be present and see the humanity? Enjoy the story like any other any other story, any other play by anyone you know, by any other human being, and still connect and still be moved and still go on a journey with me? And if it makes you think about your mama, that is a plus to me. If, on the way, this story can move you to think about your mother, I think I\u2019d be happy with that.<\/p>\n

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