Politicality in the Migratory Representation in the Play Guacamayas (2025)

Abstract

The play Guacamayas (2025) written by Percy Encinas and directed by Yasmine Incháustegui, is articulated as a theatrical device of memory and forced migration. Based on a family tragedy and a shocking moment of encounter between the protagonist and the foreign doctor from the area, the staging deploys symbols, actions, and bodies that reconfigure grief into affective and political resistance. This article analyzes its political nature from the perspective of Jorge Dubatti (2007), understood as the activation of political thought through poetic and sensitive experience, and links it to the Brechtian principle of distancing, which institutes the creation of a consciousness about fiction and, therefore, forges theater as a space for reflection created by the different signifiers that allow the emergence of a critical audience. Likewise, and with emphasis, the concepts of "migrant body" are employed, from the dual function of migration—a force that liberates and a force that subjugates—and Rocío Galicia's "border device" (2018) to establish the political aspect of the work. Multiple performance, the economy of stage resources, and the symbolism of the macaws are also examined as resources that summon a double politicality: from the affected body and from symbolic language. The work, composed of a diptych Día de Santos ("All Saints' Day") and Noche de Brujas ("Halloween"), affirms itself as a political and poetic event in the face of the violence of exile, migration, dissent, and oblivion.