Marisela Barrera

I am a Tejana born from mixed status immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Schooled in Dallas, settled in San Antonio. I’ve never heard a cowboy say yee-haw. Never had a conversation with a daughter of the republic.

Growing up in the 80s on Crockett Street, Alamo, Texas, meant ruby red grapefruits and Grease Lightning. Somersaults under a flipping baton. Friday Goth in Reynosa. Big Bird sightings over the horizon and running through open fields arms flying wide open while a dust cropper sprayed pesticides like rain. My cultural roots are a continuous point of artistic inspiration.

As an actor, writer, director, educator, and activist/critic, I engage with the intersections of theater practice. My work resides in action, community building, and struggle.

I write short stories, profiles, and nonfiction essays and turn them into transmedia performances. My protagonists are mujer malas, women who rebel against cultural expectations, while at the same time embracing the duality of Tejana-Méx border life, and the complexity of female roles of mother, lover, and Virgen. They are urban legends, la Border Goth. All my characters are isolated and searching for a place of comfort, a place to call home, like me.

I linger on my personas for months, adapting them from short fiction to live public improvisational interactions, podcasts, performance videos, and ensemble plays. Character development is central to my acting and performance methods.

My first lover was acting. It took a plague for me to pursue acting again con fuerza. I crave the process of mounting a play. I crave the community-ensemble that develops through this process. Acting is a portal into ourselves while at once connecting to our community. I love working on new plays, especially when they are from underrepresented voices in American theater. I dig into the text for discoveries. What unifies my theater work is mindful teatro, a theater practice that engages cultural identity through community-building and activism. Teatro is the choque between real life and imagined possibilities. I contribute to the collective identity of San Antonio by engaging in teatro. 

Over the years, I have practiced various methods such as Viewpoints, Stanislavski Method, improv, Theater of the Oppressed, La Pocha Nostra, Teatro Campesino with additional movement and voice practices. I now mostly forget specific practices, listen to the room, and follow intuition. I trust my process and those of my collaborators. 

I am most alive when performing. I find territories of communion through performance by exploring my most vulnerable and honest self. My characters are hybrids of the people I encounter in life, the good and the bad. To practice theater is to study humanity by telling stories. We are nourished by our stories, the stories that matter to us, the stories that reflect who we are and what we want to become.