Octavio Solis’s Journey to ‘Mother Road’
“EVERY MEMORY HAS A PATINA OF INVENTION on it,” writes Octavio Solis in his poignant and illuminating new memoir, Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border (City Lights Books). “That patina thickens every time we revisit those moments in our past, until they seem more like stories and myths of our formation, more dreamlike and yet more real than what really happened to us. So where is the fact of what actually happened? It’s still there, lost inside of and enhanced by fiction.”
Fiction, mythology, gritty realism, and autobiography have long lived side by side in Solis’s more than two dozen theatrical and prose works. His is a prolific, distinctively adventurous body of work that mingles classical Western lit with modern concerns, Latinx mythology, satire, autobiography, surrealism, and the quotidian realities of Chicano working-class life.
It has all paved the way to an epic new play that conjures a sort of Mexican American sequel to John Steinbeck’s classic novel What might have happened, Solis posits, if rabble-rousing Tom Joad fled to Mexico and started a family there? And what if Tom’s Mexican great-grandson never knew about the Joad tributary in his bloodline, until he inherited an Oklahoma spread from that obscured Anglo-American branch of the family? began with a journey through Steinbeck country and premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last March, where it continues through Oct. 26. A Chicago production at Goodman Theatre runs Oct.
