Blood Sugar, CA: 1903, A play by Javier Luis Hurtado

This event will consist of a staged reading of a new play by playwright Javier Luis Hurtado entitled Blood Sugar, CA:1903. It is a queer retelling of the 1903 Oxnard strike, a labor dispute between in the city of Oxnard between Mexican and Japanese laborers and land owners. The strike involved sugar beet growers, the American Beet Sugar Company, the grower-controlled Western Agricultural Contracting Company and local law enforcement against the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), a union of betabeleros, or sugar beet workers, in league with independent labor contractors and boarding student activists.

This event will involved student actors in the School of Arts and members of the Brown Bag Theatre Company. Afterwards, we will host a talk back with Hurtado, director and UCI professor Juliette Carrillo, and performance historian and UCI professor Christofer Rodelo.

Artist bio:
Dr. Javier Hurtado is a playwright, director, editor, and scholar who earned his Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University, where he was awarded the Kalman A. Burnim Prize for Scholarly Excellence in Drama and Dance. Dr. Hurtado has worked as a playwright and director at venues across the United States, including AS220 (Providence, RI), Brava Theatre Center (San Francisco, California), Teatro Alebrijes (San José, California), El Teatro Campesino (San Juan Bautista, California) and through the National Queer Arts Festival (San Francisco). Additionally, he earned an M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the University of California, Riverside, and has trained with Cherrie Moraga and Robert O’Hara through the Lambda Literary Foundation as a two-time Fellow in Playwriting (2016, 2017) and with Midgalia Cruz as a two-time Fornes Playwrights Workshop fellow, where their works in progress were showcased at the Goodman Theater (Chicago, Illinois) and Chicago Dramatists. Dr. Hurtado is an alumnus of the NALAC Leadership Academy and the LAByrinth Theatre Company’s Summer Intensive Ensemble. Dr. Hurtado is an active member of the Fornés Institute and the American Society for Theatre Research member and serves on the board of CSU’s Multicultural Staff and Faculty Council, and mentors playwrights through the Primeras Paginas Workshop and early career theatre educators through the CSU SPUR Center Stage Youth Arts Program.

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