Who We Are and What We Owe: Reading Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire as a Latine/x Antigone-Story

Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (2016) tells the story of a Chicana U.S. citizen haunted by the ghost of a Mexican woman who demands burial after having died attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. In this paper, I demonstrate how Treviño Orta’s play presents a uniquely Latine Antigone-story through its investigation into the realities of living and dead Chicane and Latine bodies. Woman on Fire’s emphasis on bodily physicality and how such mechanisms affect Latine experience situates the drama both among and away from the numerous Latin American adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone noted and studied by scholars. While the play’s focus on the crisis surrounding the Latin American dead and disappeared connects Woman on Fire to that greater tradition, both its exploration of an “Antigone” who refuses to participate in an available burial as well as its use of the body to interpret the complexities of Latine identity and experience breaks new ground in the reception of the Antigone-story.


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Who We Are and What We Owe: Reading Marisela Treviño Orta's Woman… article's second page. It is of 'THE CORPSE OF A RAPED AND MURDERED GIRL MUMMIFIED BY THE DESERT SUN [sic]' discovered near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, close to if not on the border between the southern United States and northern Mexico. 1 It would be difficult to avoid seeing this image should you begin to read 'While You Were Sleeping'; the description of the photo's contents sits below the image itself, which takes up about a third of the page. The body appears, as Woman on Fire's stage notes suggest, nightmarish, contorted, and burnt. The image in Harper's Magazine is cropped around the corpse's head; there are holes in the darkened, dried skin around the eyes, and its lips are parted, drawn back tightly and showing a top row of teeth. It is a photograph that may take the viewer off guard-not only because of how close it brings you to the corpse's ravaged face but also because looking upon it feels like a violation of the one who once inhabited this body. There is a push and pull at work in the way this image affects its audience: a draw to meet the challenge of confronting its significance and yet a disturbing sense of complicity and guilt for the exposed dead.
Encountering these stage directions while engaging with Woman on Fire as a textual object alters how you proceed; you are directed to this tortured image of the dead before you meet any of the play's characters or begin to understand any of its conflicts. If you were to see the play performed (as it was professionally in 2016 and 2018), this interaction with the deceased body would be different-although it would nonetheless remain, simply transformed by the medium of stagecraft. 2 Rather than gazing upon photographic evidence of a mummified corpse before encountering a single word of dialogue, the viewer would see an interpreted, painted version of that corpse for the first time in Scene Two. Even this audience, however, would be asked to interact with this image with a similar level of intensity. The portrait would still be thrust upon the viewer when Juanita reveals the canvas on which she has been painting with no prior warning of its contents. There would be even further justification for the viewer to find this image a shocking one: first because Juanita is instructed to paint a very different portrait at the opening of the play; and second because the ghost of the person who once was that body has already appeared on stage before the pictorial reveal of their remains.
How you engage with Woman on Fire, therefore-whether you read or watch it-will alter the circumstances in which you must confront this corpse, contorted and burnt. Importantly, though, you will encounter it. The interaction itself is nonnegotiable-unless you remove yourself from the work altogether. This fact identifies something deeply important to Treviño Orta's play and the use it makes of Sophocles' Antigone as a text of some inspiration. For above all else, Woman on Fire is about bodies: living bodies, dead bodies, what one body owes to another. More specifically, it is a play about certain kinds of Latine/x bodies and what one one, but rather a tense exploration of whether this supposed Antigone will even want to bury anyone at all. The play never allows the reader to forget that this question is debated below a ticking clock, for the corpse under discussion remains exposed to the elements and in a heavily detailed process of transformation because of them. By taking this conflict as its motivating force, Woman on Fire reframes what a Latine Antigone-narrative necessarily is by presenting itself as a story of fraught identity: of how the Antigone framework can be useful in navigating the greater questions of what it means to be Chicane/Latine and what kind of debt such an identity might presuppose. In considering the global proliferation of the Antigone-narrative, Erin Mee and Helena Foley suggest, 'If there is anything "universal" about Antigone it lies in the way both the play and the character have been mobilized. As Edward Ziter notes: "There's a reason people are interested in Antigone. We're in an age of civil war, and bodies are being left on the ground unburied".' 5 In the case of Woman on Fire, such a civil war does motivate the text, but it is one of a slightly different kind. Treviño Orta dramatizes that civil war which takes place within rather than without: that which arises in reaction to a dead, unburied body rather than those that create the corpse, at least primarily. It is the civil war that can rage within a Latine person as they navigate who they are and what they owe.
To appreciate how Woman on Fire reverses the traditional Antigone-narrative in order to explore these questions about Latine bodies and their meaning(s), I begin by considering how contemporary Latin American Antigone stories have traditionally found value in working with Sophocles' play; I then delineate in what ways Woman on Fire structurally moves away from this potential precedent. After noting these areas of divergence, I present Woman on Fire as a powerful example of how Latine concerns may shape a distinct engagement with the Antigone that is related to but separate from previously explored Latin American adaptions. In particular, I demonstrate how Treviño Orta's work uses bodily imagery and realities to dramatize certain complexities of Chicane and Mexican identity as well as the many conflicts-including questions of relation and separation-embedded in this relationship. Expanding this view to Latine/Latin American relationships more broadly, I close by arguing that Woman on Fire makes use of the Antigone to construct a unique argument for what I refer to as Latine debt, i.e. what a Latine person owes to a Latin American person based on the historical and cultural divergences of their lived experiences.

Situating a Latine Antigone-Story
We may better appreciate how Woman on Fire uses the Antigone-story to consider Latine concerns by first orienting ourselves among the relevant ways in which the Antigone-narrative has been consistently put to use in Latin American contexts. To begin, I must first position this investigation among those that have laboured to think critically about what labels should be assigned to works of classical reception in Latine and Latin American communities. In their introduction to Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage (2020), Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos note that the use of 'Latin America(n)' in such a context is fraught, due to both the term's imperialist history as well as its potential to imply a kind of homogeneity over the region imposed from without; the complex legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity only heightens these concerns. Further, regarding the United States' historical influence on the language used to discuss Latin American communities, Andújar and Nikoloutsos observe that the use of the term 'Hispanic' and 'other panethnic categories effectively advances the wishes of a particular country to lump all of its southern neighbours (and the majority of the Western Hemisphere) into one group.' 6 This criticism of panethnic categories may be levelled against Latine as well.
In making this important claim, Andújar and Nikoloutsos cite the work of G. Cristina Mora in Making Hispanics (2014), which explores how terms like 'Hispanic' and 'Latino/a' reached their current level of prominence in the late twentieth-century United States. More specifically, their statement focuses on the second entity in Mora's subtitle: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. In my own discussion, I would like to privilege the first-activists-while also acknowledging the importance of each. The process toward 'Hispanic' and 'Latino/a' that Mora elucidates is a many-headed one, wherein forces both within and without what has come to be known as the Latine community in the United States contributed to the same outcome from different avenues and for varying purposes. Officials in the federal government, as Andújar and Nikoloutsos emphasize, sought to erase distinction through the imposition of a panethnic label they found convenient. At the same time, however, Latine activists from various communities, including the previously geographically and culturally disparate Chicane and Puerto Rican communities, pursued their own contribution to this process in order to seek means through which their people might benefit. 7 As Mora's work suggests, there is an important question here regarding how to consider both Latine agency in this process and how we should situate that agency among the other forces that contributed to this outcome.
While such a question is complicated and no definitive answer to it can be offered here, it suggests to me a need to recognize that Latine agency did play a role in the consolidation and elevation of these terms to a certain extent and in certain contexts, and it is that agency I would like to highlight in my own suggestion: first, that it does not dilute the specificity of Treviño Orta's drama to consider how its ideas may be extrapolated to a broader Latine community; and, second, that considering a kind of Latine classical reception as related to but separate from Latin American reception is not simply arguing for a distinction between two wholly problematic terms but rather an attempt to spotlight the way in which the Latine community has 1 3 Who We Are and What We Owe: Reading Marisela Treviño Orta's Woman… identified conflicts that are specific to itself. A more substantial exploration of the benefits of considering Latine classical reception as its own, distinct category must await another occasion-as does a full defence of why the term 'Latine' has a potentially unique benefit in such study. For now, however, I simply wish to position the following consideration of Woman on Fire: first that it is a specifically Chicane and thus Latine Antigone-story, and second that its narrative foregrounds Latine agency and the specific challenges of the Latine condition.
With our terms laid out, we may briefly situate ourselves among the greater tradition of Latin American Antigone-narratives to which Woman on Fire provides a profitable contrast. As has been well documented and alluded to above, Sophocles' Antigone is a play richly imbued with the potential to explore external opposition and conflict. Antigone wants to bury Polyneices' corpse; Creon wants the body to remain exposed. Each secures authority for their position from distinct quarters, however one wishes to interpret the stance each party takes. Antigone may at times waver while Creon ultimately reverses his own position, but it is this sharp, external opposition that drives much of the central conflict of Sophocles' drama. It is this dynamic, in many cases, that has made the play such a fruitful text to reimagine in varying times and circumstances and created, in turn, what Moira Fradinger identifies as an 'indefatigable…undead' Antigone who remains 'relentlessly summoned by the undead' herself. 8 We will return to the idea of a different kind of undead Antigone below, but for now let us focus on the corporeality the image suggests. As has been well noted, Latine and Latin American bodies are and have been disappearing for various reasons, in various ways, from various places, and subsequent adaptations of Sophocles' Antigone have often utilized the play to focus not on bodies that remain exposed or unclaimed, but rather on those that are missing. 9 In his consideration of adaptations responding to the politically motivated disappearances and rampant femicide documented in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and elsewhere, Andrés Fabian Henao Castro argues that such Latin American Antigones must confront the fact that: the bodies they search for are nowhere to be found. The sovereign regime that claimed those bodies through abduction (taking the body out of the visual domain of the public space) now disclaims possession of them (refusing to give them back or to even recognize that it took them in the first place As living bodies and then dead ones are stolen, buried in unmarked mass graves, thrown into rivers, and piled in abandoned structures-unidentified and/or disfigured to the point of losing even the potential for identification-the question an Antigone must often face is not 'how can I bury this body?' but rather 'is there a body for me to bury?' 11 For a certain kind of Latin American Antigone-play, then, the central problem is that human beings have vanished and bodies have been stolen within a widespread system of biopolitical and necropolitical control. 12 For those in the community, the lack left by those disappeared bodies is profound and irreconcilable; thus the narrator of Sara Uribe's Antígona González (2016) searches-and searches, and searches-after her brother's remains despite the passage of time and discouraging false-starts, and so Perla de la Rosa's Antígona (Antígona; las voces que incendian el desierto, Antígona: The Voices that Set the Desert on Fire, 2004) refuses to allow her sister's disappearance to be overlooked and rewritten despite the many obstacles she meets in succession. The list could go on. 13 In many of these plays, the struggle for characters to find and identify the bodies of their dead also leads to the overall absence of the corpse from both the text and the audience's gaze, even when dead 11 In her consideration of the myriad engagements with Sophocles' play throughout history, F. Söderbäck, 'Why Antigone Today', in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. F. Söderbäck, Albany, N.Y., 2010, pp. 1-13 (3) sees 'kinship burial rites' as one of the three 'elements of the story that always remain the same.' Despite the dominance of this conflict, we should note that not all Latin American Antigone stories include burial as a central contention. Cf. José Fuentes Mares' La joven Antígona se va a la Guerra R. Andújar and K. P. Nikoloutsos, London/New York, 2020, pp. 199-212. 13 The manifold efforts to find and identify the bodies of the disappeared and how communities respond to the impossibility to do so is also a central concern in Ariel Dorfman's Viudas bodies find their way onstage. Despite de la Rosa's Antígona even venturing into the morgue in her attempt to locate her dead, physical descriptions of the dead are minimal and avoid bodily processes, including decomposition. 14 Similarly, as she hurries to see if any newly announced corpses may belong to her brother, Uribe's Antígona emphasizes the waves of hope and disappointment evoked in this process rather than descriptively recording what state the bodies are in. Some Latin American Antigone stories of this kind, in fact, succeed in asserting their point about the missing dead without explicitly dwelling on the deceased's physicality at all. 15 Instead, as María Florencia Nelli puts it in her discussion of Bárbara Colio's Usted está aquí (You Are Here, 2009), such plays illustrate how 'the absence of the body, the impossibility to mourn the dead, to bury the remains, perpetuates the agony of the victim's family endlessly, implying the absolute loss of the loved one.' 16 In such cases, it is the reaction to the disappeared, the trauma inflicted on those left behind without recourse, that constitutes the core of the drama. 17 A similar structure of both physical and social erasure has been identified at the United States/Mexico border and has been well documented in Jason De León's 14 In Scene Nine, Antígona notes that the most recent victim's 'beautiful face' makes her 'seem only to sleep'; citations of de la Rosa's play are taken from P. de la Rosa, Antígona; las voces que incendian el desierto, in Cinco dramaturgos chihuahuenses, eds. V. H. R. Banda and G. de la Mora, Juárez, 2005, pp. 187-228. 15 In the case of de la Rosa's drama, there is often greater emphasis on the number of the dead; see Scenes Three and Fifteen in particular. On the importance of dead and missing bodies in de la Rosa's play, see J. Weiner, 'Antigone in Juárez' and 'Antigone Undead' (n. 12). Weiner, 'Antigone in Juárez', p. 290 comments specifically on the multitude of the dead in the play, with relevant historical context at p. 278. It is worth emphasizing that my claim is not that bodies do not play a significant role in such adaptations-they undeniably do-but rather that such works do not centralize the physical realities and mechanisms of human death and decomposition. For further examples where burial is an issue but corpses themselves are absent, we might consider Griselda Gambaro's Antígona Furiosa (1986) and Luis Rafael Sánchez's La pasión según Antígona Pérez (The Passion According to Antígona Pérez, 1968). In the case of Sánchez's play, the fact that the relevant corpses remain at-large plays an important role in the conflict. Gambaro's drama, in turn, presents an occasionally dead body. As N. Kason Poulson summarizes in 'In Defense of the Dead: Antígona furiosa, by Griselda Gambaro,' Romance Quarterly, 59.1, 2012, pp. 48-54 (51): 'Gambaro opens her play at the point when Sophocles' version ends, with a dead Antigone hanging inside a triangular-shaped cage, who returns to life and removes the noose from around her neck…the Argentine version does not follow the linear order of the original but, rather, establishes a circular structure that ends where it begins with Antigone death'; see also the description at M. Florencia Nelli, 'From Ancient Greek Bodies to Argentina's "Dirty War",' p. 357 (n. 12). For an example that does dwell on the physical state of the dead and related processes of decomposition, see Nieto's Los escogidos. 16 M. Florencia Nelli, 'Usted está aquí: Antigone against the Standardization of Violence in Contemporary Mexico,' Romance Quarterly, 59.1, 2012, pp. 55-65 (63). 17 Sophocles' text arguably offers some precedent here. Although animal threats against Polyneices' body are mentioned on multiple occasions (see lines 29-30, 205-6, and 696-8), only the guard's speech at 410-2 features the physical state of the corpse; the body is 'dripping' (μυδῶν, 410) and producing a 'foul smell' (ὀσμὴν, 412) as it decays. We also get a description of certain flesh being consumed and separated from the corpse when Teiresias observes that birds and dogs have stained the city with flesh taken from Polyneices' body (πλήρεις ὑπ' οἰωνῶν τε καὶ κυνῶν βορᾶς, 1017). This, of course, is not to say that corporeality does not play a more significant role among the drama's contentions and themes; for a focused unpacking of the body's role in the play, see A. Cavarero, 'On the Body of Antigone,' in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. F. Söderbäck, Albany, N.Y., 2010, pp. 45-63. anthropological study, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015). There, De León argues, the U.S. government has made use of the challenging geographical conditions to enforce its anti-immigration policies. In his examination of the Sonoran Desert stretching across southern Arizona and the north of the Mexican state of Sonora, De León considers what happens to the numerous bodies of those that die in the desert when attempting a border crossing into the United States, as well as how the U.S. government makes use of those biological processes not only to slough responsibility for the migrant dead but also to weaponize them against other potential migrants. As De León demonstrates, the U.S. Border Patrol's implementation of a Prevention through Deterrence policy makes use of the Sonoran Desert as a weapon, wherein victims succumb to the physical conditions of the hostile environment in both life and death: When death approaches in the Sonoran Desert, there are few places to hide. The region has no giant oaks or cool elms to seek refuge under; just spindly cacti and bony paloverdes. If you can find shade, it is a luxury that often lasts only as long as the sun sits still. Anyone dying of dehydration or hyperthermia may or may not have their wits about them, but they may be aware enough to crawl under the nearest tree to temporarily get away from the light. Unfortunately, the shelter found in the early-morning shade of a scraggly mesquite may not last long. By noon the sun is staring directly down at you, its rays easily cutting between the narrow green leaves (if you can call them leaves) and baking the ground underneath you. To protect yourself, you end up having to chase the sombra, jumping from shadow to shadow like a dog on a hot summer afternoon. Border crossers on the verge of death often huddle under trees, only to be found later dead after being rotisserie-cooked by the rotating sun. 18 As De León observes, the desert transforms the body first by its very natureit shifts from human behaviour to the inhuman desperation of 'a dog'-and then physically by two degrees: from living to dead, and from fresh, identifiably human corpse to dried, grotesquely distorted mummy.
Importantly, however, the desert does not stop there. For beyond killing potential border crossers 'naturally'-i.e. in a way from which politicians and border administrators believe they can distance themselves by passing blame to the elements-the desert covers its tracks. De León records his experiences studying both corpses discovered in the desert and pig cadavers used in controlled experiments to mimic the quality and rate of human decomposition in desert conditions. In the vast majority of cases, the elements, carnivorous predators, and the common helpers of decomposition-insects and bacteria-eradicate the body in a few days or less. As De León summarizes: The annihilation of bodies in the desert is never meant to be seen. When the system functions perfectly, corpses are drained of blood and viscera by unseen monsters; bones dry, splinter, and blow away. When deterrence and erasure are fully achieved, the disappeared can be known or remembered only in stories, unsettling dreams, and outdated photos. 19 This exploration of the border conditions in this region-the very region in which Woman on Fire is set, as we will soon consider-makes the bottom line clear: desert conditions are leading to innumerable human deaths at the border and consuming their bodies, the U.S. government has manipulated these forces to collude with the environment to enforce its border policies, and U.S. citizens writ large are not really supposed to know about it. 20 As De León summarizes by drawing both on the work of Achille Mbembe as well as Giorgio Agamben's articulation of a 'state of exception', it is through the desert-a 'remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable'-that the United States exerts its control over the lives and deaths of migrants: 'Prevention through Deterrence is necropower operationalized.' 21 There is, then, a story that a Latine Antigone-play could tell at the U.S./Mexican border that speaks to these concerns with a political focus that we might consider more closely aligned to certain Latin American Antigone stories; such a narrative might unpack how the U.S. government's border policies manipulate harsh conditions-both natural and unnatural-to inflict unsustainable harm upon Latine and Latin American communities, including both their living and their dead. This is, for example, a great part of where Marc David Pinate's Antigone at the Border (2020) directs its attention. The play, first produced by the Borderlands Theater in Tuscon, Arizona and Su Teatro in Denver, Colorado and broadcast over Zoom in collaboration with Teatro Bravo of Phoenix in 2020, casts Creon as a police chief with jurisdiction over a fictionalized Thebes located on the U.S. side of the U.S./Mexican border and sets him in conflict with an undocumented Antigone who has previously been protected from deportation by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. The play considers many of the challenges introduced by the border, its policing, and the effects that the United States' immigration policies have had for Chicane, Latine, and Latin American communities, especially the undocumented. 22 19 Ibid., p. 253. 20 My thanks to Linda McNulty Perez for suggestions on how to articulate this point. 21 Ibid., pp. 66-8 and 84. See n. 12 for the use of these and related concepts in the discourse surrounding Latin American Antigone stories. 22 It is worth noting that it is not only the United States' use of the desert and its disappearing power which has faced critique in Latine and Latin American Antigone stories. Consider, for example, de la Rosa's play and its critique of femicide in Ciudad Juárez. Antígona's claim in Scene Four that Creón 'is waiting for the opportunity to throw the bodies to the desert so that they disappear as a meal for birds of prey' evokes a political use of desert mechanisms similar to those described by De León; see also J. Weiner, 'Antigone in Juárez' (esp. p. 284-5) (n. 12) on the desert framing. For considerations of space, a proper exploration of what we might consider Latine and Latin American 'desert-Antigones' must await another occasion. This, however, is not the route that Woman on Fire pursues. In turning now to Treviño Orta's play more fully, I consider how Woman on Fire forges a unique path when set against the kinds of Latin American Antigone-narratives previously discussed: for while the threat of external political and social forces is certainly present in Treviño Orta's play, its true conflict is the related but distinct debate of identity that rages within Juanita, its potential Antigone. In a notable break from the texts we considered above, Woman on Fire is more interested in provoking the internal turmoil of its central character through a deconstruction of what Latine identity really is than in sharpening its bite against the political structures which demand the necessity of such a deconstruction. While the play critiques U.S. Border Patrol and immigration policies and presents the devastating effects that the United States' necropolitics have on Latine and Latin American lives, the play does not bring Juanita into conflict with this political schema as an illustration of its main concern; rather, what is repeatedly interrogated over the course of the play is how Juanita should understand that system and what role she herself should play within it. Woman on Fire thus offers us a complex and challenging example of the ends to which the story of Antigone can be put to use in Latine contexts and offers implicit argumentation for the necessity of appreciating the nuanced distinctions between acts of Latine and Latin American reception.

Peeling Back Bodies and Their Identities in Woman on Fire
Although Woman on Fire has so far received two professional productions, as mentioned above, its script has not been published or widely disseminated; as a result, discussion of the play has not yet entered academic discourse. For this reason, I will briefly lay out a summary of Woman on Fire's events and characters so that we may situate ourselves before turning to the intricacies of the drama.
Following the most recent version of its script dated to 2016, Woman on Fire is set in 2002 and takes place in a town 'along the Arizona/Mexico border'; the house where the majority of the action takes place is on the Arizona side. The story is told over fourteen scenes, and the cast is made up of four characters: Juanita, her husband Jared, her sister Araceli, and Paola, the ghost of a Mexican woman who, prior to the events of the play, died, along with her brother, Andrés, during an attempted border crossing into the United States. While she was able to bury Andrés' body before her death, Paola's own body remains exposed on the border-in other words, Paola has already acted as an Antigone and now needs someone else to perform the role for her. Juanita has recently relocated to Arizona from Texas' Rio Grande Valley to show her solidarity with and commitment to Jared, who has taken up a position as a Border Control Officer in response to the traumatic death of his brother following the events of September 11, 2001. Importantly, and as we will discuss in more detail below, each character is introduced in the cast list in part through their skin colour: Juanita possesses a 'light complexion, güera' while Paola has a 'dark complexion,' and Araceli is identified by a 'darker complexion than Juanita'; Jared is simply 'White.' 23 The plot of the play takes place three months after Juanita has moved to Arizona and begins with the haunting arrival of Paola, who appears to Juanita exclusively to demand the burial of her exposed corpse. Although Juanita attempts to ignore, rebut, and even cast out Paola's spirit with Araceli's aid, Paola eventually succeeds in arguing that Juanita owes her a burial based on their inherent connection as individuals with a shared identity-more on this to follow. The play concludes with Juanita entering the desert to bury Paola's body; she is briefly interrupted by Jared but ultimately asserts her relationship with Paola and persuades her husband to aid her in granting Paola's spirit and body their final rest.
While our discussion will not strictly focus on where Woman on Fire aligns with or diverges from Sophocles' play but rather the connections and consequences forged through Treviño Orta's focus on a fraught burial of great significance, it is worth briefly noting that a pointed connection between the two works is made in two places. First, Araceli evokes Antigone's own negotiation of divine and human law in Sophocles' play when she chastises her sister for refusing Paola's request and not appreciating that 'there are laws greater than man's' in Scene Ten. 24 Araceli also briefly mentions the burial practices and funerary beliefs of 'the Greeks' in Scene Thirteen. Advertisements for and reviews of the play in performance, as well as interviews with the author, present the drama as inspired by ideas and concepts from Sophocles' Antigone rather than a close adaptation. 25 This is worth noting considering the number of Latin American Antigone-plays that work much more closely with Sophocles' drama or prominent European adaptations, including those of Jean Anouilh (1944) and Bertolt Brecht (1948). 26 With this utilitarian sketch of the play's contents and positionality set out, let us now turn to Woman on Fire proper.
While Woman on Fire stages Juanita's struggle with and eventual acceptance of a kind of Antigone role and a sense of responsibility for the burial of Paola's corpse, the play similarly enacts her broader negotiation of a Chicane-and, as we will later consider, Latine-identity. As the drama begins this exploration, it sustains over the course of its conflict a marked tension between ideas of separation and relation across the realm of bodily experience and its social consequences. At the same time as Woman on Fire's staging and structure work implicitly to bind Juanita and Paola, and to a lesser extent Juanita and Araceli, to one another, these three characters repeatedly emphasize the factors of their existence that mark them as distinct individuals with unique and irreconcilable identities. Importantly, much of this conflict is drawn across the canvases of these three women's bodies, for it is through the way their bodies define their internal and external experience that the debate over similarity or distinction plays out: and it is by focusing so intently on their physical realities-their physical forms, their senses, whether they are alive or dead-that Woman on Fire argues that formulating an idea of Chicane/Latine identity means confronting the lived realities of Chicane/Latine bodies.
From the structure of its prologue and subsequent opening scenes, Woman on Fire ties Juanita and Paula together closely. Juanita and Paola open the play simultaneously, both in an embodied presence; the stage directions state that 'lights up' finds the two women seated across from one another, with Paola 'staring determinedly' at Juanita while the other sits 'with eyes closed.' As the prologue concludes, this image returns when Paola states to an unwilling Juanita, 'You can see me', despite Juanita's attempts either to keep her eyes shut or direct them elsewhere; at the end of Scene One, this image is reversed when Paola takes up the agential role and warns Juanita, 'Yes…I see you…I'm coming.' 27 Beginning with this shifting image suggests spatially what Woman on Fire will go on to examine more directly through characters' articulated bodily experience; these women are distorted mirror images, somehow connected but not fully aligned.
As the play progresses, it expands upon this dynamic more explicitly through the way Paola frames her requests that Juanita provide her with an acceptable burial. Scene Six offers the first confrontation between the two, and it is at this moment that Paola begins to verbalize her own account of why she, as a ghost, has worked to 26 See Carrete, 'Humanity and revolution', pp. 511-2 (n. 11) for a summary of commonalities and literary influences shared by many Latin American Antigone adaptations; see also Fradinger, 'Nomadic Antigone', pp. 20-3 (n. Here, Paola finally names what she only alludes to earlier in the play: that it was due to an untrustworthy coyote-a hired guide who directs migrants over a border crossing-that she and her brother were unable to cross the U.S./Mexican border successfully or at least return to Mexico with their lives. 28 Initially, Paola's explanation for her inability to leave the mortal realm behind appears to follow the emphasis on connection that opened the play. As 'burial is a passage connecting and limiting the inside and outside of life and, as such, of a community,' Paola is requesting not only a practical outcome but a greater acknowledgement and enactment of relation from Juanita. 29 Although her articulation of this point will build over the play, Paola initiates it by tying herself to Juanita outright, marking them as an interconnected pair in dialogue saturated with 'I's and 'you's set side by side. Her claim that Juanita's very existence-'It's you. Who you are. Your life'-has led to her entrapment further implies a bond between the two women. The play has also worked thus far to gird this relatively undefined connection with implicit justifications. The stage directions in the prologue note that copious marigolds abound both around and inside Juanita and Jared's house: 'Sitting on a kitchen table is a bouquet of marigolds. On a counter/island sits a coffee thermos, another bunch of marigolds, a bowl of fruit and a rolling pin.' After a fearful Juanita first explains to her sister in Scene Two that the marigolds she cut in the yard three months ago have remained fresh inside the house, suggesting some kind of supernatural presence, Araceli exclaims, 'Come on, marigolds are the flowers of the dead. You've seen the altares for Día de los Muertos, they're covered with them… It's their strong scent. Supposedly it guides the spirits to the altars.' When Paola finally appears before Juanita properly in Scene Six, one of her first acts is to approach the marigolds. 28 The use of a coyote is common and can be expensive, and the deadly risks related to hiring one that

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The marigolds work at two levels across these scenes. On the first, the play allows the audience to take on a role similar to that of Araceli. For those familiar with Mexican or Chicane culture, the appearance of the marigolds would signal associations with the dead from the drama's opening; with this in mind, Araceli is only stating aloud in Scene Two a connection that certain audience members would themselves have made several movements back. It is this question of realization that leads to the second level of the marigolds' significance. Araceli and Paola understand the cultural value of the marigold as a symbol; Juanita, however, does not and needs her sister to explain and make that meaning legible within the situation she currently faces. The marigolds therefore serve to show implicitly the way in which Juanita and Paola are connected-at some level, they share a cultural heritage-while at the same time they provide an explicit demonstration, through Araceli's intervention, that Juanita does not necessarily see herself as part of such a relationship. Her Chicana identity might in some way run parallel to Paola's Mexican one, with both cultures reading the marigold as possessing the same significance, but her imperfect knowledge, and lack of concern about it, may complicate that relationship and cause it to collapse.
Therefore, although until this point Paola has focused on bridging the potential divide between Juanita and herself, an inherent tension underlying their relationship starkly remains. As we consider the implications of Paola's argument in Scene Six, however, the internal instability of that initial effort to establish a connection arises in the same way that the marigolds both draw the two women together and yet set them apart. For in her response, Paola emphasizes that she and her brother were forced to perform an extremely risky border crossing due to the political structures that govern access to the United States from Mexico; Juanita's husband, as a member of U.S. Border Control, is both a wilful participant in and a synecdochical representation of these greater mechanisms. Importantly, from Paola's perspective, Juanita herself is contaminated by association, and Paola lays out how exactly this contamination functions when she elaborates on her reasoning in the face of Juanita's sustained refusal: PAOLA: I was out there alone in that desert. Left to die like an animal. No one's going to give me a proper burial, that's why I'm stuck here. JUANITA: No, no, no, no, no. I can't go out there. PAOLA: I can take you there. JUANITA: You don't understand. You can't just walk across. PAOLA: Why not? You're a citizen, aren't you? JUANITA: It's more complicated than that…It's probably illegal…Look, I'm sorry, but it's out of the question.
In this exchange, the original lines of connection between the women drawn by both the play and by Paola herself begin to fray dramatically. As Juanita refuses to allow Paola to lead her into a relationship of mutual recognition, Paola in turn begins to retreat into the language of distance. Juanita not only bears some guilt by association for Paola and Andrés' fate due to having allied herself with a member of the political body that polices the border, but she is even more dramatically responsible for Paola's sustained suffering due to her refusal to acknowledge and take advantage of several very real differences between them. As a U.S. citizen, Juanita has a certain degree of freedom regarding the border-an ability to walk along it without the fear of immense suffering and death-but she refuses to take advantage of this privilege to aid someone who lacks it. For Juanita, the hypothetical risk of legal trouble and the conflict such an act could stir in her relationship with her husband make the potential cost of aiding Paola too high.
Juanita's refusal to engage with Paola at this juncture is especially significant if we bring to mind the conclusions of De León's anthropological research discussed earlier. As De León's investigations into bodily decomposition on the U.S./Mexican border emphasize, Paola's remains should very likely have been anonymously subsumed into the surrounding environment, eaten away by the border's predators and natural proliferators of human decay. Unexpectedly, however, not only does Paola's body mummify-the process preserving the corpse and indeed protecting it against several of these elements-but Paola herself is given the opportunity to return and advocate for her body. As a result, Juanita, too, is offered the privileged option of burying a Latin American body to which she should never really have had access. Through the survival of Paola's corpse and the fraught relationship it weaves between Paola and Juanita as potential stewards of that body, Woman on Fire considers the Latin American disappeared from a unique position compared to those Antigone stories we discussed above. The Antigones of many of those plays may never get to bury a body, while Juanita, Chicana and Latina, could and yet refuses the rare and fragile opportunity.
By the end of Scene Six, then, a play that opened by physically mirroring these two characters has transitioned to probing at the site of painful rupture. Although Paola originally sees Juanita as inherently connected to her, Juanita's rejection of this relationship causes her, too, to retreat into the wounded realm of difference: to identify Juanita as lacking due to her inability or refusal to seek cohesion. That sense of connection has not fully disappeared, but it has become overshadowed by the tensions Juanita's rejection have brought to the fore. These uncomfortable, shifting lenses of similarity and difference dominate the play until its conclusion and raise challenging questions for Juanita's tenuous grip on her own identity and self-understanding.
As Woman on Fire pursues this conflict, it revisits the focus on bodily mirroring first raised in the prologue and turns to mapping its questions of connection and separation along the site of the human form. In the previous exchange, this detail is present in an identifiable but somewhat abstracted shape: Juanita's living, Chicana, U.S. citizen body is contrasted with Paola's deceased, Mexican (both ethnically and by citizenship) body. While the qualifier of being alive or dead is a physically legible one, that of citizenship is not necessarily so; the effects of a certain kind of citizenship do affect and in many ways determine the body-where it can go, what might happen to it-but it cannot be read, contextless, from the human form in the same fashion as certain other features of identity may be (and which we will discuss below). As the play opens up this conflict of difference, it grows more and more legible in explicitly physical ways, with questions of social distinction becoming embedded in the corporeal qualities that define a life.
More specifically, what is especially noteworthy about the play's trajectory in this regard is its interest in navigating these questions of bodily experience by setting Juanita alongside Paola's dead body rather than her once living one. Woman on Fire forges the connection between these two bodies from two distinct angles: first, through the way Juanita's body physically reflects the processes and sensations suffered by Paola's corpse and second, through the dialogic exploration of how these two bodies are related to one another in the arguments put forth by Paola, Juanita, and even Araceli. Let us begin by considering the implicit framework of sympathetic relation that runs through the play and then turn to the more complex dynamics these three women articulate through their unique bodily experiences.
From the beginning, Woman on Fire subtly connects Juanita's living body to Paola's corpse through repeated imagery of heat and burning; just as Paola's dead body lies dried and contorted in the sun, so, too, does Juanita's living body sweat and burn over the course of the play. This process begins in Scene One, which captures Jared and Juanita's move to Arizona in a flashback three months prior. As the couple enters their new home, both remark upon the high temperature. When Juanita inquires whether the air conditioning is working, Jared confirms, 'Full blast. You're gonna have to get used to the Arizona heat.' Juanita downplays the difficulty since 'Texas'-her home state-'was just as hot.' Jared's response that 'It's different here…Arizona shows no mercy' is taken up throughout the remainder of the play, as all events are coated in a debilitating, unrelenting warmth.
Juanita, however, is not merely one actor moving through this hot malaise but the one who is repeatedly associated with feverish suffering in other aspects of her behaviour. When Juanita contends with visions of Paola and her demands, they come upon her like an overwhelming heat; after these encounters, she must be roused by either Jared or her visiting sister, and upon being awakened her demands are for water, which she 'drinks ravenously, as if very dehydrated' (Scene Five). The 'as if' in the stage directions does important work by marking the psychosomatic effects of Paola's visits. This pseudo-dehydration is only one representation of the heat's ability to manipulate one's perception, as in Scene Two, Juanita remarks: [The heat] plays with your senses. Your vision. It's so hot here. The heat radiates off the pavement, makes the air shimmer. Tremble. And the sunlight reflecting off the ground is so bright, so intense, the horizon melts into a slick of mercury. You can't trust your eyes.
Later on, Juanita's ability to focus dwindles due to continuous exposure to high temperatures, and she leaves tortillas smoking on the stove over two conversations (Scene Ten). Juanita thus not only suffers the effects of the scorching heat that encases her but also becomes a locus of burning herself, contaminating her environment with her smouldering touch. The steady continuity of these associations-the constant echo of Paola's dried and withered corpse as it sits in the sun in Juanita's perpetually sweating and burning body-implicitly binds these two women together even as more explicit tension arises. When one considers who the 'woman on fire' in the play's title is supposed to be, it becomes impossible to choose between these two legitimate contenders.
The connections forged between Juanita and Paola against this backdrop of shared burning do not simply reiterate the play's most prominent imagery, however, but instead centralize their bodies and bodily experience within the drama's consideration of how their identities should be understood in relation to one another. After Paola's first, failed attempt to connect with Juanita, Juanita herself begins to reflect upon the images of the corpse that have flooded her dreams and exploded upon the canvases she paints. Juanita has, in fact, been charged by Jared with painting a photo of his family, but Paola's body refuses to leave her mind's eye. As she records in Scene Nine: JUANITA: I've been looking at this photograph for almost two hours, but every time I pick up the brush, every time I approach the canvas I see her face. I see her staring back at me.
And her face changes, like one of those science films that speeds up the birth of a butterfly from chrysalis to unfolding wings. But her face isn't beautiful. Her eyes roll back in her head and her skin recedes, tightens over the bones. It discolors, her skin. Dries in the sun and turns black, like a mask, but even though her eyes are gone I can feel her stare burning, burning through death.
And I don't know how it happens, without even realizing it I've painted another. I can't. I can't do it.
While Paola's spirit has, for now, briefly retreated, her body has not; instead, images of Paola's corpse-burnt, twisted, and mummified-engulf Juanita's (sub)consciousness. In a way, Paola's dead body becomes the extension of Juanita's own; Juanita's living, moving body is the constantly inputting system for which Paola's exposed corpse is the inescapable output. Further, it is Juanita's internal self as articulated by her body as it picks up a canvas and paints that subliminally argues for understanding Paola's remains as a kind of relation. In Scene Eleven, when Jared discovers what Juanita has been painting, he lashes out with enraged bewilderment: 'I thought you were working on my family portrait…What the fuck is this?' What Juanita unwillingly continues to paint over the course of the play becomes not Jared's family portrait, but her own: and her family member is not Paola-alive but Paola-dead.
Despite this repetitive mechanism-living body makes dead body, living face stares into dead face-Juanita attempts to escape its implications by severing the relationship it implies. As she describes the process of being sucked into Paola and both the images and implications of her damaged body, Juanita forces herself back into the language of separation. Her statement of 'I can't. I can't do it' speaks first to her inability to paint Jared's desired portrait but also, and more significantly, her refusal to sink fully into Paola-to allow Paola to seep fully into her-and to therefore accept the responsibility of burying the other's corpse.
As Juanita works to dismantle this connective tissue, Paola follows her behaviour in Scene Six by weaponizing the language of difference to chastise Juanita and her refusal. When Juanita tries to dispel the ghost's presence by claiming this is all an episode of 'heatstroke,' Paola draws forth the condition of her dead body to force Juanita to take on her own physicality while simultaneously marking the two as irreconcilably divided in that experience: PAOLA: With your skin you'd burn. A bright red. After the second day you'd pray for night, as if the stars could cool your skin. They wouldn't. But at least it would be a reprieve. Until dawn. And then it would be even worse. By then you'd feel the first layer begin to peel. Separate. And pull. But it's as if every nerve is still attached and you feel like a snake losing its skin, except snakes rub their old bodies off and you'd barely be able to move without screaming, without tearing open.
Even your eyelids.
On one level, Paola labours to raise a sense of sympathetic pain in Juanita for that which she herself suffered, to connect them through the sensation of physically enduring the tortuous effects of the desert heat. She will make use of the same effect in Scene Thirteen, when she vividly describes the physical consequences of dehydration to Juanita: It's painful the way the tongue swells in your mouth, how the lips shrivel back. A sort of conscious mummification. And before you go blind, before your nose withers and your saliva stops, your eyes cry tears of blood.
At the same time, Paola works to heighten Juanita's own conception of the excruciating horror of that process by mapping it onto the landscape of Juanita's particular body. More specifically, Paola targets Juanita's pale skin as different from her own, setting her apart even as the physical torment works to bind them together.
By explicitly marking Juanita's lighter skin tone against not only the darker skin she herself possessed while living but also the burnt, even darker corpse her body has now become, Paola introduces a new dimension to the debt she argues Juanita owes her in this exchange. While her intervention in Scene Six identified Juanita's privilege as Chicana against Paola's own Mexican identity, here Paola alludes specifically to their difference along the lines of lived bodily experience, of the way in which Juanita has been able to navigate the world as a light-skinned person in a manner to which Paola herself has never had access.
The full connotations of this difference only come into focus when we turn to Juanita's relationship with Araceli, which develops alongside her encounters with Paola. It is Araceli who contextualizes this conflict as she, too, strives to function within the greater tension between similarity and difference. As she watches over Juanita while her sister sleeps at the opening of Scene Six, attempting to keep the disturbing spirit away, Araceli reflects: ARACELI: Grandpa called me la morena. I'm dark, like him. Dark like the earth, like toasted almonds. I told him not to call me that.
You, you were la güera. Your skin color currency. Especially with our grandfather. Abuelito's favorite. He'd take you every morning to get his café. Show you off to everyone else, your milky skin cradled against his dark almond arms.
Ten bars of soap. Week after week I'd stare into the foaming lather in my hands wishing, hoping it would seep in or some of me would seep out. Didn't do a damn thing.
Araceli and Juanita are sisters who both identify as Chicana and echo each other in certain social conflicts in the play. Yet, in this reflection and elsewhere, Araceli marks the two as irreconcilably divided; Juanita is la güera, pale and privileged, moving through the world with all the benefits of a White-passing person. Later on, in Scene Ten, Araceli claims that there is a logic to Juanita's haunted state: You've never had to deal with who you are, never had to own the Mexican in Mexican-American… Well guess what, the chickens have come home to roost. That ghost of yours isn't going away and you're gonna have to deal. 'Cause it doesn't matter that you can pass for nice and White.
While Juanita has been able to avoid fully engaging with the question of her Chicana identity as she has moved through various social circles, allying herself to a partner who has, in turn, allied himself to a political body that openly targets Mexican (and more broadly Latin American) people, Araceli sees her own body as constantly announcing itself to others through its colour. Like Paola, Araceli cannot retreat within her body and avoid its implications; as a dark-skinned Chicana, she argues that she lacks Juanita's ability to say 'no' when asked to interrogate the world in which she lives.
When confronted with Araceli's refusal to be fully assimilated into Juanita's own realm of experience and forced to reflect upon it, Juanita herself begins to explore this language of bodily difference. In Scene Thirteen, she responds privately to her sister's judgement by contemplating the space she occupies compared to others in her life for the first time in the play: From Juanita's perspective, the freedom to navigate external social spheres that Araceli believes she possesses is balanced against the pressures she has experienced in her inner circle. Her body is both adored and loathed; her ability to pass as White is seen as a desired trait and the source of disdain. While in her own community in Texas, as a privileged insider, Juanita operated within this tension without fully grappling with it. Now that she is in Arizona, away from that community and pulled to consider her own body and the consequences of its skin next to that of Jared, Juanita is forced to think more critically about with whom it is she truly aligns-as well as with whom it is that she even wants to align.
Woman on Fire thus takes Juanita's body and works to separate its layers by simultaneously pushing it close to and away from those of both Paola and Araceli. Through marigolds, horrendous heat, and something more intangible, Juanitaalive, pale, Chicana, and U.S. citizen-is tied to Paola: dead, dark-skinned, and Mexican. At the same time, their differences erupt shortly after the play begins, and Woman on Fire goes on to present attempts to make sense of them. Araceli's own body and the intermediate space it occupies between this central pair as alive, dark skinned, and Chicana allows for further negotiation of these terms and indeed demands that Juanita confront them.
Up until this point, Woman on Fire has used these three bodies to add greater significance to its central conflict: does Juanita owe something to Paola, and should Juanita bury her? The play's focus on opening Juanita up to understanding the various levels of privilege she possesses-while refusing to ignore the consequences of her own positionality-has suggested that Paola has a legitimate case. It is not until Scene Thirteen, however, that Woman on Fire fully explicates its own stance on these complex questions of identity and intergroup solidarity. There, Paola and Juanita again fall quickly into conflict: JUANITA: Shut up! Shut up! Why can't you just leave me alone? PAOLA: Leave you alone? Such a typical American response. I wish I had that luxury. Aren't you even curious why I had to leave my home? Why I came looking for work? Or how many people I've buried? I've grown up with blood seeping from the ground. JUANITA: What's that got to do with me? PAOLA: Juanita, you depend on that border, on pretending that your world ends there and another begins, but you can't separate what's always been connected. A pebble hitting the surface of a lake. Ripples, Juanita. You and I are connected at the ankles.
In the face of Juanita's sustained opposition to her claims, Paola makes an important rhetorical and conceptual move. Rather than only manipulate the tension between connection and difference-as she does in Scene Six when she transfers the abuse her corpse has sustained in the desert to Juanita's pale body-Paola here works to resolve that tension by suggesting that, ultimately, the connection between herself and Juanita arises in great part through their difference. When Juanita remains obstinate to Paola's attempts to vivify her life's experiences, Paola instead returns to the body by casting the artificiality of the border onto the duality of their forms and demands, through this imagery, that Juanita realize how truly and deeply their two bodies are bound. They are two ripples in the same body of water; two bodies connected by the ankles; one continuous mass with two heads. 30 30 When considering Woman on Fire with Sophocles' play in mind, this image may read as a third strong reference to the Greek tradition we may add to the other two discussed above. While I am agnostic about its intentionality, the image may prompt consideration of Oedipus, who similarly achieves self-understanding through reading his body and its 'bound ankles.' In contrast to Oedipus' horrified recognition, Once again, Juanita and Paola become connected through their shared, burning bodies; they are both Paola's corpse-vulnerable, exposed, too dried to rot. Yet, the outcome of this shared experience is vastly different from that which has come before, for Juanita finally finds herself able to empathize with Paola and to connect with her by her own choice. The scene ends with Juanita's agreement to bury Paola, and Paola, taking Juanita by the hand-extending their physical connection even as they return to their individual senses-leads the other to her body.
This, however, is not the final scene of the play. In Scene Fourteen, Jared stumbles upon Juanita mid-burial while on patrol, and he immediately turns to stopping his wife from completing her task. It is here, without Paola's spirit present, that Juanita is challenged for the final time. When Jared attempts to intervene by calling her by the anglicized nickname Nita-which the other has tolerated until this moment and even defended in light of Araceli's critiques in Scene Ten-Juanita erupts: Juanita, Jared. My name is Juanita. I know it's old fashioned, but it's my name.
And for a long time I didn't want it. Didn't want to be different. But I am. I have one foot on each side of this border and that means I'm connected. To this desert. To the people crossing it every night. To her.
It is this moment that firmly articulates Juanita's transformation from the opening of the play, as well as Woman on Fire's own stance on the question of Chicane identity as it has unfolded over the course of its narrative. In this moment, as she approaches, enters, but does not cross the border to fulfil her debt, Juanita's movements over Footnote 30 (continued) interestingly, Juanita's eventual agreement with Paola about their body-bound relationship leads her to a welcome preconception of her identity; reading one's body through the ankles turns out poorly for Oedipus but very well for Juanita. Thank you to the anonymous reader and Malina Buturović for prompting further thought on this point. geographical space emphasize her new awareness that she 'live[s] both inside and outside the beast.' 31 With Juanita's ultimate acceptance of Paola's articulation of their relationship, Woman on Fire conceptualizes an extremely intertwined but ultimately unbalanced relationship between Chicane U.S. citizens and the Mexican people that may be positioned as their counterpart. Juanita and Paola are intimately connected; they are, in sum, two variants of the same person (the stage directions even mark them as being 'around the same age') born in two different places under two different circumstances. The distinct trajectories of their lives therefore act out answers to the question of what the difference is to be Mexican on either side of the border, as well as how that experience is shaped through the bodily realities-skin colour, the mechanisms that keep a body in one place rather than another-that add greater determination to that experience.
In documenting this exploration-more specifically, in narrating Juanita's own awakening to these realities as she moves from the Valley in Texas to southern Arizona-Woman on Fire evokes the transformative trajectory Gloria Anzaldúa documents in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), although with distinct beginnings and conclusions. Noting, 'I was the first in six generations to leave the Valley, the only one in my family to ever leave home,' Anzaldúa asserts, 'I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.' 32 Juanita's very different journey of self-discovery, set in motion by her own move away from the Valley, also provokes a sloughing off of external impositions-the Nita that had overtaken Juanita-and an awakening to the complexities of her Chicana identity. For, through her own body and those around her, Juanita comes to understand that 'the U.S.-Mexico border es una herida abierta,' an open, bleeding body populated by other bodies labouring to navigate their place within it. 33 Yet, before we lose sight of the centrality of Paola's corpse in this realization, we should remind ourselves that it is the dead body-the desiccated body that has run out of liquid blood-which reveals this gaping, flowing wound to both Juanita and, potentially, the audience. The role Paola's remains play here draws to mind Cristina Rivera Garza's articulation of the 'corpse text.' Whereas in the past writers discussed their writing as a 'body text…above all a living identity,' in the violence of a world where a death like Paola's is possible, 'the body text has become-like so many other once-living organisms-a corpse text': rogate them, dig them up or exhume them by recycling or copying them, prepare them and re-contextualize them, determine whether or not they've been reported missing. Ultimately, if they're lucky, they bury them in the reader's own body-where, according to Antoine Volodine, exemplary post-exotic that he is, they may turn into the dreams that will never let us sleep or live in peace. And if this doesn't radically disturb our perception of and experience in the world, then what does? 34 As a text, whether read or performed, that was not only born in a realm of dead bodies but which also centralizes both the concept and reality of the dead body, including its physicality and the irrefutable mechanisms that led to its existence, Woman on Fire reverberates as a corpse text both in terms of its content and inherent nature. The only way forward is by confronting the dead body in every form it possesses; Juanita buries Paola, but in understanding the realities Juanita has uncovered, we may perhaps bury Paola, too.

The Ongoing Burial and Latine Debt
Now that we have unravelled the web of identities explored by Woman on Fire in its unique engagement with the Antigone-story, I would like to close by considering how the arguments put forth by the play not only speak to the Chicane condition but may also comment on the Latine experience more broadly. In doing so, we can fully appreciate the greater arguments at the heart of Treviño Orta's play and how they forge a distinctly Latine engagement with the legacy of Sophocles' work.
As we have seen, Woman on Fire is predominately interested in Juanita's internal struggle, mediated through the interventions of Paola and Araceli and a constant focus on bodies, both living and dead. Even further, this mediation centres a body-Paola's corpse-that really should never have been seen. The perseverance of Paola's mortal remains and the questions her corpse brings to the fore serve a distinct purpose in the conception of Woman on Fire as a Latine Antigone-play. As we discussed above, an important group of Latin American adaptations of Antigone emphasize the mind-devouring grief elicited by the disappearance of Latin American bodies; yet, Antigones (or rather, Antígonas) refuse to yield to the corruption and violence that steals and erases their loved ones, even when-particularly when-they have no body to bury.
What Woman on Fire explores, however, is the fact that the inescapable loss of someone dear and cherished-the gaping void that takes that person's space-is not necessarily paralleled when that loss is read by those outside of that community. Paola's family may deeply mourn her assumed death and irretrievable body, but such grief is not what Juanita feels when the ghost first reveals what she has suffered. Instead, as Treviño Orta's play dramatizes, to be Latine in the United States is at least, in part, to benefit potentially from an ability to remain outside of that relationship of fathomless loss. A second-generation Chicano living in Massachusetts does not necessarily need to think himself related to or obliged to be aware of the Mexican bodies being consumed by the Arizona-Sonora border, for example, nor does a fourth-generation Guatemalan-American in Chicago need to consider herself allied to the migrant Guatemalan dead lost along the Río Grande. We may even think of those Latine groups whose people's bodies are not usually found at the U.S.-Mexico border but elsewhere in relation to U.S. hegemony. As the child of a Nuyorican who now lives in northern California, for example, I could also avoid confronting the reality of the hundreds of unclaimed Puerto Rican dead Hurricane Maria left to rot in morgues and overflow trucks in 2017-2018. I have chosen locations distant from the United States/Mexico border to illustrate the way many ideas of distance have the potential to align here-geographical, temporal, cultural, etc.-but Woman on Fire suggests that geographical space need not be the deciding factor in this process. Juanita and Araceli are both Chicana and grew up close to the border, and yet the play presents them as split, 50-50, in terms of what interest in and responsibility for that space they possess at the start of the play.
Should a U.S. Latine person's family also be comprised of U.S. citizens or simply be uninterested in immigrating to the United States, being Latine and a U.S. citizen oneself offers the opportunity to stand removed from such trauma and loss and instead to remain complicit in the federal and state policies that create them. It is this possibility that Woman on Fire targets through its centring of Paola's burning corpse and its subsequent interrogation of Juanita and Araceli's living bodies. Treviño Orta's play refuses to allow the dead body to fade into the background, to be hidden in that complicated border space that many Latine U.S. citizens do not have to see or cross. Instead, the drama records the grotesque abuse that Paola's corpse endures in a heightened degree of detail and sets it against two distinct, living, Latina bodies, forcing all of Women on Fire's readers and viewers to see what so often remains unseen.
In spotlighting this image of disparate Latine and Latin American bodies, the play takes a strong stance on the question of what I would like to call Latine debt: what a Latine person owes to the Latin American community to which their family trajectory has historically belonged or to which they have been historically connected. The play's choice to centralize this question is noteworthy considering the many ambiguities regarding it that remain unsettled by its conclusion. Woman on Fire does not lay out an explicit line of argumentation that clarifies why exactly, in its view, a Latine person is indeed connected and owes something to a Latin American person that may be configured as a mirror image of themself. Paola is drawn to Juanita because of the marigolds planted around her house, but one may wonder why, for example, she does not transfer her efforts to Araceli when it is Juanita's sister who shows greater immediate sympathy for Paola's suffering.
Rather, as we have seen, Paola bluntly reiterates over the course of the play that Juanita bears guilt for her complicity in the system of harm to which Paola has fallen victim-for the partner she has chosen and the silence she maintains-and that the pair are irrevocably connected, having lived markedly different lives only due to the vicissitudes of circumstance. The argument the audience is left to piece together is something like the following: Chicane and Mexican peoples (and we may extrapolate this to various Latine and Latin American peoples more broadly) are intrinsically united in a greater community by a shared culture and broader sense of ancestry-whether or not that shared culture and ancestry is acknowledged or even understood-and a Chicane U.S. citizen, based on their greater levels of privilege, is morally obligated to be knowledgeable of their status and aid those in their community who go without such protections. The somewhat elided mechanism of connection here is worth noting considering the difficulties that have arisen in attempting to define what Latine and Latin American identity/identities is/are, or, as mentioned above, what they should even be called. 35 Woman on Fire's thematic focus circumvents the need for strict clarity in this regard-and for all its interest in the body, too, the play refuses to roots its argument in fixed biological or medicalized theories of racial and ethnic identity-as the play is quite happy to allow bodies and their many ambiguities to co-exist in contradictory spaces. The complex relationships between Juanita and Araceli and between Juanita and Paola are each given bodily grounding. Araceli and Juanita are both given the opportunity to share where they feel their bodies have defined their life experiences negatively, and yet these experiences do in a certain way naturally bump up against each other. The play shows Araceli narrating the internal, familial, and systematic trauma she has endured in light of others' responses to her dark skin in the same space where Juanita articulates the way her pale, at times White-passing body has made her existence feel unstable, trapped between others' feelings of distrust and desire: and both of these Latine experiences are set against those of Paola, who lies dead and desiccated in the desert. One may be tempted to work to adjudicate amongst these accounts, to decide whose experiences in some way 'matter more' to the play or retain greater validity.
Yet, while Woman on Fire clearly identifies Juanita as the one who primarily owes a debt-specifically because she refuses to acknowledge such a debt is outstanding-all three of these women are given the opportunity to open up their bodies to each other and the audience and to allow the grief their embodied lives have caused to take up space. The play is uninterested in pulling apart the many conflicting dynamics of these experiences-to lay out a rigid system of Latine dynamics akin to one of hierarchy. Instead, Woman on Fire makes use of its own identity as an Antigone-story to evoke Ofelia Schutte's claim that 'the U.S. Latino today is situated in a cultural space apt for the negotiation of identities' and presents Latine existence as perhaps frustratingly but indeed unavoidably multiple. 36