The following post was written by New York Public Library Short-Term Fellow Carla Della Gatta, University of Southern California.

The Festival Latino (1976-1991) was one of the most successful cultural programs produced in New York in the late twentieth century. It was co-produced by Joseph Papp and The New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) and a pair of South/Central American producers, bringing together performances by Spanish, Central American, and South American companies, as well as Latinx companies from within the United States.

The festival grew each year and, in 1986, satellite festivals were held in Washington, D.C., Montreal, San Francisco, Mexico City, and San Juan. The Festival Latino was so popular that in a proclamation from the State of New York Executive Chamber, Governor Mario Cuomo declared August 1989 as "Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino Month." By 1990, the festival spanned over a month with more than two hundred scheduled events. When the NYSF abruptly cut funding in 1991, the Festival Latino disappeared, not only from New York, but also from cultural and theater history. 

The Billy Rose Theatre Division, at the Library for the Performing Arts, is the public archive that holds the largest collection of materials of the Festival Latino, which includes recordings of both live and televised performances, news coverage, audio recordings of board meetings, scripts, and some programs and ephemera. Last summer, I spent three weeks probing more than 30 audio and video recordings from the Festival Latino, as well as numerous folders of mixed materials. 

Together, these materials helped me create a clearer context of the larger festival culture in New York and the Festival Latino’s position in it. By the end of my fellowship, I had a revised understanding of why this long-running and successful festival was canceled. 

Discovering the Festival Details—and Its Downfall

The card catalog led me to boxes of mixed materials including newspaper clippings about various other cultural festivals in New York during this period including Lincoln Center festivals, youth festivals, the Italian festival of San Gennaro, and the Avant Garde Festival. I viewed a 1991 interview with Cecilia Vega, one of the two co-producers of Festival Latino, and listened to the conversation in Spanish with artists in Guanajuato, Mexico, the home of Mexico’s long-standing arts festival, the Cervantino. 

Artists in Guanajuato asked if there was discrimination in the United States toward Latin American and Latinx artists. Vega’s response was candid: "If you aren’t white, absolutely." She mentioned the work of John Leguizamo, the success of the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and Míriam Colón’s Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) as progress, and a growing sign of community across Latinx cultures and artists.

I viewed video recordings of the controversial Brazilian, Portuguese-language production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which included nudity, and a recording of the Venezuelan production of The Tempest, both from the summer of 1991. These productions became the first, and the last, that the Festival Latino co-produced with the Free Shakespeare in the Park series, staged at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. It is widely believed these productions served as a motivation for the NYSF to defund the festival.

But viewing more than a dozen news clips covering the productions revealed that few theatergoers and critics took issue with the nudity. News coverage, in both English and Spanish, focused more on the acrobatics and use of trapeze in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and revealed the show was so popular that it sold out of tickets. 

The bare-chested male and female fairies were perceived by some to be a gimmick to draw crowds, and others laughed off claims that the nudity was "destroying Shakespeare" by pointing to the bare-chested statue of Juliet in Central Park.  The production itself featured only one fully naked woman, the character Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in a scene where she bathes in the forest. In an interview, the director stated the concept for the production was meant to comment on Brazil’s endangered rainforests. 

The audio recording from the first NYSF board meeting after Papp’s death in late 1991 reveals the multiple reasons for the cancellation of the Festival Latino by the new artistic director. The two productions were mentioned, not for their controversial use of nudity or bias that Shakespeare was performed in a language other than English, but in the context of the physical space of the Delacorte that they had taken over. 

Previously, Festival Latino productions were performed indoors at The Public Theater and other locations. Among other concerns about finances, the scope of the festival, and new directions for The Public, there was a turf war for theater space. In a recording of the board meeting, one board member states, "The two shows in the park last summer were theirs essentially." Although a combination of factors contributed to the cancellation of the Festival Latino, the materials I accessed during my NYPL Fellowship increased my understanding of the importance of geographic space in the sustainability of cultural festivals such as the Festival Latino.