Five years ago, a 16-year-old boy was gunneddown in the streets of Villanueva, Guatemala, by members of a
notoriously violent gang from which he tried heroically to free
himself. The regularity with which such murders occurred in
places like Villanueva made the death of Edgar Chocoy at the
tattooed hands of Mara Salvatrucha wholly unremarkable. But the
circumstances of his being on the streets in the first place made
those gunshots echo around the world.
They will be heard in Fort Collins as a play based on Edgar’s
struggle to save his own life comes to the Lory Student Center at
Colorado State University. It’s a documentary look at how a
troubled boy who was trying desperately to change his life was
sentenced to death by a flawed U.S. immigration system.
Chocoy’s story begins and ends in the slums of Guatemala, but
his fate was sealed in a Denver courtroom. His Fort Collins
lawyer, who hasn’t yet seen the play, said knowing his story will
be told on stage brings back a flood of emotions, including anger
and sadness. But there’s also hope and opportunity.
“There was a lesson to learn in Edgar’s death and we haven’t
learned it,” said immigration attorney Kim Baker Medina. “I’m
very glad that they did the play because we shouldn’t forget
about Edgar Chocoy as a person and for what he represents. The
system failed him terribly, and we need to learn about why that
happened and we need to work to see that it doesn’t continue to
happen.”
What happened was that Chocoy seemed doomed from the start. Born into a poor family on the
outskirts of Guatemala City, he was abandoned by his mother when he was six months old and left
in the care of his grandfather, who sold drugs for a living. He’d only met his father once and didn’t
step foot into a school until he was 9 or 10 years old. It was natural that his only sense of family
came from the kids he met on the street. All of them were members of Mara Salvatrucha, and at
age 12, so was he.
Although he wore the baggy pants, the tight white T-shirts and the tattoos that aligned him with
MS, Chocoy wasn’t cut out for life as a gangster. He hung out less and less with the street thugs,
preferring to play with friends in another neighborhood who weren’t involved in gang life. Finally,
he was threatened with death if he didn’t pay the gang an amount equal to $375.
DE NOVO - Part 1: Lil' Silent" - In 2002, a fourteen -year-old boy
named Edgar Chocoy fled Guatemala to escape the largest gang in
Central America, which had put a hit out on his life. He traveled over
3,000 miles, and across the borders of three countries in search for
his mother, who had left him when he was baby to work in the United
States. Detained by the Department of Homeland Security, he pleaded with a
Colorado judge to grant him asylum and not deport him to Guatemala,
where he was certain he would be killed. This new play from Houses on
the Moon Theater Company chronicles the gripping true story of Edgar
and other undocumented youth, many thousands of whom make the
harrowing journey across the border and through the U.S. system of
justice each year. "DE NOVO - Part 1: Lil' Silent" is a documentary
theater piece crafted entirely from immigration court transcripts,
letters, and extensive interviews conducted by the company with so-
called "alien" children (and their advocates) in immigration
proceedings in New York, Arizona, Colorado and Los Angeles. The play
is performed by bilingual actors in English and partly in Spanish.
PRESS:
NEWSPAPER: http://www.fortcollinsnow.com/article/20080327/NEWS/230019754
TV: http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2008/07/03/sharing-secrets-donna-decesa
re-and-jeff-solomon/
HISTORY:
This play is the most recent production of Houses on the Moon Theatre
Co. whose mission is to dispel ignorance and isolation through the
theatrical amplification of unheard voices. De Novo...Part 1: Lil'
Silent had its premiere at Colorado State University as part of the
Cesar Chavez Celebration and at the University of Colorado Law School
in Boulder. This past spring the play toured New York in a production
cosponsored by the American Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights
Program and Human Rights First and was a featured event in the Mayor's
Immigrant Heritage Week.
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