October 20th, 2009
SEGUIN – Author and performer Giselle Stern Hernández will bring her solo show, “The Deportee’s Wife,” to Texas Lutheran University tomorrow, Wednesday, Oct. 21. The 8 p.m. performance in the Chapel of the Abiding Presence is free and open to the public.
In her performance, Giselle’s marriage is laid out on the front lines of the North American immigration debate. Her husband Roberto was deported from Chicago back to Mexico in April of 2001. Giselle moved to Mexico to live with him in August of that same year. While she was born and raised in the States, and they were legally married, it didn't make any difference at all. Her husband was deported, with the order to stay out of the U.S. for 20 years. And in 2007, the day came that he also wasn't allowed to enter Canada. In The Deportee’s Wife,” Giselle takes the audience through her journey to face hard truths about how race, class, white U.S. privilege and gender intersect within the structures of a badly broken immigration system. Through her words and images, Giselle reveals a complicated love story.
A Mexican-North American writer and performer, Hernández was born and raised in New York. Cuernavaca, Mexico has been her home since 2001. She received her B.A. in English from Hunter College CUNY, and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In 2005, she was awarded a Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa. She is also the recipient of a Ford Foundation Multicultural Playwriting Grant. Hernández has performed her solo shows in Mexico and the United States since 2007.
Categories: Academic, Cultural Events