The Latino Theater Company presents ‘Yamel Cucuy,’ about ICE

The election of 2024 was a major letdown for many performers in “Yamel Cucuy,” which last played in Los Angeles just after President Trump won a second term in office. The very next morning, the cast soldiered on to perform a high school student matinee as part of the Latino Theater Company’s Encuentro festival, a celebration of contemporary Latino theater in the heart of L.A.

The mood was morose, among both the cast and the students — but then the Austin-based production company Glass Half Full held an after-show talkback, engaging directly with the high schoolers. As the name implies, Glass Half Full filters its work through a hopeful lens. Yes, the world is rife with problems — top of mind for many that day was the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants— but “Yamel Cucuy” offers potential solutions, as imaginative as they may be.

Two years later, “Yamel Cucuy” is back in L.A. and as timely as ever. Running through Nov. 1 at the Latino Theater Company, inside the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown L.A.’s Historic Core, the play follows a 13-year-old girl named Yamel (Diana Patricia Guizado) who is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by specters from Mexican folklore: the chupacabra, La Llorona, La Lechuza and El Viejo del Costal. It’s a story about borders, among them the frontier between life and death (at one point, Yamel journeys into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld).

But it also folds in modern-day horrors, both literally and figuratively. Yamel is a horror fan, bingeing scary movies in the apartment she shares with her older brother (Gustavo Martinez) and aunt (Minerva Villa) as she waits for them to get home after school.

“As a director, I thought: What horror movies do is provoke that fear in you,” said Caroline Reck, who also co-wrote the play. “I don’t want us to passively watch while somebody else is scared on stage. I want the audience to be afraid on their behalf: I am worried about her. I am complicit in watching her be in trouble. And what am I doing about it?”

The papier-mâché masks, like those seen here, were first sculpted out of air-dry clay by designer Annie Ulrich. When the clay dries, “you slather it in Vaseline so that it doesn’t stick, and then you just apply the papier-mâché right on top, and then pop it off when you’re done,” she said.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Horror movies are uniquely interactive. “He’s right behind you!” we yell at the screen, watching from between our fingers. Reck wants the audience to sit in those churning emotions. When El Viejo del Costal (Michael Galvan) appeared onstage during a recent performance, draped in rough burlap, his movements liquid and slithering, a kid in the audience whimpered.

Glass Half Full works extensively with puppets, and this production is no exception. El Viejo del Costal may be more of a costume than a puppet, as is the chupacabra (who goes by Chupacabrón, also played by Martinez), but Las Lloronas (multiple here, played by Villa) and especially La Lechuza (Marina DeYoe-Pedraza) lean heavily on puppetry. The play blends live puppetry, shadow puppetry, live performance and an original score of Indigenous percussion. Annie Ulrich designed and built the puppets, but the “life” animating them comes from the puppeteers.

“As a maker, it’s so cool to see something you made get brought to life like that,” Ulrich said. “While it’s in my hands, it’s just this dead object, and then someone with that talent picks it up and suddenly it’s breathing and it’s real. … Once people actually start really getting into character and going for it, it’s magic.”

Yamel has the easiest time talking to Chupacabrón (the reggaetonero Daddy Yankee features on Ulrich’s mood board for the character) “because he’s the most rooted in reality and [the] contemporary human world, whereas the spirits get progressively more feral as you move through them,” she said. From Las Lloronas to La Lechuza to El Viejo, these folkloric figures are less and less attached to the corporeal. But still, “the spirits are guiding Yamel, helping her make sense of the world, because she’s treading in patterns that have been playing out for centuries.”

Annie Ulrich designed and built the puppets (and some of the costumes) in this play as part of her graduate thesis. La Lechuza, the witch-owl seen here, includes two pairs of fully articulated bird wings. The wing bones are 3-D printed, and the feathers are laser-cut out of foam.

(David Butow / For The Times)

When they began devising the show in 2018, Reck and her co-writers, Gricelda Silva (who originated the role of Yamel) and Indigo Rael (also in the original production), thought a lot about fear, and how fear was being manipulated. (Jesús I. Valles and Connor Hopkins did additional writing.)

“She uses horror movies, in a way, to control her fear, which isn’t something that she can do in real life,” Silva said of Yamel. “She has that capacity when she’s watching a horror movie, but when it’s her real life, she’s pretty helpless. … There’s something about how you’re able to gauge: How afraid do I want to be today? … So I think that’s why she likes horror movies: there’s something liberating, I think, and also just powerful in being able to choose that.”

In June 2018, national attention turned toward McAllen, Texas, after news broke of children kept “in cages” near the Mexican border in the country’s largest detention center for undocumented immigrants. That got the Glass Half Full writers pondering a young person’s perspective on the situation.

“The community was really thinking about how these stories, told by mothers in times of wisdom, help create the fear in the children to not be kidnapped, to not be attacked, to not be vulnerable,” Rael said of the folkloric figures, collectively referred to as “cucuys,” or bogeymen. “How these are fun, tickly, exciting stories for kids to talk about and hear. And that’s connecting to the horrors of real life.”

In a video interview (Rael was calling from Jalisco, Mexico; Reck and Silva from Austin), Silva pulled out a wallet-sized card from underneath a “Yamel Cucuy” sticker and read its text aloud: “Do not open the door if an immigration agent is knocking on the door. Do not answer any questions from an immigration agent if they try to talk to you. … Do not sign anything without first speaking to a lawyer.”

ICE agents, played by Zac Carr and Michael Galvan, abduct one of the characters, dragging them through the refrigerator, or “ICE box.”

(David Butow / For The Times)

These cards were being passed out throughout the Austin community at the time. They had the cadence of a catechism, and evolved into a set of rules recited like a prayer by Yamel, her brother and their aunt around the kitchen table.

The cucuys are driven by being feared, but not understood. To Rael, that impulse is mirrored by the political system. “It’s driven by fear of others and racism and fear of losing power,” she said. “That’s a system that we can question and change, just like we could change a person’s mind.”

The #MeToo movement was burgeoning during the play’s inception, and Reck thinks it also played a role in the writing team’s approach to the material: Why is the onus placed on the victim to cease to function in society in order to feel safe? The rules from the wallet-sized card felt a lot like the unspoken ones that horror movies’ “final girls” must follow to survive, too.

“These roles that they’re playing, the cucuys, they’ve been doing it for so long. It’s what they know, but I think it took a defiant girl, a defiant 13-year-old final girl, to change it,” Silva said. “They continue to do what they do because that’s all they know to do.” These particular characters may be monsters, but this is a very human trait, too, Silva said: We get stuck in the roles we think we should be playing.

Siblings Xavier (Gustavo Martinez) and Yamel (Diana Patricia Guizado) and their Tía Zaira (Minerva Villa) clasp hands around their kitchen table, repeating the rules about what to do if you see ICE as if they were a prayer.

(David Butow / For The Times)

It can take just one person to shift someone’s perspective. This is true of the cucuys who came with Yamel from Mexico, and who are ultimately there to protect her. It’s also true of how the ICE agents are portrayed as bumbling “mall cops,” white and Latino people from border communities who need a job. (When two ICE agents, played by Galvan and Zac Carr, walk into Yamel’s apartment to search it, they raid her Takis instead.) The real villain here, Reck said, is the system as wielded by the government. Sometimes it takes an outsider to ask: Wait, how does this work? And why does it only work for you?

“I want audiences to reconsider their beliefs about what is real and what is invented,” Reck said. “Because culturally, we think bogeymen are invented stories and borders are real. But this play is pointing out that borders are imaginary lines that we all made up and agreed upon,” whereas bogeymen, or monstrous figures threatening children on the streets, are all too real.