Alejandro Martinez found his passion for theater and acting as a high school student in Cypress, Texas. He recalls being one of maybe two Latinx actors in his theater program and auditioning for every role without much success.

“I remember after one of the auditions the cast list goes up, and again, no,” Martinez said. “But then the theater director says, ‘Hey I need to talk to you about this because I can see your passion… you have the stage presence. I’m just not doing any shows that require people with an accent.’”

Martinez lived the first 10 years of his life in México. Having an accent didn’t come as a big surprise, but it was the first time anybody pointed it out, he said. At that moment, his teacher offered to help him “get rid of it” in order to land roles and, as a 15-year-old, this made sense. 

Today, the memory strikes a different note with Martinez, 33, who is now a human resources specialist doing theater on the side.

“My accent came from my language,” Martinez said. “My language is part of my culture. So saying you want to get rid of my accent is saying that you want to erase part of my culture, or at least delete it for the time being so that I can participate in an activity.” 

On a recent Thursday evening, Martinez was directing the rehearsal of a play where accents don’t matter. In fact, having an accent could add something important to their rendition of “Translation, Translacion, Traducción, or Whatever You Call It,” by Hernán Angulo, a play about a father-son relationship navigating life and language from different cultural perspectives. 

This will mark Martinez’s directorial debut with Teatrx at its sixth-annual La Vida En Cortos/Life is Shorts Festival, which runs from Friday, Oct. 4, to Sunday, Oct. 6 at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center in Houston, known as MATCH.

This Houston-based theater company offers an annual festival of short plays and films that are written, casted and directed by and for Latino, Latina, Latine and Latinx audiences. 

This year, the festival will showcase seven plays, 20 short films and a couple of performances for children ages 5 and up called La Vida En Cortitos. 

“The main goal was how do we get people, Latinos, to support theater? And how do we give opportunities to young Latino actors?” said Jorge Diaz, co-founder of Teatrx. “And the idea was short films and then a short play, and when they are here… we trapped them!”

Diaz created the company along with his college friends Benito Vasquez and Marissa Castillo. The love of theater united the trio, as well as the frustration of not seeing themselves in the roles and scripts that they kept coming across, which also translated into not seeing their community being drawn to theater performances.  

Each year the festival gathers anywhere between 25 to 40 Latinx artists to showcase the work by and for their people, Marissa Castillo said. From playwrights, to screenwriters, producers and actors of all ages, this festival seeks to embrace an otherwise disenfranchised community.

“A lot of them will tell us, ‘This is the first time I’ve been on stage with other Latinos. This is the first time I’m telling a Latinx story on stage,’” Castillo said. “This is the first time they are able to live in their own body and play a character who might live in that body on stage.”

Teatrx was established in 2018l to advance and promote Latinx performing arts. It was founded with the support of Fresh Arts, a local nonprofit organization to “empower local artists through programs that build knowledge, amplify local resources, and connect communities through art,” the organization’s website says.

Teatrx is a project of the heart for Vasquez, Castillo and Diaz. Vasquez and Castillo are life partners, raising children and working full-time jobs outside of their work at Teatrx. Diaz lives in New York City and travels to Houston annually to help put together the festival.

“It’s been a collaborative leadership,” Vasquez said. “The vision was to create this home, to create an ecosystem that supports Latino theater in Houston.” 

Every year, the three put out a call for Latino, Latina and Latinx playwrights and filmmakers from across the U.S. to submit their work to be considered for the festival. And each year the idea is to have a variety of bilingual work that will be casted and directed by Houston artists.  

The short play that Adriana Domínguez wrote nearly 800 miles away from Houston in her native city of El Paso, Texas, will be presented at this year’s festival. “Jarabe” tells the story of a mother and daughter in the aftermath of the Aug. 3, 2019, shooting in a Walmart by an attacker who traveled from Dallas to target the mostly Mexican-American community killing 23 people.

For Domínguez, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Texas at El Paso, replaying this life-altering moment is not easy, but the hope is to utilize art to process and connect with others.

“Someone was trying to take our stories away,” Domínguez said. “The creative word and these experiences are the one way to bring some sanity into some of these things that are happening.”

“Jarabe,” which incorporates folklorico dance, is being adapted by Adam Castañeda, a local dancer and choreographer who runs the nonprofit, The Pilot Dance Project. Castañeda presented a dance theater piece for the 2019 La Vida En Cortos Festival. 

This year will also mark Castañeda’s first time directing a play written by another artist. But it made sense to him to participate and support another effort to make space for artists like him.

“They really challenged me to merge my movement practice with storytelling,” Castañeda said. “I remember their very first festival… from the very beginning, the festival just felt like this very rich, contextual, cultural thing that they had spent a lot of time on.”

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