the plain and simple beauty in the context of unpleasant situations. This is the reality to which Peden refers.

The idea of the rose is mentioned by the first professor, who examines the complexity of serf and likens this to the rose, that unfolds its petals. He is searching for the core, the root, which for him is in the sometimes repressed and unexpressed sexuality of the individual.

The image of the rose is again brought into the play when the scavengers are together and one man sings to a woman a little song calling her a rose of the few. It is a song about making love and the images of love are rather common and base and sung to another scavenger in a makeshift shelter at the dump. Here the image of the rose is common and banal.

The rose comes up again with the announcer. Suddenly the viewer is put in almost a game show environment, where one must compete for prizes, and three images are shown, the rose in total, a rose petal, and a microscopic view of the fiber of a rose. The question then is posed: which is the real rose9 Pursing the imagery of the rose and what it represents, one must then ponder this symbol of love and beauty and wonder at the evidence. Is life perfect and complete like the whole roses—is this the real picture, is this the real truth? Or is it the petal, the small dropped leaf that makes one think of the total flower, a part that has some of the smell and texture of the whole, and which one can close his eyes and imagine. Is this the moment in life when one experiences love and beauty—is this segment of the whole the true picture of the rose? Or is it the small fiber of the rose, like a fragment of human life, the beauty and love that at a daily microscopic level, without grandeur, without sweet smell, and without perfect construction, makes up real life? The relationship of Polo and Tona seems evidence of that rose fiber. It is a simple and at times painful thing. But it is, as much as any grander expression, something that is real and of value.

The action of the play focuses on a train derailment, the events that lead up to it and the results of the derailment. Although this event doesn't call attention to itself in the play as a metaphor, it is another core metaphor that runs throughout the work.

What does the derailment represent, or what is derailed? A derailment clearly is an abrupt halt to something that was on a rail, that was certain to happen. What is derailed? Many things. The lives of the children are derailed Their regular life of going to school and playing has come to a jarring halt as they are faced with the enormity of the consequences of their actions. They will never be the same. Perhaps, in a way, this represents when their childhood is derailed. But at the end one has a bit of hope when the Medium gives a glimpse into the futures of Polo and Tona. Although their childhood and innocence have been derailed, their lives as adults are not without hope. Perhaps, in fact, the derailment is necessary for them to get onto another rail and take the trip towards adulthood.

More can be thought of as derailed in this work. There is a certain redistribution of goods that takes place when the train is derailed and the cars filled with food are off the track with their doors open. Something that seems sinister and bad contains something good as the poor rob the coffers of those better endowed with wealth and create a little bit more of life. This is a revolution on a small scale. So the derailment can represent a sort of revolution with the rebalancing effect that occurs in the economy.

Much of Mexican and Latin American theater attempts to make social criticism significant. This is certainly true for I, Too, Speak of the Rose. One can sense Carballido's biting and sarcastic criticism throughout the play. He arms his sights at many targets. He points to the school system, one without sympathy, that unfairly discourages the poorest from participating. Higher education also is criticized. The professors use their lecterns to impose their singular view of the world on the students. Unfortunately their view severely distorts the truth of the actual event, and thus the viewer starts to question knowledge and existing systems of knowledge as we know them. Carballido even asks the audience to question the source of news as represented by the newsboy whose presentation of the news goes through a significant metamorphosis.

Although viewers will grasp Carballido's social criticism, they will stay much longer with the work, toying with the metaphors, with the poetic language, and questioning the nature of knowledge and reality. They will go with him to a deeper place where he questions not just social structures and politics but the very nature of knowledge and reality, and ultimately truth.

Source: Etta Worthington, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1998

I, Too, Speak of the Rose (Yo tambien hablo de la rosa) is a play set in modern Mexico City. Throughout the play only one thing happens—two lower-class children, Tona and Polo, derail a freight train carrying food and go to jail for an unspecified (though we assume brief) period of time. The rest of the play's 21 scenes focus on the process and politics of interpretation. For the police, the incident is a criminal offense. For the scavangers picking up the food, the strewn bounty is a miracle of good fortune. The mothers blame their children's vagrancy on the absent father. The school teacher refers to Tona and Polo as truants. For the university students reading the newspaper, the event is an anarchistic, brilliant act. The bourgeois couple, reading the same paper, refer to the children as "little savages, that's what they are. All of them. They're all a bunch of savages." A Freudian psychologist expounds on the repressed libidinal component to the act. The Marxist economist interprets the destruction as the logical outburst of an oppressed class. What does the derailment mean? Whose interpretation or discourse gains authority?

While many perspectives are introduced in the play, not all of them are equal. The Intermediaria (Medium), an indigenous, or "mestizo," peasant woman, dominates the play. She appears four times, linking the episodic scenes together by telling stories that indirectly elucidate the incident involving the two children. Interestingly, however, her perspective is not valorized as correct, but as indispensable m illuminating Mexico's racial and cultural mestizage. Carballido does not suggest that she knows more than the professors, but that her source of knowledge differs from theirs. She begins the play claiming "I know many things'" As she narrates what she knows—herbs, faces, crowds, the texture of rocks, books, pages, illusions, roads, events—we come to understand that her knowledge represents a mode of perception different in kind and origin from the "scientific," objective knowledge posited by the eurocentric professors. Her epistemological framework is primarily of an oral tradition, conserved by memory, and passed on by word of mouth: "I also retain memories, memories which once belonged to my grandmother, my mother or my friends... many which they, in turn, heard from friends and old, old people." Her orality is both a product of and a producer of a network of communication, and establishes her central position in it as much as literacy shapes the professors. The philosophic schools which shape the professors' perception, and the literacy maintaining it, do not, by and large, form the traditions within which most Mexicans have lived, and to different degrees still continue to live. In a country like Mexico, characterized by the co-existence of literary and primary oral cultures, consciousness changes according to how people receive and store information and knowledge.

The most immediate distinction between the oral and literary cultures we see in the play lies in the relationship between knower and known. The Intermediaria's knowledge cannot be called "objective"—it is not empirically verifiable or in any way outside or disconnected from herself as knower. Unlike the professors with their methodological and causal framework, she does not aspire to the Cartesian ideal of objectification. From her first line in her first speech, the Intermediaria approaches knowledge reflexively, comparing it to her heart which, with its "canals that flow back and forth'' connects her with the rest of the world. As the fluidity of her' speech shows, her way of knowing is anything but isolating or reductive—each idea opens a way to another, defying the possibility of any conclusion. The Intermediaria's role demonstrates the supreme importance of the speaker in an oral culture. In contrast, the professors' way of knowing is shown as eccentric in that they stand outside and removed from the source of their knowledge and information which now, in the literate society, lies in books and newspapers. Their physical presence is gratuitous; they only read or speak what has already been prepared in writing. They maintain a marginal, alienated position in both the acquisition and transmission of their knowledge. Alienation, then, is not an existential given, but a product of the knower/ known relationship. The separation between knower/ known changes, reduces and fragments human experience. Ironically, then, while literacy allows us to know more as well as more accurately, with greater abstraction and sophistication, it simultaneously widens the gap between knower and known.

Carballido's humorous play does not condemn or endorse any one perspective. Rather, it shows all of them as co-existing simultaneously within a highly complex society. If he condemns any position whatsoever it is only the folly of those who maintain that there is only one correct interpretation. His ludicrous characters (such as the Announcer of the game show in which the audience is asked to identify the one "authentic" image of a rose), illustrate not only the fallacy, but the potentially inquisitorial violence, of imposing any one view at the expense of others. There is only one valid response, the Announcer asserts; the rest "should be stricken from the books so that they will be forgotten forever. And any person who divulges them should be pursued by law. All those who believe in these false images should be suppressed and isolated!"

I, Too, Speak of the Rose is a discourse about the nature of discourse. Discourses not only stem from differing traditions and create their own realities, but they also vie for explanatory power and authority. Historically, western theories have displaced Mexican and Latin American worldviews. In this play Carballido moves the marginalized experience to the very center of inquiry. This re-centering constitutes an important, liberating act for, by the same move, the eurocentric view (the professors) recedes, seen to be reduced in importance. Changing the relationship between the marginal and the dominant can change history, for as Hayden White points out in Tropics of Discourse, histories "are not only about events but also about the possible set of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure."

I, Too, Speak of the Rose is then a theatrical collage of many conflicting views of an accident and proposes a method of inquiry into the politics of perception and interpretation. Like the rose of the title, which Carballido depicts as a complicated and interconnected entity inextricable from (and inconceivable without) its multiple parts—stalk, petals, and fibers—the play too is made up of numerous, yet irreducible, interpretations.

Source: Diana Taylor, "I, Too, Speak of the Rose," in The International Dictionary of Theatre I Plays, edited by Mark Hawkins-Dady, St. James Press, 1992, pp. 353-54

Yo tambien hablo de la rosa (I Too Speak of the Rose) synthesizes earlier thematic concerns and technical achievements of Carballido. This one-act masterpiece further elaborates the concept of human existence as a complex web of interrelationships through a fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, as in La hebra de oro. Also, it delineates the repressive effects of ideologies and institutions through popular satire and alternating scenes of commentary and representation, as in Silencio, polios pelones, ya les van a echar su maiz- Finally, it succeeds in realizing both an explicit statement on the function of the theater and an exemplary model of total theater.

The action occurs in Mexico City during the present, and the central realistic event is the derailment of a freight train by two adolescents, Tona and Polo. The technique and structure of the play focus the spectator's attention on the process of interpretation rather than on the event itself. There are eighteen basic scenes with twenty-nine characters portrayed by thirteen actors. Transitions are fluid and rapid, effected by lighting and the commentary of the Medium and the Newsboy.

The initial scene establishes a nonrealistic atmosphere. A spot comes up on the Medium, dressed in peasant costume. In her monologue, she conjures up an image of her heart. The heart, like the rose of the play's title, symbolizes human existence, complex and fragile, but also precise and powerful. The Medium herself is an objectification of the social function of theater. In the final lines of her monologue, she outlines the following process: events are perceived and images formulated, and the latter are then communicated and contemplated. The artist provides a representation of the people and their surroundings, an image that is physical and integral as opposed to the abstract and fragmentary analyses employed by scientists and politicians to manipulate reality. With each appearance the Medium's costume becomes increasingly lighter in color until the pure white of the final scene. This externalizes the process of clarification through which art succeeds in transcending the chaos of diverse partial visions in a total concrete image.

During a blackout following the monologue, the event is first presented sensorially: the sound of the derailment, silence, lightning flashes; then the Newsboy: "Get your papers now! Delinquents derail a train!'' Although apparently a neutral medium for the news, he varies his salespitch according to the version he is vending. The Medium, however, remains constant in her refusal to offer a limited fragmentary interpretation.

Scene 2 provides a realistic representation and employs a linear progression: street scene, derailment, effects of the derailment. The behavior of the young truants is spontaneous. They steal some coins from a public telephone, and then they decide to buy some candy. Their encounters with the Candy Vendor, the Old Woman selling ji'cama, and the young mechanic Maximino develop a contrast between human relationships motivated by self-interest and, in the latter case, mutual respect. Later, at the dump, Tona and Polo give their remaining coins to a Scavenger. Objects that they find, scrap iron and flowers, are seen as gifts for their friend Maxi. In an unpremeditated gesture, they roll a metal tub filled with concrete onto the train tracks. The brief tableau (din of the crash, lightning, Tona and Polo awed by the wreck) suggests the import of the change effected by their actions.

In scene 3 the Medium reads from a Bestiary. Diverse interpretations of human existence are illustrated by animal images. They range from the canine guardian of physical integrity and property rights, the cat watching over man's spiritual integrity, the hen, fish, butterfly, and snake, to the bee that knows "all about solar energy and light. Things we don't suspect!" The latter most closely approaches the dramatist's concept of man as an intricate web of interrelationships based upon cosmic energy.

The next five scenes provide brief interpretations of and reactions to the derailment Commenting upon the newspaper report, a Gentleman identifies poverty as the cause of delinquency. A Lady agrees: "Oh, yes, then: poverty's something awful. But they didn't say anything about the trunk murder, huh?" Even if the cause is identified, there is no active response, only the passive consumption of journalistic sensationalism. The Teacher uses the newspaper to illustrate the "dangers of idleness." She, too, refuses to accept any responsibility or attempt to alleviate the problem. Two University Students react with greater sympathy, revealing perhaps a desire to rebel against society All three responses, however, contrast with that of Maxi Informed by phone that his friends have been arrested, he immediately requests that his employer give him money and time off so that he can go to the aid of the adolescents. Scene 8 shifts to the dump where the Scavengers and others reap the fruits of the wreck, carrying off sacks of food.

Scene 9 returns to the Medium. She narrates a story that is enacted by two dancers. Living in different towns, they both receive the same command in a dream: to dance and pray together at the sanctuary near the house of their brother. They meet in mid-route and, confused by the ambiguous dream, celebrate the rite at the place of their encounter. Each returns home, feeling he has only half-fulfilled the command. The anecdote reflects the image of human existence presented by the play. Man has no foreknowledge of the consequences of his actions. Therefore, primary emphasis is placed upon the process: contradictions should be faced and choices made in a spirit of solidarity with others.

The next seven scenes supply additional interpretations, and the basic opposition is human-vs.-inhuman response. First, we see Tona's mother preparing food and clothing to take to her daughter, and then Polo's mother visits him in prison. Both mothers are confused and vacillate in assigning blame. However, they do reveal a human maternal concern for their children's welfare and establish an obvious contrast with the two following scenes, which employ more elaborate distancing techniques. Both are introduced by the Newsboy: first, he hawks a Freudian analysis holding up papers covered with Rorschach-like ink blots and, later, a Marxist interpretation carrying papers printed in red on black. Each scene includes a narrator (Professor One, Professor Two) who comments upon his version as it is presented by Tona and Polo. The result is the satire of two opposing over-rationalizations: the first exaggerating the repression of the libido in the individual, the second stressing the exploitation of the proletariat under capitalism. The three following scenes underscore the inhumanity of the preceding ones by focusing upon the mutual bond of love. Maxi visits Tona in prison. He had come to free his two friends by paying then* fines. This is impossible because the derailment has resulted in a half-million-peso "crime." That the real crime is poverty is implied by Tona's expression of solidarity with her fellow inmates, who have violated society's laws in order to live. Tona and Maxi embrace as he vows to carry only Tona's picture in his wallet What had begun as idol worship on her part and friendship on his part ends in love. A scene at the dump develops a similar bond on the collective level. Here, it assumes a more popular and realistic form, as four Scavengers (two male, two female) celebrate around a fire with food, drink, and song. The earthy language of the songs contrasts strongly with the dehumanizing terminology of analysis employed by the two Professors. The scene concludes with the same gesture as the preceding one: the two couples embrace. Scene 16 returns to the Tona-Maxi plot. On the telephone at the garage, he breaks his engagement with his previous girlfriend and thus prepares the way for his future union with Tona.

Scene 17 restates the theses of the two Professors, adds a third, and requires the audience to make a choice. The Announcer illustrates the theses with three projected images and offers a magnificent prize to those who select the correct interpretation. In addition to the Freudian and Marxist rationalizations (rose petal and rose respectively), we have the web-like fiber of a rose petal seen under a microscope. This is the Medium's image, "primal matter" that is also “energy.'' The latter thesis destroys the former: there is no rose, no petal, only '' a fusion of miraculous fictions.... Without the least possibility of rational explanation."

In the transition to the final scene, the Newsboy carries parchment-like papers imprinted with magical signs and offers all the news. This introduces the Medium, now dressed in white, who gives her version. The previous representations by Tona and Polo, commented upon by the two Professors, were basically satires of exaggerated rationalizations, whereas the final scene achieves the total physical effect of ritual. The street scene included by the Professors is eliminated and dramatic intensity heightened as the Medium narrows the focus to the dump, where the change effected by the derailment occurs. As Tona and Polo enter, she explains: "They are changing into all that surrounds them." Their dance harmonizes with and evokes the creative potential of the cosmos. The flowers respond as a Feminine Chorus in a liturgy: "I have strength ...II have promise..." The dump itself begins to glow from within, and the Medium adds: "With rhythms such as these we summon and arouse fertility.'' After the derailment, all the characters in the play embrace, kiss, dance, at first chaotically and finally in a chain, with precise and complex movements. A change from sterility to fertility occurs on all levels: Tona and Polo pass from adolescents to adults (she marries Maxi, he gets his own garage), the situation of the poor shifts temporarily from lack to abundance, and the cosmos itself participates in this realization of creative potential.

Now, instead of commenting upon the representation, the Medium addresses a question to the characters:

Medium (Asking in the manner of a teacher) —And now, what about that light from that star—extinguished for so many years?

Tona —... It kept flowing into the telescope.. but all it meant to say .all it meant to reveal .was the humble existence of the hairy hunter, who was drawn by his friend, the painter, on the walls of an African cave.

This exchange provides, within the play, a statement on the function of art. The artist produces an image that persists long after the event or person represented ceases to exist The sole function of the artist is to affirm, through an integral objectification, the existence of his contemporaries as a complex web of creative potential. Thus, the web becomes an image not of entrapment but of liberation, transcending, through a complex yet precise physical representation, the limits imposed by analytical rationalizations of human existence. The play itself is an exemplary realization of this concept of drama.

Source: Eugene R Skinner, "The Theater of Emilio Carbalhdo'' in Dramatists in Revolt- The New Latin American Theater, edited by Leon F. Lyday and George W Woodyard, University of Texas Press, 1976, pp. 19-36