Rubén Martínez

ruben-martinez

Writer and performer Rubén Martínez is the host of VARIEDADES (“variety show” in Spanish), a 21st-century variant of old Mexican vaudeville shows. Artists and thinkers come together across generations and disciplines—musicians, writers, painters, public intellectuals, and activists – to explore a topic such as displacement, the drug war, the desert, or immigration.

Imagine the intellectual backed up by the house band, the writer interviewing the painter, the entire cast joining in on a hootenanny. As emcee Martínez weaves narratives together while embodying the interdisciplinary spirit—spoken word artist and musician, professor of literature and activist. With performance and conversation, with drama and pathos and comedy, a bi-national cast approaches the complexities honestly and entertainingly. With support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project and the California Humanities Council, Circuit Network recently co-produced Rubén and Elia Arce’s most recent edition of VARIEDADES at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. “Little Central America, 1984” offered a deep dive into the history of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, when conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador displaced over one million people, and faith-based activists risked their freedom to offer shelter to refugees in defiance of federal law.

Martínez is also a dynamic solo “performance lecture” presenter. He recently completed his fifth book, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, a compendium of memoir, reportage, and criticism about race, class, gentrification, and drug addiction and violence in the contemporary American Southwest, published by Metropolitan/Holt.