​Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares

Is the new comic, provocative, and politically poignant spoken word performance project in development by award-winning performance activist,
published playwright and poet José Torres-Tama. 

With a variety of voices he channels via "duende" possession,
he explores the underbelly of the "American Dream" mythology,
blind nationalism, and the pimping of fear that has driven
a colonial settler system to the "Dark Side"
​with raging anti-immigrant hysteria.

​Addressing GrinGoLandia’s appetite for Mexican food
and Latin culture, his comic battle cry is
“NO GUACAMOLE for Immigrant Haters!” 

You can’t love the food and dehumanize the cooks because
guacamole junkies are learning how to Tango by the millions,
and salsa sauce outsells Heinz ketchup
as the leading condiment every year.
states Torres-Tama.

Inspired by his debut poetry collection of the same title,
his performance is a clarion call for the United States of Amnesia
to wake up from its dreadful slumber, and remember
to live up to its press release as the "beacon of democracy"
in the free world.

Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares 
is published by Diálogos Books New Orleans.

His performance dares a divided nation to remember
the words emblazoned on its iconic Statue of Lady Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
the homeless, tempest-tossed to me …

Torres-Tama explores the psychic, physical,
and open wounds of an Ecuadorian immigrant--
balancing two languages and two cultures,
and he performs real-life border-crossing stories
informed by the numerous filmed interviews
he has developed with undocumented immigrants
for the past ten years in the cities of DC, Houston, Minneapolis,
New Orleans, and Tulsa.

This initial development and early writings of this new project
is supported in part by an award grant from Poets & Writers,
thanks to a grant from the Hearst Foundations. ​

Torres-Tama is now looking to develop this spoken word performance
into a full evening of a 75-min one-man show.
He is looking to engage National Performance Network
Presenting Partners as commissioners for a new NPN Creation Fund Project.

Also, this new work addresses the growing ICE Detention Centers
and private-for-profit prisons that jail thousands of immigrants
indefinitely in towns like Jenna, La Salle, and Pine Prairie.