This weekend marks the opening of a new play commissioned by the Latino Theater Company of Los Angeles for its 2025 season – Mascogos, a bold historical drama written by Miranda González and directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela that officially premieres Saturday, October 11 at the Los Angeles Theater Center. The play, which will run through Nov. 9, follows an 18-year-old named Jamari, played by Black Costa Rican multi-hyphenate Rogelio Douglas III, who lives in a present-day Latino neighborhood of west-side Chicago.
As the play opens, we are in a dream world from the past captured with a kind of magical realism that emerges in hallucinations experienced by this Chicago teenager. He finds himself trapped in a historical time loop that is actually in Múzquiz, Coahuila Mexico, back in 1864. As the play opens, We the audience find ourselves in a town in Coahuila which was settled by indigenous Black Seminoles who fled the United States and slavery to seek refuge and freedom beyond the U.S. borders. Opening a forgotten page of Mexican history, Mascogos captures the story of an Afro-Mexican village in the Coahuila region that exists today.
Call it speculative fiction but this is the kind of story that Imaginistas playwright Miranda González has always wanted to work with. The historical nature of Mascogos has been characterized as a sci-fi drama exploring the untold stories of Mexico’s Underground Railroad that brought runaway slaves from Florida and Georgia to Múzquiz, Coahuila. Given the parallel structure of the past and present-day scenes presented in Mascogos, I see the play as more of hallucinatory reflection on the persistence of memory in the bloodlines of a people.
What would an Afro-Latino 18-year-old Afro-Latino boy with an asthmatic condition feel such a strong connection to a past in a place in northern Mexico that he has never visited or heard of? The connective links are placed early in play where Jamari and his sister Trudy (Rama Orleans-Lindsay) share a mutual love of drumming. There is something magical about their attraction to rhythm, as we soon discover that the two loved a form of clog dancing in the distance past in Mexico, where Jamari and his then-sister Guchu. We see a group of Mascogos singing a Black English-language freedom hymn as they slowly dance in a circle on the stage.
Doubling and repetition are the structural posts of the play: The three main characters embody similar character traits in the distant past in the predominantly African town in Mexico and the present time in westside Chicago. In Mexico, the Mascogos established the town of Nacimiento de los Negros near Múzquiz, where their aunt Mama Luz (Monte Escalante) fusses over them, trying to shape the two restless teenagers into good Catholic Mexicans but their origins in distant Florida among the Black Seminole people is strong in their blood.
This restlessness causes Javari to try to convince the local priest Padre Jose (Lakin Valdez) to take him to Monterey, Mexico, where he can have a new life and a formal education. His sister Guchu is determined to leave the town and join the Black Seminole Militia that is fighting Apaches and Comanches in northern Mexico and Texas for the government of Benito Juarez. She is determined to find out what happened to her missing father who was fighting there.
All these actors provide strong performances in their double roles. The wisdom of Mama Luz reappears in the brilliance of Shine, the aunt of Javari and Trudy and a black professor at a university in Chicago. She has managed to get Javari a scholarship to a prestigious music school in Chicago, and young Trudy feels left out because she has no such prospects for her own love of drumming. The doubling of drumming/clog dancing and the theme of rhythmic connection to the past run through the play but the link-pin is an old photograph that Javari finds in his pocket: It is shows a young African-Mexican woman from the 1860s. We are left to believe that this might be the very image of a young Guchu who “fled” back north to the United States from Mexico to join the Black Seminole Militia in search of her long-lost father. Could she have made it all the way to Chicago after the American Civil War and there made a home for herself?
Mascogos captures a broad swatch of history and encapsulates what it means to be Black and Indigenous in a world that often looks to pigeonhole people for their identities — or erase them entirely from mainstream narratives. “For Indigenous people, African American people, and Black people in many parts of the world, a lot of our records have been burned,” says Miranda González, whose family is African American and Mexican. “There is this calling to find what you can to remember and remind yourself of the path that people before you have paved.”
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The history of the Mascogo people can be traced back to Florida — then under Spanish control — where runaway slaves integrated and banded with Indigenous Seminole groups around the 17th century, forming a unique ethnic group with parallels to the Gullah known as Black Seminoles. It is useful to remember who led the First Seminole War in 1817. In the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved Black people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting white slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into the First Seminole War. Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson’s forces destroyed several Seminole, Mikausuki and Black Seminole towns, as well as captured Fort San Marcos and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818.
The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1817. The United States gained possession of Florida in 1821 and coerced the Seminoles into leaving their lands in the Florida panhandle for the large Indian reservation in the center of the peninsula. In 1832 the federal government under U.S. President Andrew Jackson that they leave Florida altogether and relocate to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) as part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), both Indigenous and Black Seminole groups were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi. However, fearing re-enslavement, Seminole leader Wild Cat and Black Seminole Chief John Horse led an exodus to Mexico in 1850, where slavery had been outlawed since 1829. Settling predominantly in the Muzquiz, Coahuila, municipality, the Mexican government granted Black Seminoles land in exchange for military protection against northern frontier raids, including against the Apache and Comaches tribes in Texas. The “Mascogo” term comes from the Muscogee language, which is spoken by many Seminoles, though many elders in the community also speak Afro-Seminole Creole.
By 1852, the Mascogos established Nacimiento de los Negros (meaning: “Birth of the Blacks”), an Afro-Mexican village in the Coahuila region that exists today. Many of its residents have retained oral traditions, including knowledge of English-language freedom hymns from the U.S. For more than 100 years, Mascogo descendants in the town have also celebrated their own version of Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S, although in Spanish it is referred to as “El Dia de Los Negros” or “Day of the Blacks.”
MOSCOGOS TODAY
“When I was commissioned to write a play about the Underground Railroad to Mexico, this particular place was what intrigued me the most,” says González, whose Yaqui grandmother was born in Múzquiz, Coahuila, near Nacimiento de los Negros. “It really was something that I felt really resonated with my DNA and I felt compelled to write it in this framework.”
In 2017, the Coahuila government officially recognized the Mascogos as its own Indigenous tribe, which would allow the group to receive federal funding allocated for Indigenous communities. Many Mascogos have moved away from the small town to seek better opportunities elsewhere — especially as droughts have impacted the area’s agriculatural economy.
The struggle for Afro-Mexicans – who make up 1.2% of Mexico’s population – continues as they are often faced with structural racism that prevents many from gaining economic and educational advancement. The demographic as a whole had not been federally recognized in the Mexican census until 2020, which followed decades-long campaigns by grassroots organizations and advocacy groups.
The Chicagoan storyteller Miranda Gonzalez hopes the themes in Mascogos can spark curiosity about one’s ancestral lineage and bring audiences closer to humanity. “A lot of us have forgotten what it’s taken us to get to where we are today,” says González. “We are forgetting our humanity.”
Mascogos opens October 11 at 8 p.m. at the Los Angeles Theater Center and ends November 9. Tickets are priced from $27.50 to $51.50, with discounts for students, veterans, and seniors. To purchase tickets online, go to: latinotheaterco.org. LATC is located at 514 S. Spring Street in the heart of the Historic-Core in downtown Los Angeles, LATC parking has relocated to the Los Angeles Garage Associate Parking Structure at 545 S. Main St., LA, CA 90013, positioned between 5th and 6th Street, just behind the theater.
