Incite/Insight Spring-Summer 2019 Incite_Insight—Spring_Summer 2019 Final | Page 19

The cast of the University of Northern Colorado’s production of “Luna” | Photo by David Grapes
and publishers of children’s literature
collaborate more closely to make
racially diverse work accessible to
more children? a national tour of the production
from Childsplay Theatre that year,
but nowhere near our area where we
would perform.
In the TYA canon, because of the
need to teach to the curriculum,
much of our work is tied to popular
titles from children’s literature. When
adapting a book for the stage,
playwrights must therefore work with
these publishing companies and
the large complexities and power
structures that come with them. This left me wondering: Why were the
rights of this play denied? What are
the other forces at play here? The
impact of this decision: the work and
stories of people of color were not
made accessible to young people.
While we were looking to get the
rights, I contacted a fellow professor
who produces many bilingual
Latinx TYA plays. She shared with
me that other intuitions, such as
Dallas Children’s Theatre (a large
professional TYA company), have
also been denied the rights to
this play. A contract with this TYA
company would have been much
more lucrative for the publisher than
the contract UNC offered. There was
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, Senior
Fellow at Morehouse School of
Medicine, defines institutionalized
racism as “the structures, policies,
practices, and norms resulting in
differential access to the goods,
services, and opportunities of society
by ‘race.’ Institutionalized racism
manifests itself both in material
conditions and in access to power…
With regard to access to power,
examples include differential access
to information...resources... and
voice.” Tomás Rivera is a historical
figure in the history of Latinx people in
the US. The decision by the publisher
to deny the rights of this play to
be produced and performed for
Latinx and other students, removed
access to a celebrated history of
a marginalized group in the US,
and thus created what Jones calls
“differential access to information
(including one’s own history).”
I contacted González after
discovering that we were not the only
organization denied performance
rights. As a white woman, I did not
want to be the voice of unjustifiable
outrage and did not want to speak for
González. However, I wondered if he
knew that other companies wanted
to do his work but were also denied
the rights? I shared my concerns with
him about the publisher. González
contacted both the publisher and the
author of the original book, Pat Mora.
Soon after, I received an apologetic
email from Curtis Brown LTD, assuring
me that if we ever applied for the
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