Moral Dialogues, Caring Dilemmas (a Theater Workshop)

This chapter focuses on the implicit and explicit ways that individuals navigate moral dilemmas and produce gendered and racialized identities. Analysis centers on the performance of a play, “Natasia’s Story,” a dramatic rendering of “a mother like us” for an audience of staff, children, and volunteers. This play was collaboratively created, produced, and performed by young women at Palomitáy. Holding the words of characters (in various scenes) in tension with the situation (a theatrical performance) shows how the unspoken assumptions and embedded dialogues of characters and performers are entangled with institutional configurations of power. Attention to the micro-politics of interactions illuminates young women’s sense of themselves as daughters (as well as mothers) and the simultaneous negotiation of moral dilemmas and social hierarchies.