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Josefina López was born in Mexico in 1969. At the tender age of five she was brought to this country illegally settling with her family in East Los Angeles. She started grammar school the following year and thus began the process of "Chicano-ization" in the school system and in this society. From her first day in school, López knew that although her parents had green cards, she was undocumented and therefore lived in constant fear of being deported. But she used her vivid imagination to get her through, living a kind of shadow existence for several years until she became a Temporary Resident through the Amnesty Program in 1987. The threat of deportation would inform several of her plays, becoming a kind of leitmotif in the lives of her characters. According to López, she "became a Chicana" at the age of twenty, ostensibly when she no longer feared deportation.
López first started writing plays in the fifth grade. However, her major influences were the televised version of the Teatro Campesino' s La gran carpa de los Rasquachis, retitled El corrido, and the live production of Luis Valdez's J Don 'tHave to Show You No Stinking Badges. She had seen El corrido when she was in the 9th grade1 and could see the possibilities in the live, staged version. Watching the program, the impressionable and imaginative author felt liberated from the constrictions of realism as she relates in an interview in Chicago:
I thought, wow, I didn't know that theatre could be this way. . .that's how I think. . . .that's what I loved about it, that one moment you're in Mexico and the next [you're in the US]. . . transitions and transformation-that's how I think; that it could be an epic, adventuresome. . .it doesn't have to stay in one place. (Huerta)
While attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts in 1986, López saw Luis Valdez's play, / Don 't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, which stimulated her emerging feminism. As she searched Luis Valdez's works for a monologue to perform, López discovered that Valdez's female characters "were very flat-all mothers and girlfriends" (Green 5). López was studying acting in high school with the intention of becoming an...