Su Teatro's Play About Boulder Bombing Is "Like Getting History Shot Through Your Veins"

Fifty years ago, the foundations of the Chicano community in Boulder were shaken over the course of 48 hours. Six Chicano activists, mostly students or alumni from the University of Colorado Boulder, were killed in two car bombings, leaving a wound in the heart of the movement that has never fully healed.

Fast-forward to today, and this pivotal moment in history, known as Los Seis de Boulder (or the Boulder Six), is being revisited on stage at Su Teatro in Cuarenta y Ocho, a musical written and directed by Tony Garcia that runs through Saturday, March 23.

"We are never over-learning about that moment in our history," Garcia says. "Now, the stage production is not a biography; it is not a factual depiction of the bombing. It is based on conversations that center around the sentiment of the time — all the conflicting ideologies and political motives are told through the eyes of very human characters, so it's rowdy, obnoxious, funny and incredibly sad and painful."

Garcia originally wrote the play in 2014 to honor the fortieth anniversary of the commencement of the dead, drawing on his close proximity to the events and the larger Chicano movement of the 1970s. "I was a student in Boulder in 1974, but I was in the process of dropping out," he recalls. "I was not there for the bombing, but I was there for the activism that was taking place prior to it.

"I first heard about the bombing when I was with a group on our way down to Mexico City; we stopped in Laredo, Texas," he continues. "We were asked by a community group to help this woman move. After we finished helping her, somebody said her son had died in an explosion, and later on, I found out it was Heriberto Teran, who was one of the people who died in the bombing. I remember feeling like this should have been a big deal, but it wasn't. Although we knew about it, we were never given all the details."

To get the inside scoop, Garcia and his collaborator, Daniel Valdez, conducted story circles with people who were in Boulder during the bombings. However, not everyone was happy that the story was being told. During the initial production process of Cuarenta y Ocho, people warned Garcia not to do the musical.

"When people started to get wind of what we were doing, I started getting a lot of phone calls and even had a police officer show up," he says. "I had other people who would say, ‘Hey, I heard you doing this thing; I happen to know what so-and-so did.’ That was interesting — everybody told me about what somebody else did, but not themselves. Frankly, I do not know what happened. I think there are some important factors that we still don’t know, so there is a very strong mystery element in the piece, and it has a big twist at the end."
The cast, which includes Paola Miranda, Lucinda Lazo, Camilo Luera, Davie Gonzalez, Nina Marti, Bryan Sanchez, and 2023 OSC Best Actor winner Natalie Fuentes, brings to life the vibrant, albeit tumultuous, world of 1970s Chicano activism. Marti, playing a Chicana activist, shared that her preparation for her character was significantly shaped by her engagement with the historical context.

"My approach has been shaped by being immersed in a history that is unfamiliar to me," she says. "I grew up in Washington, D.C., and have a strong Latino identity, but it's not a monolithic experience. I didn't know the history of Chicano people here or what was going on at the time. So to be a part of this production and also to be very much surrounded by a theater that was born out of the Chicano movement is like getting history shot through the veins. It’s like being dropped into a moment in time, because you are surrounded by people who have some proximity to the experience. I appreciate being able to hear people's stories and honor them for what they are."

Cuarenta y Ocho's narrative also includes a compelling musical component. "The music in the play is presented as fight songs or anthems of the era," Marti says. "There's a lot of different musical styles in there; there's American sound, Chicano American music, stuff harking back to the classical sounds from Mexico, and it's largely performed live by me and Davie Gonzalez. The music represents a snapshot of the era and how it was being distilled by pop culture."

This musical backdrop enriches the storytelling, connecting audiences with the emotional core of the Chicano movement. Garcia's work on Cuarenta y Ocho has not been without its challenges, including navigating the sensitivities around the historical events and confronting the ongoing relevance of the issues it addresses.

"One of the things I hear from the cast is that things haven't changed," says Garcia. "My inclination is to go, ‘Things have really changed a lot,’ but it’s an interesting conversation. They feel that so many of the obstacles exist in invisible ways that perhaps were not as invisible at this time. The cast was also curious why they didn’t know about this before; they feel as though a part of history has been kept away from them. There's sadness, but also anger, in these conversations. Our history should really be taught in schools so people don’t walk around and think that racism doesn’t exist in our country.

"The narrative people are hearing is not entirely accurate," he adds. "In this, we don’t portray everybody as perfect and good — all the characters are flawed and struggling. That's the journey we take them on, because you know what? They're human."

The play is an open invitation for audiences to immerse themselves in an often-overlooked chapter of Chicano history. Through its exploration of the past, it encourages a reflective engagement with the present.

"I would love to see a really diverse auditorium," Marti says. "This play can engender empathy, and I hope people can embrace the idea of being uncomfortable with these truths. How tired is it to say that we're in a time of a lot of political turmoil? A lot of the American identity is fracturing, so easy to look at the past, at these idealized activists like Martin Luther King Jr., and feel like things were so clear: He was right and they were wrong. But it wasn’t, and today we're unwilling to look at the activism that's happening with any empathy. I hope that there are all kinds of people in the audience, because almost each demographic would have something to take away from it."

"It has this Hitchcockian feel to it," Garcia adds. "We know a bomb has gone off and there’s another one coming, so the clock is ticking all the way through. All we know is what will happen, not when, so it's quite suspenseful."

Cuarenta y Ocho runs through Saturday, March 23, at Su Teatro Cultural & Performing Arts Center, 721 Santa Fe Drive. Get tickets at suteatro.org.