Composer Carla Lucero learned firsthand that when activist Olga Talamante sets her mind to getting people organized, almost anything is possible.
Lucero, a Napa-based composer who has attracted increasingly prestigious opera commissions in recent years, first came into contact with the storied activist while workshopping her Spanish language chamber opera “Juana,” about the 17th-century Mexican poet, nun and feminist icon Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Opera UCLA premiered the piece in the fall of 2019 in Los Angeles, but Lucero was honing the work in the Bay Area and her producer wanted to connect with Latinx communities.
“He said, ‘I have the perfect person for you to meet. Olga knows everybody,’” Lucero recalled on a recent video call with Talamante. “Olga is like an octopus, with tentacles everywhere. Everyone loves and respects and admires her. We brought her on board to help with community outreach for the ‘Juana’ workshop at Theater Artaud, and it sold out. I credit Olga for that.”
Wrangling an audience for a stage production is practically child’s play for Talamante, an activist who’s taken on some of the ugliest governments of the 20th century. While gearing up to tell her own story, she’s become subject of a Lucero opera herself. Commissioned and performed by the wind ensemble Quinteto Latino, the one-act production “¡Chicanísima!” premieres May 16 at Brava For Women In the Arts. (The show is already sold out, naturally).
Born in Mexicali in 1950, Talamante immigrated with her family to California’s Central Valley in the early 1960s and labored in Gilroy’s garlic fields as a child. She’s been dedicated to improving the lives of working people ever since, and Lucero’s opera traces key moments in the eventful life of the pioneering lesbian activist who became the subject of international human rights campaign.
Imprisoned and tortured by the Argentine military government responsible for the “dirty war” of the 1970s that led to the death of some 30,000 people, she was championed by the Olga Talamante Defense Committee, which petitioned the U.S. Congress and State Department for her release. After she was freed on March 27, 1976, Talamante catapulted into international prominence.
“The opera highlights of those eras of my life,” Talamente said. “I’m in the process of trying to write a book and it complements the stage that I’m at, including working with friends who were part of the campaign to get me released from prison in Argentina. When Carla first contacted me about this I was in that reflective period trying to write about it.”
“¡Chicanísima!” is part of the Chicana Latina Foundation’s Voices of Resistance series, which started in 2017 with a post-election onstage conversation at Brava that included Talamante, Joan Baez and Lila Downs. After the opera, she’ll be talking with the award-winning Mexican journalist and Brava artist-in-residence Chelis López and Armando Castellano, Quinteto Latino’s director and French hornist.
If the opera sounds like a career-capping creation, Talamante doesn’t seem to have any plans to retire. In recent years, she’s been very active in the immigration rights movement “defending children separated from their families at the border,” she said. “We’re trying to bring all those circles together, that’s the beauty of this opera. Art can save lives and give us vision and images to guide our struggles as well as provide joy.”
Recommended concert at the SFJAZZ Center
Todd Cochran, a San Francisco native who’s lived in Los Angeles since the 1970s, is a capaciously gifted pianist and composer who has long flown under the radar. He returns to the city for a rare gig at with his trio at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab Saturday May 18 with bassist John Leftwich and drummer Lyndon Rochelle. Raised in the Black middle-class Lakewood neighborhood, he started playing with saxophone great John Handy in the late 1960s. He’d just turned 20 when he recorded with vibraphone maestro Bobby Hutcherson on the classic Blue Note album “Head On,” which also featured his arrangements for the 19-piece ensemble. If his contributions have often been overlooked, it might be due to the fact that he made his best-known work under the name Bayeté, starting with his 1972 debut for Prestige “Worlds Around the Sun,” which included his tune “Free Angela” (later recorded by Santana).