Oedipus-Inspired Pintos: The Plague of Prisons in Two Chicano Takes on the Prototypical Myth of Crisis

This article discusses two revisions of the tragic myth of Oedipus in the light of recent studies on the American prison crisis. In 2010, Luis Alfaro’s “Oedipus el Rey,” a play that draws on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, addressed the national prison crisis which has encroached on barrio life with dreadful repercussions. One year later, Ernest Drucker employed the term “plague of prisons” to describe the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the US and shed light on its effects on poor communities of color, such as barrio communities. As if responding to Drucker’s study and Alfaro’s play, Law Chavez’s “Señora de la Pinta,” presented in 2012, gets its inspiration from the myth of Oedipus to dramatize US prison experience as a plague threatening the self and the barrio. The two plays are examined for what they reveal about the impact of the prison crisis on Chicano barrio life and Chicanidad.