In Step with Ana Maria Campoy, Antonieta Carpio, and Barbara Callander: ‘Carmelita: A Vindication for the Unwritten: Or How to Write Yourself Back into History’

By Richard Hao, Youth Director At Large

Edited by Laura Lee Bennett, Executive Vice President

On March 18, the Redmond Historical Society and Friends of the Redmond Library present a one-woman show about early Walla Walla resident Carmelita Colòn—featuring gold rushes, wars, outlaws, and tamale recipes. The free performance begins at 6:00 pm, followed by a discussion with the actor and playwright.

We spoke with Key City Public Theatre’s Antonieta Carpio (Carmelita), playwright Ana María Campoy, and actor/historian Barbara Callander in a brief Q&A.

Antonieta Carpio

Ana Maria Campoy

Barbara Callander

L-R: Antonieta Carpio, Ana María Campoy, and Barbara Callander. Photos: Key City Public Theatre

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RHS: What’s the inspiration behind Carmelita and what inspired the play?

Ana María Campoy: I was commissioned to write a play for this project around what suffrage meant for other women, specifically women of color, during that era in Washington state.

We came across Carmelita Colón, an early migrant, but there was little to no information about her. What inspired me initially was how difficult she was to find in records. It made me realize how much of women’s history in general―and even more so for women of color, migrant women, and working-class women―is not recorded. A lot of the history we have of women from the last 100 years or so is about women of means or women associated with power. It’s very rare for history to include the story of women of color or working-class women.

Shining a light on that and expanding upon it was what I was excited about. Also, the fact that she started a Mexican restaurant. [As] a child of Mexican immigrants myself, a big access point to my culture my whole life has been food. Food has been a space of healing for me, and I recognize this for others as well. It’s a space where we continue practicing culture, where we see our culture evolve. It’s where we learn about our languages, our histories, our families. It’s across the kitchen table.

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[As] a child of Mexican immigrants myself, a big access point to my culture my whole life has been food. Food has been a space of healing for me, and I recognize this for others as well. It’s a space where we continue practicing culture, where we see our culture evolve. It’s where we learn about our languages, our histories, our families. It’s across the kitchen table.

-Ana María Campoy

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The idea for a history play—shared like stories around a kitchen table—came from two things: how hard she was to track down and her connection to Washington history through food.

RHS: Is there a specific reason you chose to have only one actor? Is she the same character throughout?

Ana María Campoy: Actually, it’s 19 different characters throughout. [The play]  was commissioned to be a solo show, so that was the original commission as well. But I’m also someone who has done solo shows, and I love them. They’re a really awesome, fun challenge as an actor.

There’s something really powerful about seeing what one person can do in storytelling just by using the gifts they carry with them: their imagination, their body, their voice. We’re very lucky to have Antonieta on board for this project—and to be my dream Carmelita, honestly.

RHS: How does that work? Do you just take on different voices?

Antonieta Carpio: Yes, I put on different voices for each of my characters. But I also leave characters on stage with me and talk to them. So if I’m talking to my mama, and then I am mama, I make sure I’m looking in a certain direction. Then I have to make sure I put mama in the same place that I left her before. So I’m leaving people on stage with me in places as I become others to talk to them.

It’s an interesting endeavor because I play her villains, her heroes, her inspirations. Not only do I take on those characters, but Carmelita gets to become those people as well and embody them and take on different perspectives, which is interesting and [a bit] meta. Basically, I’m talking to myself the whole time.

Ana María Campoy: There is one character that is a voice recording because it’s supposed to be an AI-type character, the Voice of History. It’s [like] when you go through a museum and you have the little thing you’re listening to, and you hear the tour guide. The idea is that Carmelita disrupts that and is like, no, no, no, we’re going to change what the tour guide is saying about me because there’s not enough history being said.

Antonieta Carpio: The play starts off in a museum. You get introduced to Carmelita as a mannequin, and [then] she comes to life and tells her story―because she doesn’t agree with what the AI tour guide is saying. So she’s saying, I’ll do it. You can be quiet.

RHS: What do you hope audiences take away from the play?

Ana María Campoy: We talk about all sorts of different things because during that time period in the United States, there was colonization and imperialism happening with Indigenous people in the United States and in Mexico at the same time. There was also enslavement and then the Civil War. There’s a huge amount of history that we cover across Carmelita’s lifetime, from the age of five to about 45 years old. Across those 40 years, so much happens.

To build a future, to build a world with justice and dignity for everyone, it takes all of us participating in small ways. We may not think of the acts of taking care of each other as revolutionary, but that’s truly where the revolution lies.

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To build a future, to build a world with justice and dignity for everyone, it takes all of us participating in small ways. We may not think of the acts of taking care of each other as revolutionary, but that’s truly where the revolution lies.

-Ana María Campoy

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There’s a quote that Abuela, her grandmother, says to her repeatedly throughout: “Every wave makes a crash.” That is one of the messages I want people to think about. You may think this action is not enough, but all of it crashes on the shore. We just have to keep going.

Though it’s about history from 150 years ago, it’s still incredibly relevant. The idea of children being victims of the greed of adults, that food is still being used as a way to hurt and harm people and control people, and that feeding people is still considered a revolutionary act. We talk about displacement, what causes displacement for people, how we seek justice for those folks, and also access to education.

When we talk about suffrage, it’s not just having access to vote. It means we have a right to be educated. We have a right to be fed. We have a right to have dignity and safety. That is something that should be innate to all humans.

Antonieta Carpio: One of the biggest things that is so relevant right now is the erasure of migrant stories. If people went home being curious about other people’s stories and other people’s cultures, that is a big win. Our administration/capitalist society spends a lot of time making sure that we only see one narrative. What’s amazing to me is that Carmelita has an opportunity to tell her own story, and there are people listening.

RHS: You mentioned earlier that it was difficult to uncover her history. What documents and what process did you have to go through to make this possible?

Ana María Campoy: Barbara can talk a little bit about what she looked up, but she went to the Seattle [Public] Library. [There is]  an incredible room called the Seattle Room at the Central Library. It has all sorts of early records and publications and access to newspapers, and there are heavy-duty librarian researchers there.

We found two census records. She was divorced, which was a huge discovery because her ex-husband married four times in his lifetime, and we found him with other wives after they were divorced. Barbara found a census record of her in Walla Walla as a tamale maker, and [she] was listed as tamale maker and restaurateur in Walla Walla after he was remarried.

We figured out that she did leave him and was able to have her own life, and she owned land, she had a home. But in terms of her life before then, and her life after that census record, there was nothing.

For me, the research part was understanding that she worked on a mule train. Barbara and I researched what mule trains were, why they were necessary in the West and mining towns, and [what]that had to do with the geography of Washington. Then researching where the tradition of working with horses and burros comes from in Mexico, and that led me to Sonora, Mexico, which was a delightful discovery because that’s where my family is from as well.

That was really incredible, learning that whole side of the history of Sonora. I learned about what was going on with the history of the Mexican government and the Yaqui, noticing many parallels with how the U.S. government has harmed Indigenous populations.

Then I started looking into who else in Washington I did not know about. I started researching specifically women and people of color within Washington and California. There’s a mention of Ma Hop and Lee stores in the California Gold Rush; those were actual stores owned by Asian immigrants, mainly Chinese immigrants, in California at that time.

I also learned about Madame Damnable, who was a madam in Seattle and owned a hotel. It was one of the early hotels in Seattle, and it also served as Seattle’s courthouse. So it was a brothel part-time and a courthouse part-time.

I also researched hidden LGBTQ history in Washington. There’s a mention in the show about Carmelita having to wear pants to disguise herself as a young man so that she’s safe. In the full production, one of the things we had on the set were photos of young trans men who were living in the Northwest at that time.

There’s also Sarah Yesler and Eliza Heard. Queer history researchers in Seattle found love letters between the two women, and they are very explicit. Even though Sarah Yesler is married to one of the founding fathers of Seattle, Henry Yesler, she had a lesbian lover for years and years and years. I tried to put little pockets of that throughout.

Even Mr. Burke, who has two lines in the show, her lawyer was a real lawyer in Seattle who helped women get divorces during that time.

Barbara Callander: This whole project, this play and the other play that we’re doing, which is called Her Ink Her Voice, about a Black woman who was the associate editor of the Black-owned Seattle Republican newspaper―the whole thing grew out of a project to create companion pieces about women of color to a play called May’s Vote, which I have toured for many years, about the two women who led the Washington state campaign that won the vote for women in Washington in 1910.

So when I began to research, we were looking for a Mexican woman. I found a HistoryLink article about Mexican women in Washington. It basically said, if I recall, Carmelita Colón and her husband came to Walla Walla in the 1860s. They ran a mule train to Idaho. When that failed, they had a Mexican restaurant, and their descendants had lived in Walla Walla until the 1950s.

The hook here to the suffrage movement is that in 1871, Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Scott Dunaway from Oregon came up the Columbia River to Walla Walla, among other places, stumping for suffrage. That was the link. That’s why I chose Carmelita.

Then, as Ana María said, when she and I went back to begin to research, it was like there’s nothing there. Fortunately, her husband, Sebastian, actually did show up quite a bit. We found his fourth marriage license. We found him in the 1900 census with another woman with a kind of similar name, but not hers. We did find Carmelita in the 1901 city directory as tamale maker. Meanwhile, he’s up in Spokane making tamales with some other woman with the last name of Colón. So it was this wonderful question of how to write women back into history.

Ana María Campoy: When we were researching Sebastian, we found that he immigrated from Spain. The thing about tamales is that tamales are [an] Indigenous food. It’s not Spanish at all. That means he would not only not have made it; he would not have experienced it until he came to the Americas.

So that was one thing for me: we have a man taking credit for women’s work. We found newspaper articles calling him the “king of tamales”. That’s funny. That’s not his culture. That’s not his food. Clearly, it’s all her work that she brought this in. That was another thread we discovered in seeing whose history is written about and whose is not.

RHS: What scene was most difficult to perform in the play, and why?

Antonieta Carpio: In the full production last year, it was two acts and a 2:10 run, so it was kind of a beast for a solo performer.

At the start of the second act, we start with the Yaqui genocide. We really depict the crimes that happened to the Yaqui people through colonization and greed and hate. Embodying those people, knowing my lineage and ancestral connection to that as well, it takes you out. But it’s so important.

In the touring show, which is just an hour, the hardest theme for me is when I’m a young child and I have to leave, or my mom is telling me I have to go, because where we live in Sonora has become unsafe, and she’s asking me to move to California with my papa and with my brother, who have already left.

That story is near and dear to my heart as a migrant. We moved from El Salvador to LA in the ’90s, but it’s always like that. First it was my uncle that came, found a job, started the paperwork. Then it was my grandma that came and was living in the tiny apartment with him and working and trying to figure it out, counting their coins. Then my mom came. So that story of family separation is very common within the migrant community.

When they have to send Carmelita away, not for work, but for her safety because there’s war, it’s sad. But thankfully, they have that option. If her papa and her brother weren’t there, maybe they would have sent Carmelita anyway on her own. That’s crazy to think about too, because she’s 10 when she does that.

RHS: What was everyone’s favorite part of the play or production process?

Antonieta Carpio: My favorite part of the play is a part that I always struggle with line-wise, but I love when Henry Plummer comes to play. He’s the vigilante of the Wild West. He comes to steal things from Carmelita and her husband that are on the mule train. That moment’s really exciting. There’s guns, there’s a lasso, there’s burros, there’s a homie trying to steal things. I won’t tell you what happens at the end, but that’s my favorite part.

Ana María Campoy: That’s one of my favorite parts. Also, as someone who grew up in a large family with a lot of women, I’m the second girl of 20 cousins on one side of my family. There are so many of us. I grew up with a lot of voices and sounds, and there’s always someone cheering, happy and singing, someone crying over here.

Seeing that framework of her childhood, surrounded by love and joyful chaos, is one of my favorite moments of the play.

I grew up with a lot of my tias being like my other mother for me. There’s a couple of my tias that I lived with throughout my childhood that were like other moms. So to find parts of their personality that I was able to interweave into certain characters, [I find it] meaningful to see their tenacity, love of community, and diligence in protecting women and serving women.

One of my aunts is a big participant in what she wouldn’t call mutual aid―she would just call it supporting people, but it’s essentially mutual aid in Mexico. To be able to interweave that into the play was an honor. It was a way not just to honor these people of history, but also to thank my family for the lessons they have given me.

Barbara: I like the Henry Plummer part. It’s pretty cool.

I’m so happy we were able to create this amazing play. Ana María was able to create this with a little bit of help from me at the beginning, which is really about empowering women and writing women back into history. I just love the play. I’m very excited about it.