From growing up idolizing cowboys in small town B.C. to exploring race and identity in Vancouver, Pedro Chamale’s new one-man play documents his personal story.
The play, Small Town Hoser Spic, will be part of the 31st annual Vancouver Fringe Festival, which runs Sept. 10 to 20. It tackles themes of race, identity and what it means to be Canadian.
Chamale knows the title is provocative but says it represents a journey he has gone through to be able to say those words.
“It’s an ownership thing that I am owning those facts about myself and that I cannot escape them no matter how hard I try,” Chamale says. “And that I don’t want to escape them because everything that has happened in relation to those words and myself has made me into who I am today.”
Chamale was inspired after writing a play about his parents, which made him want to examine his own story further.
“I explore this thought or these feelings that have been going around in me for awhile about identity and about what I identify with and with in this case Caucasian being the default,” he says.
Chamale is a first generation Canadian who was born and raised in Chetwynd, B.C., a small town of less than 3,000 people. He describes himself as a Latino Canadian, playwright, performer and director.
“There were no other Latinos around and my father was the poster boy for immigration in Canada. He even told me I didn’t need to speak Spanish because we were the only Spanish people there,” he says.
The poster for the play shows a young Chamale in cowboy garb sipping a grape soda. He says he spent every weekend in the summer watching cowboys and even had a friend almost make it to the Stampede.
“I used to think I was a cowboy,” Chamale says. “That’s one of the many faces and iterations of who I have been.”
Chamale loved the sense of community growing up in Chetwynd where he made lifelong friends. He says some of his favourite memories involve doing things you could only get up to in the country. But he says there is a darker side to small towns, which includes a culture of underage hard drinking.
“There’s harshness there but it’s an experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world,” he says. “I would love to go back and grow up again in Chetwynd because who else could say that your parents would open the doors in summer and say ‘see ya at dinner time.”
At the age of 18, Chamale moved to Vancouver to pursue a BFA in Theatre Performance at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. It was then that he began to struggle with his identity.
“Everyone here seems obsessed with where you’re from. I mean it’s natural to happen because people in the city come from a lot of different places,” he says.
Chamale found that many people weren’t satisfied when he self-identified as Canadian. It made him start questioning what it meant to be Canadian and he began researching his heritage.
“Now I’m in a place where I can’t call myself Canadian and I can’t call myself Latino because I feel like I abandoned part of that through no fault of my own with my parents immigrating here and not hammering away this Latino culture to me everyday,” he says.
He wanted to bring his struggles with race, identity and heritage to a wider audience with his play.
“I felt it was just time to explore this issue because I wasn’t seeing people like me with my stories being represented on stage,” Chamale says.
He hopes that people will be able to connect to his stories and experience and take away a greater understanding of small towns and what it means to be Canadian.
“Just because our skin colours are different and our speech patterns are different or our names are different, we don’t necessarily have to come from somewhere else,” he says.
“It’s OK to be Canadian and only Canadian, there’s nothing wrong with that and there’s nothing wrong with trying to embrace where you came from.”
Small Town Hoser Spic is one of two plays that Chamale’s company Rice & Beans Theatre will be performing at this years Vancouver Fringe Festival. His partner, Derek Chan, wrote Starstuff, which Chamale will also be performing in.
Chamale will perform his play at the Cultch between Sept. 11 and Sept 19.
For more information, visit vancouverfringe.com.
@BlakeEmily
