Every week we will be sharing new plays by our Heal the Divide playwrights. This week’s play is Dreaming, by Long Beach playwright Diana Burbano .
The ending of DACA, and the lack of response to Puerto Rico, made me want to dig deeper into stories of the immigrant community. I recently met a woman, a beautiful Mexican woman who is a jazz singer, who shared with me heartbreaking stories of how she had been treated as a Mexican in America. How her humanity was questioned because she worked minimum wage or under the table jobs. I had another friend who recently saw her daughters fiancé off to basic training. He assumed that of course he would be naturalized, because he was willing to die for his adopted country. He had been singled out by recruiters because he was a poor undocumented Latino. I put the stories together, and it became a short story of a mother saying goodbye to her child.