La Mujer que Cayo del Cielo, by famed Mexican playwright Victor Hugo Rascón Banda, is in three languages—Spanish, English, and Raramuri, the language of the indigenous people the Spanish called "Tarahumara." The "Tarahumara" call themselves "Raramuri" or "Runners," and since the arrival of Europeans, they have been pushed into ever less arable regions of the Sierra Tarahumara, in the northern state of Chihuahua, México. It is unlikely that many theatre-goers understand all three languages, so most in the audience will experience a tiny bit of the bewilderment that engulfed the Raramuri woman Rita Carillo, also known as Rita Quintero, during her more than twelve years of involuntary incarceration in Larned State Hospital, in Larned, Kansas.
   La Mujer que Cayo del Cielo is a documentary drama based on a true story. In 1983, Rita Carillo was found searching through a garbage can in a small town in western Kansas. Arrested by the police, she was sent for psychiatric evaluation and then committed to Larned State Hospital, where she was diagnosed schizophrenic and subjected to psychotropic medications. She was presumed to be Hispanic, though she could speak little Spanish. A note in her file quoted her as identifying herself as Tarahumara, but this information was first discounted and then forgotten. Indeed, Carillo's habits of dress and hygiene—all the norm for the Raramuri—were considered proof of pathology in Larned, Kansas. For over twelve years, none of her keepers spoke to her in a language she could understand, and she spoke to no one who could understand her. In 1995, a patient advocacy group, Kansas Advocacy and Protective Services, began to ask questions about Rita Carillo, and slowly the imprisoning bands of the bureaucracy began to loosen. She was able to consult with a Raramuri-speaking physician and eventually return to Chihuahua. Meanwhile, Kansas Advocacy and Protective Services filed a law suit against the Larned staff and supervisors on Carillo's behalf, in hopes of preventing similar malpractice in the future.
   When citizens of Kansas first learned about the ordeal of Rita Carillo, through a series of prize-winning articles by Mary Sanchez in the Kansas City Star, the lesson of the story seemed clear. Here was a case that exposed a number of social wrongs: a callous disregard of the poor and weak; the chemicalization of medical care (Carillo's doctors seemed to start with medication as a given and then work backwards to a diagnosis); ethnocentrism that willfully ignored cultural difference, indeed, that equated cultural difference with pathology; and a healthcare system that denied its clients a voice.

   In La Mujer, Rascón Banda does indeed bring forward these aspects of the drama. But it is not the whole drama. If it were, then the problem would have been resolved when Carillo's identity was revealed and she was repatriated, with nothing more to mourn than twelve lost years of life. But this play gives us more to think about than that and leaves us facing malevolent forces that no lawsuit has yet restrained.
   In this sense, too, the play is true to historical reality. For Carillo's linguistic isolation mirrors the situation of her whole people, whose language, like so many other indigenous languages, faces extinction. As Joshua Fishman, in Reversing Language Shift, argues, "The destruction of languages is an abstraction which is concretely mirrored in the concomitant destruction of intimacy, family and community, the destruction of local life by mass-market hype and fad, of the weak by the strong, of the unique and traditional by the uniformizing, purportedly "stylish' and purposely ephemeral." And while Carillo was first arrested for rummaging through a garbage can, thousands of her people, pushed off their land by mining, lumber, and drug-growing interests, today beg for food in the streets of Mexican cities. No wonder there is no resolution just because Carillo is sent "home."
   In his studies of debilitating illnesses, Oliver Sacks describes the "paradox of disease," in which the human body responds to trauma with creative adaptation. Rascón Banda's play evokes but strains against this optimistic paradigm. Carillo found a way to live through her years of confinement, but at what cost? The Raramuri survive and are the subjects of a newly designed bilingual education program, but do we dare to calculate what has already been lost? And the body of the human race as a whole may indeed survive the amputation of its indigenous members, one after the other, but can it do so in any state that looks like a fulfilling life? Could the final image of Rita Carillo at the end of this play pre-figure a fate that awaits us all? La Mujer que Cayo del Cielo, in addition to its faithfulness to historical facts, is true to the spirit of these questions.

Margy Stewart
—Professor of English, Washburn University