Friday, July 25, at 1:30 p.m. in Room 333, Smith Memorial Student Union, at Portland State University

A Conversation with Alana is a one-act play performed by its author, Dr. Carlos E. Cortes, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of California, Riverside. This performance is one of a series of parallel sessions for a Core Commitments conference being held by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. For play description, see below. I had the opportunity to see this play while participating in Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication at Reed College. This annual conference is put on by the Intercultural Communication Institute, a private, non-profit foundation designed to foster an awareness and appreciation of cultural differences in both the international and domesitc arenas.

The play is a unique opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a man who was part of many cultures but never quite fit any of them. It is well worth seeing for any of us who work with kids from multicultural backgrounds (or, for those of us who know this experience first hand.

A CONVERSATION WITH ALANA: ONE BOY’S MULTICULTURAL RITE OF PASSAGE

“A Conversation with Alana” is a one-hour, one-person autobiographical play written and performed by Carlos E. Cortés, Riverside. In his play, Cortés presents his story of growing up as a young man of mixed ancestry in racially segregated, religiously divided early post-World War II Kansas City, Missouri. The son of a Mexican Catholic immigrant father and an American-born Jewish mother, whose parents came from Austria and Ukraine, Cortés had to learn to navigate Kansas City’s rigid racial, ethnic, and religious fault lines, while simultaneously dealing with the internal conflicts of his own divided family.