DENVER — Every Puerto Rican in Colorado thinks that they are the only Puerto Rican in Colorado.
That’s what Jonathan Marcantoni, a playwright and theatre director who moved to Colorado Springs in 2015 realized as he sought out an artistic community among compatriots in the state.
“There’s a sense of, ‘there’s nobody else here,’” Marcantoni said of being Puerto Rican in a state not known for its Caribbean population.
“So we need to raise the awareness that there’s a lot of us and we can connect with each other. It’s so hard to say that there’s even a community because we’re so splintered,” he said.
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Flamboyán Theatre hopes to create a sense of community through storytelling.
In fact, Puerto Ricans now form the second-largest Latino population in Colorado with nearly 50,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census American Community Survey. That figure is up from just over 20,000 Puerto Ricans in all of Colorado in 2010.
In October 2023, United Airlines became the first carrier at Denver International Airport to offer a direct flight from Denver to San Juan.
The decision to open the route from Colorado was a way to connect more passengers from the island to the U.S. “particularly from the West Coast and Mountain West regions,” said Tom Kozlowski, the airlines’ senior manager of Latin network planning.
With those growing numbers and access, Marcantoni and his collaborators at Flamboyán Theatre — which he founded in 2022 and named after Puerto Rico’s flowering national tree — hope to create a space that lifts up Puerto Ricans in Denver through storytelling.
Now in its fundraising phase, Flamboyán aims to grow into a physical community arts space and nucleus for the Puerto Rican community.
“We’re trying to get a different diaspora perspective. We’ve seen the stories that New York produces, that Chicago produces, that Florida produces,” Marcantoni said.
In order to tell those complex stories, Flamboyán launched a new class of The Emerging BIPOC Playwrights Project in early February to mentor writers and forge connections within Denver’s theatre scene. Eventually, organizers hope to stage the productions.
That’s the stage of development that Denise Zubizarreta, a previous emerging playwright, is at with her play “Cody,” which she developed with Flamboyán.
Zubizarreta, Marcantoni and the play’s director, Narely Cortés, held auditions for the play at Raíces Brewing Company, a Puerto Rican-owned business in Denver where the fledgling theatre company holds everything but its performances.
“My play is much more about my experience, I’m not trying to educate you on my cultural space,” said Zubizarreta, who is Cuban and Puerto Rican and grew up in Miami.
“There’s a lot of Spanglish and there’s no translation, there’s no apology made, this is my experience,” she said.
A Navy veteran who was stationed at Guantánamo Bay post-9/11, Zubizarreta’s play deals with the effects her tour of duty had on herself at 21 years old and her marriage to a fellow servicemember.
Zubizarreta said talking through the play with Marcantoni, who is a retired Army veteran, helped her get deeper into the complexities of her cultural background and military service.
For example, serving at Guantánamo Bay miles away from her Cuban family but being unable to reach out to them, coping with sexual assault as a young woman, the death by suicide of her spouse and detaining political prisoners.
“The lack of humanity that existed in that space is part of what broke me, in a sense,” Zubizarreta said.
“Seeing what I was seeing, there was nowhere to go and the people who were experiencing it with you were also not going to talk to you. It’s a running joke about the Navy that we’re all alcoholics–of course we’re alcoholics! There’s a bar on every base and this is how you’re taught to cope,” she said.
Although “Cody” deals with difficult themes, Zubizarreta said it was important to inject as much dark humor as she could throughout the show.
“I didn’t want people to watch it and be in a depression,” she said.
But, the discomfort and unapologetic perspective is also the point. As newcomers to Colorado theatre, both Zubizarreta and Marcantoni said they didn’t want their work to be tokenized.
The Flamboyán Theatre Troupe reads through “Cody” at Raíces Brewing Company, where they do everything but final performances. Marcantoni said the goal is to eventually have a physical community art space for the Puerto Rican community. Photo: Liukura Mariman, courtesy Flamboyán Theatre
Most of the audiences for the play’s run, Marcantoni said, were Puerto Rican and responded by showing up to support the production.
“People responded to seeing fully-dimensional human beings and it wasn’t just the same old narrative,” he said. “Latinos like challenging material, too. It’s not just academic people who are willing to see something that’s dark.
While the company is still looking for a place to fully stage “Cody,” it will be produced as a podcast in partnership with Denver Community Media. Flamboyán also plans to produce “Empire of Solitude,” about the last days of poet Julia de Burgos, this Spring.
“As a storyteller, and as a person, if you tell a good story it will attract everyone,” Marcantoni said.
“I want people from all races and all backgrounds to come see our shows, I want them to be accessible but I want them to get a taste of what the Puerto Rican experience is.”
The finale for the emerging playwrights, with readings and discussion from writers on being Puerto Rican in the Rockies, will be held at Raíces Brewing Company August 18 from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m.
