Waiting for Godínez
Daniel A. Olivas
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Daniel A. Olivas has long been a sharp chronicler of Chicano life, his fiction attentive to both the absurdities and indignities of American culture. In Waiting for Godínez (University of New Mexico Press), Olivas takes his most audacious step yet: an absurdist tragicomedy that transplants Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into the terrain of U.S. immigration policy. In place of Estragon and Vladimir we meet Jesús and Isabel, two Mexican friends marooned in a city park. Jesús is nightly abducted by immigration agents, locked in a cage, and—thanks to bureaucratic negligence—allowed to escape, returning to Isabel so that together they may wait, once more, for the enigmatic Godínez. The ritual repeats with Beckettian circularity. Time stalls, memory falters, and the cruelty of state power acquires the banal rhythm of routine. Olivas’s genius lies in how he allows humor to refract horror. The dialogue slides from slapstick (“Would a dog wear huaraches?”) into devastating clarity (“Ni de aquí, ni de allá”), forcing the audience to register how absurdist theater and American immigration enforcement share a logic of repetition without resolution. Where Beckett staged existential dread, Olivas stages political trauma—though in both cases, the cage remains, literal or metaphorical. Yet the play is not without tenderness. Jesús and Isabel’s banter, however futile, is threaded with loyalty. Their waiting is both ridiculous and necessary: an insistence on hope, however ill-defined, in the face of violence. Even the mysterious Godínez—part savior, part bureaucratic cipher—becomes a stand-in for every deferred promise of reform. Olivas has written, in eighty taut pages, a play that feels at once timeless and piercingly contemporary. To watch it performed (the world premiere took place at Teatro Espejo in Sacramento in 2024) is to be reminded that theater remains uniquely suited to dramatizing injustice. Onstage, the absurd becomes undeniable. |
In Waiting for Godínez, Olivas suggests that we may indeed all be condemned to live in a Beckett play. The tragedy is that for too many—those who wait in detention centers, or in legal limbo—the absurd is not metaphor but reality.
Daniel A. Olivas is an attorney, playwright, and author of 13 books, including the story collection, My Chicano Heart (University of Nevada Press), and the novel, Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press).
Daniel A. Olivas is an attorney, playwright, and author of 13 books, including the story collection, My Chicano Heart (University of Nevada Press), and the novel, Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press).
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