Ricardo A. Bracho is a queer Chicano Marxist playwright from Los Angeles whose theatrical works dramatize the lives of gay Black and Brown partisans of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Characterized by their playful use of theory, Bracho’s plays utilize the stage as a place for characters to debate questions of sexual and political liberation. Though Bracho’s work has been breaking ground within the experimental Latinx theater and arts community since the 1990s, his plays have not been widely accessible beyond their staging. Driven by passion—for politics, for the dancefloor, for dispossessed bodies, communities, and lands—Bracho’s award-winning plays express a polyphony of outlaw voices and contemporary dramas. With a foreword by Bracho’s teacher and iconic Chicana writer CherrÍe Moraga, an afterword by Juana Maria Rodriguez, as well as critical notes and an introduction by editors Jennifer Ponce de León, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Randall Williams, Puto makes Bracho’s key works available to a broader public for the first time, bringing Bracho’s frank, transgressive, and revolutionary work to the forefront just when the world needs it most.
By:
Ricardo A Bracho
Foreword by:
Cherríe Moraga
Edited by:
Jennifer Ponce de León,
Richard T. Rodríguez,
Randall Williams
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 572g
ISBN: 9781478029496
ISBN 10: 1478029498
Pages: 238
Publication Date: 10 March 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
General/trade
,
Undergraduate
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Foreword / CherrÍe Moraga Author’s Acknowledgments Editors’ Acknowledgments Introduction / Jennifer S. Ponce de León, Richard T. RodrÍguez, and Randall Williams The Sweetest Hangover El Santo Joto Ni Madre Mexican Psychotic Appetites I Have Inherited Sissy Puto A Black and A Brown “I Don’t Do Plot, I Do Ideology”: Interview with Ricardo A. Bracho / Jennifer S. Ponce de León Afterword / Juana MarÍa RodrÍguez Bibliography Contributors Index
Ricardo A. Bracho is Abrams Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Reviews for Puto: Plays
""Bracho is one of the most important and innovative US playwrights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The themes that Bracho takes on in his plays are crucial for understanding racism, colonialism, decolonization, contemporary politics, and liberation for all peoples. These plays constitute a fantastic experimentation in aesthetic form as well. This collection is an outstanding work of dramaturgy.”—María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States “Puto is the House of Bracho we all need to belong to. Ricardo Bracho’s collection of work and reflective writings by his long time carnalas takes us on a joyride filled with house music that refuses the romanticism that art practice is activism. Instead, Puto offers us writing filled with contradictions, exhilaration, mess, and excess that ‘gives us another way.’”—Deborah R. Vargas, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
