Performance,Democracy,and the Commune in the Black Sheep Revolution

El Cine Anauco: A Shelter From The Storm

The Black Sheep was staged onsite in the ruins of a real theatre, the Cine Anauco, which was an icon of an ascendant urban middle class in midcentury Caracas. The cine-club, a combination dinner club and movie theatre, was built in 1946, featuring films of the era, as well as music, cocktails, and dining to entertain the working- and middle-class neighborhood of San Bernardino. Severely damaged in the earthquake of 1967, however, and without resources to refurbish, the building was abandoned for twenty years until Román Chalbaud chose the location for the filming of The Black Sheep. Chalbaud recalls that he passed by the cinema frequently while walking on his way downtown from his home in San Bernardino and imagined the abandoned cinema as the set location for The Black Sheep in memory of its former grandeur. ¹¹

A relatively simple exterior of the Cine Anauco hides its former opulence; a ceiling soared above a wide and raised stage where jazz and comedy, salsa, and big band played to the promise of advancement in the rising oil-rich nation. From the 1940s, at the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Vicente Gomez and the beginning of a democratic aperture led by one of Venezuela’s most famous novelists, Rómulo Gallegos, hundreds of thousands of domestic migrants arrived in the city. By the 1960s, with the promise of “fast capitalism” in the oil-rich nation, jobs and opportunity drove hundreds of thousands to migrate to the city. What awaited them, however, were chronic problems in housing and unequal distribution of income, which by the 1980s had become an acute crisis. The pressing inequality inspired playwright Román Chalbaud to write:

Considering that from the first exploitations of our natural riches, the population has tripled, and the national budget is one hundred times stronger, yet the majority of the population that makes it possible for the lavish excesses of a minority, continues to be as poor as in the era of when the country depended on coffee and chocolate. [. . .] Considering that throughout the hills of staircases and tin shacks, more than half a million contemplate their lives from houses surrounded by garbage, far away from the excesses of wealth and abundance . . . (1974: 128)

For Chalbaud, the actual Cine Anauco mirrored the decline of decadence, a mid-century Caracas largely fallen into ruins both morally and physically through a rampage of capitalist and consumerist influences. After the film was recorded, the building itself was eventually demolished and turned into an apartment building.

In the shuttered Cine Anauco, the theatre in ruins became a refuge for the poor who sought housing and relief from social inequities. Patricia C. Márquez documents the housing crisis in Caracas, where in the late 1980s, income disparity was critical, driving families and young people out of their homes and onto the streets. During the filming of The Black Sheep, the wealthiest 20 percent of Venezuela’s households claimed ten times more income than the poorest 20 percent in the country. ¹² Thus, given the greater demands for housing, abandoned buildings like the Cine Anauco were regularly squatted by those who could not afford the highly exclusive rents. Occupations, whether legal or not, were difficult for law enforcement to apprehend given the frequency of absentee landlords. Spaces like the Cine Anauco thus presented an opportunity for shelter and communal living as is depicted in the film.

Not incidentally, its name, the anauco, refers to a medicinal shade tree native to South America and known for its analgesic healing properties. ¹³ The widespread branches of the anauco also provided cover for the better growth of coffee and cacao, such that the anauco was associated, as Andres Bello said, with “simple and rhythmic tranquility.” ¹⁴ In this sense, the Cine Anauco carries an even broader bio-regional memory of the shade-tree sanctuary and a symbol of not only resistance, but also healing, resurrection, and peace.

In the film, after we meet and understand that parishioners occupying the theatre are part of a survivant underground, the plot takes a turn when Evelio (Javier Zapata), a hunky captain of La Nigua’s gang, meets and falls in love with Sagrario (Zamira Segura), a young sex worker who is the survivor of domestic abuse. The young lovers appeal to La Nigua to admit Sagrario to the Cine Anauco community, since, like the others, she has nowhere else to turn. The hitch is that Sagrario’s stalker ex-husband, Jairo, is a police officer whose violent obsession with Sagrario threatens to take down the commune. To further complicate the plot, La Nigua’s son, Hermes, falls in love with Evelio, adding a triangular tension to the fledgling relationship and their loyalties as they endeavor to financially support the burgeoning community with food, clothing, and medicine.

After one successful heist of a baroness who was charmed by the resident fortune-teller Esotérico (Arturo Calderón), the Robin Hood thieves of the Cine Anauco rejoice and ambitiously announce that the stars are aligned for their grand finale—robbing a jewelry store on Christmas Eve. The celebration is topped off with the happy announcement that Sagrario is pregnant and due to deliver on the same night as the burglary. Tragically, however, the jewelry store heist becomes their last. Just as Sagrario is giving birth under starlight that streams through the tattered roof of the old theatre, the same stars that Esotérico later bemoans for having failed him, Jairo the jealous police officer foils their plot, and the commune of the Cine Anauco meets its tragic fate as the police violently invade their compound.

The Cine Anauco as a decadent ruins, refuge, and resistance, in many ways, is a story just as much about the physical space of the theatre as it is about society. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz mark the distinction between a theatrical space that separates spectator and actor, next to what audiences perceive as the separation of the stage from the “everyday social sphere” (2012, 4). In this case, The Black Sheep draws from the references of the everyday social sphere in such a way that reflects the reality of its time producing a merger of the spectator and actor in part through the space of the Cine Anauco. In other words, the stage depicted in the film, marks all of these: spectator and actor, space of ruin, space of refuge, and space in which resistance narratives are revived towards making a new society.

La Nigua, as the leader of the underground Cine Anauco, can also be perceived in multiple ways: as a mother, as a militant, and as a matriarch of communal leadership. Rather than top-down, La Nigua, translated as mite or tick, suggesting the unassuming power of small beings to antagonize the mighty—a populist sensibility from below. A character familiar in Chalbaud’s many productions of theatre and film, the matronly jefa in this case, reflects self-governing women-led communities, aligned with the crucial role of women in urban land committees and housing cooperatives of the revolution (Motta, 2013: 9). La Nigua as woman and leader of the Cine Anauco supervises this alternative underground society for refugees: the commune.

We also learn from La Nigua that she leads the village of squatters in part because her husband who was accused of being a “subversive” working against the state, was captured and assassinated by the police, an experience with the police that no doubt allows her to identify with Sagrario’s trauma. As she supervises the duties of the men in the commune, however, we are also reminded that the inside space of the theater carries its own rule of law—both in response to and in reverse of the propertied class and the state. The lawyer forges identification cards for the undocumented. The tailor sews up costumes for disguise. The locksmith rigs up tools for breaking into and entering property. These tasks of the communards are not just acts of subversive resistance. The so-called criminal gang that La Nigua takes care of literally in the orchestra pit of the former bourgeoisie presents both the delusional parody of failed neo-liberalism and the possibility of its alternative remaking. They are as much about citizen artists in the act of creating a new state by the dismantling of the old—whereby the new residents of the Cine Anauco take over the decadent remains of the previous regime, and within its shell they construct a counter-society to the world outside.

Through La Nigua, the film parodies romanticized spiritualism with references to popular religiosity. As La Nigua prays for her son, she calls on the figure of María Lionza, an icon for followers in her faith, known as the Queen of the Jaguars (Barreto, 1995). Hundreds of thousands of people make pilgrimage each year to a central altar in honor of María Lionza located on the mountain of Sorte, where it is said she was born as a goddess of Yaracuy chiefs, protector of waters, and the ruler of several courts including the Corte Malandro, or Corte Calé, of Robin Hood “santos” who would steal from the rich and distribute the funds among those dispossessed in the barrios of Caracas. ¹⁵ As a leader of rebellions, Maria Lionza is not alone; the famed Taina leader Anacoana in 1503 is said to have organized a rebellion against the Spanish genocidal repression on the island of Ayiti (present-day Haiti). In that year, Anacoana called for a ceremony in which eighty-four regional leaders gathered in her honor allegedly to begin the rebellion. Spanish troops ambushed the event in a preemptive attack. Like La Nigua at the end of the film (spoiler), it is said that rather than surrendering, Anacoana remained a faithful warrior to defend her people resulting in her execution.

In this sense, the Cine Anauco calls on deeper memories of resistance against a violent and genocidal invasion as much as against a pattern of colonial laws that would render them landless and enslaved. As a site of anti-colonial resistance, the commune is justified in their defense against an occupying army, confronting the distortions of the ruling order by openly turning to so-called criminality against it. ¹⁶ The commune in the film then leads to a parallel economy of laws and a way of life. This is most evident when Jairo, the police-husband stalker, discovers that Evelio is Sagrario’s new lover. Jairo finds the couple selling vegetables at the public food market. After harassing Sagrario, Jairo arrests Evelio for “obstructing justice.” In response to Evelio’s arrest, the community of the Cine Anauco comes up with a plan for his legal defense.

At one point the communards rehearse a mock trial in defense of Evelio on the stage of the theatre. The stage thus becomes a space to contest the claims over law, criminality, and civic order. One of the elderly residents of the commune pretends to take the stand as his doting middle-class grandmother. Documents are created to attest to his upstanding citizenship. The lawyer argues the case with articulate and unwavering conviction following all protocols of the court. During this rehearsal “trial,” the audience of comuneros in the seats of the old theatre cheers on the plausibility of their mockery in preparation for the “real-life” event of the trial. Thus, we see the “false” story of Evelio’s upstanding citizenship staged by his companions next to his true innocence in being framed for a crime while selling vegetables at the market. Likewise, the rehearsal of the law, staged as a mock trial in the theatre, is juxtaposed with an entirely unjust system, equally scripted and theatrical for the real-life “due process” with the judge. Of course, what is suggested in this juxtaposition is that due process is rigged by the charlatans of the state as much as, and even more unjustly than, the malandro communards.

The name of the film, The Black Sheep, points to this rebellious and even revolutionary nature of the commune in relation to the state. Its members are society’s “black sheep,” an idiomatic expression in both Spanish and English meaning someone—usually a family member—who is outside the order, the one gone astray, defamed or outcast. But, more than outlaws, the story orchestrates the reversed polarity between these two bodies: the patriarchal state vs. the woman-led queer misfits; those who break the law vs. those who enforce it; the commune (Anauco residents) vs. the individual (Jairo) as bad cop, reality vs illusion; just as it merges other perhaps more familiar binaries: birth and death; angels and devils; good and bad. There is of course a certain irony in the story of the black sheep, where members of the community of the Cine Anauco survive the conditions of a failed state by dwelling in the symbolic ruins of its decadent past. In La Nigua’s dramatic last stand, even as the embers are still falling, viewers are left with an inkling of hope for Sagrario and the birth of her child. The Cine Anauco is no longer a site of decadence but now one of refuge, and in the final moments, a poignant legacy in which the squatters in the cine have justifiably refused the state and persist in rebuilding anew. This does not come, however, without tremendous sacrifice.

At the end of the story, La Nigua, learning that her beloved son Hermes was killed in their botched plan to rob a jewelry store, takes on Jairo and the police in one last stand. In the final tragic moments of the film, La Nigua resolves to defend the commune to her death. She marches past the relic statues of angels along the passageway of the old theatre. Her petite saintly frame with her housedress is offset by the machine gun in her hand. As she steps out onto the street, knowing she is against impossible odds, she whirls around and shoots Jairo with her famous last line, “la maldita ley” (“the damned law”). He falls just before the entire police line opens fire on La Nigua. The police storm the building, while the elders and Sagrario (in labor) witness their communal utopia being destroyed. The camera view takes us to the back of the theatre where the curtained wall opens onto the city of Caracas, smoke filtering against a horizon line of city lights. From Sagrario’s screams, fireworks of the fiestas explode, and the epic theme music rolls to the credits. Again, the separation of spectator and actor, both who witness the destruction and new birth, seems to dissolve just as the separation between the stage and the everyday social sphere brings the film into context of its reality outside the theatre walls. Decades later in the 2010s, the space of the theatre—in both senses that Fischer-Lichte and Wihstutz suggest—carries this memory as it is destroyed and resurrected. ¹⁷

Barrio Theatres

Decades after the characters in the film squatted in and were forced out of the abandoned theatre in the 1980s, organizers from the poorest municipal sectors recuperated the theatre as a vital place of democratic participation. As part of 21^st century socialism in Venezuela, communal bank Fundacomunal was established to support thousands of community-led programs around the country. One such program is a municipal initiative, FundArte, in which neighborhood groups restored abandoned theatres to build community performance and meeting spaces. ¹⁸ Today, residents throughout the city have refurbished a dozen or more theatres that currently serve as active spaces for organizations to meet, for workshops and community classes, and for hosting a season of touring productions. While the characters of The Black Sheep sought shelter in the theatre from a failed neo-liberal state, in this case, activists and organizers from neighborhoods around the city have worked with the support of the revolutionary state to recuperate the theatre as a vital place of deliberation, participation, and debate in civic affairs.

While the election of Hugo Chávez Frías galvanized the policy and structures to support social programs such as FundArte, people living in poor and working class urban neighborhoods in the capital city of Caracas already had played a major role in organizing self-determined political action groups that became the cornerstone of the Bolivarian project. ¹⁹ In the first decade of the revolution, over thirty thousand cooperatives, known as comunas, were organized throughout the country in a model of locally controlled governance. Many of the comunas that emerged were directly in lineage to early social and political barrio groups who were squatters, militants, and “outsiders” of the law (Ciccariello-Maher, 2016). In other words, militants like La Nigua and the other occupants of the Cine Anauco, might well have realized the legitimacy of their project as a non-violent commune and neighborhood organizing center had they survived to the new millennium.

By 2010, even theatres as large as the Teresa Carreño fine arts complex, became the home for communal councils, unions, advocacy groups, and other barrio organizers around the country. With mounting opposition pressure against the revolutionary state, community members of the popular neighborhoods of Caracas strengthened their resolve to build social and cultural programs of their own in what was coined a “government of the streets.” During this time, efforts to refurbish storefronts and housing, clinics, and schools, including abandoned theatres in their neighborhoods, became part of a deepening commitment to popular power with the support of public banks and the municipal left-leaning PSUV leadership.

The day I visited the Teatro Alameda in March of 2014, the door to the theatre was open onto the bustling main street of the near central working-class barrio of San Agustín. Three employed instructors, two of whom lived within a few blocks of the theater, passed between the gallery-space lobby and main office in preparation for workshops they were offering that evening in drumming, dance, and the cuatro (a four-string, guitar-like instrument popular in Venezuela). One of the coordinators of the space, also a resident of the area, told me about the café that opens in the evening to serve food and beverages to theatregoers and others in the community. Tickets for the venue amounted to reasonable and accessible rates, with many of the events and classes totally free and open to the public. That week, despite the shutdowns in other parts of the city due to street protests, an African dance workshop was happening, and several neighborhood groups were using the lobby space as a meeting place.

In the case of the Teatro Alameda, the building had been virtually abandoned for decades. After its heyday in the 1950s, it became a warehouse and was later left fallow for decades, falling into disrepair. In 2003, a group of artists and activists began a cleanup project of the tons of toxic waste and garbage that had been dumped in the building, formalizing the group as a citizen’s assembly a year later. According to artist and activist Javier Madrid, who was part of the initial cleanup and subsequent organizing, the process was not easy (2014). When they first occupied the space in 2004, the municipal police showed up to force them out based on property laws. In Javier Madrid’s words:

We gained the respect of the community through this work because we were not grabbing these spaces for our own personal interests to enrich ourselves. Rather, these spaces were taken in order to educate all people who come from whatever place in the city, whatever part of the world, to take music classes. The teachers here are giving classes because it is a vocation of the heart. Here, everyone gives it all so that people can learn. [. . .] There were people in the community who even cried because they didn’t know that such a beautiful place was even here in the neighborhood. The community did not have access to these spaces like they do today. We were able to recuperate it. This is where we had meetings. We had dance recitals. There was a group of women who were practicing biotherapy. But we did not have the stage as we do now. [. . .] For me personally, it has been a beautiful experience because I feel like I contributed something to my country and to my neighborhood. I’ve given years of sentimental struggle so that future generations will have something beautiful that they can enjoy inside the neighborhood, and, well, to keep for their history (Interview, 2014).

Interestingly, the process in the case of Teatro Alameda was even further complicated because the building belonged to the extended family of the former presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, who owned several such buildings under the film empire of Circuito Radonski.

Tensions over who claimed legal rights to the theatre space prevailed. The owners of the theatre filed a complaint that the community organizations took over the space in violation of private property rights. The political position of Capriles Radonski presented a further suspicion that the takeover was politically motivated. Even though the project began in 2003, the case was being presented as an expropriation of the state alleged as evidence of “political persecution.” Community groups, on the other hand, argued that the property had been abandoned and was a public nuisance in their neighborhood. Garbage and other toxic dumping of decaying film and other chemicals in the space meant a health hazard to nearby residents. “But we in San Agustín had our imagination nourished by the stories of the Alameda Theatre,” Reinaldo Mijares, now director of the theater recalled. “We always dreamt of taking it back, to have a home for the different artistic expressions we find in this neighborhood.” ²⁰ It took years to petition for the rights to open the space. After community-wide mobilization, they began a public dialogue with support from the mayor’s office, and eventually raised the money through the state to complete the renovation.

In March 2014, when I asked FundArte Production Coordinator Ricardo Pernilla about the politicization of these spaces, he replied: “Performance with social and political content needs to be shown. But culture for us is not closed-off or fixed to any one political alignment. It should be totally open. What better way of doing that than making as many opportunities as possible for participation here in Caracas?” ²¹ The open-ended and inviting stance of cultural producers like Ricardo is consistent with the attitudes of several other directors and art producers that I have spoken to at FundArte and in the local theatres. Moreover, Maduro and officials of the municipal art projects that supported the restoration project of Teatro Alameda reiterated that nonviolence is the only road to this future, and Madrid and others that I spoke to firmly agreed. As Madrid said, “Here our arms are the cuatro, the guitar, the maracas and musical instruments. These are our arms. Song” (2014).

Meanwhile, just as the theatre recuperation project was underway in the mid 2010s, a phase of violence by anti-government typically well-heeled, protesters (known widely as guarimbas) blocked the streets of upper- and middle-class neighborhoods on the east side of the city. The question of violence, and particularly state violence, persisted in the media during precisely this period as a function of not just the state or anti-state– but as a terrorist force with the U.S. State Department backing the perpetrators. As I discuss more in the next section, these opposition-staged street mobilizations contrast with the generally pro-government takeovers of the theatres. Both claim revolution. Both claim democracy. Both claim the streets and theatres—in a sense, trading places in what formerly was the domain of the other.

Upstaging The Demos Of Democracy: A Picture Can Hide A Thousand Words And An Entire People

In February 2014, while the theatre recuperation project was in full gear in the barrios of Caracas, parts of the city erupted in protest, where organizers mounted large-scale street disturbances in opposition to the revolutionary government. Known as guarimbas, generally middle-upper class protesters with leadership among the wealthiest families in Venezuela built street barricades of household items including wooden furniture, tires, and other discarded objects set on fire (Lovato, 2014). ²² With the guarimba violence tearing up the streets just a few miles away, Madrid’s attempt to democratize the theaters in his neighborhood with equity and access arguably faced its greatest threat by the land-owning class.

Roadways in several Caracas neighborhoods became impassable. Wire lines were strung across streets targeting motorcycle messengers, who were known to be one of the most visible groups of Chávez supporters circulating in the city. Dozens of motorcyclists were seriously injured or killed by such tactics, including Elvis Rafael Durán de la Rosa who was decapitated by a coordinated guarimba team on the Avenida Rómulo Gallegos. ²³ Buses were torched. Public buildings were destroyed. Socialist projects such as food trucks, public transportation, voting machines, and health clinics were targeted and bombed. ²⁴ While barrio residents (mainly low-income and working-class people) were trying to maintain “life as usual,” it was middle- and upper-class protestors who staged this disruption on the streets in mainly their own wealthy neighborhoods.

Despite these obvious realities on the ground, the global media events of 2014 were framed as if they were uniformly “the people” in revolt—unidentified by their privilege, and with little context for what was going on in the rest of the city. ²⁵ What was not mentioned were the millions who did not join the protests, or the hundreds of thousands who joined rallies in support of the government on a weekly basis, all asking for peace. Nor was it mentioned that of the forty-three dead in 2014, over half were verified to have been perpetrated by the guarimberos themselves. ²⁶ Protestors hung effigies of the socialist Chavistas. By 2017, the street protests grew unchecked on their tactics despite elections and repeated calls for peace. In April of 2017, a massive right-wing mob in the same district of Altamira lynched Orlando José Figuera, a 21-year-old Black man after accusing him of supporting the president. Figuera was stabbed, doused with gasoline, and immolated. ²⁷ He died two weeks later from his injuries. ²⁸ Those killed or maimed, regardless of the circumstances, were routinely labeled as victims of the state in the U.S. news and human rights reports, regardless of the perpetrators. ²⁹

While ordinary people throughout the country were denied their human rights to peace, images of the guarimbas circulated prolifically on television, online, and in print news, generating a continual reel depicting insurgent youth against a repressive state. What was projected through the spectacle of the guarimbas was what Guy Debord would call a mediated relationship between the global south and the global north. Through violence, the guarimbas as spectacle acts erased any substantive conflicts between contending parties while reflecting only a superficial narrative of public space, revolution, and dissent. With half the characters missing from the stage, the effect was a total distortion of reality from the jump.

Indeed, by 2014, a year following Hugo Chávez’s passing, the streets in other parts of the city were plentiful with the colors of various party and ideological leanings. In the downtown vicinities where Chávez supporters populated government buildings and the near west popular neighborhood of Catia, the streets were colorful with people wearing party colors of white and red freely and without concern. Meanwhile, at a government-sponsored food market, a woman told me how she feared for her life for simply wearing red (associated with Chavismo) as she attempted to get to her job as a housecleaner in the well-off neighborhood of Altamira. I interviewed several people that day in a crowd of thousands of people who expressed how grateful they were that the government had installed a line of tanks on the other side of the Plaza to protect them from protestors who were hurling Molotov cocktails and heading their way. With the guarimbas on the streets, artists and other barrio residents who were wholeheartedly committed to access, equality, and democracy leaned on the state for protection from the violence of the propertied class.

That night, almost every television channel played a constant reel of the tanks on the streets, but the plaza was entirely out of view. All the footage had been taken from the other side, erasing the actual context of thousands of people the tanks were protecting. Since then, media watchdog organizations have pointed out with abundant detail how the major networks played a central role in depicting the opposition in Venezuela as heroes, regardless of their active role in perpetrating violence and harm on ordinary people in the country (Ostrow, 2019). Today the word guarimba brings back the painful past with trauma. ³⁰ Across the political spectrum, people came out to denounce the architects of the guarimba strategy including Harvard graduate, Leopoldo López of the Voluntad Popular (“Popular Will”) party. It is true that the occupation of the Teatro Alameda and the food market plaza were eventually upheld by the law, a service of “protection” that Partha Chatterjee (2004) notes as moves by the state to make the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate acts. However, what is the crucial missing piece is how a spectacle of so much violence displaced the story, and nevertheless became the pretext for crippling sanctions that have killed so many more. ³¹ I’m referring to the story of the thousands of people at the market, artists, musicians, housekeepers, and street cleaners living in the barrios who were terrorized by the guarimbas during this period. ³² So while the theaters and the streets changed up the mis en scene of state revolution, the basic plot has remained the same where the communards of the Cine Anauco, like Chávez-Maduro supporters in the present day, are censored, lynched, and maligned while liberal society abroad applauded a parallel state regime of Juan Guaidó.

The mediated frame was devised to present Venezuelan socialism on the brink, which has been the explicit objective of a bipartisan Washington Consensus, U.S. strategists, and hardline opposition groups like the Voluntad Popular. Projecting an image of crisis and instability, they believed, would result in greater domestic and international pressures against the Maduro government to trap them into a prepared script as an “authoritarian” state. The strategy, known as La Salida, (the Exit, designed to force out Maduro) was orchestrated by US-based consultants and members of the political opposition including Leopoldo López, the Harvard and Kenyon College grad who was the celebrity front face of Voluntad Popular (Cannon, 2014: 62; Lovato, 2014). This was no secret, and yet the corporate media and the U.S. State Department hid this crucial fact of their violence and foreign financial support, playing directly to its hand with a mixture of naïve empathies and a consensus that regime change would be necessary to “restore democracy” (Koerner, 2020). ³³ Most recently in March 2023, López was given exclusive audience in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee calling for “pro-democracy” funding to groups in dissent, while describing his activism as perfunctorily “non-violent.” Ironically, just as Leopoldo López was embraced by the bipartisan committee to “defend democracy,” U.S. lawmakers announced jail terms for those involved in the insurgency of January 6th. ³⁴

A decade later, and most recently a few months ago from this publication, right-wing protesters who claimed a fraudulent election seized the country once again. Now it is Edmundo González who claims victory, alleging voter fraud and accusing the highest court of having lost its independence under Maduro. Twenty-five people were killed, including two women who were major grassroots leaders, with hundreds more threatened, attacked and persecuted by the guarimbas. ³⁵ Schools, hospitals, and Chavista party centers were attacked, including statues of Indigenous leaders. ³⁶

The mob violence of the guarimbas contrasts dramatically with the communal politics of mutual aid. The malandros of La Nigua’s commune in their heist of a jewelry store indeed are theives, and yet one might compare such theft in scale to the seizing of billions of dollars in assets including its company, CITGO. ³⁷ Under this siege of right-wing violent insurgency, and an incessant campaign to vilify the black sheep revolution, it comes as no surprise that participants in the revolutionary process would see themselves once again as a marginalized commune in the global order, battling to maintain their sovereign democracy with U.S. intervention pounding at the door.

Conclusion

The recuperation project of the theaters, in this sense, is a recuperation of memory. It is also a measure of where one stands as a witness to change on the social, spatial, and material map. The performance space, as Ngũgĩ argued, are focalized spaces within the nation to witness “the totality of external relations,” whereby the media spotlight blinds us as audiences from afar to not see the obvious reality on the ground. Working-class residents are visible among themselves through their face-to-face meetings in neighborhoods, markets, buses, and now refurbished theatre spaces, where in the same city but different neighborhoods, the middle- and former ruling class find a tremendous and unequal platform of visibility in global media.

Since the events of 2014, while there is also a widely discussed concern to hold those accountable for harm, the central demand in Venezuela is peace. Just two metro stops away from the barricades, people like Javier Madrid and the many organizers with FundArte continue to create a genuine example of a democratic alternative. Many people who were witness to opposition tactics in this period doubled down in their support of the revolutionary government of Maduro. Others sought a space for renewed unification. Still others sought to radicalize their artistic proposals, critiquing the government for not doing more to stop the violence.

Just as the violence ripped smoke and flames on one side of Caracas, a much stronger movement of peace was afoot. For Madrid, Mijares, and others in the collective, perhaps like La Nigua and the extended community that squatted the Cine Anauco, the initial occupation of the theatres was taking back space for the community. Against the hardened military state of the 1980s, La Nigua’s commune took up arms where the San Agustín collective did not. To recuperate an abandoned space for the benefit of a broad-based group of residents was, for those in San Agustín, an act of peace.

In 2019, during extremely difficult economic conditions caused by the hundreds of sanctions placed on the country, the theatre recuperation project held strong with cultural life. Dozens of colorful murals honoring local heroes of the barrio cover the walls around the entire corridor surrounding Teatro Alameda. In 2021, Jericó Montilla, a celebrated actor, theatre director, and arts organizer, emphasized the renewed power of women in the arts who have since begun to occupy major positions and spaces with feminist-led proposals, and widespread access in cultural spaces like theatres.

In the pre-Chávez era, access to any kind of cultural production was severely limited, especially in the barrios. Sites to produce theatre were difficult to obtain, with many groups making do in ill-suited or makeshift spaces. ³⁸ Today, San Agustín is a headquarters for festivals and performing arts. The Teatro Alameda hosts several festivals and cultural events including popular theater, dance, drumming, and other music gatherings throughout the year. Tours bring people through the neighborhood to appreciate the Afro-Venezuelan music and culinary scene. Organizers across the city prepare for hundreds of thousands of people attending festivals across Caracas and even more nationwide. The idea that these organizers share is that the arts offer a public forum that ultimately strengthens democracy inviting the open exchange of dialogue for all people to participate.

With the Zone of Peace now officially declared by CELAC and other alliances of the global south, the invitation remains to join. Jairo, and the proto-guarimba violence he represents, can only imprison and deprive the most vulnerable populations. Right-wing terror caused wreckage in 74 schools, municipalities across the ountry, over 35 clinics and health centers, 38 buses and the list goes on. Indeed, when the rich were piling furniture on barricades pretending to be the sans coulottes, the commune has been busy in repair. The tremendous suffering and debt of reparations owed to Venezuela exceeds billions and with lives lost of great leaders. Nevertheless, the perseverance of a democratizing project continues step by step for a global project of peace. Only this time, it might be less of a clandestine march at dawn of the black sheep parishioners. This time, it is a daylight liturgy for the living memory of people like José Orlando Figuera, Elvis Rafael Durán de la Rosa, Isabel Cirila Gil, and Mayauris Coromoto Silva Vielma. A democracy based on collectivism from below is where this procession moves forward, recuperating historical memory even under threat of erasure. This was Román’s dream, to build the capacities of the communes to be visible, to recuperate, and to create even stronger inclusive societies for difference, debate, healing, and for genuine peoples’ rule.