La Soldadera, a screenplay reading

After directing nearly 60 plays in the RGV in the last 17 years, local theater director, Pedro Garcia, continues his sights on filmmaking. His next story is a screenplay he wrote and revised in a period of 13 months tentatively titled La Soldadera. The story is in Spanish and is set in two countries, the USA and in Mexico. It's the tale of a Mexican woman named Marisol, a wife and mother of two children in her 30's, who having endured years of domestic abuse from her husband manages to escape. On a circuitous journey into the USA, she garnishes the self esteem, the knowledge and the courage to return to her town and to regain a decent life for her, her children and for others like her. 

At the beginning of the story, Marisol wishes she had the courage of a Soldadera, (a woman soldier who accompanied men into battle alongside the Mexican Revolution). Although years have passed since those timely struggles for equality in Mexico, Marisol sees the images of these courageous soldier women on old movies on her small black and white TV screen and wishes she had their valor. (These are old films such as La Cucaracha that starred Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio that were directed by Ismael Rodríguez and captured by cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa of Mexico's golden age cinema.)

Garcia who is also directing the staged reading of his script said, "The story came to me after my nephew who was doing volunteer work in Peru, back in late 2012, posted a picture on his Facebook about the struggles of a group of women from India known as the Gulabi Gang. Essentially these women had formed to retaliate against vicious men, husbands who would physically abuse their wives and in some cases rape young girls, sometimes leaving them for dead or crippled or blind. And since the authorities were turning a blind eye to these issues, these women decided to take matters in their own hands as vigilantes and to seek out these vile abusers and beat them with large bamboo sticks. 

After reading more on this particular group of women, I thought I could write a documentary about this kind of abuse and set it in the regions I am more familiar with. After all, domestic abuse is somewhat of a large occurrence worldwide. I thought something like this could help. After a year of developing, writing and tweaking the story, it became a screenplay instead, but with an anti-violence twist and more of an awareness and educational angle. The story includes a subplot on the perils of immigration alongside the mutual borders", added Garcia.