Dreaming Los Dreamers

NEWS | TUESDAY, JULY 14 | BY FUSION STAFF WRITER, RUDOLFO CARRILLO

Los Dreamers is a play by Mónica Sánchez, a notable, au courant playwright with New Mexican roots whose work upon the boards can be traced back to the fabled and legendary Albuquerque theatre company, La Compañía de Teatro de Albuquerque, as well as the foundational work she did as theatre director at Working Classroom. Los Dreamers recently had a very successful run at the University of Oregon, and Sánchez has returned to Burque to continue her sage and engaging work on the stage and within our community.

Los Dreamers will be featured as a staged reading at FUSION on Friday, July 31, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That’s important news for the theatre community, the arts universe as viewed from the FUSION campus, and of course, for you, dear reader, always on the lookout for provocative, progressive and poignantly vital performance experiences here in the 505 and beyond.

Sánchez’ work is a romantic comedy that tells the story of Scoobi, an undocumented law student with a revolutionary background and family who seeks meaningful resistance; a sense of redemption and identity; and, ultimately, affiliation with a system that will never cease to be a source of controversy—while also presenting the audience with a deep source of questioning in regards to what it truly means to be American.

During the play’s production at the University of Oregon, directed by UO Theater Arts professor Malek Najjar, critics agreed that the combination of dramedy situated within pertinent and passionate social and cultural themes was well worth experiencing. Last month, Eugene Scene reporter Daniel Buckwalter characterized his experience with Los Dreamers as “profound,” writing, “Los Dreamers is a complex play—romantic, comedic and sometimes politically edgy, gentle and sometimes fierce. It also is a must-see play.”

Najjar, another successful creative with Albuquerque roots like Sánchez, told the University of Oregon student newspaper, Daily Emerald, that Los Dreamers “really straddles multiple worlds, multiple time frames and also asks us to cross that border of empathy for the characters.”

In anticipation of the presentation of a staged reading of this important part of—and very much culturally relevant representative of—contemporary, postmodern American theatre culture, I emailed Sánchez and asked if she’d be down to chat about her work, its relevance, and the author’s return to New Mexico.

She gratefully obliged, and we set out to bring Los Dreamers onto this very page, for your consideration. 

Rudolfo Carrillo: Could you please tell me about your play, Los Dreamers?

Mónica Sánchez: I wrote Los Dreamers in 2018 during the time of the first Trump administration in response to the threat to DACA and the anti-immigration sentiment at the time. In many ways, I feel that the play is almost too tame now. But nonetheless, and very sadly, it’s still a very timely play because it deals with the plight of these characters as an example of the undocumented in our midst; it takes place here in Albuquerque. The play has had a developmental history. I’ve gotten some support to develop it over time. I had it slated for a production in Los Angeles; that happened to have been the summer of 2020. We all know what happened to any live performances during that year. It’s kind of just been lying dormant, lying underground, kind of keeping quiet, under the radar, perhaps appropriately.

But then, someone from Albuquerque coincidently, but working in Oregon, became interested in the play. What was that about?

Malek Najjar, who is on faculty at the  University of Oregon, Eugene, found the play while he was looking for something to produce at his college that would be appropriate for student actors because it’s a mostly a young cast. And so they staged it. And I went up to see it. And it kind of got me thinking, ah, this is very timely!

How did that success lead to an engagement in Albuquerque at FUSION?

Well, I’m also recently back full-time to my native New Mexico and my hometown, Albuquerque. I’m trying to generate some interest in work and engage more Latino talent and get the lay of the land and find out who my people are, who are potential collaborators. A staged reading is a kind of a low overhead way of sharing the work. I’ve been talking to Dennis off and on over the years, and I pitched a few things last fall and followed up and now have a date for Los Dreamers in July! We’re on July 31st.  So we snuck in right at the very end of the month. Right at the height of the summer theatre season.

Why is this play important? What should audiences know about this particular work?

Every day there are thousands of people being deported; there are people being murdered by ICE agents. As a theatre artist, one of the things that I aim to do through my work is to humanize characters who may be at the margins of our pages, who may be at the margins of our culture or our society. I’m also giving a historical context to this tragic, continuing story. In this particular play, we’re reaching back to the Zapatista rebellion of the early 1990s, and in a sense, mapping a lineage of some would say resistance—I would prefer to say liberation. We’re also dealing with the story of Scoobi, who is an undocumented law student. She and her mother conspired to make it possible for her to finish her law degree in these very precarious times, when she’s at risk of being deported. So they arrange a marriage of inconvenience, as I like to say, to an all-American white kid. And we watch this. His name is Dylan. He’s not a villain.

That sounds fascinating!

Dylan could be played as a trope, but that’s not my intention. We had our first table read with this new wonderful cast last week, and I emphasized to the actors, and to everybody, that I’m humanizing all of the characters. And in some ways for me, this character is a stand-in. Dylan is a metaphor for white dominant culture and what they have to gain when they fall in love with us, when they get to know our culture.

There’s a lot of misinformation, ignorance, lack of literacy, lack of knowledge about history within our current culture. Are people going to come into this situation and be confused or perplexed and be like, “I didn’t know this was going on.” I know this is an obvious question with obvious answers, but I just have to ask.

This theatre, this piece of theatre, represents an opportunity to move that dialogue into the lives of people who might not have a clue about all of this. You know, it’s possible [that people are, in general, unaware of the injustices being committed all around them] because I know I myself have made many presumptions about people’s awareness of the situation.

Yes, some of the reviews that came out of the Eugene Oregon production indicated a sort of self-proclaimed naivete and ignorance about what brown people, what immigrants are going through now.

Likewise, I’ve talked to an audience member who told me the same thing, who said, “I had no idea that people were going through these kinds of things.” And I’m showing kind of a light version of the situation because this play actually runs on the engine of a rom-com, a romantic comedy, right? Everything goes down easier with a spoonful of sugar and with a few laughs. So it’s definitely meant to be funny. I mean, people will laugh, I hope, I think. But the play is also another way to, if you will, to infiltrate [the system]. And at the end of the day, as a theatre maker, one of the greatest things that the theatre can do is to cultivate a sense of empathy for the other, for all of us.

FUSION presents LOS DREAMERS
Friday, July 31, 2026
7:00 PM  10:00 PM
FUSION | 708
708 1st Street Northwest
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87102

Tickets Here.