James Adlesic’s dance is a sign and a a warning about the effects of cultural pressures to be a man, to be powerful and virile— the matador. But Soto’s choreography also resists stereotypes about poor, Latino men.

Soto’s choreography uses Christ imagery to associate this drunken man with wisdom, women, and God. Adlesic’s attempt to control his hands and to fly, suggest he wants to be cleansed of his faults, and transcend his body. There is something archetypally wise about a man who wants to escape the limitations of the body and see beyond the experience of suffering. His white underwear, the ethereal music, and his preoccupation with his hands and side, soften and reveal his body; moreover, he is associated with Jesus who is the wisest archetype in Christian symbolism. Towards the end of the dance, the three women remove their capes, revealing golden slips, and carry him, like the three Marys who removed Jesus from the cross, in a pieta position. Thus images of man as martyr, a drunk, and a prodigal son combine to represent a complex masculine identity.

Through the archetypal representations , Soto does an incredible service to warn her community about the crisis of masculine identity and addiction. At the same time her choreography resists stereotypes without ignoring an obvious problem and trend in many families… These archetypal visions of man illuminate the complexity of masculine identity and represent his vulnerability.

The history of colonization distinguishes the Latina’s experience as a woman from her European counterpart because rape and single motherhood form part of the Latin American woman’s recent past. Hence Soto’s portrayal of women as child bearers and caretakers who are at times subservient to men and even caught in supporting an addiction that perpetuates male dominance and abuse. Kathy Westwater’s solo invokes the strength and courage needed to struggle free from unhealthy relationships and prescribed roles. She is the heart of Familias and marks a beginning in Soto’s narrative that traces both the challenges and new ways of envisioning family and gender roles.

Soto creates compound archetypal female characters in her choreography; mother, daughter, angel, and warrior reveal the strength, resilience, spirituality, and interdependency of a Latina cosmology. Westwater’s solo portrays woman as angel, daughter, and mother, but because the dancing body slides in and out around these roles, she creates a dialogue among these archetypes which complicate and individualize her. Her literal separateness does not exclude her interactions and relationship with others but rather provides a space in which she can negotiate the frustrations, pressures, fears, pleasures, and hopes which arise through these relationships.