New musical, Anita, brings story of family separation, joy and resilience to the stage

TUCSON – A group of young girls scrub the floor with a towel while on their hands and knees as they sing in unison. 

“Trabajando noche y día, working hard to do our part. Porque somos inmigrantes, even us kids have it hard,” they sing, moving the towels in a circle to the beat of the song. 

The girls are young actors practicing for the upcoming local musical, Anita, which tells the fictional story of a 12-year-old girl who is separated from her parents at the border and ends up in an immigrant shelter for girls. Anita tries to escape the shelter, determined to reunite with her parents. In the process, she inspires others to help her.

Anita will premiere on April 2 at the Leo Rich Theater inside the Tucson Convention Center and will play through April 19. The Borderlands Theater production is playwright Milta Ortiz’s first musical. 

During President Donald Trump’s first term, Ortiz kept seeing stories on the news of kids being separated from their parents at the border. It was something she could somewhat relate to, Ortiz, the associate artistic director of Borderlands Theater, said. 

When Ortiz was a little girl, her parents left her and her sister with her godparents in El Salvador in 1980 and moved to the U.S., Ortiz said. She would wait on the stoop, wondering when her parents would come back home. Seven months later, she was reunited with them in a new country.

“I remember that feeling of being abandoned and separated… it hit my sister and I hard,” Ortiz said. “So I was really torn up about the kids that were being separated and put in detention centers.”

Between 2017 and 2021, an estimated 4,656 children were separated from their parents who faced immigration court proceedings due to Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, according to a report published by Human Rights Watch, Texas Civil Rights Project and The Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School. Of those children, more than 1,300 still remained unaccounted for in 2024, according to the report.

Around the same time she was seeing families separated, Ortiz’s daughter was performing with Las Aguilitas de Davis, a mariachi group composed of students from Davis Bilingual Elementary Magnet School. As she watched Las Aguilitas perform with a folklorico dance group, “I just got goose bumps, and I was like, ‘oh my god, this is so joyful.’”

Then she thought to herself, “Why isn’t this on Broadway?”

That’s when she got the idea to write something inspired by Annie, but different, she said. 

“It's just the same scenario where a little girl is … separated from her parents and her hope and joy and, you know, ganas, inspires her whole community to help her find her parents,” Ortiz said. “And that's how Anita came to be.”

Approaching the ‘difficult topic’ of family separation via art 

In 2020, Ortiz was awarded a paid fellowship from The Mellon Foundation, allowing her to focus on her art. She met with Quetzal Guerrero, composer and musical director for Anita, and they got to work. Guerrero and Ortiz worked side-by-side on lyrics for the show and Guerrero composed original music, he said. 

The songs in Anita are about revolution, the contributions of immigrants, and “pupusas y paletas.” There are hip-hop and Latin genres, such as cumbia and salsa. 

Ortiz saw Anita as a storyline that would always have life, but she didn’t expect it to remain so relevant six years after she started writing it, she said. 

Guerrero immediately felt a connection to Anita when he read the script, he said. His Brazilian mother is a political refugee who moved to the U.S. seeking safety. He said the topic of family separation will remain relevant because the root issue is never addressed. 

“Indigenous peoples and communities have been migrating for thousands and thousands of years,” Guerrero said. “I mean, it's part of our human story. It's part of what makes us human is our ability to migrate and move with the seasons, and go and escape danger, persecution to plans and places where we can create anew.”

People sometimes unconsciously suppress the “tragic realities we’re experiencing today,” because they’re too difficult to face, Guerrero said. The musical is a way for artists to bring the issue onstage and “transmute these issues in a loving way.” 

“Through the medium of theater and music and performance, I feel like we can approach these difficult topics in a more playful and humanizing way that I think will help us collectively as a whole to process what is actually happening,” Guerrero said.

While recent news stories focus less on family separation, immigration agents have been recorded violently arresting immigrants with impunity in the last year. Increased immigration detention in Arizona and across the country has led to mixed immigration status families being separated.

Keeping joy alive amid family separations

Actors and dancers from the musical promoted the film outside the Tucson Convention Center over a weekend in March, offering early tickets without fees at the TCC box office. Local dancers spun and moved to the music as the girls sang. Even Spider-Man — a stranger walking around downtown Tucson dressed in the superhero suit — joined in.

Vanessa Corona, the choreographer for Anita, said she thought she would have a hard time taking on the songs' difficult, sad themes and choreographing a dance to match them. 

“When I first heard the music, read the lyrics, I thought it was going to be one of the most difficult [things] I've ever done,” Corona said. “Turns out it has been the easiest… because of the way that they've directed it, the way that they've let me kind of take the reins with the dancing, with the choreography and, I don't know, I think it's just everybody's attitude.”

Ortiz said people who have watched their development readings tell her they feel seen. They laugh and cry and really connect with the musical, she said. 

“I think what people connect to is the resilience and the joy that we still have no matter what we're up against,” Ortiz said. “And I think that's what I love about the immigrant community. And, just Latinos, I think we have song and music and dance and that brings us joy and no matter what's going on, we do the best that we can.”

She doesn’t want to glamorize immigrants’ resiliency, but she does see the persistence and joy as revolutionary, she said. She also wants the immigrant community to see themselves reflected back, remembering their ability to thrive and “keep joy alive,” Ortiz said. 

She also hopes non-Latinos and non-immigrants who watch the musical can appreciate the culture and hard work of immigrants, she said. 

“One of the reasons that drove me to write the musical is that I wanted us to feel joy and pride together,” Ortiz said. “And I think that that's persistence, and that it’s revolutionary to thrive in the atmosphere that Latine and especially immigrants find ourselves in.”

Anita will run at the Leo Rich Theater inside the Tucson Convention Center from April 2-19. Visit https://theater.tucsonconventioncenter.com/events-tickets/ for tickets.

Stephanie Casanova is an independent, bilingual journalist from Tucson, Arizona, covering community stories for over 10 years. She is passionate about narrative, in-depth storytelling that is inclusive and reflects the diversity of the communities she covers.