As a kid, I was obsessed with Dick Cavett—his sly sense of humor and his nerves of steel. He never lost his cool, no matter how cranky his guest, and always found the smoothest way to have the hardest conversation. Cavett was known to say, “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”
What I learned from Dick Cavett is that it’s essential to go toward what scares you. One of my first documentary plays sat squarely in the center of some of my biggest fears. My family, along with nearly everyone in our little town, was involved in a major land feud. Tomé, New Mexico, was settled by the Spanish in the 1630s and was formed as a documented land grant in 1731, when the Spanish government gave this massive tract of land (250,000 acres) to about 30 families. These were my ancestors, who were a combination of Pueblo Indians, Sephardic Jews, and German merchants.
The Tomé Land Grant continued for centuries as a communally owned land grant, from 1731 all the way until the 1970s. If you were born in Tomé and your family was from Tomé, then you inherited a share in this property. Over the centuries and under three different governments—Spain, then Mexico, then the U.S.—the Tomé Land Grant remained intact. The size diminished, as segments of land were lopped off and sold to pay for maintenance or taxes, but for nearly 300 years the people of Tomé shared the land grant.
By the time I was born, the land grant was about 47,000 acres of land, still a rather impressive piece of property, shared by descendants of the founding families. Aside from the fertile Rio Grande River Valley on one end and the mountains on the other, the majority of the property was high desert, very dry, and very sandy. This is the very land that recently served as the backdrop for Breaking Bad. Under a huge blue sky surrounded by nothing but desert sage, that great expanse of nothing—that was our Tomé Land Grant. The only way to get much use out of the land was to graze cattle. If you could afford cattle, you could get something out of the land.
Then, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, a feud broke out over the rights to the Tomé Land Grant. Everyone sued everyone; lives were threatened and families torn apart. Sometimes the battle lines cut right through nuclear families: A cousin of mine did not speak to his brother for 13 years, though they lived next door to each other. All told, there were over 100 lawsuits. Ultimately, everyone lost. The suits made their way to the State Supreme Court, where the judge threw out centuries of precedent and decided that the entire land grant was null and void. And just like that, the land was gone. People were left with nothing but their rancor and hatred for each other.
My father was one of the Tomeseños at the center of this war between families. Half of the town thought he was a hero fighting for the poor and the other half thought he was the devil himself, only out for his own personal gain, obsessed with power. Growing up, our house was command central for meetings about the Land Grant, and the stress on my parents—waist-deep in lawsuits and trying to run their own business to provide for their 12 kids—was palpable. That’s when I headed out to the llano to pretend that I was Dick Cavett…far, far away from the fighting and worry.
I never expected to be a playwright. That was out of the realm of possibility. Most of us Tomeseños became cowboys or land developers, or worked for the Catholic Church. Somehow, through a series of accidents, I found myself in theatre. I stumbled into it and fell hard and fast and deeply in love with it. I have always loved everything about the problem-solving of rehearsal, and I found a particularly deep love for making plays, especially plays about real people and real events.
When I was about 25 and starting my professional theatre career in New York, my father passed away from a stroke after surviving two heart attacks. No doubt the stress of so many years of court battles and personal threats had an impact on his health, as it did on most of the patriarchs of Tomé, many of whom, like my father, died at a relatively young age.
A few years after my dad passed, my mom came to visit me in New York, and one night she said, “Honey, somebody needs to make a book or a movie or something about everything that happened. You should write it all down.”
And so I did. I pulled out a tape recorder and started asking her questions. I knew I couldn’t do this alone; the subject was far too personal, and I knew I needed collaborators to help me approach the material with expansive listening. So I got a grant and found a theatre company in Albuquerque called Working Classroom, and together we went to Tomé, interviewed Tomeseños who had been involved in the feud, and made a play about it called Highway 47.
My first rule of engagement when making a documentary play is, “It ain’t about me.” I have no interest in putting my own opinion, my own agenda, or my own politics or beliefs onstage. I want to put the opinions, agendas, and politics of the people I interview onstage instead. This ethos probably sounds impossible when working on a story that was so deeply personal, but it was in fact the only way into and through this story.
And, believe it or not, setting my own feelings aside was easier than I thought, because my feelings were rather ambivalent. My mother’s family was on one side of this feud, my father’s on the other. I was stuck right in the middle. And I needed to stay right there in the middle, the only way to honestly hear both sides of this story.
I worked with Working Classroom’s ensemble of actors; I shared with them the interview techniques I was using and we went to Tomé to interview my father’s friends and foes alike. For those who were my father’s friends, I would introduce myself as Gillie Sanchez’s daughter; and for those who were his enemies, I introduced myself as Cipriana’s child. My mother was one of the kindest, most generous humans on the planet, and no matter what they thought of my father, they granted me an interview because of their affection for her. When trying to gain access to a closed community like this one, the key for me is this: If you earn just one person’s trust, they will then vouch for you and introduce you to others. What can you do to earn that trust? Here are a few suggestions:
Meet that person on their turf. When you set up the interview, ask them where they would prefer to meet, and what is most important to convenient and comfortable for them. This is incredibly helpful, because the location the person might choose will inform what they tell you. For example, one of my father’s enemies chose to meet me at the town cemetery. As we visited graves, he told me stories about each person buried there and we realized that many of his great-great-grandparents were also my great-great-grandparents. This commonality bridged so many gaps for us. On another occasion, a matriarch of the opposition wanted me to go to her home. Tomeseños are very hospitable people, and so she offered me coffee and cookies. We talked about her biscochitos recipe, which was quite like my mother’s recipe, and through this talk of cookies, we found common ground.
Be transparent about what you are doing and why you are doing it. With this particular project, I explained that my mission was to capture the whole picture, not just my dad’s side of the story, and that I wanted to share the whole story with a larger audience. This play had the potential to be part of the historical narrative of Tomé, so people agreed to be interviewed because they wanted to make sure that their experience and family’s role in this feud was properly chronicled.
Be a compassionate, non-judgmental listener. Do your level best to leave your own opinions and judgments at the door. If you share how you feel about something with the interviewee, that will always impact what the interviewee might say. If one of the Tomeseños thought that I was angry at them for their position toward my father, it would color what they shared with me. It was vital that I helped them understand that I wanted to hear it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Leave your notebook at home. Keep your list of questions in your back pocket, and just listen. If you are worried you will not remember anything, bring a small, unobtrusive audio recording device with you, turn it on, set it aside, forget about it, and just listen. If you have a notebook out or a list of questions, people might likely feel they are being quizzed and can become self-conscious. I avoid using video cameras because I find some people become self-conscious and can’t forget about the camera. We are all familiar with the reality show confession booth, and interviews with video cameras can easily get performative.
Don’t go fishing. Let them lead where the interview goes. This requires faith and trust. The best material comes from tangents, from stories that at first might seem like they have nothing to do with the subject. If I went into an interview with what I would consider a fishing question—like, “Tell me how you feel about what my father did”—the answer would likely be short and obvious. So instead, I started with very open-ended questions and then let them lead the way from there. A person can feel when you are really listening without judgment or agenda, and when they feel that, they trust that they can speak candidly and freely and will tell you anything.
In short, you earn someone’s trust by putting aside your own needs and agenda and being present and ready to go wherever they lead you. For Highway 47, little by little we earned the trust of a handful of Tomeseños, who in turn vouched for us and opened doors we could not have opened otherwise. Little by little, the people I listened to felt they could tell me the story from their personal perspective, even though they knew who my parents were.
I’d like to note here that I offer these strategies as just the beginning of the covenant we create between the people we listen to and the work we make. My plan is not to win their trust just to get the good stuff for my play. My hope is to earn their trust. The first step is to listen without judgment, without agenda, and then, of course, I try my best to honor that trust by never intentionally misrepresenting them onstage. I have no interest in twisting what someone has said to prove my point. In fact, we don’t need to, because the real is always so much more interesting—to me, at least—than anything I could make up.
KJ Sanchez (she/her) is associate professor in playwriting/directing at the University of Texas at Austin, and the founder and CEO of the theatre company American Records.
