U.S. Customs Bars Barcelona Dance Company from Entering U.S. 

By Steven Leigh Morris

Marta Carrasco and Alredo Diaz in Perra de Nadie (Photo courtesy of Marta Carrasco Co.)

Latino Theatre Company (LTC) announced yesterday that its presentation of Barcelona’s Perra de Nadie – a dance piece featuring award-winning Marta Carrasco — was cancelled after the four-member company was turned back in Seattle. They were en route to Los Angeles after performing at a theater festival in Colombia.

LTC had provided co-director/performer Marta Carrasco, performer Alfredo Diaz, business manager Manuel Illan, and lighting designer Danielle Guillaune with plane tickets. LTC Artistic director Jose Luis Valenzuela says they obtained work visas from the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. 

Yesterday, Valenzuela received a phone call from an unidentified U.S. customs official in Seattle telling him that the four were being turned back.

(Carrasco performed at REDCAT in 2005.)

According to a statement put out by Marta Carrasco Company upon its return to Barcelona, the four were separated into different interrogation rooms for five hours of questioning, during which their passports were confiscated, they were warned against touching their cell phones, and the security cameras were aimed at the floor. They provided their letter of invitation, that disclosed the terms of their employment and instructions to send LTC copies of their passports and corresponding visas. They were told they could make only one phone call, on the condition that they identified the call recipient to authorities.

“The atmosphere was hostile . . . Later, they tell us that all the documentation was correct but the visa that the American Embassy authorized us to be able to work in Los Angeles was not valid. (That statement was a lie, according to the American Embassy here in Barcelona.)”

The company’s statement said that they were accompanied by guards onto their deportation aircraft, and Valenzuela added that they were kept in isolation during an Amersterdam layover. 

Stage Raw received notice that its request for comment from the U.S. Consulate in Barcelona might be addressed in three to four business days.

Valenzuela’s agitation was compounded after his personal Facebook account was taken down, shortly after he posted the missive from Marta Carrasco Company, though it is now back up.

“In authoritarian regimes,” he noted, “they come after the press, the intellectuals and the artists.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation reports that journalists are increasingly harassed at the U.S./Mexico Border for doing their jobs, citing “at least five journalists who have been stopped on the U.S. side of the border since December 2018. Some have been stopped numerous times, where they are put in situations that could threaten their privacy, reporting processes, and confidential sources.” 

Marta Carrasco Company noted that 95% of the people being held in the Seattle Airport’s interrogation rooms were Latino.

This story will be updated.

Correction: The company’s assertion from the “U.S. Embassy in Barcelona” that U.S. Customs in Seattle had deported them for reasons that were a “lie,” came from the U.S. Consulate in Barcelona, not the U.S. Embassy. There is no U.S. Embassy in Barcelona. Also, a previous version of this story erroneously referred to the company obtaining their visas from the “U.S. Embassy in Barcelona.” They can only have obtained their visas from the U.S. Embassy in Madrid.