Creative Loafing's cover for the week of May 7, 2026, featuring "Mujeres en ritual." A group of women wearing contemporary Mexican fashion pose surrounded by floral patterns. They are framed in a nicho box shape and surrounded by floral paterns. The subhead reads "Queer women share migration stories through Tampa play" — Credit: Photo by Estefany Maya Photography. Design by Jack Spatafora.

Dora Arreola looks good in black. She and her dance troupe, Mujeres en Ritual, pose proudly for headshots in black turtlenecks and cowboy hats—the kind of thing they wore in front of audiences around the world.

For nearly three decades, Mujeres en Ritual focused on telling migration crisis stories through a queer, feminist lens. As part of Arreola’s project, Queering the Border, the troupe performed at migrant shelters and camps at the U.S.-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemala border.

But when it came time to tell the stories they learned, black didn’t work anymore.

In her new play, “Que el amor nos haga (Until Love Makes Us),” Arreola and her troupe’s characters learn to embrace their queer identities and indigenous roots as they struggle to immigrate to the U.S.

For the first scene, where the characters walk with other displaced migrants, they wear black hoodies and sunglasses.

“We were more accustomed to that,” Arreola told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

But rehearsing a scene in which the characters arrive at a gay bar in Long Beach, California, Arreola realized their usual look wouldn’t work.

Dora Arreola poses in a black turtleneck and cowboy hat against a dark background — Dora Arreola Credit: Israel Josafa

“It was very minimalist,” Arreola said. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, we are not minimalist. We are maximalist.’”

So she turned to fashion designers in Tijuana.

The costumes in promo shots are definitely maximalist—beads, ruffles, lace, leather, denim and patterns blending modern queerness and traditional Mexican fashion in the Nueva Mexicanidad (AKA Neomexicanism) style.

The work tells the story of three women—a queer Dreamer (DACA recipient) and two separated lovers who are forced to flee Mexico and hope to reunite in the United States. Their journeys include “danger, interrogation, and a flock of unlikely guides,” per the event description.

Presented in Spanish with English supertitles, the play incorporates live music, dance, and video projections.

Mujeres en Ritual members Kenia Delgadillo and Aymé Giles play the main characters with Arreola. The cast also includes dancer/choreographer Miroslava Wilson and musicians/vocalists Azzul Monraz and Gabriela Bojorquez.

For Arreola, it’s important to show audiences that even as her characters immigrate to the U.S., their identities remain unique—just as hers has. Arreola has taught dance and theater around the world, from her native Tijuana to Italy, Nicaragua, Canada, Poland, India, Massachusetts and now in Tampa at the University of South Florida.

“Queerness is pretty different in Latin America than the United States,” Arreola explained. “This American history (in the) gay movement, in queer movement…That is very powerful to everybody, to the world, but it’s not the same.”

Growing up near the border, she continued, “To me, everything that was coming from the United States was a question.”

Through the play, she analyzes those differences and the questions she had growing up. Indigenous LGBTQ+ people in Mexico face discrimination that drives many to immigrate to the U.S., but Mexico also has a more progressive legal history than the States. Mexico decriminalized homosexual acts in 1871, which the U.S. didn’t do until 2003. Today, Mexico has stronger anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ+ people—U.S. laws that largely eroded in Trump’s second term.

When it came time to choose music for that scene in the gay bar, Arreola considered queer music she grew up hearing from the U.S., like The Village People and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Instead, she went with “Ven BB” and “Fierro” from Renee Goust, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter who reframes traditional Mexican music through a queer, feminist lens.

Until Love Makes Us / Que el amor nos haga by Dora Arreola

Time Fri., May 15, 8-9:30 p.m. and Sat., May 16, 3-5 p.m.

Location Stageworks Theatre, 1120 E Kennedy Blvd., Suite 151, Tampa

That’s how Arreola approaches all of her work, including her theater and dance classes at USF. Her students, she said, are often nervous to talk about concepts like feminism and queerness in a state where Gov. Ron DeSantis has tried to silence such conversations in state classrooms. But Arreolla isn’t afraid.

“Feminism moved theater forward. That’s why we are in theater,” she said. “If we don’t analyze these texts from the queer perspective, that is a feminist perspective, we’re not reading it correctly.”

Art2Action founder and director Andrea Assaf told CL that’s exactly why she wanted the arts nonprofit to put on the show.

“It really is important to resist the pressure and the tendency to silence ourselves and to back down in the face of political pressures that are akin to fascism,” Assaf said.

Art2Action co-commissioned the play for May 15-16 at Stageworks Theatre along with several other national arts organizations.

“It’s centering women’s stories. It’s centering queer stories, LGBT plus stories …these stories are also migration stories,” Assaf said.

“I always think we learn the most about what a community is really facing when we look at the most vulnerable or the people who are holding the most intersectional identities.”

Tickets start at $10 for “Until Love Makes Us / Que el amor nos haga” happening Friday-Saturday, May 15-16 in Tampa.

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