Opera Cultura presents ¡Chicanísima! at MACLA on S. 1st St. this Saturday — two performances dramatizing the life of Olga Talamante, who grew up in Gilroy, was tortured in an Argentine prison in 1974, and became a founding figure of the Chicana-Latina Foundation.

At 510 S. 1st St. in San Jose's SoFA district, MACLA hosts two performances of ¡Chicanísima! this Saturday, June 27 — a noon matinee and a 5:30 p.m. evening show — a staged concert opera whose subject, now in her 70s, grew up picking garlic and fruit in Gilroy and later survived imprisonment and torture in Argentina.

When composer Carla Lucero first proposed making an opera of Olga Talamante's life, Talamante's reaction was skepticism. "Opera to me felt so European and also with characters that existed many decades before," she told ABC7 News. It's a reasonable read of the form — less so of herself.

Talamante's family moved from Mexicali to Gilroy when she was a child. She worked summers in the fields. San Jose State students helped her navigate college applications her parents hadn't known to expect, and she landed at UC Santa Cruz during the late 1960s — farmworker rights, Vietnam protests, the Chicano movement. After fieldwork with indigenous communities in Chiapas, she followed a group of Argentine activists to Buenos Aires and joined the Juventud Peronista, working alongside a marginalized community on the city's outskirts.

In November 1974, the Isabel Perón government declared a state of siege. Talamante was detained leaving a gathering. "The first few days it was just interrogations and beatings and torture with electric shocks, and then finally being formally taken to prison, and that's where I spent 16 months," she told ABC7. Her family and Bay Area supporters organized the Olga Defense Committee, fundraising and lobbying members of Congress; she was released March 27, 1976.

Back in the Bay Area, she became founding executive director of the Chicana-Latina Foundation, which provides scholarships and leadership training for Hispanic women, and later co-chaired the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Lucero — a composer and librettist whose prior operas include Wuornos and Juana, trained at CalArts under Morton Subotnick — was commissioned by the classical ensemble Quinteto Latino to write a new work and chose Talamante as the subject. The title is a coinage. "I wanted something really strong that actually spoke about the Chicano movement and the fact that she's a woman and she's lesbian," Lucero told ABC7. "I can't think of anything stronger than this." ¡Chicanísima! premiered at Brava Main Stage in San Francisco on May 16, 2024, and sold out. The opera's cast Saturday features soprano Alexa Sessler, mezzo-soprano Jessica Gonzalez-Rodriguez, and tenor Sergio Gonzalez.

Opera Cultura, San Jose-based and the only Latinx professional opera company in the United States, is presenting the production. Talamante and Lucero will hold a Q&A after the 5:30 p.m. performance. Tickets start at $10; MACLA is a short walk from VTA Bus 68, and weekend parking in the lot at First St. and I-280 is free.