"I describe the piece as a play about the imprints that places leave on our souls and that souls leave on places," says playwright Raul Garza of his new work, She Was Here. "So to get to the heart of that, I spoke to about 10 or 12 Latinas who had grown up or developed their consciousness or influenced the community around them while our community changed drastically from the '50s to today. Those stories really colored the way that characters came to life. And rather than be autobiographical or try to be accurate to specific things that happened, what they did was they created threads that had commonalities in them and moments of illumination, moments of struggle, and that really helped weave into a narrative of these independent characters who inhabit a singular place over 50 different years."

The play takes place over decades in one Austin home - a fictionalized version of a small house on Rainey Street - and is populated by multiple generations by Latina women, portrayed by a small ensemble of actors including Tonie Knight. One of the characters Knight plays is Donna. "She's there throughout [the play]," Knight says, "[and] in the '70s she's a single mom who has had to move back into her mother's house and times are tough and she's got this job in a bar and just trying to make it. She's very much a live-in-the-now person, quite a risk taker, and really sort of the opposite almost in in a lot of ways of her mother. I also play her mother, Elsa, in the 50s, who is not anything like Donna. She's very image conscious, a strong matriarch, and religious and... just one of those Latina moms who just pushes and pushes for you to always do your best. Donna is looser. And I actually have some of both of them in me. I've been both of those Latina moms and both of those Latina daughters."

"So the story itself follows how these moms and daughters navigate really radical change," Garza says, "whether it's things like the pandemic, segregation, women's rights, the economy... and so the story weaves its way around them and through their lives, and that's how it comes to life.There's a couple of moments in the play that... I've gotten to see in rehearsal here and there that I really, really relate to, which is asking, 'Tell me your story. Tell me that story again, and I'm gonna listen differently this time.' So I hope that people ask anyone they love or anyone they know, tell me your story, and approach it in a different space of listening and receiving and empathizing and understanding."