¡VIVA HoCo! A Fiesta Homecoming at Riverside High School
Riverside High School is proud to announce Mr. Octavio Solis, graduate of the Ranger Class of 1976, as the 2018 Honored Ex.
Riverside High School’s 2018 Honored Ex, Octavio Solis, is a playwright, director, author and professor. This Ranger began his career in theater at the age of 14 when he joined the Riverside High School Theater group & Speech and Debate team.
With a career that spans over 20 years, he is an author of over 25 plays and most recently a culture consultant and voice actor in Disney’s Pixar Oscar winning film, Coco! This outstanding gentleman, is now considered to be one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America.
According to Wikipedia: Solis received a BFA at Trinity University and went on to earn his MFA at Trinity University's off-campus program at the Dallas Theatre Center. After college, while acting in Eric Overmyer's Native Speech in Dallas, Solis was inspired to write his own plays rather than act in them. In between acting and writing, he taught high school students. He moved to San Francisco in 1989 to further his career, as he felt he was "hitting a glass ceiling" in Dallas, and felt that California would be a good place to participate in the "Mexican American experience."
Solis uses his experiences in life to help create and shape his plays, often drawing directly from his time in El Paso, where he states that he was able to see both the first-world and the third-world from his backyard. In his play Lydia, which focuses on a working-class Mexican-American family and an undocumented maid who arrives in the broken home, he draws upon his own experiences as a Latino living only a mile from the Rio Grande. In Disney's Coco, Solis voices an Arrival Agent.
Click here to see a list of Homecoming activities.