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Sometimes people in Texas marvel at how few others have heard the Tejano Conjunto music that they are so passionate about.

Hector Galan joins us now from Latino USA Studios at KUT in Austin.

And so I'm hoping that through this documentary, people will learn and embrace the music as much as we have here in Texas.

So for all the people who really don't understand how it is that Mexicanos and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest ended up playing accordions of all things, give us that history.

Well, you know, it's a little cloudy, the history in terms of the actual accordion when it came to the United States. If you look at studies in Mexico, for instance, they claim that it came to Texas around New Braunfels area first.

Other scholars feel or state that the accordion came to Monterrey in Mexico first.

Well, I think basically the history of Conjunto music is, especially here in Texas, sort of reflects the history of America.

You know, there was a time when Tejanos, Mexicanos were segregated, you know, in the state.

And for a lot of generations, say in the 40s and 50s and 60s, that music became something associated with something that you were running away from, meaning accordion-based Conjunto music.

For a lot of people who were assimilating into the United States, it represented something that they wanted to get away from.

I think now that we're in, you know, the 2000s, the young people are rediscovering, the music has always been there. It has never died. For a while, people thought it was going to be forgotten. Unfortunately, it has died in some other communities where accordion was real strong.

But it's these young people, the Tejanos, that have re-embraced this sort of as a cultural symbol of music, of an original music. It's sort of an identity that they're re-embracing. And now they're taking it to different limits and they're keeping it and maintaining it.

There are a lot of people who don't realize that you were born in Chihuahua, Mexico.

So was it when you went to Italy that you feel that things changed? You had been typecast in Hollywood for so long as a pirate or an Indian chief, for example. When did the roles that you were able to play begin to change for you?

Well, as you said, I wasn't accepted as an American. I mean, I wasn't accepted as an American, having been brought up in the east of Los Angeles.

Quique Aviles is a Salvadoran born poet based in Washington DC.

The bilingual film chronicles the struggle of immigrants to form a union in Southern California during the 1990s.

The film premiered recently in Los Angeles.

Nearly a decade after he came up with the idea for Bread and Roses, screenwriter Paul Laverty was back in Los Angeles for the film's opening party.

He'd just arrived from his state of Scotland in the early 90s when thousands of janitors, mostly from Mexico and Central America, were beginning to demand better pay and benefits.

I went along and I met the people. I met cleaners who were activists and trade union organizers.

And they were fantastic people. And there was a kind of a spark to them that really got to me, you know, the way they organized and a real depth of human experience.

You know, and there was a determination to organize and change their lives without making a fuss or playing victim.

The first time I met Paul, he sort of appeared and started asking a bunch of questions and I was totally suspicious about who this guy was, you know.

But over time he, you know, sort of wore on me. He said he was making a movie. I was like, yeah, right, everybody in L.A. is going to make a movie. You know, it's like this will end up in some trash can somewhere.

Once a ragtag troupe performing in the great fields of California, it staged the back of a flatbed truck. El Teatro Campesino has made its mark from movies to Broadway, training a now veteran generation of Latino actors and directors and influencing a new generation.

It's full in San Juan Bautista, California, the tranquil California mission town that Teatro Campesino, the farmworker's theater, has called home for over three decades.

El Teatro Campesino is now practically an institution for many Latinos, especially for Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.

To whom it may concern, there is an interest in establishing a bilingual community farm workers theater.

The primary aim of this theater would be to belong to the workers themselves.

It is time the Raza landed the artistic blow it is capable of giving.

Those interested in attending an organizational meeting, please sign below.

The place was Delano, California.

This was the text of a leaflet which announced the formation of a theater troupe quite unlike any before.

It was influenced by La Barraca, the 1930s traveling theater of Spain's Federico García Lorca, by the Mexican burlesque style known as Carpa, and by the work of the German playwright Bertholt Brecht.

But the actual spark that led to the founding of El Teatro Campesino was something known simply as La Huelga, the farm workers movement for social justice.

Now the night that I left San Francisco for Delano, I was talking to this guy from the Free Southern Theater, which was also an inspiration because they were black actors from New York City touring the south in 1964-65.

And I was talking to one of them, a guy by the name of Murray Levy, and he said,

You're going down there to start a theater company? And I said, Yeah, you know. With what? Do you have any money? I said, No. No funding? No. Do you have a board of directors? No. Do you have any actors? No. Do you have any scripts? No.

He says, How are you going to do it? And I said, I don't know. But I'm going to do it.

If you believe in something, it becomes true.

Luis Valdez came from a family of migrants from the San Joaquin Valley.

We're at the Teatro Campesino, the farmworkers theater from Delano, California. And we've come here this evening to tell you the story of our strike, our huelga, and of our union, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO led by Cesar Chavez.

35 years after the Huelga, I spoke with director and Teatro Campesino founder, Luis Valdez, at his theater in San Juan Bautista about the past and the present.

It was very inspiring to walk into the Teatro Campesino here in San Juan Bautista, and there was so much going on, there was so much energy here.

For one reason or another, it didn't happen, has not happened yet. There isn't a single regional-level style theater that relates to Latinos in the state of California.

Zoot Suit told the story of racism against Pachucos in Los Angeles.

Pachucos were young Mexican-Americans who'd adopted the Zoot Suit style of dress during the time of the Second World War.

Four hundred thousand people saw the production of Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where it ran for 46 weeks, with actor Edward James Olmos in the lead role of El Pachuco.

In Hollywood, they call it the Hispanic market. We know it to be simply the presence of millions and millions and millions of people that are attuned to the new realities of the Southwest.

Though Luis Valdez is widely considered a pioneer, he himself doesn't consider his work nearly done yet. Last year, Valdez premiered a new original play, The Mummified Deer. Zoot Suit had a successful revival in Chicago. And in the long term, a number of important film projects remain on El Teatro Campesino's horizon.

Well, I have the movie on Cesar Chavez, you know, that I'm struggling. That's another protracted struggle. But for all the reasons that made Cesar who he was, this is another film that is a long time struggle. Maybe just because I've chosen, you know, this life of struggle that happens this way. But there's a lot of truth in it that California is not ready to acknowledge yet.

Nopal cactus, also known as devil's tongue, may not immediately come to mind when you're looking for something new for lunch. But in Mexico and the southwestern United States, the prickly pear cactus has been cooked and enjoyed for generations.

Susana Trilling is a chef and former restaurateur from the U.S. now living in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Latino USA caught up with Susana Trilling in Austin, Texas at Manuel's Restaurant, where she shared with us her recipe for ensalada de nopales asados, grilled nopales salad.

Susana Trilling is author of the book Seasons of My Heart, A Culinary Journey Through Oaxaca, Mexico.

[Music] In Old New Mexico, way before the advent of the railroad, candle flames danced in tin sconces on white plaster walls. Tin flames lit the faces of Christian saints. Tin crosses led processions of worship.

In those days, traders brought in small tin items. Then in the mid-1800s, the railroads began to haul in large sheets of tin. It became plentiful for the first time, inspiring the golden days of tin making for the next 75 years.

Sadly, we don't know much about tin's history. Few artists signed their work, and much of it has been lost. But today, tin making is popular once again in New Mexico.

Reporter Deborah Begel dropped in on a tin making class at the public library in the northern New Mexico town of El Rito.

Elaine Archuleta started taking tin making classes and found she couldn't stop. She stayed for three semesters. Now she's teaching her first class at the El Rito Public Library. She explains each step to students one on one. I lean in close to catch her soft voice.

Tin work in our community hasn't been around lately these last years, but the thing about it is that it's been done many years before, and I think it's great that we can introduce it back into the young kids and keep it going for the years to come.

It's also Tijuana and the border.

We were like making an experiment of using the traditional sounds of the border, which is the Norteño music, Tambora and all these original sounds. The sounds that you commonly hear on the border.

I went to local studios and grabbed some samples from people that used to play in bars in Tijuana and used to get jobs, you know, in restaurants and even on the streets.

They record demos in cheap studios in Tijuana.

Yeah, the thing is like we live on the border and San Diego is next to Tijuana.

Yeah, people is like when we put in the music, people were in Tijuana, they start recognizing the sounds, you know, the sounds of the border, the sound of the stuba, the sounds they hear on taxis, but now they're hearing on clubs with electronics.

So then people that were in other disciplines like graphic designers, painters, and then they say, you know, 'I'm working with the image from the border, an image from Tijuana, and I fusioned this in my works. Can I use your music?' Yeah, of course.

And earlier than Santana was, you know, like Herb Alpert, you know, fusioning the jazz, the American jazz with all the sounds happening in that moment in Tijuana.

So I think it's always Tijuana has this vibe, you know, the border, the fusion of two cultures, the sounds that are flying around the radio waves and all these television channels, you know, back and forth from the border.

It's something that inspire people and people like us, you know, living in Tijuana, inspired by both sides, you know.

It's like kind of a, that's a way to broke the border, you know.

Mine goes back to, yes, you're right, from childhood in Iran and the exposure that I had to records that came from Latin America to Iran.

And later on, of course, coming to Texas, I got exposed to Andean and Latin American music. And that was the beginnings of my contact with Javier's culture.

For me, when I arrived in Houston in '78, I used to go to a club named the Acropolis. And I started getting to see Greek bands, Turkish bands, and all sorts of different foreign music. And I got really fascinated by it.

When I moved into Austin, the first band that I got to see that had a Middle Eastern music was 1001 Nights, which is the band that Kamran had in those days.

Rita Moreno was born Rosita Dolores Alberio in Puerto Rico. She came to the United States with her family in search of new opportunities some 55 years ago.

We're pleased that she joins us from a studio in New York City.

Welcome to Latino USA. You know it's a total pleasure to be speaking with you. You know when I was 10 years old growing up hating my name Maria.