Annotations for Names: La Huelga

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.

[Chanting] Huelga! Huelga!

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.

Through music, song, and drama, the members of the Teatro gave the Huelga animo.

They kept the strikers' spirits up and even persuaded some of the strike breakers to join up.

Years later, Cesar Chavez recalled the impact that el Teatro Campesino had on his movement.

Teatro and the struggle really made a difference for us. Luis was able to get people who had been on strike three months, four months, six months a year to laugh at their own conditions, to look at themselves, and to join with us laughing about the injustices and the growers who were committing those injustices against them.

Teatro had a tremendous impact, and one of the factors why we won that strike, because it gave people the courage and the vision, and also made it possible for them to laugh at themselves during a hard, hard struggle.

The first striker to join the Teatro was Agustin Lira, then a 21-year-old migrant from Coahuila, Mexico.

Strangely enough, I was working in the fields around Stockton, Sacramento, and I bought a newspaper and I picked it up, and it said that there was a strike going on, you know, and I'm very sure that I, inside of my soul, I was looking for an opportunity to fight back, because my parents had been farmworkers.

And we had never had a chance to fight for better wages, but of course we were exploited.

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.

but I couldn't see the future beyond a certain point. So I did it anyway, and I jumped into the grape strike, and the idea of starting and maintaining a farmworker's theater was a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month challenge.