Annotations for Speaker: Maria Martin

This is Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture. [Intro Music]

Maria Hinojosa is on assignment, I'm Maria Martin.

On this special edition of our program, we remember farmworker leader Cesar Chavez by recalling 35 years of the theater that grew out of the farmworkers movement, El Teatro Campesino.

El Teatro Campesino, its past, present and future, in the words of Teatro founder Luis Valdez.

That's coming up on this special edition of Latino USA.

I'm Maria Martin. For more than 35 years now, the theater company El Teatro Campesino has brought the Chicano and Latino experience to the American stage.

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.

Like most days, it's busy at the old packing shed that Teatro Campesino converted to its theater and headquarters. Kinan and Anahuac Valdez, both young directors, actors and filmmakers, are busy rehearsing a new play.

And in the Teatro's recording studio, their uncle, singer, composer and actor Daniel Valdez, is recording the soundtrack of the Teatro's annual miracle play, The Virgen of Tepeyac.

Many of those who will act in this play this year have done so countless times before. Some 10, 20 or even 30 years. Like the Teatro Campesino itself, it's become a tradition, an expression of community and familia.

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

That's because El Teatro Campesino, which has produced television programs and motion pictures, and has been the spawning ground for some well-known Latino actors, has its roots in the very beginning of an important historical movement for Latinos, the Chicano movement for social and political recognition.

For the Teatro Campesino, it all started back in 1965.

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.

Farm workers had gone on strike in September of 1965, led by labor organizer Cesar Chavez.

At the beginning, it was very much a David and Goliath scenario. Farm workers had no political voice, the growers were very powerful. It was just the inspiration that an optimistic young Chicano playwright needed.

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

His family had moved north, and Valdez had studied drama at San Jose State. He'd also done a stint with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Teatro's early performances were simple, agitprop pieces. Valdez called them actos.

Bilingual, one-act skits using broad characters. The grower, el patroncito. The strikers, los huelguistas. And los esquirolaes, the scabs.

In those days, there were no sets, no costumes. The actors wore signs around their necks with their characters' names. The stage was the back of a flatbed truck. It was, says Valdez, our own brand of commedia dell'arte.

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.

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

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.

Is this the old spirit? Is there a new spirit?

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.

It was, said Valdez, a very American play. Zoot Suit is about American identity. The Zoot Suit phenomenon was something that was of the period of the early 40s.

Actor Edward James Olmos, star of Stand and Deliver and Miami Vice, recalls he was a furniture mover when he was asked to audition for Zoot Suit and saw a script of the play.

Seven years went by between the release of the film of Zoot Suit and Valdez's second film, La Bamba.

It was a time which saw what some call the Latinization of the United States. Everyone, from Linda Ronstadt to George Bush, it seemed, discovered their Hispanic connection.

At last, the American cultural climate seemed to have caught up with the work of El Teatro Campesino.

La Bamba, the story of 1950s singer Ricardo Valenzuela, better known as Ritchie Valens, grossed 55 million dollars in the United States, 90 million worldwide.

What is there left for you to do Luis? What do you still want to do? What are the dreams that perhaps are yet unfulfilled?

Director, playwright, filmmaker, cultural icon, and pioneer of the American theater, Luis Valdez.

They forced the scholars to recognize that there is more than Western European theater. And as long as the companies that have been spawned by the Teatro Campesino and the playwrights that have been inspired by the Teatro Campesino continue to write and express their reality concerning their own communities, then the impact will continue to be felt.

There are certainly playwrights out there who have, from the Chicano community, who have not necessarily been influenced by Luis Valdez per se. But without Luis Valdez having opened the doors in many of these institutions, then they would not even be listened to. They wouldn't be heard from.

For Latino USA, I'm Maria Martin.