El Teatro Campesino

A notable U.S. example of radical street theater has been El Teatro Campesino (the FarmWorkers' Theater). It became known through the later success of one of its key members, Luís Valdez, and his brother Daniel, whose Zoot Suit became a popular Broadway musical and a 1981 movie, but the theater group's beginnings were anchored in the labor struggles of Chicana/o and migrant Mexican farmworkers on huge California plantations in the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1960s, some 100 such street theater groups were in operation, but El Teatro Campesino was the spark.

The California labor struggles from 1965 onward were often led by the UFW (the United Farm Workers of America), the unofficial union founded in 1962 by César Chávez, Helen Chávez, and Dolores Huerta. Official unions often sided with the big farmers in disputing the UFW's right to negotiate wages and conditions. Part II of documentary maker Hector Galán's PBS series Chicano! graphically recounts this story. Earlier centuries of struggle by poor farmers, peones, slaves, and seasonal day-laborers were another more diffuse but powerful source, whether in México or within the southwestern United States.

Popular oral traditions of commentary, protest, and ridicule based on these grievances fed into the productions of El Teatro Campesino. So did a well-established popular Mexican theatrical form, the traveling carpa (tent) performance, whose performance space was, literally, a collapsible tent, taken from site to site on a truck or even a mule cart. It had brightly painted backdrops, often a single naked electric lightbulb, and plain benches for the audience, and it offered live music, dance, and a series of comic sketches (actos) with both earthy and fantastic subjects.

As with African American dance in the era of slavery, the performers' use of their bodies as a communication instrument was especially important, sometimes almost more important than the words themselves. As Broyles-González (1994) explains, “Understanding a performance … entailed an apprehension of tone, of silences, of body movement, of images, of sounds in all their variety…. The performance aesthetic capitalized on mime” (p. 18).

Language was another crucial feature of the performances. Spanish and English intermingled in the deft deployment of both that is sometimes referred to as “Spanglish,” but also calós (local mixed dialects from different Chicana/o neighborhoods) functioned as yet a third language. This blend made performances hard to understand for second-language Spanish speakers, but tremendously rich and rooted for the actual audiences.

Both in carpa theater and El Teatro productions, the script was an approximate guide, discussed in common beforehand, but performances were intensely interactive: As Broyles-González (1994) notes, “Improvisation [depended] most notably on … audience response and participation…. Essential to this process [was] each individual's split-second timing and capacity to think on [his or her] feet” (p. 17). A key character in [Page 171]carpa was the underdog, el pelado/la pelada: irreverent, ribald, irrepressible, at one and the same time truculent and scared, winner and loser, scruffily dressed, a trickster figure combined with man/woman of the people. Humor, often farcical, was a key component.

Commentators have often suggested the influence of Brecht and other radical theater exponents on El Teatro Campesino, and certainly the San Francisco Mime Troupe had been a formative influence on Luís Valdez. The iconic Mexican comedian Cantínflas (Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes, 1911–1993), a Chaplinesque figure, was also a source of inspiration.

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