El Teatro Campesino

El Teatro Campesino ("farmworkers' theater"), is a theatrical troupe founded in 1965 as the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers with the "full support of Cesar Chavez." The original actors were all farmworkers, and El Teatro Campesino enacted events inspired by the lives of their audience. Early performances were on flat bed trucks in the middle of the fields in Delano, California, and the theater is now located in San Juan Bautista, California. Currently, El Teatro Campesino’s mission is “…to create a popular art with 21st century tools that presents a more just and accurate account of human history, while encouraging the young women and men of a new generation to take control of their own destiny through creative discipline, vibrant education, economic independence, and artistic excellence.”

Luis Valdez, a Chicano from a migrant farmworker family, founded the troupe after attending San Jose State University and working briefly with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Teatro Campesino's early performances drew on varied traditions, such as commedia dell'arte, Spanish religious dramas adapted for teaching Mission Indians, Mexican folk humor, a century-old tradition of Mexican performances in California, and Aztec and Maya sacred ritual dramas.

El Teatro Campesino started as the cultural wing of the United Farm Workers union in California's central valley, to help raise both Mexican workers and American people awareness on the Delano grape strike controversies during the five years of the strike (1965 – 1970). Although the troupe began by entertaining the farmworkers, within a year of their founding they began to tour to raise funds for the striking farm workers. By 1967, their subject matter had expanded to include aspects of Chicano culture that went beyond the fields: education, the Vietnam War, indigenous roots, and racism.The work of the theater has been considered by critics of Chicano art, such as Holly Barnet-Sanchez, as a "major catalyst for an explosion of Chicano/a arts."

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