ABSTRACT
TEATRO CAMPESINO WAS CREATED DURING the Chicano, i.e. Mexican–American, Farmworkers’ Movement by, for and with Chicano farmworkers. Early performances frequently took place at picket lines, on the dirt roads of California migrant camps and at union halls. In this excerpt, Broyles–Gonzalez elucidates the Mexican popular cultural forms at the source of El Teatro Campesino and the Chicano theatre movement. Like traditional performance, popular forms cannot be attributed to individuals; that may be why, embedded in some of the most persistent, seemingly iight–weight entertainments is a deep sense of the identity and world view of the people with less cultural and political clout who developed them. Here Broyles–Gonzalez celebrates the carpa, or travelling tent show, grounded in the perspective of the Mexican working class, and the key contribution of actors who transmitted these forms.
