ABSTRACT
The struggle to establish a pluralistic society is the great drama offered in this study of El Teatro Campesino’s 1981 adaptation of the 1906 Broadway hit The Rose of the Rancho, by David Belasco and Richard Walton Tully. US theatre has often helmed the colonial illusion of the need for a Euro-American-dominant US. Interpretations of California’s sudden, mid-19th-century conquest and annexation – from a Mexican state to a US state – have played a significant role in establishing a paradigm of ethnocentric dominance through the present. Critical theatrical approaches to race and class can provide a consciousness that reinterprets representations of US history by interrogating colonial practices of empathy. Consequently, with multiple languages, diversified aesthetic modes, and a postcolonial paradigm, El Teatro Campesino decolonized what audiences were accustomed to seeing, hearing, feeling, and empathizing.
