CHICANO! 500 Years of Struggle
THE
NEW YORKER
The Talk of the Town
August 19, 1967
Actos
We had barely started what the politicians call a walking tour of Second avenue below St. Mark's Place the other evening when the number and variety of our fellow-pedestrians -- there were Flower People, Bowery People, tourist People, and even Real People -- began to overwhelm us, and we took refuge in the Village Theatre at East Sixth Street, which contained only some two thousand spectators, several unlaid ghosts of the once-resident Yiddish theatre, and, onstage, six men and two women in work clothes, who turned out to be members of the Teatro Campesino, the theatrical arm of the Delano, California, grape pickers' union.
It seemed that the Teatro had stopped over on its way from Newport, where it had performed at the folk festival, to Washington, where it was going to perform for the Senate Sub-committee on Migratory Labor. The actors sang, mainly in Spanish, and performed skits, mainly in English, in which the characters, identified by placards hung around the actors' necks, included grape growers, labor contractors, scabs, pickets, green grapes, rotten grapes, all four seasons, and a hapless archetype of the migrant worker named Don Sotaco.
All the skits, which the performers call Actos, reached predictably uplifting climaxes -- a scab was converted, a grape grower got his come-uppance -- but they all made their points through good, wholesome, frequently amusing slapstick, and they all seemed to take themselves with a large grain of salt.
We figured that any propaganda theatre that took itself with even a taste of salt bore further investigation, so the next afternoon we stopped by the apartment, on the eighth floor at 27 West Ninety-sixth Street, in which the actors were staying to talk with the Teatro en masse.
As we entered the elevator, a dark-haired young woman carrying a huge bag of groceries got in with us and, upon discovering that the two of us were heading for the same floor, introduced herself as Norma Whittaker. Miss Whittaker said that she does publicity for the Teatro, and told us that the bag was full of sandwich-makings for the actors, who were still in Central Park, where they had spent the past three hours performing for Channel 13's television cameras.
The apartment they were using, she said, belonged to Mrs. Ronnie Gilbert, formerly of The Weavers, who was about to leave for London with the cast of "America Hurrah." Inside the apartment, Miss Whittaker lugged her groceries into the kitchen and left us to explore the living room, a big room with windows that looked downtown across Ninety-sixth Street and over the roofs of several blocks of brownstones.
Near the windows, a large Tiffany lamp hung over a heavy oval oak table, and, closer to the door, a couch and several chairs were arranged on an olive-green carpet. Two wide-brimmed Mexican hats lay on the carpet, along with several of the signs that identify the Teatro's characters during performances. The visible signs, hand-lettered, read "Summer," "Spring," and "Green Grape." A pair of old Mexican sandals lay there, too, beside an open suitcase containing props, among them a huge pencil and a green globe that is worn like a mask on the face of the actor who plays the green grape.
Miss Whittaker returned and explained that the Teatro usually performs for migrant farmworkers but occasionally makes trips like this one to win supporters and raise money. She said the group was organized in the fall of 1965, during the early months of the Delano grape pickers' strike, led by Cesar Chavez, and that it became a part of the United Farmworkers Organizing committee, which Mr. Chavez's union of migrant pickers became when it joined the A.F.L.-C.I.O. All the male actors had worked in the fields, she said, although some had done so mainly during school and college vacations, and all but one of the actors came from a Mexican American migrant background.
Miss Whittaker offered us a beer, which we declined, and then the actors arrived, wearing the same work clothes they had worn onstage, and she introduced them to us as Luis Valdez, Agustin Lira, Danny Valdez, Lorie Huerta, Felipe Cantu, Kerry Lira, Joe Otero, and Doug Rippey. They all looked hot and tired after their performance in the Park, and they all seemed to be in their twenties or their teens except Mr. Cantu, a small, wiry, middle-aged man with a stubble of beard and a weathered face, whom we recognized as the previous night's Don Sotaco. Mr. Cantu, who was wearing a wide-brimmed Mexican hat, crouched on the rug and began to imitate a one-book writer who had been at a party given for the Teatro the night before, delivering his lines in gravelly Spanish and slapping his thigh on the punch lines. The other actors watched, chuckling, and then, when Mr. Cantu had finished, they all began bustling between the living room and the kitchen, making themselves sandwiches and opening cans of beer.
In the living room, we heard someone mention a would-be radio interviewer whom the actors had thought condescending, and after Agustin Lira and Luis Valdez, who directs the Teatro, had provisioned themselves and settled near us, we asked them if interviewers often approached the Teatro with stereotyped notions of what a migrants' theatre should be.
"Yes," said Mr. Lira, a slim, brown-skinned young man in a white shirt. "They expect us to be farmworkers, which to them means stupid and ignorant. They're always surprised to find we speak good English. They think, 'If you speak good English, you can't be real farmworkers.'"
Mr. Valdez, a short, husky man wearing a khaki shirt and a magnificent Pancho Villa mustache, nodded, and added that most of the people they encountered in a city like New York -- even liberal audiences, predisposed to like them -- saw the Teatro largely in terms of local color. "A Mexican American audience is our toughest audience," he said, "because to them we're not colorful farmworkers, we're just ordinary people, with brown skins like theirs, and they want to see what we can do."
"Also, Mexican American audiences expect slick, professional entertainment, such as they get from television and from Hollywood movies, or an imitation of it, because that's all they ever see," Mr. Lira said. "If a band comes to a migrant town to play for a Saturday night dance, the promoters put the star on the back of a convertible and parade her up the main street of the town, even though the main street isn't paved and the dust is blowing up in her face, and they have mariachis riding in a car behind her."
We asked Mr. Valdez and Mr. Lira what they considered the troupe's main function to be. "We try to educate the workers," Mr. Valdez said. "In each acto, we explain a particular point to them. We started the Teatro to entertain the workers at meeting and to keep up their morale, but it was never just entertainment. Recently, the Free Southern Theatre performed for Negro sharecroppers in the South, but it did things like Waiting for Godot, and though Waiting for Godot may be all right for a middle-class audience, the Free Southern Theatre's audiences were Negroes who were poor and starving and oppressed, and what they needed were solutions. We take a real situation -- often something that happens on the picket line -- and we improvise around it."
"When we get an improvisation that we like, we're ready. An acto is never written down. When we started the Teatro, workers came up to us after performances and said, 'There's not enough action,' so we introduced more slapstick. We use even more slapstick when we perform for Mexican American farmworkers than when we perform for a middle-class audience in New York. In the future, I'd like to use a lot more music, too."
"Music is action," Mr. Lira interjected. "Now we're working with archetypes, but I'd like to develop more depth of characterization," Mr. Valdez said. He sipped from his can of beer. "I think what we're doing is art," he went on. "Well, the word art has been so debased that maybe I shouldn't use it, but at least what we do works. An airplane works, and it's a kind of art. A set of gears work, and it's a kind of art. Well, the Teatro works, too."
EL TEATRO DE LA TIERRA
414 North Park
Fresno California 93701
(209) 237-3016
Email: almas2@earthlink.net