Training Aztlán to Act: Chicanx Theatre, TENAZ, and Theatre as Social Change

Abstract

Excerpt: As mainstream theatre history would have it, the Chicanx theatre movement began in 1965 with the first actos staged as part of Cesar Chavez\u27s farmworkers\u27 movement and ended in 1981 with Luis Valdez\u27s film adaptation of his play Zoot Suit.1 This imagined trajectory makes for a tidy story arc that follows a marginalized population from the grape fields of California to the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood. These bookends also serve as exemplars of the Chicanx theatre movement\u27s emphasis on social justice; the former used theatre as a tool for organizing labor unions while the latter drew attention to racist policing practices and a discriminatory legal system. For many historians, Valdez and the collective of artists that comprised El Teatro Campesino in its first two decades constitute the whole of Chicanx theatre, a movement that gave way to the growth of a broader Latinx theatre that continues today. Those who have engaged in a deeper study of the movement, however, have long recognized it as a rich and diverse phenomenon composed of hundreds of teatros across and even outside of the United States, many of which have actively centered social and political concerns including labor rights, Latinx education, and anti-war protest, among others