century-old tradition of Mexican per-
formances in California, and Aztec and
Maya sacred ritual dramas.LATINO CULTURAL
ACHIEVEMENT IN THE
POST-WAR ERABy 1971, Valdez began adapting tradi-
tional religious plays La Virgen del Tepeyac
and La Pastorelafor Christmas celebra-
tions. In doing so, Valdez was not alone.
Throughout the postwar era, Latino
artistic expression, whether in theater,
literature, music, or the fine arts, fre-
quently reflected not only current audi-
ence tastes and the contemporary
Chicano rights movement, but long-
standing Hispanic traditions. In reviving
and renewing these artistic traditions dur-
ing the 1960s and 1970s, Valdez and oth-
ers were embracing their historical
identities as Chicanos, Puerto Ricans,
and Cuban Americans.Hispanic-American
TheaterThe theatrical traditions that Valdez drew
on dated back to both the religious theater
and pageantry of medieval Spain and to
the ritual dances of American Indians. In
the sixteen and seventeenth centuries,
Spanish missionaries fused these tradi-
tions together by using theater as a toolfor converting the Indians of Mexico and
their mestizo descendants. These plays
incorporated the colors, music, and some-
times even languages of Mexico’s indige-
nous peoples. By the eighteenth century a
cycle of religious plays dramatizing stories
from the Bible, had become popularized.
Among them was the pastorela,or shep-
herd’s play, which told the story of Satan’s
efforts to tempt shepherds on their pil-
grimage to Bethlehem to pay tribute to
the newborn Christ Child. Local produc-
tions of the entire cycle of these plays—
each imbued with a sense of missionary
zeal—took place each year between mid-
December and Easter, and involved the
entire local community. Despite their
Christian nature, these plays frequently
had strong elements of slapstick comedy,
and often used allegory and masks for
actors—folk elements that can be found in
the Hispanic theater even today.
While the roots of the Hispanic folk
theater go back to the era of Spanish col-
onization, the first professional Hispanic
theater troupes in the United States first
emerged in mid-nineteenth century. By
the 1840s, itinerant professional theater
groups toured the ranchos of northern
California, and by the 1870s, local troupes
as far afield as Tucson, Arizona and San
Antonio, Texas toured regionally.
By the early twentieth century, rail
transportation allowed touring compa-
nies the ability to reach smaller cities and
towns as never before. Mobile makeshift
tent and circus theaters soon sprang up
on both sides of the Rio Grande, partic-
ularly during and after the Mexican
Revolution, as thousands of Mexican
refugees arrived in the United States,
settling in small communities from the
border region up to Chicago, New York,
and Tampa, Florida. Los Angeles and
San Antonio, the U.S. cities with the
largest Mexican populations became
major Hispanic theater centers. Mexican
expatriate playwrights such as Adalberto
Elias Gonzalez and Esteban Escalante
produced full-length plays that addressed
the situation of Mexicans in California.
Their extremely popular works helped to
solidify Hispanic culture and mores in
the United States among the Mexican
immigrant community in the face of
pressures to assimilate into mainstream
American culture.
While the rise of Mexican vaudeville
and musicals would displace more serious162 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
Artist Rudy Cuellar, a member of the
Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), created
this poster to promote a performance
by El Teatro Campesino. The RCAF,
based in Sacramento, California, is an
artistic collective founded in 1969 to
express the goals of the Chicano civil
rights and labor organizing movement
of the United Farm Workers. (Poster by
Rudy Cuellar, Royal Chicano Air Force
Archives, California Ethnic and
Multicultural Archives, Special
Collections Department, Donald C.
Davidson Library, University of
California, Santa Barbara)