Mexican theater in the early twentieth
century, that did not mean serious themes
did not underlie the presentations.
Instead, they were developed within the-
atrical revues known as revistas. Revistas
usually focused on the lives of the work-
ing class. While the early revistason the
stages of Revolution-era Mexico City
were overtly political, later revistas on
both sides of the border were less so. Still,
they remained comedic revues that fea-
tured comic underdog heroes known as
pelados,who poked fun at the American
and Mexican governments and other
authorities. Plots of revistasin the
American Southwest frequently centered
on the misadventures of naïve newcomers
to the United States and the underlying
real-life cultural shock that the Mexican
immigrant community was experiencing.
By the late 1920s, and particularly during
the Depression-era repatriation crisis,
revistasreflected the shift from culture
shock to outright culture clash. In the
face of growing anti-Mexican sentiment
in the United States, an even stronger
sense of national identity arose in the
Mexican-American community of the
Southwest. Depression-era revistas
reflected this by introducing the renegado,
or thoroughly Americanized Mexican
immigrant as a target of satire.
Meanwhile, theater in Hispanic com-
munities in other parts of the United
States also blossomed during this era,
though with differences. Cuban and
Spanish immigrants dominated the turn-
of-the century Hispanic theaters in New
York City and in Ybor City, Florida.
Instead of the Mexican revista,Cuban
New Yorkers and Floridians frequented
obra bufa cubana,or Cuban blackface
farce. These productions featured slap-
stick comedy, Afro-Cuban song and
dance, and like revistasdrew material out
of current events, gossip and concerns of
the community.
During the 1920s and 1930s, New
York’s Puerto Rican theatrical communi-
ty produced far more serious works.
Puerto Rican playwright José Ena-
morado Cuesta produced socialist dra-
mas in support of the Spanish Republican
cause and the struggles of the working
class. Gonzalo O’Neill’s plays focused
on Puerto Rican nationalism and inde-
pendence from the United States.
Meanwhile, Tampa’s Centro Asturiano,
one of the city’s most important mutual
aid societies during the Depression, host-
ed the only Spanish-language Federal
Theater Project in the nation. The
Federal Theater Project was a program of
President Roosevelt’s New Deal, in which
the federal government financed artists to
develop theater productions in an effort
to keep them employed as well as to
bring the arts to communities that rarely
benefited from live theater.Post-War
Hispanic TheatreDuring World War II and the years
immediately following, Hispanic theater
in the Southwest, New York, Tampa,
Florida went through difficult times, as
many local venues for live theater con-
verted to moviehouses. In San Antonio,
comedic stage actors like Beatriz “La
Chata” Noelesca and Pedro “Ramirin”
Gonzalez kept the vaudeville tradition
barely alive, while other vaudeville per-
formers began making the transition to
radio and television.
In New York, 1953 saw the opening
La Carreta(“The Oxcart”) by Puerto
Rican author Rene Marqués at the
Church of San Sebastian. The play con-
cerned a rural Puerto Rican family and
their relocation first to a San Juan slum
and then to New York—this dramatizing
the real life experience of many of the
working-class audience. In 1965 La
Carretamade it to Off-Broadway in a
production starring Raul Julia and
Miriam Colón.
With Luis Valdez’s founding of Teatro
Campesino in the fields of Delano,
California in 1965, a groundswell of new
“teatro Chicano” (Chicano theater) groups
arose throughout the nation. In communi-
ty centers, church basements, public parks
and elsewhere, a new generation of
Chicanos used theater in service of a new
bilingual, bicultural identity. With the
publication of an anthology of Valdez’s
works in 1971, local teatros had access to
his full repertoire. And with it they also
received Valdez’s theatrical and political
canons for presenting el teatro Chicano:
(1) Chicanos must be seen as a nation
with geographic, religious, cultural, and
racial roots in the Southwest; teatros must
further the idea of nationalism and create
a national theater based on identification
with the Amerindian past;LA RAZA UNIDA 163