![]() This year, national companies who produce Latino/a theatre rediscovered one another. In many ways, the movement is also new to the very people producing these works. "Latino/a Theatre is new to Americans," says Huerta. The genre just looks fresh because outside the Latino/a theatre radar, many are unaware of the stories that have been produced. "There are reconfigurations published and played. "No one teaches strictly Chicano Theater," Huerta told me. It continued to grow, and current plays and scripts from Latino/a companies have become multicultural works, and showing how the movement has evolved and begun to carry bolder themes of sexuality, as well as speaking for the current wave of immigrants. The figurative icons, such as Our Lady of Guadelupe, are among the spiritual references that become urbanized in the 1960s and 1970s, reviving Mexican figures and Aztec and Mayan theology on the walls of Los Angeles barrios.īut the use of "Chicano imaginary" was void of extended narrative that could be only provided by playwrights, Huerta postulates. The cultural legacy of Latino storytelling is based in murals, as Huerta noted in our conversation by phone and in his writings, yet all art forms rooted in Chicano idealism use a linear interpretation of spirituality that, in part, comes from a history of invading Roman-Catholics attempting to eliminate indigenous Mexican folklore. He notes how this theater movement has expanded by multiple generations and shaped a defined brand of nationalism, yet can also show the conflicts of assimilation or resistance to being colonized. "Chicanos are Americans," says Jorge Huerta, a leading scholar of Chicano/a and Latino/a Theater. It speaks to the very nature of our shared citizenship: Children of immigrants asking the question: What is the American Dream?īut can the Chicano experience be interpreted as the American experience? It grew into Teatro Chicano and is now a prominent form of American Theater, rivaling the themes of the conflict, flux, or successes of the American Dreams from mid 20th-Century playwrights like Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams.īecause of Latino/a theater, those themes have migrated throughout the Southwest and are moving Eastward. Latino/a Theater is a under-documented literary form with deep roots in the fertile soil of California that began as voices from its fields and groves. A theater movement born from a civil rights movement is underway like a brown tide.
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