SOURCE: "The Agitprop Pilgrimage of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino," in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 17, March-May, 1975, pp. 30-9.

An American professor and critic, Huerta has written many books on Chicano literature and drama in addition to serving variously as founder, director, and actor in many Chicano theater groups in California. In the following essay, he and Harrop provide an overview of Valdez's career with El Teatro Campesino, focusing in particular on his development as a playwright.

San Juan Bautista is a very ordinary, small town in central California. Its chief attraction to outsiders is the Catholic Mission—one of those churches the Spanish priests dotted along the coast of California in their eighteenth century odyssey, with cross and sword, to claim the heathen Indian for Christ. An odd place to find Peter Brook and his International Centre for Theatre Research—among the arid hills where, for...