SOURCE: "The Agitprop Pilgrimage of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino," in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 17, March-May 1975, pp. 30-9.

In this essay, the authors trace the origins and evolution of El Teatro Campesino and Valdez's work with the group.

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 the mere wages of survival, expatriate Mexicans now work the land that once belonged to their ancestors.

But here, for six weeks in the summer of 1973, Brook and his acolytes came to work with and to learn from one...