SOURCE: "Notes on Chicano Theatre," in Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Arte Publico Press, 1990, pp. 6-10.

In the following essay, which was written in 1970, Valdez attempts to define a uniquely Chicano theater.

What is Chicano theatre? It is theatre as beautiful, rasquachi, human, cosmic, broad, deep, tragic, comic, as the life of La Raza itself. At its high point Chicano theatre is religion—the huelguistas de Delano praying at the shrine of the Virgen de Guadalupe, located in the rear of an old station wagon parked across the road from DiGiorgio's camp #4; at its low point, it is a cuento or a chiste told somewhere in the recesses of the barrio, puro pedo.

Chicano theatre, then, is first a reaffirmation of LIFE. That is what all theatre is supposed to be, of course; but the limp, superficial, gringo seco productions in the "professional" American...