“Chicano Power!” El Treato Campesino (The Farmworkers’ Theater) explores the creative, cultural and political roots of these slogans.

Migrant workers from Mexico, an abundant source of cheap labor, were key to grape growers’ profits. These workers lived in worker camps and often had to work the field without toilets or other facilities.

They also made below minimum wage while doing hard stooping labor all day in the fields.

These conditions El Teatro Campesino communicates, says Cesar Flores, a member of El Teatro Campesino.

Cesar Flores, member of El Teatro Campesino, spoke at Marilyn Patton’s English IC class on Thursday, April 20.

On any given day, you can see the paint chipping away from exposure to the hot rural sun, tumbleweeds rolling across the dusty parking lot, grass growing around the building’s edges and an old truck that stays permanently parked in the front yard. According to their website, El Teatro is as rustic, as the company who lives in it.

In 1965, an aspiring playwright named Luis Valdez left the San Francisco Mime Tropue to join Cesar Chavez in organizing farm-workers in Delano, California.

Valdez organized the workers into El Teatro Campesino in an effort to popularize and raise funds for the grape boycott and farmworker strike.

In 1968, El Teatro Campesino left the fields in a conscious effort to create a theater that reflected the greater Chicano experience.

Within a year, the company was awarded an Obie Award , for “demonstrating the politics of survival,” as well as its first of two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards.

Recently, the company has undergone major reorganization to better achieve its mission to serve as a unique institution for artists, and to develop, produce and present new works in the theater, film and video.

Now in its 30th year as professional theater-arts organization, El Teatro Campesino prides its new generation of talented actors, director, producers, who spearhead the company into the 21st century.