"The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa" poster, 1969 April 11

File — Box: 2, Folder: 2

Identifier: 5

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

From the Series:

This series contains materials documenting the United Farm Workers movement. Items include photographs of Juan Chavez and Cesar Chavez, a flag from the United Farm Workers, and a poster advertising for a play at University of California Berkeley, entitled, “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.”

Dates

Creation: 1969 April 11

Langauge of Materials

From the Collection:

Languages represented in the collection: English, Spanish.

Access

This collection is open for research.

Extent

From the Collection: 7.5 Linear Feet (4 document boxes, 1 oversize doc box, 1 half-size document box, 4 flat oversize boxes)

Additional Description

Note

[Berkeley]: Committe for Arts and Lectures, 1969. 11 by 15 inches; printed offset in three colors.

This is a poster for the April 11, 1969, performance of a play by El Teatro Campesino on the UC Berkeley campus. The Shrunken Head was Luis Valdez’s first full-length play, written when he was a student at San Jose State University in 1964. It was influenced by the nascent magical realist movement in Latin American literature and involves surrealist elements, including a talking head. After college, Valdez joined the United Farm Workers movement and formed El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworker Theater). His troop, drawing on agitprop traditions, performed for striking farmworkers and soon evolved into the first (and still oldest) Latino theater group. El Teatro Campesino (ETC) material from the 1960s is quite scarce.