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    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos"
    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos"
    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos"
    Ebook45 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535827645
    A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Luis Valdez's "Los Vendidos" - Gale

      12

      Los Vendidos

      Luis Valdez

      1967

      Introduction

      Los Vendidos is a one-act play by Luis Valdez first performed in 1967 by El Teatro Campesino as part of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement. The play helped pioneer the acto, which is the term coined by Valdez to describe a type of one-act play that uses stock characters and humor to emphasize social or political themes. Along with the leader of the UFW movement, Cesar Chavez, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino brought these actos to the migrant workers in the fields of California as a means to motivate the Mexican immigrant political base to fight for unionization and demand fair working conditions. Los Vendidos (The Sellouts) addresses the identity issues that Chicanos faced during the late 1960s as immigrants trying to find a place within American society while struggling to maintain their ethnic heritage.

      The play highlights common stereotypes of Chicanos in the late 1960s, among them the campesino, the pachuco, the revolucionario, and an assimilated Mexican American man. Each of these characters embodies a different Anglo American view of Mexicans. In addition, there is a completely assimilated, anglicized Mexican American woman named Miss Jimenez (pronounced JIM-enez) and a salesman who pointedly describes the traits of each of the stock characters. Los Vendidos is a satiric portrayal of the Chicano struggles with cultural stereotypes, and it and other actos like it helped form Chicano theater, of which Valdez is often said to be the father.

      First published in Valdez's collection Actos in 1971, Los Vendidos can also be found in numerous anthologies, collections, and textbooks on Chicano or drama studies such a Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, published in 1990, with accompanying notes and introduction.

      Author Biography

      Valdez was born on June 26, 1940, in Delano, California. A son of migrant farmworkers and the second of ten children, Valdez traveled as a child to wherever his family could find work. In elementary school, Valdez was assigned a leading role in a puppet show. Although his family moved on to the next camp before he could perform, it sparked in him an interest in theater. As a teenager, Valdez taught himself ventriloquism and was featured on KNTV, a local news channel, in 1956. After graduating from high school, Valdez attended San Jose State University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English and wrote award-winning plays that stressed ethnic pride, a growing issue among Chicanos. The Chicano migrant worker population was getting restless, incited in no small part by the efforts of the revolutionary labor leader Cesar Chavez, who organized the United Farm

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