Crystal City 1969 saved Cara Mía Theatre from the brink of collapse.
The theater company had only $2,000 in the bank when it premiered David Lozano and Raul Treviño’s true-life drama on Dec. 9, 2009 — 40 years to the day that Mexican American students walked out of Crystal City High School in South Texas to protest discriminatory practices.
The students propelled a movement that changed the town’s politics and the fate of future generations of Mexican Americans.
Based on those events, Lozano and Treviño’s play struck a chord with Dallas audiences and helped raise money for the theater, Lozano said in a phone interview. It also spurred his own activism and renewed Cara Mía’s mission of bringing issues affecting American Latinos to the public’s attention.
“When we first mounted the show in 2009, we were working with a group of actors in their early 20s who are now in their 30s, and now we’re mounting the show with another generation of young Latinos,” Lozano said as Cara Mía prepared to revive Crystal City 1969 to open its season. “The question that keeps coming up for me is: ‘Who’s next? Who is next in line to take on the important role of activists in our community?’ Because it’s something that you learn how to do.”
The play is running at the Latino Cultural Center, where Cara Mía is a resident company. It was previously revived in 2010 and 2016.
The walkout on Dec. 9, 1969, was led by students Mario Treviño, Diana Serna and Severita Lara, who were fed up with rules forbidding them to speak Spanish in school and eat Mexican food in the cafeteria. They weren’t allowed to fully participate in extracurricular activities either. The cheerleading squad was limited to one Mexican American girl at a time. Mexican American boys could not start for the varsity football team.
“Not only were they being punished for speaking Spanish, they were denied their own culture,” Lozano said. “That’s a big thread and why I feel so strongly about this play. It’s an event in which we are able to reinforce our identity. Because if we don’t know who we are, we don’t know what we need to fight for.”
Hundreds of students joined the walkout, and it drew national attention. The walkout leaders even traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress. Encouraged by a mediator, the school board gave in to student demands. A local political party, La Raza Unida, grew out of the protests, and the majority Latino population of Crystal City ran the table in the 1970 election, taking over the school board and the City Council.
“It’s an incredible story, right?” Lozano said. “I mean, these students led a walkout and then they ended up canvassing for adult Mexican Americans who take over the school board and just transform the school system overnight.”
In 2008, Raul Treviño, Mario Treviño’s nephew, approached Lozano about writing a play about the Crystal City walkout. They had become friends after acting together. Treviño knew about the walkout from his uncle. His interest was sparked when he found himself working in the same Dallas ISD office as one of the walkout leaders, now known as Diana Serna Aguilera.
Lozano had left Cara Mía as artistic director two years earlier to sell print advertising. He and Treviño conducted research, interviewing everyone they could find who was involved in the walkout, and came up with a script in about six months, Lozano said.
Rather than recounting every indignity faced by Mexican Americans at Crystal City High, the play focuses on the awakening of the students to their own situation and how they might address it. “They realized that in order to change anything, they have to work collectively as activists and then through electoral politics,” Lozano said.
Lozano is back at the helm of Cara Mía. Once supported by just one foundation, local arts funder TACA, its annual budget now exceeds $1 million.
“To get where we have gotten in 2022 has been a long, arduous and difficult journey,” he said, referring not just to his company but other activists taking on injustices. “And for us to keep going and to know how to fight for ourselves, we have to know our history.”
Details
Thursdays through Sundays through Dec. 18 at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St. $10-$30. caramiatheatre.org.
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