Latino theater continues its 50-year rise in Sacramento

By Marcus Crowder, Solving Sacramento

In early April, Manuel Pickett gave a guest lecture in the Playwrights’ Theatre on the campus of Sacramento State about his involvement with Latino theater. It was both a picaresque autobiography and an eyewitness history of Latino Theater in the Sacramento region. 

Pickett founded Teatro Espejo — his Latiné community theater collective — in 1975 after spending several formative years touring and performing with the ground breaking Teatro Campesino led by Luis Valdez. Then he began teaching theater at Sacramento State in 1980, directing 40 productions in the theater and 15 more around the campus, before he retired in 2013. But Teatro Espejo lives on, and is celebrating its 50th year bringing Latino theater to the region while fostering other theater companies as well.

About 40 attendees were spread through the horseshoe-configured performance space. Pickett, a stout man in a wide-brimmed straw hat and rectangular glasses, spoke from the stage while leaning on a lectern mostly ignoring his scattered notes. After the talk, a gaggle of students formed around him, lobbing questions.

“There were five people who came up to me and wanted us to teach them how to do political theater on campus,” Pickett said. “When people approach us, it’s probably because they’ve been turned down by other places, and they’ve not had the opportunity. That’s exactly why we remained a community theater.” 

To Pickett, being a community theater doesn’t just mean non-professional, it also means “for and by” the Latino community.  

“Very few plays we do are just for entertainment’s sake,” Pickett said. “They all have to have a purpose. That’s the reason why I got into doing theater.”

From the field to the picket line

Pickett came about his activism through life experience growing up in a knotty part of Fresno, working in the fields near there as a kid; His parents worked the fields, too. Pickett learned the guitar, becoming a paid musician by the time he was 12. After graduating from high school in 1968, the burgeoning Chicano consciousness movement claimed him. “People thought in terms of a physical revolution. And we believed that,” Pickett said. 

Pickett toured with Teatro Campesino as its musical director, going all the way to Mexico City. Teatro Campesino was formed during the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and Boycott organized by Cesar Chavez. Valdez trained with the original San Francisco Mime Troupe, so he naturally embraced social commentary, satire and taking performances wherever the action was. Campesino became an essential ingredient of Chavez’s outreach. Riding a cramped DIY bench in the back of an overstuffed tour bus, Pickett brought socio-political theater to the people of California and Mexico. 

“When I saw how empowered people got through performance, it started to make sense to me,” Pickett said. “It gave me a direction. I knew I was going to be an activist all of my life.” 

With his own company, Pickett remembered making a theater piece out of an almond pickers strike, which Teatro Espejo performed on the picket line and throughout the region. The cover charge for these shows was a bag of groceries. 

“People would bring all these bags of groceries, and we would put them in the truck and go take it to the almond workers who weren’t getting paid while they were on strike,” Pickett said. 

There are fewer farm worker strikes these days, but Pickett’s commitment to the struggle has never wavered. He also happily welcomes new members into his orbit. Teatro Espejo performances are a collective effort. “Anyone can become part of the group as long as they go through the training that we offer for free. It takes a lot of time, a lot of involvement, but it gives us some really dedicated people,” Pickett said.

Richard Falcon’s Teatro Nagual (TeNa) in Sacramento also has a connection to Cesar Chavez.  TeNa initially grew out of Falcon’s involvement with a 2006 Midtown California Stage production of “Let the Eagle Fly,” a musical about the life of Chavez. After co-directing the production with Ray Tatar, Falcon contributed to productions in San Diego, Chula Vista and San Jose. He founded TeNa in 2006, and then incorporated it in 2009. He then began producing Latino-themed plays including “Manuelito the Lion Tamer,” “Solderderas” and “Anna In the Tropics.” Like most community-based theater groups they struggled to find venues.

Richard Falcon leads a meeting for a theater festival. Falcon founded Teatro Nagual in 2006.Courtesy of Richard Falcon

“We started off at CalStage, then we produced at the Coloma Community Center (on T Street), which became a home for us for a period of time,” Falcon said. “B Street offered us their space. It was wherever we could rent space to be able to do the shows.” 

Though Falcon did not know Pickett when Falcon first started his company, the two have become supportive colleagues sharing ideas, talent and connections in pursuit of similar objectives. Falcon even starred in Pickett’s biographical play about the artist Diego Rivera.

In 2016, Falcon refined the company’s mission under a broader artistic umbrella focusing on “issues of economic well-being, health disparities, environmental justice, immigration challenges, voter participation and stories relevant to the community” with Latino-based theater as its main vehicle. 

“We’ve gone from quality theatrical programming, that’s our first pillar, to our second pillar which is now what I call mobile social justice theatrical programming,” Falcon said. “We create small ACTOS, or small ‘Saturday Night Live’ kind of sketches, dealing with issues that are important to the community — be it immigration, be it COVID, be it census, be it air quality, be it water quality — and we perform those in parks, or at town halls, or in schools — wherever.” 

The third pillar of Falcon’s Teatro Nagual is growing the next generation of Latino arts educators. “Where are the Latino art educators for our students when 44% of the students that attend our schools are Latino?” Falcon asked. “We are trying to grow that, so that gives us more opportunity to expand ourselves.”

Passing Espejo’s reigns on

One of the most prolific branches of the Teatro Espejo tree has been actor/director/dramaturg Nicole C. Limón, founder of Matriarchy Theatre, a resident artist with Teatro Espejo, and an adjunct theatre faculty at Sacramento State. Pickett has consciously lifted Limón up as the emerging face and creative center of Teatro Espejo.

This spring Limón directed the romantic farce “House of Desires” by Juana Inés de la Cruz on the University Theatre stage while in the midst of several other projects. 

Nicole C. Limón at Southside Park on Wednesday, May 14. Limón founded Matriarchy Theatre and is a resident artist with Teatro Espejo.Cristian Gonzalez/Solving Sacramento

“I’m kind of all over, doing a lot of things, but I’m primarily an educator, a director and an actor,” Limón said. 

Limón was the dramaturg — also known as a literary adviser — and intimacy coordinator for “American Night” in April by Richard Montoya at Folsom Lake College and the intimacy coordinator for the recent world premiere of “Everything Beautiful Happens at Night” at Cap Stage. She is the dramaturg for Cap Stage’s current production “Unseen” and the intimacy coordinator for B Street’s “Nosotros La Gente,” an original world premiere work by its Executive Producer Jerry Montoya. 

“The dramaturgy stuff I love just because I’m a research nerd, and the intimacy stuff I started doing because I just really felt it was necessary to be on the cusp of that as it’s coming into our field,” Limón said.

She holds an MFA in acting from UC Davis and studied at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto. “I loved storytelling — not just acting, but directing and lights and playwriting and text analysis,” Limón said. “I really fell in love with collaboration and creating with the community to tell a story.”

Landing at Sacramento State, Limón worked with the student club Sons/Ancestors Players and Teatro Espejo. “I got introduced to social justice theater and theater that is combining entertainment with  necessary stories that we need to hear that weren’t being highlighted.” 

After Pickett retired from the university and Limón started teaching there he made her an intriguing offer. “He said ‘I really need help with Teatro Espejo. I need you to help me save it,’” Limón said.

“When you have an elder sit down and ask you for help, that doesn’t happen very often. I could tell how important it was for him to ask the right person,” she said.

Limón had been on the brink of starting her own theater company, Matriarch Theater. “I put that on hold for about five good years so that I could really help sustain Teatro Espejo, and here we are at our 50th anniversary,” she said. From Pickett she learned about creating opportunities and making space for everyone. “We have such a long legacy already, I wanted to make sure it was there for future generations.”

Limón understands the political heart of Teatro Espejo even as she gravitates toward current issues of women’s health and reproductive rights. “For me, the audience is universal but I think the stories are very specific,” Limón said. “The beauty is in the specificity of the culture, the language, the point of view. They speak to everybody.”

In 2021, Limón brought her theater company to life with a play by Tara Moses, a Seminole Muskogee woman. “The board of Teatro Espejo, unbeknownst to me, voted to completely fund Matriarchy Theater’s first production, and we sold out pretty much every single show,” Limón said.

“I did a lot of grassroots social media promoting in a very simple way,” Limón said. “Because they’re finally seeing themselves represented, they’re gonna come, they’re gonna show up, and they’re gonna celebrate that story.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Hmong Daily News, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.