Teatro Campesino performing at CU Boulder

Description

Digital copy of a film negative taken by photographer Juan Espinosa in May 1974. The image depicts El Teatro Campesino actors performing a play, "La Carpa de los Rasquachis," at the Mary Rippon Theatre on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. El Teatro Campesino is a theatrical troupe that was founded in 1965 by the United Farm Workers (UFW) to put on plays about Chicano culture with farmworker actors. Juan Espinosa was a journalism student at the University of Colorado in Boulder when he took this photograph. He won his first camera in a poker game at Da Nang Air Force Base in Vietnam while serving with the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War and, after his discharge in 1969, learned journalistic photography and darkroom techniques at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado. Espinosa enrolled at CU Boulder in 1971, joined the United Mexican Student Association (UMAS), and worked as a stringer for the Colorado Daily newspaper and as a photographer for UMAS Publications, which published Somos Aztlan magazine and newspaper by the same name. In the summer of 1972, Espinosa founded the El Diario student newspaper during the summer of 1972, which primarily covered the Chicano civil rights movement and UMAS activities on the CU Boulder campus. Between 1971-1974, Espinosa photographed the events and people of the Chicano civil rights movement in Colorado, Arizona, Texas, and California. In 1975, he and his wife Deborah moved to Pueblo, Colo., where they founded and published La Cucaracha, a community newspaper, from 1976-1984. Espinosa later worked as a reporter and photographer for the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper for 22 years.

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