Episode three features Luis Valdez and the legendary Teatro Campesino, a segment of San Antonio, Texas Day of the Dead Celebration, he image of the Virgen de Guadalupe as a Latina icon, Experimental border filmmaker Willie Varela, and a profile of Chicago.s soapbox artist Carlos Cortez.  Featured artists include Alma Lopez and Cesar Martinez.

Teatro Campesino:

In 1965, an aspiring playwright named Luis Valdez left the San Francisco Mime Troupe to join Cesar Chavez in organizing farmworkers in Delano, California. Valdez organized the workers into El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers Theater) in an effort to popularize and raise funds for the grape boycott and farmworker strike.

In 1968, El Teatro Campesino left the fields in a conscious effort to create a theater that reflected the greater Chicano experience. Within a year, the company was awarded an Obie Award, for "demonstrating the politics of survival," as well as its first of two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards.

By 1970, El Teatro Campesino had established what would come to be known as teatro chicano. It was style of agitprop theater, incorporating the spiritual and presentational style of the Italian Renaissance commedia dell'arte with the humor, character types, folklore and popular culture of the Mexican theater, the type presented by vaudeville companies and tent theaters that had toured the Southwest earlier this century.

For over 25 years, company has produced an evolving series of plays termed "The Miracle, Mystery, and Historical Cycle of San Juan Bautista" or simply, "The Cycle Plays." During the Christmas season, either the miracle play classic of LA VIRGEN DEL TEPEYAC, or the traditional shepherds play, LA PASTORELA is performed in the Old Mission of San Juan Bautista. In 1991, Luis Valdez adapted and directed El Teatro Campesino's film version of LA PASTORELA for the PBS Great Performances series, which starred Linda Ronstadt and Paul Rodriguez.

Recently, the company has undergone major reorganization to better achieve its mission to serve as a unique institution for artists, and to develop, produce and present new works in the theater, film and video.

Alma Lopez:

Alma Lopez is a visual and public artist, whose innovative digital work re-contextualizes major cultural icons, bringing issues of race, gender and sexuality into relationship with trans-nationalist myths and urban ecology. She holds a B.A. from the University of California Santa Barbara and a M.F.A. from the University of California Irvine. She exhibits her work extensively and has received numerous awards for her work such as the Brody Emerging Visual Artist Grant, the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Grant, and the California Community Foundation Arts Funding Initiative.s Individual Artist Grant. Her work has been featured in several publications including, Art in America, Flash Art International, and Ms. Magazine. Lopez is the co-founding member and art director of Tongues, a Queer Women of Color webzine, magazine, and performance venue. She is currently working on a short digital video about short hair.

Cesar Martinez:

San Antonio-based Cesar Martinez was born in 1944 in Laredo, Texas. A major figure in the Chicano Art Movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, Martinez.s portraits are icons of Texas art history. Martinez.s work has been included in the landmark exhibits La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexican/U.S. Border Experience, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego; CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation 1965-1985, organized by the Smithsonian Institute; and Hispanic Art in the United States, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has also shown at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

A prolific painter and printmaker, Martinez works with a wide range of materials. Primarily known for his Bato series of portraits of Pachucos and rucas, Martinez also paints abstracted landscapes that incorporate Aztec imagery and history, and constructions made of found wood.

Willie Varela:

Willie Varela has been making film in the independent, personal tradition since 1971. To date, Mr. Varela has completed 91 films ranging in length from 30 seconds to 104 minutes. In addition, Varela has completed 15 videotapes since 1991. Varela's image making practice also encompasses photography and visual/text pieces incorporating found imagery, photos, text, and graphics.

Mr. Varela's public exhibition career has spanned over twenty years, with one-man shows at such independent film showcases as the San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles Film Forum, Chicago Filmmakers, Millennium Film Workshop, Rice University, Berks Filmmakers, the Boston Film/Video Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Collective for Living Cinema, Pacific Film Archives, Austin Film Society, Guadalupe Central Arts Center, San Antonio, Donnell Media Center, and many others. Highlights of Varela's career include a Cineprobe at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988; videos in the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennials; and inclusion of 12 Super 8 films in the Big As Life: An American History of the 8mm Films, the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Carlos has been recognized for his many contributions to the art world as a respected print artist whose themes deal with Chicano issues, Latino identity and worker's rights.

Son of a Mexican Wobbly father and German socialist-pacifist mother, Cortez was born and raised in Milwaukee, but has long made his home in Chicago. During World War II, he served two years in the federal pen at Sandstone, Minn. as a conscientious objector, and soon afterward joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He has served as one of the union's best know figures--poet, artist, editor and public speaker.

Renowned especially for his powerful woodcuts and cartoons --- he is probably the only Wobbly whose work has been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institute and leading galleries in Germany and Spain--- Cortez has also been a noted columnist for the union's newspaper, the /Industrial Worker /for over 20 years.

Cortez' poems and poetry collections such as Where Are the Voices? & Other Wobbly Poems (Charles H. Kerr Pub.) have received praise form the likes of Dennis Brutus and Edward Abbey. Cortez is also the editor of the book ,Viva Posada, published in 2002 by Charles H. Kerr.