El Teatro Campesino was founded in 1965 California during the Delano Grape Strike to share information among the striking farmworkers and to entertain those on the picket lines. A decade later, the troupe’s artistic director, Luis Valdez, combined Broadway, Brecht and East L.A. to tell the story of a central episode in Chicano history: the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon murder and trial. The “riots” were actually a series of attacks in Los Angeles by servicemen on leave in June 1943 targeting Latino men, chosen because of their zoot suits. A couple of months later, a group of young Chicanos were railroaded into court on a murder charge for which they were innocent. Out of the chronicle of these events, Valdez presents a musical about racism and justice that does exactly what Brecht said theater ought to do: entertain and educate. By focusing on a mythical, omnipresent narrator, the iconic El Vato, able to move through space and time at will, Valdez gives cinematic life to Zoot Suit.