La familia Rasquache.

This Carpa de los Rasquachis was preceded by another carpa (tent show) written by Luis Valdez, called La Carpa Cantiflesca (1972). Since 1965, Valdez had described El Teatro Campesino as a cross between Brecht and Cantinflas. La Carpa Cantinflesca was his attempt to pay homage to the great comic and Mexican movie star Mario Moreno, a.k.a. Cantinflas, who had begun his career performing in Mexican tent shows. Thus in La Carpa Cantinflesca Valdez created a family of Cantinflas types: Cantinfin, Cantinflon, Cantinflucha; all the characters, including the women, wore Cantinflas costumes. The piece told the story of the family in three parts: the parents (Mexicans), the sons (Mexican-Americans), and the daughter (La Chicana). When the idea proved to be too esoteric, Valdez eliminated the Cantinflas references but kept the three generational elements, and renamed the show Carpa de los Rasquachis. This early version of La Carpa still retains the three-act family structure, utilizing corridos (Mexican ballads) to provide the narrative line. In time, it became apparent that the three-generation structure and the epic nature of their collective tale were too much for a single play. So, after 1974, Valdez conflated all three stories into a single focus on one main corrido, the story of the patriarch, Jesus Pelado Raquachi, peripherally telling the story of the family. In this early version of the Carpa de los Rasquachis, titled La Familia Rascuache, it is clear that Valdez and the Teatro were still wrestling with creative elements regarding the acting style, musical arrangement, and narrative continuity of its single Corrido, which ultimately gave shape to the final, precise 1975 version called La Gran Carpa de Los Rasquachis. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics