SAN ANTONIO — In five performances, a Latino theater company’s restaging of a play about historic but overlooked Mexican American student walkouts rekindled sorrow and pride among audiences, while triggering worries about the present.
The play “Crystal City 1969,” first staged in 2009 in Dallas, was performed for the first time in San Antonio last weekend at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.
The play tells the story of the Crystal City, Texas, student school walkouts and boycotts, when thousands of students demanded changes from school and local leaders, who were white, and an end to racist and discriminatory treatment of Mexican American students.
“We’d get paddled if we spoke Spanish in class. Discipline was very unequal. We didn’t have Chicano counselors. They demeaned us. They were very racist with us,” Severita Lara told NBC News in 2019.
The students went to the school board with 13 demands, including more Mexican American faculty, the inclusion of Mexican…
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