Dramatic Perspective

Theater as a weapon

Los Vendidos (Spanish for "The Sold Ones" or "The Sellouts") is a one-act play by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, a founding member of El Teatro Campesino. He wrote it in 1967, and it was first performed at the Brown Beret junta in Elysian Park, East Los Angeles. The play examines stereotypes of Latinos in California and how they are treated by local, state, and federal governments.

Is one of the best plays ever that applies the concept of 'theater as a weapon'

"Los Vendidos" is not a shoulder to cry on for the Mexican targets of stereotyping, but rather a method of ending prejudice in itself. Mexican people dealt with it and this is evident by the play. Defining each label with every character showed that Mexicans recognized the stereotypes. However, this does not mean they were ready to accept them. Creating fictional characters with stereotypical features presented in such a way to emphasize the lack of truth and reason behind branding. The play was meant to make people see the unfairness of their judgments and obtain their understanding.

The reason these types of plays exist is to point out the discriminations that Chicano people face on a daily basis and point of the blemishes of Americans. The stereotypes are exaggerated to over emphasize the importance of acknowledging them in a society that disregards the Chicano people. Chicano people are looked at as second-class citizens. Their well-being is discounted by the American society. The general conception of a Chicano is outdated and incorrect. Valdez’s success is based on getting Americans to understand the ridiculousness of their views on the Mexican people. The play is a form of resistance for Chicanos. It is a way for Americans to think for themselves about the misconstrued views and stereotypes they have about Mexican-Americans. While Valdez is deliberate in his attempts to stereotype each different persona of Mexican people, he is in turn satirizing the American people and their preconceived notions. By withholding his true ambitions, Valdez’s attempt at resistance accomplishes a major objective in making the American people critically think for themselves about what they are actually doing to Chicanos in the United States. By seeing the failure in the attempt for the American to find her ideal Mexican, Valdez makes Americans more responsible for their actions and realizes that the American ideal Mexican does not exist.

The message of the play is that "Chicanos can only be who they are and not be what Americans wish for them to be"

The idea of attacking stereotyping itself is that "people are not to be what others wish for them to be, but every one of us has their own identity, their own power and their own way of thinking, and this is probably the deep meaning of LOS VANDIDOS       

 We are in the 21th century, but still can see stereotypes and discriminations everywhere, so here the role of drama \art  as a weapon comes again.

In 2006, a film named civil duty is produced as a thriller film directed by Jeff Renfroe and starring Peter Krause, Khaled Abol Naga, Kari Matchett, and Richard Schiff

The film is about an American accountant bombarded with cable news and the media's obsession with terrorist plots in the post 9/11 world, who receives a jolt when an unattached Islamic graduate student moves in next door

This directly addresses the idea of stereotyping of Muslims especially after 9\11.

Following September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported a 1,700 percent increase of hate crimes against Muslim Americans between 2000 to 2001 (Anderson, 2002). During the process of adjusting to the aftermath of September 11, Muslim Americans faced an upsurge in negative stereotypes expressed by the larger society (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 2003; Cassel, 2006) and Muslim immigrants, more than any other immigrant group, were met with negative attitudes (Council of American Islamic Relations, 2003; Saroglou & Galand, 2004). Since then, increased racial and religious animosity has left Arabs, Middle Easterners, Muslims, and those who bear stereotyped physical resemblance to members of these groups, fearful of potential hatred and hostility from persons of other cultures.

Although Muslim is a religious label and does not pertain to race, the line between racism and religious discrimination is often blurred (Allen & Nielsen, 2002). Muslim Americans are often perceived as a monolithic group (McCarus, 1994; Nyang, 1999), conceptualized as a religious minority thought to act, think, and behave similarly despite wide ethnic differences that exist within the Muslim American community.

So, "civil duty" is a film based mainly on these facts, it's a work that's made to correct the idea of generalization and discrimination of Muslims, and to show to the audience of such kind of drama, how much stereotyping is unfair.