Los Vendidos

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.

Plot

The short play is set in Honest Sancho's Used Mexican Lot and Mexican Curio Shop, a fictional Californian store that apparently sells various "models" (robots) of stereotypical Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that buyers can manipulate by simply snapping their fingers and calling out commands. The action of the play revolves around "The Secretary," a character by the name of Miss Jiménez, who converses with Honest Sancho, the owner of the store. Sancho says her name with Spanish pronunciation ([xiˈmenes] or, roughly, hee-MEN-ess), though she chastises him for speaking bad English, demanding that it be pronounced as the Anglicized /ˈdʒɪmᵻnɛz/ JIM-ə-nez.

Miss Jiménez explains to the courteous Honest Sancho that she is a secretary for Governor Reagan and that his administration is looking to purchase "a Mexican type" to appeal to a larger voting crowd. Sancho shows the Secretary four different models, snapping in order to bring them to life to demonstrate their behaviors. Although Miss Jiménez is herself evidently a Chicana (Mexican-American), she seems completely ignorant to the cultural stereotypes displayed in each of the four buyable characters.

First, Sancho shows her the sturdy Farm Worker, but she refuses to buy him because he speaks no English. Second, they examine the "Johnny Pachuco," a 1950s Chicano gangmember model who is violent, profane, and drug-abusing, though an easy scapegoat and perfect to brutalize. Third, when Miss Jiménez asks for a more romantic model, they come to the Revolucionario, one of the glorified bandit/martyrs of early Californian history; however, she denies him when she learns that he is completely Mexican and not even American-made.

Finally, they come to the most contemporary Mexican-American model, named "Eric Garcia": a well-dressed and exciting public speaker who is university-educated, ambitious, bilingual, and polite. Miss Jiménez very reluctantly agrees to buy Eric for $15,000, when suddenly he begins staging a vocal protest in Spanish: "¡Viva la raza! ¡Viva la huelga! ¡Viva la revolución!" (Long live the people! Long live the strike! Long live the revolution!). Soon he snaps the three other models awake and they join in his miniature uprising. After Jiménez flees in fright, the four models converse among each other, revealing that they in fact are not robots, but rather, living human beings. They dispense the money equally among themselves and leave, carrying the limp form of Sancho the salesman who needs an "oil job"—it is Sancho who is the robot.

Sources

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