The piece opens with a summary pre-history of the mostly regional, local character of Latino theater and performance, and the often Spanish-only or bilingual registers of those practices, which set the stage for the more prominently English-language, nationally scaled, practices emerging in the mid-twentieth century. It traces those emerging practices along the parallel and intersecting tracks of traditional theater and experimental performance-art practices that exerted significant impact on the more dominant theatrical forms. The piece also traces this cultural history’s powerfully dialectical relationship with political and social histories: of civil rights empowerment against racial, sexual and class based injustices, and of movements of resistance and protest against a violently dominant political order. It also tells the history of intellectual movements in Latino theater and performance studies that shaped the critical knowledge reflected here of the practices defining US Latino theater and performance in the twentieth century and after