When a "New Deal" Became a Raw Deal: Depression-Era, "Latin" Federal Theatre

Abstract

My intention with this essay is to provide preliminary evidence of the fourteen-month (1936-37), Spanish-language, Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in Tampa, Florida, a virtually unknown chapter in American theatrical history. 1 The Spanish-language FTP in Tampa affords us a unique opportunity to examine what can happen when '"progressive,'" U.S. government policies, immigrant transnationalism and biculturalism, and the theatrical arts intersected in the name of work relief, the '"great melting pot'" and '"good neighborliness'" (as in the F.D.R.''s Good Neighbor Policy). More importantly, this episode begs the question of whether or not it was or ever could be possible for the United States to have a "national" theatre with room enough for the country's diversity-particularly linguistic and cultural diversity. As Robert Mardis states in his 1972 dissertation about Florida's Federal Theatre, "not only was the concept of a national theatre untried in America, but its scope exceeded that of established foreign national theatres. More important, it represented the first (and only) time a state theatre had been dedicated to a nation-wide relief function" (Mardis 464).

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