The '60s, now

Tribe, 41, an assistant professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, said that talks with his students inspired the project. "I was struck by the apparent apathy of my students," he said. "But as I spoke to them, I realized they weren't apathetic at all, that in fact they cared very deeply, for example, about the war in Iraq, but they seemed to believe that resistance is futile."

For some students, he said, that feeling of helplessness stems from watching the mass protests of the Iraq war in the United States and in London in 2003. "There were something like a million people on the march in London, hundreds of thousands of people in American cities," Tribe said, "and the Bush administration and the Blair administration didn't seem to blink."

He added that Vietnam-era speeches cannot help but resonate in the face of the Iraq war. "There is a sense of historical vertigo almost -- you know you're hearing a speech that you know was written in 1968 but sounds as if it was written yesterday," he said.

Although Tribe says he is not trying to sway the vote in the presidential election, he hopes the reenactments will inspire '60s-style grass-roots action, such as neighborhood meetings as well as online networking.

Montebello attorney Armando Duron, 53, president of East Los Angeles' Self Help Graphics & Art, has spent most of his life in Los Angeles and has been a Chicano affairs activist since he was 16. Duron was among those tapped when Tribe held a community meeting in L.A. in June as project research.

"I wasn't at the original event, and it wasn't like I was his buddy or anything like that," Duron said of Chavez. "But I was certainly around the movement for years, and I was one of the 35,000 people at his funeral. He was so influential for the urban Chicanos at that time, for many reasons; it is special for us in that sense."

Tribe said he sees the project more as visual art rather than theater because videotapes of the piece are intended for distribution on the Internet or to art galleries on a screen or as a video installation.

He added that the actors delivering the historical speeches will not wear period clothes or attempt to imitate the original speakers.

"As an art project, it does tread the line in an interesting and ambiguous way between performance art and political protest," Tribe said. "It's an ancient debate in a way, the relationship between art and politics, and this is kind of my way as an artist to play a part in the political transformations that we are witnessing in America right now."

Rita Gonzalez, assistant curator of special exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and one of the curators of the museum's exhibition "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement," participated in the community discussions and said artists of Tribe's generation, the children of the activists of the 1960s and '70s, want to engage their parents' history in their own art.

"There are a lot of portals into that history -- an archival approach, an approach through narrative, or this interest in reenactment," Gonzalez said. "It's interesting to see how these events take place outside of the 'white cube.' "

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diane.haithman@latimes.com