the fascinating world of film and video
Valdez to the Hollywood Latino and non-Latino talent pool, suddenly bringing him into contact with a different breed of artist. With a large population of professionals at his disposal, Valdez’s vision had to expand. No longer surrounded by sincere, but sometimes limited talent, Valdez could explore any avenue of theater he desired. The success of the Los Angeles run of Zoot Suit enabled our playwright/director to move more seriously into filmmaking. Valdez adapted and directed Zoot Suit as a motion picture in 1981.
The collaboration with a non-Hispanic theater company and subsequent move into Hollywood film making was inevitable for Valdez; the natural course for a man determined to reach as many people as possible with his message and with his art. Theater was his life’s work, it was in his blood, but so was the fascinating world of film and video.
With the financial success of Zoot Suit, Valdez purchased an old packing house in San Juan Bautista and had it converted into a theater for the company. This new playhouse and administrative complex was inaugurated in 1981 with a production of David Belasco’s 1905 melodrama Rose of the Rancho, adapted by Valdez. This old fashioned melodrama was an ideal play for San Juan Bautista, because it was based on actual historical figures and events that had occurred in that town in the nineteenth century. Played as a revival of the melodrama genre, the play could be taken for face value, a tongue-in-cheek taste of history replete with stereotypes and misconceptions.
The experiment with Rose of the Rancho served as a kind of motivation for Valdez, inspiring him to write the second play in this collection, Bandido! which he then directed in 1982 in the Teatro’s theater. This was Valdez’s personal adaptation of the melodrama genre but with a distinctly Valdezian touch as we will see later.
Valdez wrote and directed Corridos for the 1983 season, producing this elaboration of the earlier exercises in San Francisco’s Marine’s Memorial Theater, a large house that was filled to capacity for six months. The San Francisco production garnered eleven awards from the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle before moving on to residencies in San Diego and Los Angeles.
All of his interaction in Hollywood and his own sense of history inspired Valdez to write the final play in this collection, I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!, first produced by El Teatro Campesino and the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1986. This production represented the beginning of yet another phase for Valdez and his company. El Teatro Campesino was no longer a full-time core of artists, living and creating collectively under Valdez’s direction. Instead, the company began to contract talent only for the rehearsal and performance period. El Teatro Campesino became a producing company with Valdez at the helm as Artistic Director and writer. After great success in Los Angeles, Badges! was co- produced with the San Diego Repertory Theater and the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, Florida. While the Teatro continued to produce, Valdez began to focus his efforts more on writing and directing films.
Valdez directed “La Bamba,” the sleeper hit of the summer of 1987, finally opening up the doors that had been so difficult to penetrate for so many years. “When I drove up to the studio gate,” Valdez related, following the success of his film, “the guard at the gate told me that the pastries were taken to a certain door. The only other Mexican he ever saw delivered the pastries.” That same year our playwright adapted and directed the earlier Corridos into a PBS version titled “Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution,” starring Linda Rondstadt and featuring himself as narrator. This production won the Peabody Award, the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting.
Following the success of “La Bamba” and “Corridos,” Valdez continued to work on other projects for television and film as he also took his position as the leading Chicano filmmaker in Hollywood. Ever the activist, Valdez helped form the Latino Writers Group, which he
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hoped would pressure the studios to produce films written by Latinos. “The embryo is the screenplay,” he said. “The embryo, in fact, is what is written on the page. This is where you begin to tell the difference between a stereotype and reality.”
In 1991, Valdez adapted and directed La Pastorela, or Shepherd’s Play for a great performances segment on PBS. This television production is based on the traditional Christmas play, which El Teatro Campesino has produced in the mission at San Juan Bautista for many years. That same year, Valdez and his wife, Lupe, co-scripted a motion picture based on the life of Frida Kahlo, for production in 1992. Plans were also underway for a revival of Bandido! in San Juan Bautista during the 1992 season as well as a re-mounting of Zoot Suit for a national tour.
Valdez’s impressive career can be separated into the following four periods: Phase One, the director/playwright of the original group of farmworkers; Phase Two, a Teatro Campesino independent of the Union; Phase Three, a professional Teatro and co-productions such as Zoot Suit; and the current, Fourth Phase, Luis Valdez, the filmmaker alongside El Teatro Campesino, professional productions across the country and community-professional productions at home.
Cutting through the News: Zoot Suit
Zoot Suit is the logical culmination of all that Valdez had written before, combining elements of the acto, mito and corrido in a spectacular documentary play with music. Unlike any of his previous plays or actos, however, Zoot Suit is based on historical fact, not a current crisis.
By illuminating an actual incident in the history of Chicano-Anglo relations in Los Angeles, Zoot Suit does not have the immediacy of an acto about today’s headlines. The politically aware will know that the police brutality and injustices rendered in this play are still happening; others may lose the point. Most significantly, this play illuminates events that had a major impact on the Chicano community of Los Angeles during World War II, incidents that are carefully ignored by most high school history books.
Like the acto, Zoot Suit exposes social ills in a presentational style. It is a play that is closer to the docu-drama form, owing more to Brecht than to Odets as the action reveals the events surrounding the infamous Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942. By employing a narrator, Valdez is discarding a totally representational style in favor of this more direct contact with his audience. El Pachuco’s almost constant presence, underscoring Henry’s inner thoughts and tribulations, skillfully captivates the audience and serves as a continual commentator on the action.
Just as La Muerte did in Soldado Razo, El Pachuco will stop the action entirely in order to make a point, telling Henry (and the audience) to listen again when the judge rules that the “zoot haircuts will be retained throughout the trial for purposes of identification … ” It is a kind of “instant replay” that is only used once for maximum effect. Countering the figure of El Pachuco is the allegorical character of The Press which descends directly from the acto as well.
Like the corrido, there is a musical underscoring in Zoot Suit, placing the events in a historical context by employing the music of the period. El Pachuco sings some of the songs, as in a corrido, setting the mood through lyrics such as those that introduce the “Saturday Night Dance” in Act One, Scene Seven. While El Pachuco sings, the actors dance to the rhythms he creates, transforming from youthful fun to vengeful intensity gone wild by the end of the scene.
Some of the songs are original while others are traditional Latin or Anglo-American tunes,
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such as Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood.” Unlike the corrido, in which the music was played by live musicians, however, the music is pre-recorded. The choreography is also more like that of a musical comedy during the dance numbers, staged with historical authenticity to enhance the theatricality and further engage the audience.
Most importantly, this play places the Chicanos in a historical context that identifies them as “American,” by showing that they, too, danced the swing as well as the mambo. Valdez is telling his audience that the Chicanos’ taste for music can be as broad as anyone’s. He is also revealing a cross-culturalism in the Chicanos’ language, customs and myths. As Valdez so emphatically stated when this play first appeared, “this is an American play,” attempting to dispel previous notions of separatism from the society at large. He is also reminding us that Americans populate The Americas, not just the U.S.
Valdez will not ignore his indigenous American ancestors, either, employing elements of the mito very subtly when the Pachuco is stripped of his zoot suit and remains covered only by an indigenous loincloth. This image suggests the sacrificial “god” of the Aztecs, stripped bare before his heart is offered to the cosmos. It is a stunning moment in the play, when the cocky Pachuco is reduced to bare nakedness in piercing contrast to his treasured “drapes.” He may be naked, but he rises nobly in his bareness, dissolving into darkness. He will return, and he does.
The character of El Pachuco also represents the Aztec concept of the “nahual,” or other self as he comes to Henry’s support during the solitary scene in prison. Henry is frightened, stripped emotionally bare in his cell and must rely on his imagination to recall the spirit of El Pachuco in order to survive. The strength he receives from his other self is determined by his ability to get in touch with his nahual.
The documentary form of the play is influenced by the Living Newspaper style, a documentary theater that exposed current events during the 1930’s through dramatizations of those events. The use of newspapers for much of the set decoration, as well as the giant front page backdrop through which El Pachuco cuts his way at the top of the play is an effective metaphor for the all-pervading presence of the press. When Dolores Reyna hangs newspapers on the clothesline instead of actual laundry, the comment is complete.
