Valdez is attempting

action, although the fate of Bandido!’s central figure is predetermined by history. Valdez knows that nobody can change the inequities of the past, but offers the suggestion that the future can be altered for the better, if misrepresentations of the Chicano are altered.

It is not that Valdez is attempting to completely whitewash Vásquez, either. When the Impresario asks him, “Are you comic or tragic, a good man or a bad man?” Vásquez responds: “All of them.” To which the playwright might respond: “Aren’t we all comic and tragic, good and bad?” It is perhaps the degree of evil that fascinates our playwright here, that degree always determined by who is being asked. Thus, the opposing views of this comic, tragic, good and bad man.

Valdez’s style here is reminiscent of Luigi Pirandello, the Italian playwright and novelist whose works often turn reality inside out, leaving the reader or observer to ponder the nature of reality. Again, the Impresario states the obvious when he tells Vásquez, “Reality and theater don’t mix, sir,” as we watch a play that is watching its own melodrama.

Above all, Bandido! is theatrical, offering the audience a delightful mixture of songs and dances that narrate the story as in the corrido, as well as characters that can be hissed or cheered as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Melodramas were extremely popular in Mexican theaters and carpas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in this country, a fact that histories of U.S. theater neglect to report. In other words, the genre belongs to all of us.

What makes this play truly Valdezian, however, is the fact that it is not simply a play presenting us with villains and heroes in conflict. The conflict is the melodrama itself—the distortion the Impresario wants to present for profit. “The public will only buy tickets to savour the evil in your soul,” he tells Vásquez, a truism that cannot be denied. It is more fun to watch the villain than the hero in an old fashioned melodrama. In Valdez’s play, however, the villain is the Impresario, precursor to a legion of Hollywood producers. If history cannot be changed in either Zoot Suit or Bandido!, the next play looks to the future as the only hope.

Searching for Reality: I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!

The Valdezian questioning of reality reaches its pinnacle in I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! In this play the playwright presents us with a world that resembles a hall of mirrors, sometimes catching this picture, other times another view. One never knows for certain if what we are observing is real or an illusion. Instead of Bandido!’s “Melodrama within a play,” we are now given a much more complex vision as Valdez explores the different levels of reality between the world of the stage and the realm of television. Like Zoot Suit, this play was written for a fully-equipped theater. Furthermore, it requires a realistic set, designed to look like a television studio setting, including video monitors hanging above the set to help the audience understand its transformation into a “live studio audience.”

Badges! focuses on a middle-aged Chicano couple who have made their living as “King and Queen of the Hollywood Extras,” playing non-speaking roles as maids, gardeners and the like. The couple have been very successful, having put their daughter through medical school and their son into Harvard. They have, in effect, accomplished the American Dream, with a suburban home complete with swimming pool, family room and microwave.

The major conflict arises when Sonny, alienated from the Ivy League reality, comes home from Harvard unexpectedly and announces that he has dropped-out. To make matters worse, he decides he will become a Hollywood actor. His parents, his girlfriend and the audience know his fate will be the same as his parents’, playing “on the hyphen” in bit parts as thieves, drug addicts and rapists. Or will he? Like Zoot Suit, I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking

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Badges! does not give a distinct ending, but rather, leaves the solution up to the audience members to decide.

While Zoot Suit takes us from a presentational style to a representational style as a play, Bandido! explores both styles transferring from the “real” Tiburcio Vásquez to the melodramatic version: Vásquez through the eyes of Luis Valdez and Vásquez through the eyes of Hollywood and dime novels. Badges!, on the other hand, takes us on a much more involved journey, by remodeling the theater to look like an actual television studio with all of the paraphernalia of the medium. To add to the effect, when the action begins it begins as an actual taping in progress.

As soon as the action begins in Badges!, we begin to think of it as a play, performed in the style of a sit-com, not a taping, but rather, a play, until the final scene. This is when it becomes difficult to tell if what we are seeing is a part of Buddy and Consuelo’s “sitcom,” or if what we are witnessing is Sonny’s “sit-com,” or his “play,” existing only in his mind.

Just as we saw Tiburcio Vásquez attempting to write the true version of his story, we now see Sonny Villa recreating his reality. “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” he asks, underscoring the premise of the play itself. Are we, the audience, a “live studio audience?” Are they really taping this? Did Sonny really rob a fast food restaurant? Questions mount as we watch Sonny’s transformation, his angst or his drama.

What is real to Sonny is the fact that he must find himself within this society, the son of parents whose very existence has depended on portraying the marginalized “other.” When Connie tells her son “I’d rather play a maid than be a maid,” she makes a point but cannot escape the fact that maids are all she ever will play. Sonny knows that he, too, will not be given greater opportunities unless he writes and directs his own material, to his standards and not some Hollywood advertising agency’s.

From melodrama-within-a-play to video-within-a-play, the playwright takes us on theatrical explorations that offer no easy solutions. The earliest actos offered clearly defined action: “Join the union,” “Boycott grapes,” etc. But what to do about distorted history or negative portrayals of Chicanos in the media? Can any of us, as Sonny Villa proposes to do, write and produce films and videos that cut through the biases of generations? Only a select few will ever have that opportunity and Luis Valdez is one of them.

Ultimately, these three plays present us with different aspects of the playwright himself. Valdez is the Pachuco of Broadway, the social bandit of the media and the brilliant student who will change the face of Hollywood portrayals of his people. He laughs at himself as much as at historians and Hollywood in these plays, exploding myths by creating others, transforming the way in which Chicanos and Chicanas view themselves within the context of this society. Each of these plays is finally about a search for identity through the playwright’s quest for what is reality—past, present and future. “How can we know who we are,” he continually asks, “if we do not know who we were?”