Photo Courtesy of Annenberg Media
By Blanca Esthela Castañeda García
Playwrights often joke that they worry an unhappy theater audience might throw tomatoes.
Luis Valdez worried about being shot at.
America’s pioneering Chicano playwright and filmmaker said gunplay was not the only thing that made his early work with the United Farm Workers dangerous. His intended audience often watched his 15-minute actos in 100 degree heat, sun stroked, thirsty, hungry, scared and tired. Gun toting landowners and the local police they had in their pockets were a near-constant menace.
“That’s why actos were so short,” he said with a chortle.
Valdez paid a visit to Southwestern College recently to meet with theatre arts students and social justice activists. The Peabody Award-winning and Golden Globe nominated writer, director, actor and university professor formed El Teatro Campesino (the farmworker’s theater) in 1965 to support the work of UFW leaders Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta. He and a small cast of 2-4 actors would roll flatbed trucks up the edge of farms in the Central Valley and perform Actos, short one-act plays. He had learned street theatre during his time with the revolutionary San Francisco Mime Company and took it from the bustling sidewalks of The City to dusty off roads near out backs like Delano, Del Rey and San Juan Batista.
Actors taught the farm workers that they had the right to water, decent housing, breaks and school for their children. They also had the right to put their money in a bank.
El Teatro Campesino also performed in towns and cities to teach the broader population about the abuse and deprivation of the hard-working, long-suffering laborers who harvested their food. Sometimes Teatro Campesino used real campesinos as actors. That was challenging.
“I just had to get people on their feet to begin to improvise their own reality,” he said. “Rather than impose something, we encouraged people to speak for themselves. That became really important and continues to be a principle for us today.”
Southwestern marked the visit of Valdez and his wife, Lupe Trujillo Valdez, by raising the UFW’s iconic red flag with a black eagle. As the eagle rose into a pearl overcast sky, students honored Mother Earth with the Salute to the Four Winds, an ancient Mesoamerican rite. Valdez, a 1999 Southwestern College Honorary Degree recipient, smiled nostalgically.
Valdez first met César Chávez in Delano when he was just 6 years old. Delano was a hardscrabble town of about 10,000, barely more than a grape and cotton picking labor camp. Segregated Mexican and Filipino immigrants lived in shoddy sheds when they were not laboring in triple digit heat under the relentless San Joaquin Valley sun.
Teatro Campesino and its mobile messages found success.
People began to notice. His flatbed truck/portable stage drew crowds when it rumbled into farm areas striped with verdant rows of strawberries, onions and celery. Most viewers were the farmworkers they sought to educate, but many were gun toting plantation owners, their thuggish private security and local cops who did their bidding. Shots were occasionally fired, though Valdez said he does not think an actor was ever hit by gunfire.
Others noticed, too, including theatre professionals in New York City who in 1968 presented Teatro Campesino an Obie Award — off-Broadway’s highest honor – for its courage and service to a vulnerable population. Valdez’s actos became popular fare at progressive colleges and universities.
“They gave us the Obie for demonstrating the politics of survival,” said Trujillo Valdez. “It was after they saw the theater’s national tour in 1967. We were in New York promoting the (table grape) boycott.”
Teatro Campesino stayed in the fields and clearings of the Central Valley for many years as Valdez worked on other projects, including one of his masterpieces. His edgy musical “Zoot Suit” explored the mostly-forgotten Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 when military recruits and Los Angeles police attacked Latinos who wore flashy zoot suits. Navy sailors and Marines beat and stripped Latinos wearing peacoats, feathered hats and other stylish clothes, accusing the Mexican-Americans of being disrespectful of the war effort by wasting fabric.
“Zoot Suit” ran for nearly a year at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. and was lured to Broadway in 1979. It was the first (and still only) Chicano production ever produced on the Great White Way. Valdez directed a film version starring his brother Daniel Valdez and the great Edward James Olmos released in 1981. It was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and in 2019 was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for its cultural significance.
In 1987 Valdez wrote and directed the motion picture smash “La Bamba,” the story of the first Latino rock and roll star Ritchie Valens (Ricardo Steven Valenzuela). Valens’ demise in a plane crash with music superstar Buddy Holly was immortalized in the Homeric Don McLean song “American Pie.” “La Bamba” was a Golden Globe finalist, one of the most popular films of the year and a cultural touchstone for American Latinos.
SC theater arts major Xóchitl Ramos, 20, said it was an honor to meet Valdez because he paved the way for Latino performing artists.
“The very first professional theater production I ever saw was ‘Zoot Suit’ at the Cultural Center in Tijuana,” she said, “I believe his work gives a voice to the underdog. In this case, the underdogs are quite literally us. Especially at the border, where you have the huge contrast of two different cultures. Chicano culture has always had to fight for its ideals and rights both in Mexico and the U.S.”
Like Delores Huerta during her recent visit to the college, Valdez called for students and young Chicano/Latinos to take the torch from his generation of activists. He also encouraged talented writers, actors, signers and directors to take control of the narrative and tell Latino stories with truth and purpose.
“At the same time Chicano and Puerto Rican cinema has kind of dipped, the Mexican cinema has risen internationally, with Alejandro Iñarritú and Guillermo del Toro,” he said, “The American experience has been relegated to second place in the minds of Los Angeles movie producers. They are corporate representatives. They represent the money.”
Valdez said storytellers should write about what they know from their own experiences.
“Local stories told about us are a very difficult game,” he said. “It’s going to take a whole new generation of artists. These new movies are more personal. The quality is there, but they’re not political in the same way, due to financing (from conservative sources).”
Now in life’s third act, Valdez said he wants to make sure his work is available for future generation. His plays are now available in book form. He said he believes his films and scripts still have something to offer.
His wife Trujillo Lopez agreed.
“We’ve been around the block,” she said. “The stories of our generation have meaning, but we need new generations to tell theirs.”
Chicano artists have an outsized responsibility to represent their culture and enormous opportunities to have impact, Valdez said.
“If we don’t tell our stories they may be lost,” he said. “We are a storytelling people. Time for Chicanos to get busy.”