Luis Valdez: 1940—: Playwright, Director, Writer, Actor, Teacher

Acknowledged as the "godfather of Chicano theater," Luis Valdez is the founder and artistic director of El Teatro Campesino, which translates to The Farmworkers Theater. Started in 1965, Valdez has led the theater company to international acclaim and numerous awards. The author and director of numerous plays, Valdez has also written and directed two films: Zoot Suit, based on his play of the same name and La Bamba, the 1987 hit movie based on the life of the Mexican-American rock star, Ritchie Valens. It's his work with El Teatro Campesino, however, and his dedication to advancing the role of the arts in people's lives that sets Valdez apart from his contemporaries. "If you want to understand modern Latino theater, you have to know that Luis was the start," Sean San Jose of San Fran-cicso's Campo Santo Theater Company told Karen D'Souza of the San Jose Mercury News. "Everything that came after him was informed by him."

Born Luis Miguel Valdez on June 26, 1940 in Delano, California, Valdez was raised in the agricultural labor camps around California where his parents worked in the fields, picking what ever crop was in season. It was a small role in an elementary school play and seeing his parents and those like them work the long, grueling hours for little pay that moved Valdez to use the theater to shed light on the Latino experience. "I took what I most feared, the thing I was most ashamed of, and turned it into something I could write about," he told students at San Diego State Universtiy in 2000.

El Teatro Campesino

Following graduation from high school, Valdez attended San Jose State University where he produced his first play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, in 1964. Following a short time with the famed San Francisco Mime Troupe, Valdez joined activist Cesar Chavez in 1965 and sought to raise funds for the grape boycott and farmworkers strike that Chavez had organized, and bring attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers. Thus begun El Teatro Campesino which performed short plays based on the struggles of the farmworkers and people of Mexican descent. "He addressed cultural and Chicano issues from the point of view of a migrant farmworker," Professor Arsenio Cordova of the University of New Mexico told the Albuquerque Journal. "He's been able to address those attitudes totally, of discrimination."

After four years the small theater company received national recognition by winning an Obie Award in New York and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 1969, and then another L.A. Drama Critics Award in 1972. In 1977 Valdez co-wrote the screenplay for Which Way is Up?, a comedy starring Richard Pryor, and received a Rockefeller Foundation Artists-In-Residence grant which enabled him to write the most famous play to come out of El Teatro Campesino in 1979, Zoot Suit.

Zoot Suit was based on the murder of a Mexican American and the subsequent unfair trial of Mexican Americans or zoot suiters, as they were termed by the press in Los Angeles in the early 1940s. A musical, Valdez's Zoot Suit become one of the most popular plays to have ever originated in Los Angeles and was the first play by a Chicano to be presented on Broadway. A movie version, also written and directed by Valdez and starring Edward James Olmos, was released in 1981 and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Musical Picture.

La Bamba

Valdez had his most mainstream success in 1987 with another film he wrote and directed, La Bamba. The story of Mexican American rock and roller Ritchie Valens, whose brief time in the spotlight ended when he was killed in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly, was one of that year's biggest box office successes. That same year, Valdez adapted his play, Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution, for PBS and won the prestigous Peabody Award. That play had previously won the San Francisco Bay Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, when it premiered in 1983.

In 1993 Valdez co-wrote and directed a made-for-TV movie of The Cisco Kid starring Jimmy Smits. Broadcast on the Turner Television Network, the entire production was filmed on location in Mexico. The following year, Valdez received the prestigious Aguila Azteca Award (Golden Eagle Award), which is the highest honor bestowed by the Mexican government for citizens of other countries.

In 2000 Valdez became a founding faculty tenured professor at the Center for Teledramatic Arts and Technology at California State University, Monterey Bay. In this role, the playwright works with students from a variety of backgrounds and encourages them to use technology in an effort to continue the tradition of raising social issues through art. "Today, the opportunity to distribute artistic work and share untold stories has never been greater," Valdez told Alejandra Navarro of the Modesto Bee, adding that he envisioned live theater going out over the Internet.

Back to "the Farmworker Question"

In 2001 Valdez returned to a play he began writing in 1976, and to a subject matter that's never left him: farmworkers. "It's been 25 years," Valdez confessed to the San Jose Mercury News. "It's time to come full circle, to come back to the farmworker question." Mundo Mata tells the story of two migrant worker brothers divided by their beliefs. One brother is idealistic and eager to join the United Farm Workers, while the other falls into drugs after a tour of duty in Vietnam, and begins working for the landowners.

In the title role of Mundo was one of Valdez's sons, Kinan, who shares his father's beliefs in the social significance of art and seeks to instill those ideas in El Teatro Campesino of the future. "We, the new generation at the theater, really want to take the company back to its roots in agitational propaganda," Kinan Valdez told the San Jose Mercury News. "The farm-workers are still stuck in the same place. We want to remind people of the struggle."

In his work, Valdez attempts to illustrate, not just the plight of Latinos and the prejudices they face, but also the fact that there are differences among all people and that there is much to be learned from them. "What comes out in the final analysis," he told the students at San Diego State University, "is we are all more alike than we think, we're just from different tribes."

Selected Works

Plays

The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, 1964.

La Virgen de Tepeyac, 1971.

La Carpa de los Rasquachis, 1974.

El Fin del Mundo, 1976.

Zoot Suit, 1979.

Tibercio Vasquez, 1980.

Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution, 1983.

I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, 1986.

Bandido!, 1994.

The Mummified Deer, 2000.

Mundo Mata, 2001.

Screenplays

Which Way Is Up?, 1977.

Zoot Suit, (also director)1982.

La Bamba, (also director) 1987.

Television Plays and Movies

Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution, (also director) 1987.

La Pastorela: A Shepherd's Tale, 1991.

The Cisco Kid, (also director), 1993.

Books

Actos: Produced Between 1965-70, Cucaracha Press, 1971.

Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, (with Stan Steiner), Knopf, 1972.

Pensamiento Serpentino: A Chicano Approach to the Theater of Reality, Cucaracha Press, 1973.

Sources

Albuquerque Journal, April 1, 2001.

Daily Aztec (San Diego State University), May 11, 2000.

Modesto Bee, April 29, 2000.

San Jose Mercury News, May 31, 2001.

Other

Additional information for this profile was obtained from El Teatro Campesino.

—Brian Escamilla