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Luis Valdez
 Luis
Valdez (born 1940) was founder of the El Teatro Campesino in
California and is thought to be the father of Mexican American
theater.
Playwright and director Luis Valdez is considered the father of
Mexican American theater. In 1965 he founded El Teatro Campesino, a
theater of farm workers in California. This project inspired young
Mexican American activists across the country to use the stage to
give voice to the history, the myths, and the present-day political
concerns of Mexican Americans. In later years, Valdez has tried to
portray Mexican American life for a mainstream audience, and his
popular 1987 film La Bamba helped him do that.
Valdez was born in 1940 in Delano, California, into a family of
migrant farm workers. At the age of six he began to work in the
fields with his parents and nine brothers and sisters. Because his
family had to travel around California's San Fernando Valley
following the ripening of the crops, his
education was continuously
interrupted. Despite this, Valdez managed to finish high school and
to attend San Jose
State College. He majored in English
and explored his interest in theater. While in college he won a
writing contest for his play, The Theft. Later, the college's
drama department produced The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa,
his play about the problems facing a Mexican couple in America.
Learns Techniques of Agitprop
After graduating from college in 1964, Valdez joined the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, but he couldn't give up telling stories and
writing plays. During this time he learned the techniques of
agitprop (agitation and propaganda) theater, in which a play puts
forth political views and tries to spur the audience to act on those
views.
For years migrant farm workers had to endure unhealthy working
conditions. They worked long hours for extremely low wages and
received no benefits. Finally, in 1965, migrant grape pickers in
Delano decided to go on strike. These workers were backed by the
labor leader César Chávez and the migrant worker union he helped
found, the National Farm Workers Association.
Brings Theater to Farm Workers
Two months after the strike began, Valdez joined Chávez in his
efforts to organize the farm workers of Delano. It was there that
Valdez brought together farm workers and students to found El Teatro
Campesino (the Workers' Theater). The original function of this
group of actor-laborers was to raise funds and to publicize the
farm-worker strike and the grape boycott. Their efforts soon turned
into a full-blown theatrical movement that spread across the country
capturing the imagination of artists and activists.
By 1967 Valdez and El Teatro Campesino left the vineyards and
lettuce fields to create a theater for the Mexican American nation.
The movement evolved into teatro chicano, an agitprop theater
that blended traditional theatrical styles with Mexican humor,
character types, folklore, and popular culture. All across America,
Mexican American theatrical groups sprang up to stage Valdez's
one-act plays, called actos. The actos explored modern issues facing
Mexican Americans: the farm workers' struggle for unionization, the
Vietnam War, the drive for bilingual
education, the war against drug
addiction and crime, and community control of parks and schools.
Hands Down Rules for Mexican American Theater
In 1971 Valdez published a collection of actos to be used by Mexican
American community and student theater groups. He also supplied the
groups with several theatrical and political principles. Included
among these were the ideas that Mexican Americans must be seen as a
nation with roots spreading back to the ancient Aztec and that the
focus of the theater groups should be the Mexican American people.
Valdez's vision of a national theater that created art out of the
folklore and social concerns of Mexican Americans was successful.
The Mexican American theater movement reached its peak in 1976.
Valdez and others in the movement then tried to expand the Mexican
American experience into areas that would reach all Americans. In
1978 Valdez broke into mainstream theater with a Los Angeles
production of his popular play Zoot Suit, about
Mexican-American gang members during the Los Angeles race riots of
1942-43. The following year the play moved to the Broadway stage in
New York. It was then made into a film in 1982, but this version
failed to please both critics and audiences. Valdez was hurt by the
experience. "It's painful to make a passionate statement about
something and then have people ignore it," he explained to Susan
Linfield in American Film.
La Bamba Brings Attention
Valdez remained determined to reach a national audience. His next
play, Corridos, the dramatization of a series of Mexican folk
ballads, was praised by theater critics. It was then made into a
television production that aired on PBS in the fall of 1987.
Valdez's breakthrough into mainstream America, however, had come
earlier that summer. He had written and directed La Bamba,
the screen biography of Ritchie Valens, the 1950s Mexican American
rock-and-roll
singer. Audiences across America
learned not only about the tragically short life of Valens but also
about the lifestyle and other elements of the Mexican American
community. The movie was an overwhelming
box office success.
"My work comes from the border," Valdez told Gerald C. Lubenow of
Newsweek. "It is neither Mexican nor American. It's part of
America, like Cajun
music." Valdez has continued to write
plays for the theater, for
television, and for motion pictures
that focus on the lives and the histories of Mexican Americans. In
1994 he began work on the script for a film about the life of César
Chávez, who died in 1993. He has also remained artistic director for
El Teatro Campesino. In the process, he believes he is simply
exposing America to another part of itself. "I have something to
give," he explained to Lubenow. "I can unlock some things about the
American landscape."
Valdez holds honorary doctorates from
San Jose State University, the
University of Santa Clara, Columbia
College of Chicago, and the
California Institute of the Arts. He is also a founding faculty
member of the new
California State University Monterey
Bay and a founding member of the California Arts Council. His awards
include the George Peabody Award (1987), the Governor's Award
(1990), and Mexico's prestigious Aguila Azteca Award (1994).
Luis Valdez from Encyclopedia of
World Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson
Corporation. All rights reserved. | 
