Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez: El Teatro Campesino

Valdez formed El Teatro Campesino, a theater company, to help unite farmworkers during the Delano strike by farmworkers. The plays focused on the history and culture of Californian Latin American people, known as Chicanos.

El Teatro Campesino helped inspire a national movement of Chicano theater troupes performing its signature, one-act plays, called actos. Through satire, comedy, and improvisation from farmworkers, they sought to bring awareness to their condition and inspire social action. Valdez believed that theater could be used as a tool to achieve social justice and improve the human condition.

Valdez was the artistic director and resident playwright until he left in 1967 to write and direct his own works, while still closely working with the company. Typically, Mexican-American people would study and be cast in classic plays written by Spanish playwrights. Valdez wanted to challenge this by expanding theater and arts to include the Chicano experience and reach mainstream media.

Fig. 2 - Valdez bought a building with the money he made from Zoot Suit to move El Teatro Campesino to San Juan Bautista, California.

Luis Valdez: Plays

Valdez is known for writing many plays. Los Vendidos (1967) and Zoot Suit (1978) are two of his most significant. Later, we will explore other plays in his published book collections.

Los Vendidos (1967)

One of the last actos that Valdez wrote for El Teatro Campesino, and one of their most well-known, is Los Vendidos. The story follows Honest Sancho, who owns a store that sells robots of different stereotypical models of Mexican and Mexican-American robots that were played by live actors. Miss Jiménez is a secretary for California Governor Ronald Reagan and is looking to purchase a model that can appeal to low-income Latino people. Valdez intentionally plays up the stereotypes to show the absurd, yet very real, perception of the Chicano community by non-Chicano people. It was first performed at the Brown Beret headquarters at Elysian Park in East Los Angeles.

Zoot Suit (1978)

Zoot Suit originally premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was one of the first Chicano plays to be performed on Broadway. The play is a mix of fiction and history. Zoot suits were worn by Black people and Latinos, and in California, the descriptor was made synonymous with gang members by many white people, the police, and the news media. The play is based on the Sleepy Lagoon Murder trials. Over a dozen Mexican-American people were arrested despite a lack of evidence or connection to the crime. The play explores the discrimination of zoot suit-wearing Chicano men and the social injustices inflicted upon the Mexican-American community.

Luis Valdez: Books

Valdez’s most successful and critically acclaimed plays were compiled and released as books in the 1990s.

Luis Valdez Early Works: Actos, Bernabe and Pensamiento Serpentino (1990)

Published by Arte Publico Press, this book collects Valdez’s earliest works, a full-length play, and a narrative poem. The actos were the foundation of El Teatro Campesino, so these short, one-act plays served to reflect the reality of everyday Chicano life. Bernabe blends a Chicano farmer’s reality with a spiritual connection to the elements, viewed from the perspective of Bernabe, who has an intellectual disability. Pensamiento Serpentino was created in the spirit of the mito (myth), a longer-form play that is meant to explore and create mythology built upon the Chicano roots of Aztec and Mayan cultures. Valdez detailed his vision of neo-Mayan philosophy with the embodiment of Chicanos, who strive to become people of love and action.

Fig 3 - Luis Valdez is honored as a father of Chicano culture, which has its origins in Mexico.

Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992)

While Zoot Suit, Bandido!, and We Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges had very successful theater runs, they were not published until this collection. Zoot Suit was the culmination of Valdez’s experience in El Teatro Campesino. Bandido! sought to alter the popular historical image of the Mexican bandit. We Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges explores the television and film roles typically offered and played by Mexican-American people through satire and exaggerated performances.

Luis Valdez: Quotes

The following quotes reflect Valdez's experiences growing up as Mexican-American that provided the inspiration for his work.

The stereotype of Mexican-American people pinned them as farmworkers and manual laborers. The racially charged adjective “dirty” refers to this stereotype. Often people of Mexican descent are hidden, living in separate communities and performing difficult labor that is not visible to citizens in everyday life. Segregation of peoples of white, mixed, and Mexican, or indigenous descent dates back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Luis Valdez exposed this vestigial, yet very present, racial hierarchy in his plays.

Valdez was well aware of the stereotypes his theater company sought to combat. Initially, his plays with El Teatro Campesino aimed to bring awareness to the farmworker's labor movement. Once he left El Teatro Campesino, he worked with other theater companies to increase the visibility of Chicano culture in a positive light that reflected the nuances and richness of their world.

Valdez noted a parallel between the detention of migrant Latino families on the Mexico–United States border and the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. As a very young child, Valdez remembers his family living on a ranch he believed to be their own. Later, he learned that they bought the land after it had been taken away from the previous Japanese owners. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government forced the Japanese-American people into internment camps. Valdez feels the same thing is happening with the holding cells at the US border.