‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez’ Documentary Gives A Chicano Icon His Due

Luis Valdez has spent his life unapologetically telling Chicano stories. Born in Delano, he found his footing in the Bay Area and went on to produce “Zoot Suit,” the first Chicano play to make it to Broadway, direct “La Bamba,” one of the most successful Latine films ever. In a new documentary, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” director David Alvarado put the camera in front of Valdez to tell his story. Valdez and Alvarado join us to talk about the documentary, the importance of capturing the Chicano experience and the stories they still want to tell. To find screenings of the documentary near you, visit www.americanpachuco.com/screenings.

Guests:

• David Alvarado, director, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez”
• Luis Valdez, playwright; actor; writer; director; founder and artistic director, El Teatro Campesino

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

When I was a young Mexican American kid still living in L.A., La Bamba felt like the biggest thing in the whole world. The movie was everywhere. The song was everywhere. A soundtrack to a whole era of life in the city.

Between that and the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela, it felt like Mexicans and Mexican Americans were riding a cultural wave right into the mainstream of American culture.

But, you know, it didn’t quite work out like that. Fernando is still the most famous Mexican baseball player ever. La Bamba is still the biggest Chicano movie ever made. Edward James Olmos is still the most famous Chicano actor.

In a new documentary by David Alvarado, we get both parts of this story. American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez relates the incredible story of El Teatro Campesino and Valdez’s rise to the heights of fame with La Bamba. In the background, we also get hints about how the country’s cultural institutions have sidelined Chicano voices and limited the prospects of Mexican Americans in Hollywood and at the highest tiers of theater — the very places where the idea of America has been fashioned and refashioned.

Here to talk with us about this excellent film and his life, we’re joined by Luis Valdez himself. Welcome.

Luis Valdez: Thank you. Thank you, Alexis. Pleasure.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined by the director of the film, David Alvarado. Welcome.

David Alvarado: Hey, so glad to be here.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Luis, let’s just begin at the beginning. You were a kid working in the fields, going to school. At what point did you realize that you wanted to go into theater and English and these dramatic arts?

Luis Valdez: Well, literally I was six years old when I got hooked on the idea of theater.

I was a migrant child, you know, living in a migrant labor camp with my family and going to a school that was nearby because there was nothing else to do. I was cast in a Christmas play by my first-grade teacher, and she took my lunch bag — a grocery bag — and turned it into a mask. The mask was a monkey because it was Christmas in the jungle, and it was my first role.

But then, the week of the show, we were evicted from the labor camp, so we left. I was never in the play.

That left a gaping hole in my chest, which became the hungry mouth of my creativity. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated with the possibilities of theater and storytelling.

Although I also developed an interest in math and science, as my older brother did. I was going to be an engineer, and he became an engineer working in aerospace. That also became a source of difference and conflict between us.

But anyway, I got hooked on theater early on.

Alexis Madrigal: Do you remember the first play you ever wrote?

Luis Valdez: Do I remember my first play?

I did puppet plays as a kid. I was telling this story — I found a potato in the fields, and it looked like a human face. That became my first puppet. I stuck my finger in the potato and began to play with it.

I got an old boot, and the potato was looking for revenge because of what people had done to potatoes. But the boot eventually squashes him.

Anyway, that was my first sort of concoction, and it was popular among the kids.

But I went on to do other things, and I became very aware that I was living a life that no one had really addressed in any way — not in literature, not in movies, not in plays.

Pretty soon I began to see that there was a path here for me to do something by becoming first an entertainer and then later a playwright.

Alexis Madrigal: And of course, you first came to prominence inside the UFW, leading this emergent thing called El Teatro Campesino. Can you tell us what it began as? How did it start?

Luis Valdez: Well, I pitched the idea to Dolores Huerta first.

I met her in 1965. She was a firebrand. She was 35 years old and the first woman general I ever followed. Again, she was way ahead of her time, and she’s 96 years old now. But at that time she was leading the charge, certainly in terms of Latinas, in terms of feminism and standing up for your rights.

There she was leading the grape strike.

So I convinced her that maybe a theater could be organized on the picket lines with the workers. She said, “Well, you have to speak to César.”

So I went and talked to César Chávez and pitched him the idea. He said I’d have to volunteer. There was no money, no actors, no stage.

So I joined the grape strike basically as a volunteer.

Eventually, about a month in, I was elected picket captain. I had control of the picket line, so I started introducing chants and eventually doing short actos with other strikers. We had a guitar too, so we started singing songs and composing songs.

There were two people responsible for the music. One was my younger brother Daniel, who’s in the documentary, and the other was Agustín Lira, who was another striker. These were young men in their 20s, so it was a very youthful kind of expression.

We were using the music of the people, using corridos, and also translating songs from the civil rights movement and the labor movement.

So it became something very tangible in the grape strike, and people seemed to love the spirit it created and, eventually, the humor that we were able to bring by doing these actos, these short skits — but I call them actos.

That led to the creation of El Teatro Campesino on the picket line, but also at the weekly Friday meetings.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, it’s interesting watching this film and thinking about how you were both a catalyst for forming the Chicano movement and also a witness to many of the things that were happening in the movement.

It’s really one of the high points in Mexican American political power, and I’m not sure we’ve had it quite together in the same way since then. Why do you think that is?

Luis Valdez: Well, you know, things come in waves.

We hit a high point in the 1960s, not just among Latinos. The civil rights movement specifically helped catalyze a whole lot of activity, artistic and political. There was a generational change. There was a pivot, I think, in American history in the 1960s, in the 20th century.

A lot of it was centered in the Bay Area at the beginning.

Again, I graduated from San José State in 1964 and went to Cuba to protest the travel ban. I came back and started working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, living in the Haight-Ashbury, with everything that went with that.

It was the beginning of the countercultural movement, and performing in the parks and doing commedia dell’arte with a political twist was just my thing. It laid the foundation for me to improvise later with farmworkers.

That connection is pretty vital geographically, in the sense that San Francisco was the mecca of that time. Also for theater. Coming out of the 1950s and into the early ’60s, San Francisco was the place on the West Coast. This is where the Actors Workshop was, and of course the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

It seemed to me that was the perfect place for me to take my early plays to see if I could get them produced.

It became pretty evident, though, that the city and the country at large weren’t ready yet for a Chicano playwright.

So I went back into the trenches. I joined César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in order to establish a voice within the farmworkers’ movement and serve as a foundation for what I wanted to do in the theater.

It’s very much workers’ theater, very much protest, agitprop to a great extent, but eventually other forms came, and that led not just to plays, but also films and videos, and eventually to this wonderful documentary that David Alvarado has put together using our archives and archival footage from the beginning of the grape strike and from the very first moments that led to the creation of El Teatro Campesino.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez. Of course, you’re hearing Luis Valdez right now.

We’re also joined by David Alvarado, the filmmaker and director of American Pachuco.

I mean, David, you have this legendary figure on the line with us and at the center of the film. How do you even start to carve a life story out of someone who’s been working for decades?

David Alvarado: Yeah, there’s so much to work with.

The true shame of the film, as proud of it as I am, is that we barely touch his whole body of work. It’s a 93-minute film. We cover maybe 40 years of work, but there’s just so much that didn’t even end up in the film.

For me, it was always going to be a story about this quest for belonging in America. This idea that Luis grew up born in America, with parents born in America, and yet they were told by all the signals around them that they didn’t belong, that they were somehow less than the people around them.

I think that has driven Luis to tell his story in his own way — in a way that has resonated with so much of America.

That’s what I wanted to be at the core. Through that lens, we tried to identify which works explored that most explicitly and in a way that could really live on a cinema screen. That was the guiding force.

Alexis Madrigal: Also, as I understand it, in addition to the documentary itself, you digitized massive amounts of film of El Teatro Campesino and Luis’s work.

David Alvarado: Yeah. He had collected film over the decades, and we worked closely with the University of California, Santa Barbara, which was storing and preserving that celluloid. Much of it hadn’t yet been digitized.

It would have been great to get in there and reel by reel pick out what we needed because digitizing these things is extremely expensive.

But we couldn’t, because some of it is 50 years old. It’s dangerous to open these things up. The film can become brittle and decay over time.

So it wasn’t worth risking losing it just to pick and choose.

We ended up having to digitize the whole dang thing.

Alexis Madrigal: But for the rest of us, what a gift. Thank you.

David Alvarado: Yeah, well, exactly.

What it ended up being was 80,000 feet of celluloid. For reference, when you’re on an airplane, you’re only about 40,000 feet up in the air.

So we’re talking about a massive amount of material, and we’re so proud to have played a role in preserving it.

Through the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Internet Archive, we want to continue making a lot of this available to the public.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re listening to “Zoot Suit Boogie” from the soundtrack to the play Zoot Suit.

We are, of course, talking about the documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez with David Alvarado, the documentary filmmaker and director of that film.

We’re also joined by Luis Valdez — playwright, actor, writer, director, and founder and artistic director of El Teatro Campesino.

We want to hear from you. Did you ever attend a show by El Teatro Campesino? What are your memories of watching La Bamba or Zoot Suit?

Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can also email [email protected].

I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.