For Luis Valdez, art and real life began in the sun-baked fields of Central California. The Chicano filmmaker and playwright was born in a farm labor camp in Delano, and was working beside his parents by age 6, picking cotton, tomatoes and other crops as a migrant worker from sunrise to sundown.
“I was in the field before I could walk,” said Valdez, now 86. “We were living in dumps. We were living in tents, and also living hand to mouth. I became aware of this whole network of a farm-working industry that used people as disposable labor.”
Those beginnings became the foundation of his work as an artist, bringing the struggles of migrants and the larger Chicano experience to dramatic life in a multitude of theater and feature film productions over six decades, most notably in Zoot Suit and La Bamba, the latter the first major box office hit written and directed by a Latino.
The filmmaker is now the subject of American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, a documentary that arrives at a moment of fraught political conflict over immigration, cultural identity and whose stories get told in the Trump era. Valdez’s story is about the power of culture as a means of political organizing and claiming an equal place in society. As Valdez declares in the documentary, “We laugh and cry like anybody else. We make America strong because we are America.”
American Pachuco chronicles Valdez’s life in vivid visual and emotional detail through newly available vintage footage and interviews with actors Lou Diamond Phillips and Cheech Marin, filmmaker Taylor Hackford and singer Linda Ronstadt, among others. The film follows this son of Mexican American migrant workers who discovered his public voice through drama, leading spirited performances on the back of a flatbed truck within the farmworkers movement, and later earned acclaim as a filmmaker and playwright of untold Chicano stories by the ’70s and ’80s.
The movie, directed by David Alvarado, premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. After American Pachuco’s Northern California opening in San Francisco on July 29, the documentary will continue its theatrical run via a tour of more than 20 cities across the U.S. this summer and also air in the fall on PBS.
The documentary is narrated by Edward James Olmos, reprising his formidable “El Pachuco” persona of effortless, defiant cool from Zoot Suit, the compelling musical and 1981 film created by Valdez to dramatize the history of the “Zoot Suit Riots” in 1940s Los Angeles, where young Mexican Americans dressed in flamboyant, oversized zoot suits were attacked by sailors and soldiers on leave.
That dynamic performance introduced Olmos to a national audience and kick-started an acting career that has included roles in Blade Runner, Miami Vice, Battlestar Galactica and his 1988 Oscar-nominated role in Stand and Deliver.
“It changed the course of our lives in this country,” Olmos said of Zoot Suit outside a July 22 screening of American Pachuco in Los Angeles. “It gave us a voice and a presence.”
Valdez was drawn to theater from a young age, and as an adolescent in the 1950s began staging puppet shows for migrant children. Later at San Jose State University, he majored in English and began writing plays, before he graduated to political theater, music and comedy with his El Teatro Campesino group.
His first produced full-length play, in 1964, was The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which Valdez called “an absurdist comedy” that reflected on the disparity of his family’s fortunes during a time of postwar prosperity across the U.S. When his father showed Valdez a newspaper article about the farmworkers movement emerging from Delano, the young dramatist proposed a workers’ theater to union leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta as a means to “activate a picket line,” Valdez recalls in the documentary.
“It was so important because there was so much fear among the workers and they felt so helpless,” Huerta said before the L.A. screening. “The workers were able to look at themselves, make fun of themselves and make fun of the bosses and the labor contractors. So it was a strengthening of the movement.”
As the strike wore on, the farmworkers union sought broader attention through a 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento — 10,000 strong by the end — and Valdez’s theater group performed in every town along the way. El Teatro Campesino also embarked on its first national tour, which further publicized the union’s campaign for a national boycott of grapes. Some growers responded with violence.
“I was beaten and jailed on a couple of occasions,” Valdez said. “I had a loaded gun pointed at my head by a grower’s son who said, ‘OK, act.’” With a smile, he added, “It was very exciting at the same time.”
On March 18, the documentary screened at the Houston Latino Film Festival, the same day The New York Times published revelations about Chavez’s sexual abuse of young women and girls in the movement. Alvarado has since changed how Chavez is introduced to the Valdez story, as narrated by Olmos’ scornful El Pachuco.
“History shifted under our feet in the middle of releasing this film,” said Alvarado, who grew up in Texas with the image of Chavez as a heroic figure. “It was painful and expensive even to make a small change. But it was worth it because now we can feel better about the perspective of the film on Cesar Chavez and how Luis’ story fits in that.”
When Chavez decided to end the theater troupe’s activities and reassign each member to focus only on organizing, Valdez took his group independent. That freed him to explore other issues, including the Vietnam War, performing on college campuses and embarking on an international tour in 1969.
On Aug. 29, 1970, Valdez and his group participated in the Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles, where 30,000 demonstrators protested the Vietnam War and its disproportionate number of Latino casualties. He’d also made arrangements to meet with Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar for an interview at the end of the march, but after a confrontation between protesters and law enforcement erupted on the streets, Salazar was killed while sitting in a bar by a tear gas canister fired by a L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy.
When Valdez won a commission from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to write a play about the city’s history, Zoot Suit was the result. It recounted the violence that greeted many young Latinos for their flashy attire, and the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon murder conviction of 12 Latino youths, which was later reversed.
“I knew that there had been a psychic wound,” Valdez said. “I certainly knew that there were stories about how the Pachucos had been abused, and the racism in the city at the time. I decided to try to navigate this in the most careful and yet explosive way that I could.”
Zoot Suit was a Los Angeles sensation from its 1978 debut, with Olmos’ character speaking a blend of English, Spanish and street-slang Caló, dressed in dark suit and red shirt, his wide-brimmed hat shading a confrontational sneer.
“Luis did a great service by making people reexamine that story in a different light,” said Alvarado. “Those pachucos were pretty cool guys. They were quintessential Americans who had found their own identity, who had expressed themselves as belonging here.”
As a child, Valdez was close to his older brother, Frank, who was determined to assimilate into mainstream American culture, even as he faced racism in his job as an engineer working for the Air Force. Conflict between brothers was frequently reflected in the director’s work, including La Bamba, which told the story of ’50s rocker Ritchie Valens and his older brother, Bob Morales.
“In Mexican culture, a family is like a river — you bathe in it,” Valdez said. “No one is out there by themselves. We all like our independence, but the support of a community and a family is what allows you to overcome all of the obstacles, and certainly Mexicans have had their share in this country. We’re still here, and we’re contributing. … We can all share then. That’s my image of the world and America at large.”
