Zoot Suit

Jorge Huerta introduces the play by outlining a history of the playwright, Luis Valdez. According to Huerta, “no other individual has made as important an impact on Chicano theater as Luis Valdez” (vii). Huerta explains, “Before discussing Zoot Suit, I would like to trace Valdez’s aesthetic, spiritual and political development, placing the director/playwright and this play in a historical context” (vii). Valdez’s work, including plays, poems, essays, books, films, and videos, comments on the Chicano/Mexican-American experience in the United States.

Born in 1940 to a family of migrant farm workers in California, Valdez managed to excel at school despite his family’s frequent relocation for work. Valdez developed an interest in theatre that solidified at San Jose State College, where he produced his first full-length play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964). Huerta divides Valdez’s career into five phases. In Phase One, Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker’s Theatre) in 1965 with a group of farm workers who were on strike. The troupe performed “brief commedia dell’arte-like sketches called actos about the need for a farm worker’s union” (viii).

Phase Two began in 1967, when Valdez and El Teatro Campesino shifted focus beyond the union in order to address broader social issues that were affecting Chicanos in the United States. Although the group wrote their works collectively, Valdez crafted his own play, Dark Root of a Scream, which he called a “mito, or myth” about a barrio community honoring a Chicano soldier who died in Vietnam. Valdez objected strongly to the Vietnam War as well as the sacrifice of Chicano men who were drafted to fight for a country that did not value them as citizens. This theme pervades his work, including Zoot Suit. El Teatro Campesino received an Obie, “off-Broadway’s highest honor” (ix) in 1968. In 1971, the company “moved to its permanent home base in the rural village of San Juan Bautista, California, where the troupe established itself as a resident company” (x).

Over the next several years, Valdez “began to explore the idea of adapting the traditional Mexican corridos, or ballads, to the stage” (x). In these works, actors would stage popular story ballads. One corrido, La Carpa de los Rasquachis (trans. The Tent of the Underdogs), astounded viewers at the 1973 Fourth Annual Chicano Theater Festival in San Jose, California. The play subsequently toured the United States and Europe to “great critical acclaim” (x). Meanwhile, shifting into Phase Three of his career, Valdez wrote Zoot Suit. This marked the beginning of an era in which “Valdez began the mainstreaming of Chicano theaters” (xii). El Teatro began to co-produce with other professional theatres. Zoot Suit “was a first step toward an individual identity that Valdez had previously rejected by working in a collective” (xii).

Valdez used the money from Zoot Suit’s success to buy a new theatre space for El Teatro Campesino. He experimented with melodrama, adapting the 1905 play Rose of the Rancho in 1981, and writing Bandido! (1982). His play I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges (1986) challenges the one-dimensional portrayals of Chicano people in Hollywood.

As El Teatro transitioned from a company of full-time artists to one that hired for each individual show, Valdez shifted into Phase Four, in which he concentrated on film. He directed La Bamba (1987) and earned a 1987 Peabody Award for his PBS adaptation of his earlier work, Corridos. With Phase Five of his career, Valdez returned to the theatre with the play Mummified Deer (1984). Huerta concludes:

From street theatre to melodrama-within-a-play to video-within-a-play, to a vision of the past and future, Luis Valdez takes us on theatrical explorations that offer no easy solutions. […] In the thirty-nine years since he founded El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez has made an odyssey few theater artists in the United States can claim. This course could not have been predicted, yet the journey was inevitable (xx-xxi).