Luis Valdez at 50: The Rage Has Cooled : Chicano theater's onetime angry young man still has his moments of fury, but now, he says, he's a man mellowed by optimism

By SEAN MITCHELL

July 29, 1990 12 AM PT

It was entirely in keeping with his life thus far that Luis Valdez, at his 50th birthday party last month, stepped up to a microphone and saluted his own death.

Addressing a couple hundred friends and supporters of his Teatro Campesino arrayed at clusters of tables under the late afternoon sun at a ranch near his home in San Juan Bautista, Valdez said with rising cheer in his voice, “I’m going to be planted over there one day,” and gestured in the direction of the local cemetery. “Yes, I am. That’s where we’re all going.”

For Valdez, the pioneering Chicano theater artist, Hollywood director and neo-Mayan spiritualist, mortality has long been a subject for singing, as is evident from the crooning figures of Death found in his early plays, to “La Bamba”--his joyously morbid 1987 film biography of Chicano rock ‘n’ roller Ritchie Valens.

But as he continued his informal birthday address from a stage where mariachi bands would soon bring on the night, the director, dressed in a white guayabera shirt, went on to salute his beginnings in El Teatro Campesino--the farm workers theater that he created alongside Cesar Chavez in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in 1965, and which has remained a refuge for him away from the limelight and fevers of “Zoot Suit,’ “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” “Corridos,” “La Bamba,” and Hollywood deals come and gone.

“It’s about grounding,” he told the audience assembled in tribute. “The Teatro is the roots of the tree. It’s been important to me. Otherwise I would have been fried to a crisp by all the attention.”

Reminding those present that the Teatro’s cultural crusade was far from over, he said, “We’re redefining America.”

A lot has changed in the 25 years since Valdez and his upstart band of players performed their brief agitprop scenes on the back of a flatbed truck, encouraging migrant workers to join Chavez’s union. Today, Valdez is thicker in the midsection, no longer wears sideburns and has tamed his Zapata mustache. Meanwhile, the union has shrunk to a fraction of its former strength, weakened by the agricultural policies of an unfriendly Republican governor and waves of undocumented workers from south of the border.

He has been around the world and back again, with stops at Broadway and the executive suites of Hollywood, and countless stages and microphones in between. His company has toured Europe six times. He has inspired a generation of Latino writers and directors, sung with Linda Ronstadt on PBS, been courted by universities as well as film studios, and was even invited earlier this year to a cultural summit by the president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

And while he has remained based in San Juan Bautista, a historic mission town (pop. 1,300), east of Salinas, where he moved the Teatro in 1971, in recent years much of Valdez’s energy has drifted south toward Hollywood, destination of dreams for so many Americans of all colors and ethnic origins.

“I like Hollywood, you know, in its own way, because it is such a metaphor for American society as a whole,” Valdez says during a conversation the night before his party. He’s sitting in his office at the Teatro, a converted produce warehouse purchased with the money made from “Zoot Suit,” the 1978 play with music about the racist prosecution of some Los Angeles Latino gang members on murder charges in the 1940s.

“(Hollywood) is just this concentrated swirl. I’m not particularly attracted to the frills, the fluff, showing up in the right places and being seen with the right people.”

He remains tolerant of the fact that Hollywood has not rushed into Hispanic film production. “Producers are still very cautious,” he says. “You still hear too often the refrain: ‘I don’t know how to market this material.’ Which is fine because it just opens up more opportunities for me and others. The Hispanic community in the U.S. spends $170 billion a year, $10 million alone a day in Los Angeles.”

“La Bamba,” which Valdez wrote and directed, was co-financed by Columbia and Taylor Hackford’s New Visions Pictures and grossed more than $90 million around the world--an unqualified hit, especially considering it had no stars and was made for $6.5 million.

When director Taylor Hackford, serving as a producer, hired Valdez to write and direct “La Bamba,” it was because Hackford remembered and respected him from the early days of the Teatro and knew him to be a contemporary of Ritchie Valens.

“There’s a part of California he put in that film that he knew from his own experiences,” Hackford says. “Especially those early scenes in the fields, which I remember he described as ‘the orange-colored land.’ He breathed great life into that script.”

The success of “La Bamba” was expected to throw open the studio doors for other Latino-themed projects, not the least of which were some that Valdez wanted to direct (he worked on an early version of the script for “The Old Gringo”). Three years later, he is still waiting for a solid green light to flash somewhere.

“I was at Paramount for seven months working on a project that never got made, so I quit. Well, I didn’t quit, but I went off to make a television pilot after getting frustrated. We had gone through three drafts, and the green light seemed like it was flashing on and off forever.”

At the same time, Valdez says, “It would be a real exaggeration to say that doors have been closed. I have been going through the traces that everyone goes through in Hollywood, plus I’m dealing with some special material. I’m dealing with another perspective on America. All of this takes time.”

Valdez is reluctant to give details about the assortment of film and TV ideas he is developing “because of the nature of the business,” as he puts it, but it’s known that among them are a sitcom based on his 1986 play “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center; a feature film based on “Carmina Burana,” the collection of ribald Medieval poetry that Carl Orff set to music in 1935; and another feature film adapted from Rudolfo Anaya’s novel “Bless Me Ultima,” set in New Mexico in the 1940s and being produced by Moctesuma Esparza, who produced “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

“A lot of what I am working on has to do with history,” Valdez says. “As a Latino I have been attempting to recapture those lost periods in American history that have to do with Latinos that nobody knows anything about. ‘Zoot Suit’ was about that. ‘La Bamba’ was about that. And many of these projects are about that as well. I want to show that there’s more to the Sunbelt than Southwest furniture and Mexican food.”

The three years that have passed since “La Bamba,” “is not that long a time in Hollywood,” says Esparza. “It represents the creative time it takes to put projects together.” Esparza is developing four feature films with Valdez, including “Angel’s Flight,” a story about the destruction of the red car trolleys that once criss-crossed Los Angeles.

“Angel’s Flight,” written by Jill Isaacs, is not readily labeled a Latino film, unless, as Esparza says, “you consider that we founded Los Angeles, and it’s a story about Los Angeles. One of things that must be understood is that we are part of the mainstream culture in America.”

That Valdez has not advanced more quickly in movies Hackford attributes to the fact that “Hollywood is a very conservative community and right now everybody only wants to make movies that can do $30 million in the first weekend. You’re not going to make films for the Latin community that fit into a $30-million opening. But look around you in California--the Latin tide is rising.”

Valdez, a supremely confident man who stands 5 feet, 4 inches tall and can fix you with a brown-eyed stare even as he is breaking up at a joke, remains undaunted by his experiences in Hollywood.

“It took me a long time to get from ‘Zoot Suit’ to ‘La Bamba’ but I got there,” he says.

In his Teatro office, he settles back in a leather rocker, takes out a cigar and tries to put his latest show-business battles in perspective.

“I’ve gone through a lot of phases. I started out as a playwright 30 years ago attempting to locate a niche for myself in the American theater, and I found that there were no niches open to me. So I had to essentially carve one out for myself. And I did that not by going to New York but by going to Delano and joining the farm workers struggle.

“I’ve had to open up the whole country to the concept of Latino theater. I mean literally, for 10 years riding in the back of a van with other people and doing guerrilla theater from the back of flatbed trucks.”

Among those riding with him were his wife, Lupe, once a student of his at Fresno State, and their three sons--Anahuac, Kinan and Lakin--all of them actors with the company at one time or another.

Influenced by the politically powered San Francisco Mime Troupe, with whom Valdez spent a year after graduating from San Jose State, Teatro Campesino in its early years was a portable, bilingual theater of masks, signs and guitars--”somewhere between Brecht and Cantinflas,” Valdez said at the time.

The group’s eventual shift from the didactic actos, or short improvised scenes that underscored the oppression of the growers, to the more dreamy mitos, or mythological plays that became the Teatro’s main events in the ‘70s and ‘80s, reflected the quest by Valdez and other Chicanos to forge a link with the ancient Indian cultures of the Mayans and Aztecs who ruled Mexico before the Spanish conquest. The mitos were political, too, but in a broader, less confrontational manner.

Some of the plays were developed by the group, with Valdez serving as the scriptwriter, notably 1973’s “La Carpa de Los Rasquachis” (“The Tent of the Underdogs”), in which a Chicano Everyman comes to the United States to endure the punishments of poverty while at the same time the Virgin of Guadalupe is united with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent and redeemer figure of the Aztecs.

The subsequent “El Fin Del Mundo” (“The End of the World”), follows a similar allegorical path through the territory of the urban Chicano where water and energy shortages suggest that the source of life is in jeopardy. Most of the Teatro’s work achieved a distinctive and recognizable style that was sometimes confounding to the literal-minded. It was phantasmagorical rather than linear, an onstage parade of rhetoric, farce, dance and song.

Like the character Don Juan, the desert-wise man and sorcerer made famous by writer Carlos Castaneda, Valdez is a descendant of the Yaquis, believed to be a tribe of Mayans who wandered north into what is now the Mexican state of Sonora bordering Arizona.

“So a lot of my thoughts and ideas come almost subliminally from those origins,” he says.

His family--which included nine brothers and sisters--was officially Catholic but not far removed from an earlier Indian belief system.

“My parents--particularly my mother, who is a spiritual counselor now--were Indianists. I am a Mayan. I’m an American with a very deep root. I go back, you know, 50,000 years. I didn’t have to come across the ocean, I was here.

“As I go along in my life, I recognize things,” Valdez says mystically. “I read ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ when I was 12, and I recognized them. How? I knew what they were. I don’t know how. A woman came to a show one year and looked at me and said, ‘You were a Greek playwright in one of your past lives.’ Maybe that’s part of it too.”

His father was a migrant farm worker who, almost by accident, happened to appear as an extra in the 1930 Western “Cimmaron,” which was filmed in the San Joaquin Valley. Valdez got his first close-up glimpse of show business from an uncle, Lalo Guererro, who was a working musician in Los Angeles. “He did a parody of ‘Davy Crockett’ that was heard coast to coast and made him some money. He drove a big shiny car. I saw that kind of success and I said, ‘Great!’ ”

“I was hooked on theater when I was 6 years old,” he says, going back even farther. “Anything to do with papier-mache masks.”

But he missed his first opportunity to show himself as a performer. While following the crops with his migrant family, he was cast in a Christmas play at a school in a town where the family’s truck had broken down. “But I never got to be in it because my dad got the truck fixed.”

By the time he was 16, he had worked up an act as a ventriloquist and was appearing on local television in San Jose. At San Jose State, where he won a scholarship, he was introduced to the larger world of the theater and as an undergraduate wrote a full-length play about the problem of Chicano identity, “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.” Playwrights John Howard Lawson and William Saroyan, in town for a conference, saw the piece and made a point of meeting the young author.

“They gave me such a boost,” Valdez remembers. “I got such encouragement from both of them.

“I was very attracted to the world of Bertolt Brecht and his work in the German theater in the ‘20s, and I ended up doing Brechtian theater in the ‘60s, which was quite appropriate. Then for awhile there I thought I would be a Hispanic Clifford Odets. To some extent that’s true, on the other hand, I’ve had to be a lot of things to a lot of people.”

Lighting a torch where there had been only darkness, Valdez showed the way for a procession of Chicano theater groups that sprang up across the Southwest, giving voice to the swelling Chicano drive for jobs, dignity and cultural pride. Chicanos then had no body of work in the theater that spoke to their history, hopes and dreams.

“Luis had to carry a huge burden,” says Jose Cruz Gonzalez, director of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa for the past five years. “He had to create something totally new. He really has shaped the course of Latino drama. And he’s had a tremendous influence on my work. A new world opened up to me because of him.”

“He’s the person who taught me how to put on a good show,” says Diane Rodriguez, a member of Latins Anonymous, the comedy revue that recently played for six months at LATC. Rodriguez was a member of Teatro Campesino for 13 years.

“He taught me the meaning of how to be centered onstage. And what he taught me about the stage was also about the way to deal with your life. Luis taught you about how to make a commitment. He was a tremendous influence. What I’m doing now is taking that style I learned with the Teatro and taking it farther.”

Like so many other of the liberation movements that shook the status quo in America in the 1960s, the Chicano movement and its theatrical branch seemed to subside as the ‘70s wore into the ‘80s. The network of teatros spawned by Valdez and his company grew to an estimated 100 at the high point in 1975, but eventually dwindled to perhaps the dozen that remain today.

While some major institutional theater companies like LATC have added programs for Latino playwrights, Los Angeles itself has only a single full-time Latino theater, the tiny Bilingual Foundation for the Arts in Lincoln Heights.

“We were on such a high in 1970,” Jose Luis Valenzuela, director of the Latino Playwrights lab at LATC, says about the teatro movement. “We were created out of political need. Every play that was created was created out of a need we had, things that needed to be said. It was a fascinating time. What happened to us?”

In 1986, when Valdez arrived at LATC with “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” his uncharacteristically realistic comedy about a contemporary Chicano family, some saw this as proof he had capitulated to the gods of sitcom. The reviews were mixed.

“We ran for five months,” Valdez says, as evidence that he considers “Badges” to have been a success. The play also traveled to other cities, although not to New York.

While “Badges” seemed to disappoint Valdez’s followers in political theater circles, it could also be seen as another step in his stated goal a few years earlier to “go beyond performing for a small circle of friends” and to reach a national audience.

“He’s crossing over and that’s where we need to go,” says Jose Cruz Gonzalez about Valdez’s Hollywood ambitions. “There are always going to be be those little teatros, but we (as Chicanos) have to be seen by those millions in television and film.” In the mid-1980s, as Valdez became involved in “La Bamba,” activity at the Teatro slowed down, with the company producing only one or two shows a year, not counting the traditional religious plays staged at Christmas and Easter in the 192-year-old Mission San Juan Bautista.

“We had to do some soul-searching and decide if we were going to go on,” says Phil Esparza, a company member since the old days whom Valdez calls “my right-hand man.” Now administrative director, Esparza says, “We’ve undergone a major reorganization since ‘La Bamba,’ and Luis is much more involved now than he has been in the last six or seven years.”

Operating under the professional small theaters contract with Actors Equity on a budget of $550,000 a year, provided by grants, corporate sponsors and ticket sales, the Teatro is back to producing about four shows a year for an audience that comes from the surrounding towns of Hollister, Gilroy and Salinas, as well as from the Bay Area, Santa Cruz and Monterey.

The company is also launching its first tour since 1980 this month, with a two-week stop in Los Angeles at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center beginning Saturday. The program consists of a revival of “Soldado Razo” (“The Private”), Valdez’s moving 1971 piece about the conscription of Chicanos to fight in Vietnam; and “Simply Maria,” a play by the 21-year-old Josefina Lopez exploring the identity crisis faced by a young Mexican immigrant.

There is talk of a revival of “Zoot Suit” in Los Angeles within the next 15 months, with the possibility of Olmos repeating the role of “El Pachuco.”

“I couldn’t turn around and kiss the Teatro goodby and go to Hollywood without ruining my chances in Hollywood,” Valdez says. “My roots would dry up. I need to be true to what I set out to do. I set out to work on a problem 25 years ago in the theater, to create an environment, a context for me to exist as a Chicano playwright. As it turns out, it wasn’t just for me, it was for a lot of other people. And that’s great.

“I continue to work in the theater. I’ve got pieces that we’re developing here at the Teatro, a piece that I’m working with some other people on to develop for Broadway. I’m definitely interested in going back to Broadway,” he says, referring to the bittersweet experience of “Zoot Suit,” hailed as the first Hispanic play to make the Great White Way, but one that lasted only four weeks there in 1979 (after running for nearlya year in Los Angeles).

“The stage is duck soup for me. My hardest problem is getting past the smokescreen that critics set up, when they look at me and say, ‘Well, I don’t know, can Hispanics do this sort of thing?’ ”

As he makes this point, there is no anger in his voice, only bemusement before he laughs and says, “Come on, give me a break!”

Valdez says his success in the material world has not removed him so far as some might think from the fields of the campesinos. “I can’t forget them, they’re my relatives,” he says. “I have a lot of contact through the family with that whole section. The Teatro here in San Juan allows us to have a whole stream of people coming in. We still consider ourselves to be an extension of everything we began in the 1960s. Our ties with the union are still fairly intense.”

The company is developing a new piece based on the controversy over the use of dangerous pesticides in the fields--the issue that has preoccupied Cesar Chavez for the last few years.

“Generally, because of increased immigration, illegal and otherwise, coming from Latin America, there’s not a real sympathetic mood in the country with respect to farm workers, which is too bad,” Valdez said. “There are people still living on river banks, which is stuff that I saw 40 years ago when I was a kid. Some things have not changed.”

Ritchie Valens was born a year later than Valdez. While they never met, he speculates that their families could have worked together in the orchards outside San Jose.

“He’d be 49 today,” Valdez says about Valens. “He’d be the grand old man of Chicano rock. Maybe. He had a choice: He could either be a mythical icon, dead but legendary, or a 49-year-old has-been, who’d probably be making his second or third comeback by now.”

The intimations of mortality that haunt Valens in “La Bamba,” Valdez says, were mentioned by all his family and friends. These foreshadowings of death played directly into one of Valdez’s spiritual beliefs: that mental visualization is the key to both triumph and disaster.

“I happen to believe in visualization and the power of our minds over our own lives is greater than we know. So if you tell yourself enough times that you’re going to die at a young age, that’s what’s going to happen to you. In a sense you program yourself. So Ritchie had dreams, he had nightmares. I dramatized that.”

For Valdez, the age of 50 has arrived with a sweet-sounding bang. “Life is full of surprises,” he says, “that you could feel better at 50 than 40. Forty hit me harder interestingly enough. Forty was a real downer. But 50 is an upper, coming out of the 40s and feeling like I’m suddenly in possession of myself.

He exercises more and walks six miles every other day. He says he drinks less and has even cut down on his trademark cigars.

“One of the nice things about turning 50 is that cash flow statements no longer intimidate you, nor do board meetings or the necessity of having to talk to politicians and coporate presidents. I think that just comes with the territory. Besides, most of the people are younger than me anyway!

“I was a lot more angry 20 years ago. I’m still angry about a lot of things--I’m capable of being furious. But I don’t feel that heavy ball of rage in my chest that I did when I was 30. There’s a certain kind of hopelessness that comes with too much rage because eventually you end up paying the price. Ultimately anger is born out of fear--fear that you’re going to be stomped on or you’re going to lose and be ignored. Obviously I no longer feel ignored. I feel a little impatient to some extent about television programming, but that’s a matter of time. I feel there’s still enough time in my life to get something done. That something better will follow.

“I’m optimistic because with the Mayans I believe that the universe is mine. I really do. Mayan is not just a thought, Mayan is also a feeling. Mayan is a state of being. I like drama, I like confrontation. It’s just life. We’re all here to consume and be consumed. It’s the big churning of the world.”

These remarks were almost 24 hours old by the time he finished his speech during his birthday tardeada , a traditional Mexican party that starts at in the late afternoon and lasts until midnight. The crowd included an envoy sent by Mexican President Salinas; one of his high school teachers now running for mayor in San Juan; Alice McGrath, the legal aide and activist who was the heroine of the real-life “Zoot Suit” case; his agent Joan Scott; his brother Frank; and his parents Frank, 74, and Armida, 68.

After an interval of mariachi music, a sizable cake with tan and yellow frosting was wheeled onto the lawn and a crowd pressed in close to see the guest of honor make the first cut. The sun had already slipped over the brown hills of San Benito County when Valdez, knife poised, stepped up to the cake, which was stacked in a series of narrowing square platforms to resemble a Mayan pyramid.

He plunged the knife into the pyramid, then rested the slice on a waiting plate. Two mariachis appeared and began to play a tune that he knew. He stepped between the two, embracing each musician, and belted out one of those joyful songs of sorrow, “Mexico Lindo y Querido” (“Beautiful and Beloved Mexico”)--a song about someone longing for his homeland.

“It was,” Valdez explained later, “one of the first songs I learned as a child.”