The Pride of the Comunidad

I was the only girl Miguel Delgado ever dropped while dancing. That’s what the most popular dancer ever to come out of Boyle Heights told me back in 1981. He let me slip while we were dancing by the drunken moonlight on a hillside at 2 a.m. in a small central California town.

When Miguel arrived in San Juan Bautista, pop. 1,200, we didn’t know what hit us. He strutted through the streets of our small Western town in his brown charro jacket with the Mexican eagle on his back. He came to work with the company of actors in “El Teatro Campesino.”

Miguel was fearless and graceful as he tried to transform us into the dancers we were not. He danced through life and work with an unbridled energy, and if he liked you, he’d reach into your soul and make friends with you before you had a chance to meet his glance. That was his true talent--more than his dancing, it was his friendship.

His untimely death on Nov. 4 at the age of 46 left a void for his friends, the theater and film world and in the Chicano arts community that he so loved.

Miguel was fierce on the Mark Taper Forum stage in Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit.” He transferred with the production to the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood, went to Broadway, then shot the film. In each version he never lost his fire. Miguel belonged on the stage, but chose for most of his all-too-short career to remain behind the scenes as a director, choreographer and coach.

His dance card was always filled with either a film or theater project that demanded his devoted attention. From Linda Ronstadt on a video shoot to Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2,” he coached the ladies on their suave moves or their Mexican Spanish. He seduced Jimmy Smits and Elpidia Carrillo to move together like two thirsty bodies drinking each other up in Gregory Nava’s “Mi Familia.” The dance sequences in “La Bamba” were pure Delgado. He danced with a mischevious twinkle in his eye as he mysteriously guided Cheech Marin off a bus in “Born in East L.A.”

There was the constant pull away from his own work. It was his struggle as an artist. In the early years he had his own folklorico dance company, Teatro Mexicano de Danza. Miguel broke the rules in his search for a Chicano dance form, and this made him a modernist in the traditional folklorico dance world.

Years later, when he created “Hollywood Olvidado,” a wildly entertaining musical revue about Latinos in Hollywood, he never lost sight of where he came from or where he was going.

Miguel was intrinsically tied into and proud of his culture, his language and his comunidad. In recent years he became the heart of East L.A.’s Plaza de la Raza.

Tonight, I’m dancing with Miguel’s spirit, and as I lean back to do a Delgado move, I feel the warmth of his presence lift and glide me through the room. In death as in life, que baila, Miguel!

Diane Rodriguez is co-director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Initiative.

* A memorial service for Miguel Delgado will be held at 7 tonight, followed by a reception at 8:30 p.m., at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 415 S. Spring St., Los Angeles. Information: (818) 846-9259.