VALDEZ--A LIFE IN THE RIVER OF HUMANITY

Four barefoot actors and Luis Valdez are sitting on the floor of a spare rehearsal studio at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. After a first read-through of Valdez’ new play, “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” the playwright-director is firing up his actors for their roles. They are minorities who play minorities determined to share in the country’s mainstream success.

Hunched over in a compact, powerful knot, Valdez speaks intensely. “All those songs in all those musicals, all those speeches in all those American plays--they’re saying, ‘I can overcome any obstacle. I’m gonna go for it. You grab the opportunity and make it your own.’

“What in Chicano or Japanese culture can relate to that kind of American ambition? That’s what you’ve got to find.

“Because what we’re saying in this play is, ‘I’m gonna make it. I don’t care what!’ ” Valdez slams his fist in his palm and punches the air. “Boom! Baaam!

“Let’s entertain ‘em! Make ‘em laugh!” Valdez’s baritone voice booms through the room.

“Take five.”

With the assiduity of Woody Allen probing the psyche of his New Yorkers, Valdez is, as he has always done, confronting the stereotypes of his Chicanos. The timing of his latest effort is propitious. In a period when the immigrant surge is at a post-war peak and when Latinos are the nation’s second-largest minority group, Valdez is saying that life on the hyphen is no longer acceptable.

Sonny, the protagonist in “Badges,” resents his parents’ work as Hollywood extras, playing Latino bandidos and maids. Quitting Harvard, he is determined not to be a bit player, but to become a Hollywood star. The story is a metaphor for a growing population of hybrid Americans that lives on society’s fringes and that is now impatient to move into the Establishment.

The title line, drawn from the classic, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” starring Humphrey Bogart, announces a refusal to show credentials--from passports to credit cards--as evidence of solid standing among the U.S. citizenry.

For Valdez, “Badges” represents a return to center stage. It is his first major play since “Zoot Suit,” his hit about the mythic pachuco, swaggered into the Mark Taper Forum eight years ago. With the exception of last year’s production of “Corridos,” created and directed by Valdez, his presence has been largely missed in theater circles.

A vital force whose pride and politics have inspired Chicanos since his El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers Theater) rallied grape pickers in the ‘60s, Valdez has engendered curiosity and criticism by his absence. His entry into the commercial marketplace has prompted insinuations that he is a “Tio Taco,” an “Uncle Tom” of sorts. Supporters, on the other hand, often adulate Valdez, typifying him as a modern Mayan, a holistic American.

Touted as the first Chicano to have a play produced on Broadway, he is a trailblazer. And, they say, hopes for further Latino advances hinge on his successes.

Not surprisingly, Valdez has his own story of his ambitions.

On a winter’s day in San Juan Bautista, a rural hamlet 35 miles south of San Jose, Valdez is holed up at home, pushing around words and phrases, puffing cigars, racing to make his deadline to ready “Badges” for Los Angeles. He has dipped from comedy to tragedy at the end of the second act, and this afternoon he has been trying to regain an easy hilarity. He has switched on his answering machine and notified the Teatro staff that he will not make the theater’s board meeting or a potluck lunch to thank the company’s local supporters.

At the theater, a converted fruit-packing shed, Valdez’s “creative chaos,” as company members refer to his spontaneity, is causing consternation. “He’s a creative, independent animal,” comments Andres Gutierrez, company archivist, publicist and actor. Gutierrez is anxious to get Valdez to a cocktail buffet, another effort by the company to thank its backers.

Valdez sees his duties to El Teatro more immediately as a deadline creative sprint. He has been writing since 10 a.m. and stops only at late afternoon. Demanding and ambitious, he is also sensitive, impatient, proud. He speaks in a rich, resonant voice with passionate rhetorical punches and jabs, and his laugh rushes up from his toes, flooding the often harsh reality invoked by his words. Humor has always been important in Valdez’s work. A barrio is a place where geraniums bloom in tin cans, and the pachuco , who grins like a razor blade, razzes, “Orale no se escamen “ (“Hey, don’t be afraid”).

Valdez is himself such a quintessential product of his Mexican-Indian ancestry that Chicano friends say, “He’s got a cactus on his forehead.” A Zapata mustache, piano-key teeth and the cigar almost seem like Hollywood props.

Valdez is a family man. “The family is more important to me than career or money,” he says, speaking inside his snug, comfortably carpeted house. “It’s a connection to the stream. I believe in the stream, in the river of humanity. If you don’t pass from this generation to the next, then where’s your place in life?”

The family is also a dominant element in Valdez’s work. Notes theater director and scholar Jorge Huerta of San Diego’s Old Globe, “He captures the Chicano family the way Odets captured the Jewish family.”

In “Badges,” a disoriented Sonny returns to his family for nurture, and, says Valdez, writing the play in his own home has colored the work. “There’s warmth and humor in the family in “Badges” and that comes from drawing from my own family.”

One of 10 children, Valdez has gathered most of his brothers and sisters, his parents and parents-in-law to San Juan Bautista, where he lives with Lupe, his wife, and his three sons, Lakin, 7, Kinan, 12, and Anahuac, 14, who bear Aztec and Mayan names. “I wanted to give them all a point of reference that is as ancient as you can get in terms of this continent,” says Valdez, enfolded in a well-stuffed sofa in the family room, where he is defined by north-south symbols of the Americas.

There is a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the patron saint of Mexico), a pachuco doll and an Aztec sun. There is also an exercise bike on which Valdez, a high school gymnast, pedals five miles a day; his electronic typewriter; and a stereo system.

While Valdez talks, Lupe returns from shopping burdened with packages, Kinan bounces in from a basketball game and rock music thunders from Anahuac’s room.

In material terms, it is a far cry from the childhood which ultimately gave Valdez his direction. Born into the relative prosperity of San Joaquin Valley farm life, Valdez was tossed onto the migrant workers route when his parents lost their property as post-war agricultural prices collapsed. Living in shanties and army tents, the Valdezes followed the crops, picking grapes and cotton. Valdez remembers the pride he felt when he brought in his first day’s work of 100 pounds of cotton and received his $3 pay in shiny silver 50-cent coins.

He also remembers a six-year-old’s rage as he fished in the San Joaquin River one fall when the harvest was over and, with their truck broken down, the family was temporarily stranded without food or work. Yet it was at this time that Valdez discovered the magic of theater, acting the part of a monkey in an elementary school jungle drama. “The theater and the farm labor camp became fused in my mind as obsessions,” he says.

In 1964, with his parents settled in the San Joaquin Valley farming town of Delano and a scholarship to San Jose State College, Valdez traveled with a student committee to Cuba. He returned wearing a black beret, smoking Cuban cigars and espousing a new-found pride in his Latino identity.

The following year, when United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez organized the grape boycott in Delano, Valdez, already a fledgling actor and playwright, seized the opportunity. “It was like finding the navel of my life,” he says. With a handful of strikers, he mounted a Brechtian theater of untrained actors and took la causa to the fields on a flatbed truck.

It was raw, vital agitprop drama, with one theme: la huelga , the strike. After touring major cities across the country, as part of the United Farm Workers national boycott effort, El Teatro won an off-Broadway Obie award in 1968. But la huelga was a demanding mistress, claiming actors for boycotts and picket lines, and after two years, Valdez left the farm-workers union to hone his craft. With new college-educated recruits, El Teatro went on to actos, skits which dealt most powerfully with the Vietnam war.

In 1971, Valdez settled the company in San Juan Bautista, and, with the heady days of the ‘60s past, turned to mythos , infusing the Chicano experience with a mystical, religious quality, drawn from Mayan myths, which the Taper’s Artistic Director Gordon Davidson calls “really the power” of Valdez’s drama.

His major mythic work, “La Carpa de la Rasquachis” (“The Tent of the Underdogs”), toured the United States and went to Europe twice. Along the way, Valdez and the company captured the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award twice for their body of works, with the “Zoot Suit” production winning it a third time, and brought home an Emmy in 1972 for “Los Vendidos” (“The Sell-Outs”), produced for KNBC.

More than a decade later, Valdez is taking another major direction with “Badges.” “It’s a turning point in my work,” he says. “It’s basically realistic and has very real characters.” A contemporary comedy set in a Los Angeles tract home, “Badges” addresses current issues: the expectations of an emerging immigrant middle class and their quest for cultural consciousness, discrimination against Chicano actors, the relationship between Latinos and Japanese-Americans, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua.

But beyond its Chicano point of view, Valdez says, “ ‘Badges’ hopefully is an American play. I’ve been trying to write a play that isn’t thought of as a Chicano or a minority play. It’s reaching out to the largest possible audience and it’s going to use all the theatrical tricks. It’s going to make itself as charming as it can.”

Unlike previous bilingual works, “Badges” is also almost completely in English. “I’m finally being fair to myself. I’m writing the kind of English that I speak,” says Valdez, who for years felt too alienated from English to use it entirely.

“This play is trying to state what to me is the obvious. It’s saying, ‘Hey, we’re here, we speak the language.’ ”

In “Zoot Suit,” based on the ‘40s “Sleepy Lagoon” murder trial in Los Angeles, El Pachuco’s first words on stage are in street slang, esoteric even in the Chicano community. “It was a verbal symbol of the pachuco’s sense of alienation. He was saying ‘I don’t care if you understand a word I’m saying. I’m here and you’re going to have to like it or lump it.’ ”

After a 10-month run at the Mark Taper Forum and the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood, “Zoot Suit” went to Broadway, but closed after five weeks. The New York audience was not drawn to the play’s cultural context and critics panned its aesthetics. The New York Times noted that “Zoot Suit,” “like the garment that serves as its symbol, is a great deal of loose material draped over a spindly form.” Enraged, Valdez declared at the time, “I refuse to be left out of the mainstream of American theater.”

“Badges” is a return engagement in Valdez’s effort to transcend the boundaries of race and find universal acceptance. But it is just such initiatives which have provoked his critics, always strongest among his own people.

Manuel Pickett, a former El Teatro actor who has directed Valdez’s plays, says he used to feel bitter at what he calls Valdez’s “catering to the white middle class more than trying to recruit Chicanos. There’s also been the question of his going into the commercial world and what that means in terms of his involvement with the Chicano movement.”

However, says Pickett, “I began to realize that people go through a transition from the ‘70s to the ‘80s and a lot of things happen that not everybody may like. But none of us knew what professional theater was at that level, so we couldn’t understand what was going on.”

The California Arts Council, which ranks both the merit and needs of state arts organizations, cut El Teatro’s funding last year by $10,000 to $7,935. Notes Juan Corillo, who heads the grants program, “People still want to see them as a small touring company dealing with issues of the day. There are indications that they really need to hang onto that.”

But if criticisms are present, Valdez and El Teatro hold a revered place in the Chicano community.

Touring universities and community centers, they planted the seeds for the Chicano theater groups that sprang up in the ‘60s. Twenty years later, El Teatro is one of only a handful of professional Chicano theaters in the country and easily the most influential.

Professionally, Valdez is credited with opening doors to acting careers, and Latino theater observers often point to the success of “Zoot Suit” star Edward Olmos, later an Emmy winner for his role in the television series “Miami Vice.”

Says Pickett, “The Hollywood scene in terms of Chicano theater wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for people like Luis Valdez.”

As for Valdez’s appeal to a broad American public, Huerta says, “The audiences outside the fields have changed. There’s a growing middle class in the Hispanic community who may or may not be politically aware.

“You have to become more subtle with your politics. You can’t beat people over the head.”

For some Chicanos, Valdez the man exceeds the confines of his work. Huerta calls him “a modern Chicano Mayan,” melding politics, aesthetics and culture.

Corillo, a former community college teacher, recalls his provocation to political awareness. “There was no question that how I stood up to administrators was tied to my consciousness being developed by workers standing up and saying, as we used to say, ‘ Basta! No more! This is it. I’m standing for this one.’ ”

It is this kind of vital force that Corillo finds lacking. “Luis is not as visible as people would like,” he says. “They are used to seeing him. His absence is confusing. When he goes into a room and locks himself up, we miss him.”

But it is precisely by locking himself up and writing that Valdez hopes to make his mark.

“For people in Latin theater, he’s on the cutting edge,” says playwright Rodrigo Duarte-Clarke of Santa Barbara’s Teatro de la Esperanza. “He’s cutting new territory that the rest of us have not got to. It’s important to see what will happen. Will he succeed?And what will he do with that success?”

Valdez’s push has in large part been focused on Hollywood. Besides “Badges,” he has written a film script, based on the life of Ritchie Valens, for Taylor Hackford’s New Visions. A script drawn from the novel, “Gringo Viejo,” by Carlos Fuentes, offered to him by Jane Fonda, was scrapped.

Perhaps most bitter was the failure of the 1981 film version of “Zoot Suit,” made on a 14-day shooting schedule for under $3 million for Universal. Says Huerta of Valdez’s chances for success, “They might as well have given him a jar and said, ‘Cross the ocean.’ ”

There have been other disappointments, as well. “Corridos,” Valdez’ theatrical revue of folk ballads, which won critics awards in San Francisco, played a short run at the Variety Arts Theater in Los Angeles and closed with tepid reviews at the Old Globe last year.

Moreover, El Teatro’s economic status has been shaky at best. “We’re hanging on by our fingernails,” Valdez admits. The packing shed has no heat and the roof leaks, and the core company consists of four old-time members, all of whom are in their forties.

Theater members recognize a need to reconstruct an ensemble, bringing in young blood and re-invigorating the company’s touring program.

Valdez also wants to build a school to train young artists. With a nest egg set aside by El Teatro members, the company bought 40 acres on the crest of a hill, which overlooks the Valdez’s house.

Strengthening El Teatro’s organizational structure has become a priority. The company’s first major fund-raising effort pulled in $100,000 last fall;an assistant artistic director, Tony Curiel, a recent recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation’s Theatre Fellowship Grant, has been hired;and the Teatro’s archives will be housed at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Directed by Curiel in New York’s Public Theater as part of last summer’s Festival Latino, the early acto , “Soldado Razo” (“The Private”), received enthusiastic reviews.

Valdez thinly conceals his desire that “Badges” follow a similar course. For the moment, however, Gutierrez prevails. At Lupe’s instruction, Valdez dons a coat and tie and heads over to the town square for the cocktail reception. With a politician’s savvy, he greets a bevy of notables. A small, historic moment occurs when the head of the city council invites Valdez to be a member;when El Teatro came to town, ultra-conservative elements on the council had attacked Valdez as a communist. Now Valdez declines the invitation;for the moment he is too busy.

At the Los Angeles Theatre Center rehearsal studio, Valdez has presented the play’s purpose and put his actors through a series of game playing, creating a sense of compania, of ensemble. Now, as the sun sinks out of sight below the window sills, the actors explore their relationships to the play’s characters.

“I’ve sprinkled the script with Spanish. But I could get rid of it,” Valdez says, and recalls how he used to feel set apart by language. “When I was in college I wanted to read T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ my favorite poem, and was as much as told that it was better if I didn’t try.

“The worse thing was when you let your accent sl-e-e-e-p.” Valdez mimics a Mexican pronunciation of slip . “That was real guilt.”

Patti Yasutake, who plays Anita, Sonny’s Japanese-American girlfriend, says racial humiliation for her comes in the incarceration of her parents’ generation in World War II detention camps. She worries about Anita’s overt ambitiousness. “It’s terrible!”

“That’s New York,” Valdez says, and tells tells her to be more assertive.

Robert Beltran, who plays Sonny, doesn’t speak Spanish. He understands how at Harvard Sonny’s assimilation and alienation grind against each other. “When you go to Harvard and you’re the only one there and you’re going, ‘So, you guys don’t like me or what?’ You’re like isolated. You’ve got to have a lot of balls to come through with that.”

“You’ve got to have a spiritual place inside yourself,” Valdez says.

Valdez modeled Sonny on a composite of Beltran, actors including Freddie Prinze, and on himself. When a slide of a child, dead of starvation, was shown in a college biology class, Valdez says, “That broke me.” Suffering a nervous depression, he left school for a year and began his first full-length play, “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa,” which was to set him on his way as a playwright. When Valdez tells the story later, he squeezes his eyes shut and doesn’t speak for a minute.

As the session ends, he tells Beltran to look deeper for Sonny inside of himself.

Eating a take-out Japanese dinner and drinking a Coke in the Center’s production offices, Valdez declares his identity:”I’m as American as tamales, an ancient American food.”

As such, like Sonny, Valdez wants a full measure of success. “Zoot Suit’s” Broadway failure infuriated him and now he wants more. “I’m going to take New York sooner or later,” he says. “New York is mine. It’s part of my country. I can’t be kept out of New York--professionally, humanly, individually, collectively. . . .”

His ambitions are not small--some say he is losing focus in the midst of his projects. But heading into a second 20 years of theater, Valdez is aiming at posterity. If there was no audience for Chicano theater when he arrived on the scene, when he departs he wants to leave behind a school, a theater and a body of work.

“So Luis Valdez is going for high visibility,” he states. “I’m determined to make it as a professional artist. I’m going to make movies that make money. I’m going to make plays that are critical and commercial successes, just to prove to the forces that be that what goes on in San Juan Bautista must be funded.”

As for critics who accuse him of going soft, Valdez juts out his chin. “I’ll stand toe to toe with any of them. I was radical before they were. I was the first one on the block.”

Valdez takes a small, slim Partagas cigar from his wind-breaker pocket. “We’ve taken our Chicanoism into the heart of America,” he says, leaving the theater complex.

Broadway is just a block away, someone remarks. Valdez laughs at the double-entendre and marches off into the night.