Cal State Fullerton Talk : ‘Zoot Suit’ Creator Stresses Identity

“From the time I was 6 years old,” playwright and director Luis Valdez told a Cal State Fullerton audience Wednesday night, “I found myself asking, ‘Who am I?’ ”

Valdez--founder of El Teatro Campesino, creator of the stage hit “Zoot Suit” and writer and director of the film of the same name, plus “La Bamba” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez”--mused on the topic of identity, personal and cultural, as the university’s Distinguished Hispanic Lecturer for 1989.

As an artist, Valdez said, he seeks to define “what it means to be an American.” His writing has evolved from the highly political actos of the early days of El Teatro Campesino (the Farm Workers’ Theater) to become more introspective.

“My writing gets more personal as it goes,” Valdez told a vocal and appreciative crowd in the university’s Little Theater. “These days I know who I am, to a point.”

Valdez spent the day at Cal State Fullerton, giving two lectures during the day and meeting with students informally. He appreciates the chance to meet with students, Valdez said in a brief interview after his evening talk.

“It gives me the opportunity to discuss pure ideas,” he said, “Ideas motivate my work.”

Now hot in Hollywood after the success of “La Bamba,” which told the story of singer Richie Valens, Valdez said he is casting for a new feature film that will be completed in about a year. He declined to describe the project, other than to say it is “about Europe” and a break from the Latino-oriented themes of his previous work. He is directing the film but did not write it.

Meanwhile, Valdez plans to revive the 1979 stage hit “Zoot Suit” for a national tour, with a stop next year in Los Angeles, site of its first success. Dates and location remain to be settled.

He also remains active with El Teatro Campesino, which this year for the first time presented a Passion play at its base in San Juan Bautista, 35 miles northeast of Monterey. The play included a procession, was performed in front of the Spanish mission there and drew at least 1,000 people for each performance, Valdez said during his talk.

Valdez was born in the San Joaquin Valley farming town of Delano in 1940. His family became owners of a large ranch in 1941, as did other Latino farm workers with the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

“It was a wonderful ranch,” Valdez said, with three houses and several barns. “I was a landed Chicano. . . . We had land, but not under our fingernails. Then something terrible happened. The United States won the war.”

The government, which had supported and encouraged the Latino landowners in the early days of the war, abandoned them after the victory. The ranches were lost in a collapse of agricultural prices--”one by one they went out, like candles”--and by 1946 the Valdezes were once again migrant workers.

It was a rude awakening for young Luis, who had grown up in relative affluence. “I said, ‘What the hell happened?’ ” Valdez recalled.

Then, expressing mock distaste, he asked, “You want me to pick this?”

Despite the poverty, Valdez said, he had one thing he still treasures: the wide San Joaquin Valley sky.

“We were poor, but we had the stars,” he said, telling how he and his brother saved to buy a small telescope.

His grandfather, a Yaqui Indian, refused to go to church but would stand each evening, hands on hips, and look at the sky. “I didn’t know he was revitalizing himself,” Valdez said.

He related early episodes of discrimination: being told to sit in the Mexican section of a cinema in Vallejo, the railroad tracks that divided the whites from the ethnics in Delano, not being able to play with the “American” kids.

When he was 6, he met Cesar Chavez, 10 years his elder. “He was a pachuco , and best friends with my cousin, Billy, who was also a pachuco ,” Valdez said about the juvenile street toughs.

Years later, when Chavez organized the grape strikes of the mid-1960s, Valdez organized El Teatro Campesino and toured the San Joaquin Valley with his troupe, playing for farm workers from the back of a flatbed truck.

In Wednesday’s lecture, Valdez often invoked the name of Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. He also quoted such disparate sources as Mao Zedong and Thomas Jefferson in a talk that, though entitled “Latinos and the Arts--Past, Present and Future,” was more of an inspirational and philosophical discourse than a lecture.

His appearance was sponsored by the university’s Chicano Resource Center, Chicano studies department, Hispanic Faculty and Staff Assn., the theater/dance department and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan.

Valdez, a small, compact man with a deep, booming voice, veered between humorous anecdotes (with punch lines often delivered in Spanish) and deeper ruminations. He closed with a theatrical flourish, his voice rising dramatically as he exhorted his audience to “dream a common dream.

“America is a dream that binds us all together,” he told the crowd and finished with a simple pun that summarized his message: “What is art? Thou art.”