Luis Valdez’s Teatro: Setting the Stage for More Dreams

Luis Valdez would rather not talk about his past.

But at age 51, Valdez has earned the right to rest and look back on his achievements. After all, he founded El Teatro Campesino, the farm worker’s radical theater company, during the 1965 Delano grape strike, and that theatrical troupe continues to thrive under his guidance in San Juan Bautista.

His 1978 musical, “Zoot Suit,” has become a Mexican-American classic, an icon of the emerging Latino spirit. His script and direction of “La Bamba” led to one of 1987’s top-grossing films. “La Pastorela,” his adaptation of a medieval morality play, premieres tonight on PBS--and could become an annual holiday event, a Chicano “Christmas Carol.” The film co-stars Linda Ronstadt and Paul Rodriguez.

But today, Luis Valdez won’t look back.

Nor does he wish to discuss the present, even though he’s briefly in town to finalize casting for one of Hollywood’s most coveted projects, the movie biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. He has finished the screenplay, co-written with his wife, based on the book “Frida: The Brush of Anguish.” Now he must cast it for New Line Cinema.

Who has he cast in the title role? Valdez, laying to rest a recent rumor, will only say: “Not Madonna.”

With neither the past nor the present on his mind, Luis Valdez wants to talk only about what is to come.

He speaks of future Mexico-United States relations. (“That whole border is going to become a Silicon Belt.”) He speaks of cultural exchanges with Mexico. (“I would love for some campesinos from Oaxaca to come to San Juan Bautista and to just live and work with us for six months, as a group.”) He speaks of Mexico recognizing the value of Mexican-Americans. (“Instead of looking at Mexican-Americans as a discarded, lost group of people, Mexico is retrenching and saying, ‘Hey, maybe they’re like the Jewish community with respect to Israel, maybe they’re a lobbying group, a bridge to understanding.’ ”)

Above all, Valdez speaks of the future for El Teatro Campesino.

“We’re building a dream up there, man!” he exclaims. “It may take us another 25 years before we finish all the dream, but we’ll build it!”

Valdez remains committed to his Chicano roots. Rather than promote his career or hype the film, Valdez describes El Teatro’s ambitious project in San Juan Bautista. He vows that the tiny farming town 75 miles south of San Francisco will be the site for a major Chicano arts complex.

“We call it ‘El Rancho del las Americas.’ The name is because we intend to celebrate all of the Americas,” Valdez explains, “and the whole concept of what the New World is.”

San Juan Bautista has been the headquarters for Valdez and El Teatro since 1971. This “dream” began two years later, when legendary theater director Peter Brook and his Paris-based International Centre of Theater Research company participated in an experimental workshop with El Teatro Campesino.

“Brook asked me if there was one thing I could get for the company, what would it be,” Valdez says. “I pointed at a hill and said, ‘That piece of land,’ and he said, ‘If there’s anything that will solidify the evolution of a theater company, it’s a piece of land that you can set your sights on.’ That was the key.”

With monies paid by Brook for the workshops, El Teatro made its first down payment on the 40-acre parcel in 1973. Making the payments, keeping their goals focused on the land, helped El Teatro to survive. Except for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, all other American theater companies formed in the 1960s eventually perished. El Teatro thrives.

Eighteen years after making that initial real estate down payment, El Teatro owns the land.

“We’ve earned the money over the years to purchase the land,” Valdez says with quiet pride. “We had monthly payments to make and they were made. There have been a lot of people working over the years to keep it up. That’s one of the things that we try never to compromise, our own future.”

This year, El Teatro purchased an additional 10 acres for an access road. Next they intend to raise funds for architectural designs. The company’s current plan is to make the center operational by 1997, the 200th anniversary of San Juan Bautista Mission. Next summer, Valdez intends to stage outdoor performances on the site.

Ever the pragmatist, Valdez is quick to deny any utopian idealism.

“Our rancho is going to be a working cultural center,” he insists. “A huge amphitheater that can seat up to 10,000 people will be part of the complex. We envision a number of functions there, not only performances. Plays on horseback, concerts. One feature of it will be a historical re-creation of an early 1845 California ranch with animals and actors in costumes for the school kids, like Williamsburg, Virginia.”

In addition, the Rancho will contain housing, meeting rooms, and a sound stage for video productions. In other words, it will resemble a miniature Hollywood studio.

Hyperbolic fantasy?

“La Pastorela” proved to Valdez that all this could be realized. To him the evolution of this simple shepherd’s play into a major television event offered validation of the Campesino dream.

El Teatro’s first staging of “La Pastorela” occurred 17 years ago as a puppet play. This transformed into a fully fleshed production after one company member’s mother, Longina Montoya, presented Valdez with a yellowed copy of the script used in her Mexican village.

The company added songs and quickened the story’s pace. Gradually, El Teatro’s productions in the San Juan mission became a community event, alternating each Christmas with another medieval morality play adapted by Valdez, “La Virgen del Tepeyac” (the Latino Lab’s production just closed at the Million Dollar Theater). When it was proposed that he direct “La Pastorela” for a television broadcast, Valdez knew it was an opportunity for El Teatro Campesino to explore its potential.

Valdez’s adaptation proved that El Teatro Campesino could remain faithful to its Mexican-American folk tradition while appealing to a wide public.

“We totally produced it out of our existing building,” he says of the PBS “Great Performances” telecast. “We hired all of the staff that we needed, technical as well as acting and performing, out of San Juan. We set up shop in the Teatro and became a small, low-budget movie production company. This was very important for the future--we saw we were quite capable of mounting a film.”

Although a few scenes for “La Bamba” were shot nearby, and Valdez watched some of that film’s dailies in El Teatro offices, “La Pastorela” became the terrain’s true baptism as a film location. This was crucial to Valdez. Like another California writer, John Steinbeck, who wrote about neighboring Salinas and Monterey, Valdez is a regional artist whose work transfers to a multiethnic, international public.

When Valdez speaks of his beloved San Juan Bautista, a softness enters his commanding baritone. He knows the landscape by heart, such as the old stagecoach road running over the San Gabriel Mountains, “called the Road of the Sheep back in the old days.” He believes the surrounding hills are “some of the loveliest country in California. Here was a tremendous opportunity to aim the camera at this landscape.

“A lot of people here don’t understand why I insist on going back to this dinky little town,” Valdez said. “Those people who do make it to San Juan Bautista understand.”