El Teatro Campesino: An Interview with Luis Valdez

El Teatro Campesino was the cultural wing of the United Farm Workers union, a popular theater that took its material directly from the lives of its audience in the bean fields of California's central valley. With a pointed political mission, the theater, and its driving force Luis Valdez, went from agitprop to Broadway. San Francisco writer Carl Heyward met with Valdez in 1985 to talk about the theater and its radical activist history. —Eds.

Luis Valdez is out of the fields, but the heart and sentiment of his El Teatro Campesino remain true to its original vision: performance that addresses the Chicano experience in America in a context meaningful to all Americans.

In the mid '60s, flatbed trucks provided their first forum in the fields, adding a creative element to the struggles of farmworkers in Valdez's native Delano County. The immediacy of these actos, agitprop improvisations, communicated eloquently to many workers, who could neither read nor write, but recognized themselves and their values in what were essentially morality plays. El Teatro created site-specific installation in the truest sense of the format, transforming the fields into sociopolitical arenas, furthering the cause of the United Farm Workers union in their fight for human dignity. If Cesar Chavez was the upfront political figurehead of the farmworkers, then Luis Valdez provided its cultural wing with a flair and artistry that, in tandem, realized a solidarity unprecedented in relation to such emotional issues.

Years later, during the enormous success of Zoot Suit, Valdez observed that "until we had the artists who could express what the people (farmworkers) were feeling and saying, we wouldn't really register politically. Art gives us the tools of that expression."

El Teatro is popular theater with a deference to technical proficiency, to professional and performance excellence, all geared toward expression of social, political and cultural perceptions. It is a theater rooted in the American streets, early California history, Mayan/Aztec mythology and Mexican folklore and spiritualism. It cannot be ignored. Valdez, like Artaud, believes in a total theater—one where an elevation of sensation is achieved through a trinity of music, dance and drama to stimulate a "New American Audience."

In the 20 years since El Teatro's inception, the political erosion of many of the gains of the UFW has made a need for revitalization of the movement obvious. Though autonomous and independent of the union for a long time now, the unpretentious yet eclectic theater group still bases itself in its community, and preserves and rediscovers rites of identity of Mexico and the region.

During the past four years El Teatro faced both bankruptcy and the roller-coaster effects of sudden Hollywood and New York fame, forcing a reordering of priorities. Some of those priorities are the training of Third World directors, playwrights, actors and technical people. Other concerns include the development of that "New American Audience," plays centered around early California history and the evolution of the unique "Campesino aesthetic" through a body of new works.

My first conversations with Luis Valdez began in the summer of 1981 while completing a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for the Expansion Arts Program. I documented national NEA grantees whose organizational and artistic performances stood as models for the continued federal support of such groups.

Arriving in the old mission pueblo, San Juan Bautista, I walked the short, cactus-covered distance from the Greyhound stop to their new playhouse, a sprawling former packing plant. Valdez, understandably flush with the celebration of the opening of the space, their first real home, struck me as an articulate, committed artist, centered, yet excited at the prospect of establishing a place for his plays and his company. This building would house a training center and showcase for People's Theater. He is a highly talented man; actor, playwright and poet, concerned with the conditions he experienced as the son of migrant workers. That ability to feel and communicate is essential to understanding the source of his drive to touch easily and deeply.

My last visit to San Juan Bautista marked the 20-year celebration of El Teatro, and the retrospective of two of Valdez's early surrealistic "popular classics," Soldado Razo and The Dark Roof of a Scream. The collective's mood is less ecstatic after the sobering experiences in the "bigtime," and dwindling foundation and federal support. Still, they believe in the magic of exploration of the human being and the ability of their work to teach and delight. The following is an excerpt of those conversations.

Carl Heyward: What does it mean that El Teatro has been in existence for 20 years?

Luis Valdez: Twenty years is a long time and not such a long time. What it means in a word is that we are on the verge of institutionalization. We have laid a foundation that will insure the survival of the company, not just in terms of a physical building, but also in terms of having an aesthetic, developing an approach to our work that has evolved from practice. We have also identified a need for this work that gives us confidence that we will be here as an organization 20 years from now.

CH: El Teatro and your work are interesting in terms of the mix of cultural information that is offered. What is that aesthetic?

LV: We are after the truth about America. I guess that it's time that America came of age and got a little sophisticated about itself. We are a lot more varied, as a country, than we like to pretend to be. I mean, we give sort of a nodding recognition that the country is multiracial, for instance, but do not do a lot to really integrate, in a cultural-artistic sense, the real currents that flow in this country. That sort of thing has to happen of itself through the daily life of the people, through the daily cultural life.

As a theater company, we are consciously and deliberately trying to provide certain kinds of images. When you talk about what California really is, the truth can be so penetrating that it changes perceptions of history. When you view the Anglo-Hispanic crux of this country, you are talking about two different views of people, especially in terms of racial culture. La Raza, if you look at the whole of Latin America, integrated all the races of mankind, it mixed everyone really—Blacks, Anglos, Asians, Indians, everyone. In that sense, Hispanic culture has not had the problems that Anglo culture has had, and our job is to stop some of this hard-core, blue-nosed racism; we have always been fighting and addressing that.

CH: How have you grown and matured as an artist? How have the goals of El Teatro evolved over the years?

LV: I have been challenged in a number of different ways with the way that El Teatro has developed. When I first started, we were the only ones. I had an image in mind, when I went to Vallejo, that I wanted to work with people. I had to introduce basic concepts. I was working with farmers, some of whom could not read scripts, so we had to use improvisation, which made presentations very lively. We had a willing audience, a message, and that was the raw material, to better structure the drama, improve the acting and get a better organizational grasp of our own reality so that there was a roof over our heads. I have developed into a playwright and director through the work of El Teatro. I was its first student, and to teach is to learn. In the old days, we rehearsed on the run and performed on the picket line. This was in the middle of the great strike.

While we had the strength and urgency of the struggle, our artistry had to sustain our politics. Ultimately it is artistry that makes the point and cuts across the barriers to understanding. There is a certain quality of excellence that we have discovered over the years, that a lot of people assumed that we didn't have to have, you know? They assumed that we could be rough and untutored and primitive, and still maintain our charm.

CH: What are some bright moments in the history of El Teatro?

LV: For a long time, a milestone in the history of El Teatro was a milestone in my personal life as well. Going back to Delano was a milestone. My family had left the valley to get away from that whole life of working on the farms—migrant labor. It was hopeless. We went to school, me right behind my brother, the first of the family ever to have gone to college. My people were shocked to see me show up back in Delano. I saw the social movement of the time, 1965. I felt that this movement was right at the center of things, that this is what I should be doing. I went back on so many levels.... El Teatro was located a block from the place where I was born. I was in the belly button of reality (laughs). A milestone for the company and one also for me. The next came with the separation from the UFW. It was a classic argument, we were doing art and doing politics: At what point do they meet and at what point do they diverge? It seemed like a contradiction in terms in that we were a part of the union, but we came to that point.

The union was interfering with our organizational growth. They were not focused on the arts, they allowed the arts to happen. It was viewed as a tool and not a service. So the chaotic birth of our independence began. Another milestone might have been Zoot Suit. It marked my rededication as a playwright. Without El Teatro I would not have been able to write Zoot Suit. I know that our work reaches into the streets. We attract young people, people who are confronted with rather stark realities. They have to hope for something, man. If they don't have the arts telling them about the essence and meaning of life, offering some kind of exploration of the positive and negative aspects of life, then there is no hope. I was a very angry young man not too many years ago, and I was able to channel that anger into the arts.

CH: Talk about the experience of doing Zoot Suit.

LV: It was an American experience. I had no notion of what that kind of success was. We have always been successful in terms of the work, and the audience telling us that they like the work, but that thing just took off. We were here in San Juan in the spring of 1978, trying to pay attention to going to L.A. and the Mark Taper Forum. By the spring of 1979, we were packing to go to New York. All this in one year. All the madness came to the limit around opening night. Celebrities, people that you don't know—all there, wishing you luck, covering their bases in case you were a hit on Broadway. I had a very sobering moment in Sardi's when Phil [production chief Phil Esparza] came in and told me that the N.Y. critics knocked it very badly. At that exact moment I felt home again. I touched the ground. People think that tremendous success is very good, but it takes you off the deep end. Being successful again and again, you can get used to it. The first time, [success] can knock you for a loop, and destroy the thing that you love most, your stability. Not too many opening nights in N.Y. for you, buddy! [laughs]. [Zoot Suit played for 46 weeks in LA. for more than 40,000 people. Valdez became the first Chicano director to have a play presented on Broadway. The film version was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and won the 1982 Cartagena Film Festival's Best Picture Award in Colombia.]

CH: Talk about your relationship with your audience—the idea of the "New American Audience."

LV: Since we started as a theater company, the audience has always been crucial. In Delano, we had a mixed audience to begin with; largely Mexican and Filipino, with Berkeley volunteers and black farmworkers from Bakersfield. The combination was always varied. That set the pace for us. The audience has always been looked upon as the main factor in our presentation. Once you have a mixed audience in that way, which is a true cross-section of the country, there is a dynamism and electricity that helps each performance. It is just as important for us to cast the audience, as it is to cast the play. We have found that playing just for Chicanos evokes certain things, just as playing for Anglos...neither is correct. What we call "The New American Audience" is a cross-section of the country that brings us to the future. We have to respond to the whole audience, the whole country. You are protected against your own racism and narrow-mindedness, and are urged, due to the make-up of that audience and the need to reach them, to reach a higher place. That is the truth that needs to invade Broadway—get in touch with the world.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1985.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002