This is Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture. [Intro Music]

Maria Hinojosa is on assignment, I'm Maria Martin.

On this special edition of our program, we remember farmworker leader Cesar Chavez by recalling 35 years of the theater that grew out of the farmworkers movement, El Teatro Campesino.

Teatro had a tremendous impact because it gave people the courage and the vision and also made it possible for them to laugh at themselves during a hard, hard struggle.

El Teatro Campesino, its past, present and future, in the words of Teatro founder Luis Valdez.

I was six years old when I met Cesar Chavez. He used to come to my house when I was a little kid. He lived on the same street where I was born.

That's coming up on this special edition of Latino USA.

[Music]

I see the work of the Teatro as being a Chicano Latino theater company over the years, but it's been more than that. It's been a cultural institution. I think we've had an impact not just as a theater company, but as a mover, a mover and a shaker.

[Music]

I'm Maria Martin. For more than 35 years now, the theater company El Teatro Campesino has brought the Chicano and Latino experience to the American stage.

Once a ragtag troupe performing in the great fields of California, it staged the back of a flatbed truck. El Teatro Campesino has made its mark from movies to Broadway, training a now veteran generation of Latino actors and directors and influencing a new generation.

Where's our warm-up coach? I'm just, I'm getting everybody. Do you want any more people?

It's full in San Juan Bautista, California, the tranquil California mission town that Teatro Campesino, the farmworker's theater, has called home for over three decades.

Like most days, it's busy at the old packing shed that Teatro Campesino converted to its theater and headquarters. Kinan and Anahuac Valdez, both young directors, actors and filmmakers, are busy rehearsing a new play.

And in the Teatro's recording studio, their uncle, singer, composer and actor Daniel Valdez, is recording the soundtrack of the Teatro's annual miracle play, The Virgen of Tepeyac.

[Singing]

Many of those who will act in this play this year have done so countless times before. Some 10, 20 or even 30 years. Like the Teatro Campesino itself, it's become a tradition, an expression of community and familia.

Teatro Campesino is corazón de la gente. It's what our soul is about and it touches it.

I've always thought of Teatro Campesino as being the mirror image of us.

There's a lot of theater all over the country, but there's only one, El Teatro Campesino.

El Teatro Campesino is now practically an institution for many Latinos, especially for Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.

That's because El Teatro Campesino, which has produced television programs and motion pictures, and has been the spawning ground for some well-known Latino actors, has its roots in the very beginning of an important historical movement for Latinos, the Chicano movement for social and political recognition.

For the Teatro Campesino, it all started back in 1965.

To whom it may concern, there is an interest in establishing a bilingual community farm workers theater.

The primary aim of this theater would be to belong to the workers themselves.

It is time the Raza landed the artistic blow it is capable of giving.

Those interested in attending an organizational meeting, please sign below.

The place was Delano, California.

This was the text of a leaflet which announced the formation of a theater troupe quite unlike any before.

It was influenced by La Barraca, the 1930s traveling theater of Spain's Federico García Lorca, by the Mexican burlesque style known as Carpa, and by the work of the German playwright Bertholt Brecht.

But the actual spark that led to the founding of El Teatro Campesino was something known simply as La Huelga, the farm workers movement for social justice.

[Chanting] Huelga! Huelga!

Farm workers had gone on strike in September of 1965, led by labor organizer Cesar Chavez.

At the beginning, it was very much a David and Goliath scenario. Farm workers had no political voice, the growers were very powerful. It was just the inspiration that an optimistic young Chicano playwright needed.

Now the night that I left San Francisco for Delano, I was talking to this guy from the Free Southern Theater, which was also an inspiration because they were black actors from New York City touring the south in 1964-65.

And I was talking to one of them, a guy by the name of Murray Levy, and he said,

You're going down there to start a theater company? And I said, Yeah, you know. With what? Do you have any money? I said, No. No funding? No. Do you have a board of directors? No. Do you have any actors? No. Do you have any scripts? No.

He says, How are you going to do it? And I said, I don't know. But I'm going to do it.

If you believe in something, it becomes true.

Luis Valdez came from a family of migrants from the San Joaquin Valley.

His family had moved north, and Valdez had studied drama at San Jose State. He'd also done a stint with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

At that time, I was aware that the problem with trying to be a Chicano playwright in America was that there was no such thing as Hispanic theater in America.

There was community Hispanic theater, but professional Hispanic theater in America was almost nonexistent.

So I saw it as a challenge, you know. Here's a challenge to try to fill this gap, this hole, this enormous vacuity.

We're at the Teatro Campesino, the farmworkers theater from Delano, California. And we've come here this evening to tell you the story of our strike, our huelga, and of our union, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO led by Cesar Chavez.

Teatro's early performances were simple, agitprop pieces. Valdez called them actos.

Bilingual, one-act skits using broad characters. The grower, el patroncito. The strikers, los huelguistas. And los esquirolaes, the scabs.

In those days, there were no sets, no costumes. The actors wore signs around their necks with their characters' names. The stage was the back of a flatbed truck. It was, says Valdez, our own brand of commedia dell'arte.

[Singing]

Through music, song, and drama, the members of the Teatro gave the Huelga animo.

They kept the strikers' spirits up and even persuaded some of the strike breakers to join up.

Years later, Cesar Chavez recalled the impact that el Teatro Campesino had on his movement.

Teatro and the struggle really made a difference for us. Luis was able to get people who had been on strike three months, four months, six months a year to laugh at their own conditions, to look at themselves, and to join with us laughing about the injustices and the growers who were committing those injustices against them.

Teatro had a tremendous impact, and one of the factors why we won that strike, because it gave people the courage and the vision, and also made it possible for them to laugh at themselves during a hard, hard struggle.

[Singing] Campesinos Mexicanos, Americanos de Color, Puerto Rico...

The first striker to join the Teatro was Agustin Lira, then a 21-year-old migrant from Coahuila, Mexico.

Strangely enough, I was working in the fields around Stockton, Sacramento, and I bought a newspaper and I picked it up, and it said that there was a strike going on, you know, and I'm very sure that I, inside of my soul, I was looking for an opportunity to fight back, because my parents had been farmworkers.

And we had never had a chance to fight for better wages, but of course we were exploited.

[Singing] Viva la virgen de guadalupe, viva nuestra union!

35 years after the Huelga, I spoke with director and Teatro Campesino founder, Luis Valdez, at his theater in San Juan Bautista about the past and the present.

It was very inspiring to walk into the Teatro Campesino here in San Juan Bautista, and there was so much going on, there was so much energy here.

Is this the old spirit? Is there a new spirit?

Well, fortunately, it's both the old and the new, you know, coming together and meeting head-on, so to speak.

We have a new generation that was born into the Teatro. They're in their 20s, starting to push 30, which means that they're entering a real age of responsibility here, organizationally speaking, in addition to the creative impulse and spark. So that's real good for the company, you know.

You know, every organization is like a living organism, and like a human being, an organism, an organization sometimes has to take a break, has to take a rest, they have mental breakdowns, they have moments of exhaustion where they have to sleep. Organizations do sleep.

So the rhythms come and go, and it's been an amazing year. This is a real important year for us.

It's not just our 35th anniversary year, it's what comes after 35 years.

It's a certain kind of solidity and experience and patience and family cohesion and generational bonding, transgenerational bonding that you can actually harvest after many years of work.

When you look back at 35 years of the Teatro Campesino and all of its manifestation, what or how would you characterize what its continuing legacy is?

I think the reality of El Teatro is cultural, and I understand it a lot better now than I did, you know, when it started. It was an impulse then that came from a 25-year-old on my part, you know, and you can only really see so far when you're 25. You've got a lot of energy and a lot of faith,

but I couldn't see the future beyond a certain point. So I did it anyway, and I jumped into the grape strike, and the idea of starting and maintaining a farmworker's theater was a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month challenge.

After a while, the process itself began to raise questions of how long we were going to survive and how we were going to survive.

When members started to get older and develop families, it became a much more serious question of how we were going to maintain and support everybody.

We couldn't all just live on the wing, you know, as we did back when.

So the struggle all along has been to create and maintain the context that's going to support the Teatro.

You've got to understand how the Teatro looked at the very beginning. People can say, okay, the Teatro started in 1965, but it wasn't just the Teatro. The farmworker's movement was going on. The Chicano movement started at that time as well, as far as I'm concerned.

The Teatro was a way to change our country, the country that we lived in, to make some room for us, give us some opportunities in education, in politics, in the commercial world, you know, in the corporate, whatever.

That's what began. And in order for the Teatro to exist as, say, a regional theater, you had to have all those elements that support regional theaters.

You had to have a community made up of not just working-class people, but also the middle class and working professionals, who helped then the organizations within the community to get the money that they deserve.

The theater that we were interested in, which was a commercial venue, a restored movie theater, is still an old movie theater, has not been restored.

But in any case, had we gone in there, we would have needed municipal and corporate support to maintain.

For one reason or another, it didn't happen, has not happened yet. There isn't a single regional-level style theater that relates to Latinos in the state of California.

So back when we started, it was basically an empty plane. And I knew that as a playwright. Here I was a playwright without an audience, a playwright without a theater that could produce my works, a playwright without actors, Latino actors that could do my roles.

So I had to begin to write to my reality. And so agitprop and the acto level, and later the mito and the corrido, was the way that I could survive as a theater artist by not overtaxing, if you will, the preparation of my actors and my audience.

Political theater made perfect sense. It was free. That makes a lot of sense to an audience.

But it was passionate. And it was pointed at an action that they could also participate in. So that allowed our survival.

As we went on and got to Zoot Suit, and there I am at the Mark Taper Forum now as a playwright, and we were there with the teatro first.

We did a 10-day run at the Mark Taper Forum with Carpa de los Rasquachis in the mid-70s.

That led to my being invited to commission to write a play for the Mark Taper Forum.

By that time, the audience in Los Angeles was willing to pay for theater tickets.

So that proved that, oh, Latinos can finally sustain commercial theater. The problem is that there has not been another one since then.

Zoot Suit told the story of racism against Pachucos in Los Angeles.

Pachucos were young Mexican-Americans who'd adopted the Zoot Suit style of dress during the time of the Second World War.

It was, said Valdez, a very American play. Zoot Suit is about American identity. The Zoot Suit phenomenon was something that was of the period of the early 40s.

The whole country became Zoot Suit crazy. And of course I'm talking about the young people, those young people that were just about getting ready to go off to war.

What it meant for Chicanos is that they were identifying with the average American kids who were wearing Zoot Suits and saying, Hey, we're American. We love this music. We love this style. We're here, and we're doing it in our own way.

And so Zoot Suit became a symbol of Chicano identity, but also a symbol of American identity. So that's what the play's about.

Four hundred thousand people saw the production of Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where it ran for 46 weeks, with actor Edward James Olmos in the lead role of El Pachuco.

Before I got that phone call, I could not work in this community because there was nothing for me to do. I've been entertaining people since 1961. Here it is, 1978. I had not gained one penny from the American theater. The first paycheck I ever got was from Zoot Suit when I made 250 bucks a week for acting on stage.

Actor Edward James Olmos, star of Stand and Deliver and Miami Vice, recalls he was a furniture mover when he was asked to audition for Zoot Suit and saw a script of the play.

Words never seen printed in my life. Words that I had heard all my life. Words that only could come from the heart and the passion and the understanding of the finest who command the language.

I said, my lord, que le wacha mis trapos, ese?

Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you're about to see is a construct of fact and fantasy. But relax, weigh the facts, and enjoy the pretense.

Our Pachuco realities will only make sense if you grasp their stylization. It was a secret fantasy for Vivato, living in or out of the Pachucada, to put on the Zoot Suit and play the myth. Pues Orale!

This is the fact, the fantasy, the music, the myth, the magic, the movie. Zoot Suit. Universal Pictures presents Zoot Suit, an American Original.

[Music] Oh, Donna, oh, Donna, oh, Donna, oh, Donna.

Seven years went by between the release of the film of Zoot Suit and Valdez's second film, La Bamba.

It was a time which saw what some call the Latinization of the United States. Everyone, from Linda Ronstadt to George Bush, it seemed, discovered their Hispanic connection.

At last, the American cultural climate seemed to have caught up with the work of El Teatro Campesino.

[Music]

La Bamba, the story of 1950s singer Ricardo Valenzuela, better known as Ritchie Valens, grossed 55 million dollars in the United States, 90 million worldwide.

What makes America great is that it is dynamic, and what makes any theater great or dynamic is the audience.

In Hollywood, they call it the Hispanic market. We know it to be simply the presence of millions and millions and millions of people that are attuned to the new realities of the Southwest.

Ten years ago, Luis Valdez had this to say about his experience as a Hollywood filmmaker.

Hollywood is an ongoing carnival, you know, deal-making. It's a game that can wear you down, and literally I think it wears people to the ground.

Ten years later, Valdez still has an uneasy relationship with the movie business.

I don't think the general public really understands completely how Hollywood works, and they only understand what they see, and what they see are movies that make it to theaters, but they don't understand it.

Not only is it a competitive business, but it's also a corporate business with corporate structures and multimillion dollar investments made by individuals in some cases, but more often than not by corporate combines, corporate investors.

Both inside the studio system and outside the studio system that expect a quick return for their money, and that quick return, if you look at most movies, is generated in the first couple of weekends.

And what is becoming the frightening norm for filmmakers that are attempting to work in LA or Hollywood slash planet Earth, because it's really a worldwide business, is the frightening thing is that if you don't make 20, 30 million dollars on your first weekend, you're not in competition.

And in order to ensure that, and some movies have made over 50 million on their first weekend, in order to ensure that they have to pack films with movie stars with a lot of flash, a lot of stuff that is really aimed at the target audience, in most cases the largest audience is the 17 to 25.

So a film has to cater to those tastes, meaning action, meaning male action oriented films. And occasionally they allow themselves, these investors in studios to gamble with an unusual project. Occasionally a surprise comes along and a sleeper becomes a big hit. But there are limits. Nothing can compete with the big blockbusters.

Though Luis Valdez is widely considered a pioneer, he himself doesn't consider his work nearly done yet. Last year, Valdez premiered a new original play, The Mummified Deer. Zoot Suit had a successful revival in Chicago. And in the long term, a number of important film projects remain on El Teatro Campesino's horizon.

What is there left for you to do Luis? What do you still want to do? What are the dreams that perhaps are yet unfulfilled?

Well, I have the movie on Cesar Chavez, you know, that I'm struggling. That's another protracted struggle. But for all the reasons that made Cesar who he was, this is another film that is a long time struggle. Maybe just because I've chosen, you know, this life of struggle that happens this way. But there's a lot of truth in it that California is not ready to acknowledge yet.

And I will continue to work with the family, with United Farm Workers, and with Hollywood in order to make that a reality. So the ultimate result though, and I know Dolores Huerta feels this way, is that maybe what that project is, is an independent film. You know, unrestrained by any corporate pressures. And I think probably Cesar would have appreciated that more.

Poor, you know, in the sense that they won't have a huge budget, but it will be a labor of love and a labor of commitment, a political and social commitment, human commitment, which I think really explains who Cesar was. So maybe that's the way it'll get done.

And don't be surprised if it comes out of this packing shed, because this is a very natural place for it to come out of. And really just looking at it, it's very difficult to take Cesar and to try to put him through the sieve of Hollywood. You know, it somehow doesn't work. And I think he knew that. He knew that for 10 years, the last 10 years of his life, when I was talking to him about this. He resisted the notion. He didn't want a Hollywood movie about him. He hated that stuff.

And I understand. I understand exactly what he meant. And so maybe it'll get done that way. Maybe it'll get done by somebody else. You know what I'm saying? But at least I will have carried the ball this far.

And I have written seven drafts of the Cesar Chavez story, some major drafts that deal with the history of the farm workers from my perspective and my experience in it. I was six years old when I met Cesar Chavez. And he was a pachuco. He was a zoot suiter who ran with one of my cousins.

So you see, what it comes to is the fact that really I'm talking about a member of my own family here. And that's the best way. This is the way I feel about it. So I'll try my best. And we shall proceed and persevere.

Director, playwright, filmmaker, cultural icon, and pioneer of the American theater, Luis Valdez.

They forced the scholars to recognize that there is more than Western European theater. And as long as the companies that have been spawned by the Teatro Campesino and the playwrights that have been inspired by the Teatro Campesino continue to write and express their reality concerning their own communities, then the impact will continue to be felt.

There are certainly playwrights out there who have, from the Chicano community, who have not necessarily been influenced by Luis Valdez per se. But without Luis Valdez having opened the doors in many of these institutions, then they would not even be listened to. They wouldn't be heard from.

For Latino USA, I'm Maria Martin.

[Music]