 The General Manager of the Cultural Center, it's my pleasure to welcome you to see the center of our health and safety series. We've been seen by this, but I'd like to touch on a few points before that. The Cultural Center is actually the vision of the city of Dallas and Waukesville. The Cultural Center is actually the vision of the city of Dallas and Waukesville. We're continuing the work of the city of Dallas and Waukesville. With us we have tonight several elected officials, and I'd like to acknowledge them. We have one tonight, first of all, I'm the official mayor of Pro Tempo, and I'm here with this mayor, Pro Tempo. And with us tonight also is council member, Mr. Sikron, who got this one. With us, Mr. Doulton, and Mr. Salah. State representative, Pro Tempo, and Mr. Sikron. And the State representative, Mr. Salah. Also with us this evening is a public party chair, Mr. Salah. We're the chief executive, Sikron, and Pro Tempo. First of all, first of all, thank you for being here. And a cultural presentation, Mr. Salah. And a cultural presentation, Mr. Salah. Okay, really quick, because I know we're running a little behind on the Latino Public Commission. Really quick. The Center serves regional catalysts for the preservation, promotion, and development of Latino and Hispanic arts and culture. As such, we're very proud to have this this evening. But first, I'd also like to give a quick shout out to everyone here for the TCG conference. Thank you. I hope you're enjoying Dallas. It's a great place to live. We're halfway between New York and LA, so don't forget that. Without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce Lisbeth Ness, and his moderator, Jose Luis Torres. Thank you so much. I'll make a notice with the city of Dallas and the Department of Aviation with the city. Tonight it is my pleasure to have someone whom I met several in the, well, let's see, in the early 70s. He was a real young man, and at the time he was being named as the father of Chicano theater. But I just saw him again after many years, and I think he's the grandfather of Chicano. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. Big, nice Dallas welcome to Mr. Luis Valdez. El Campecino, grandfather of Chicano theater. But anyways, in 1965 Luis started El Campecino, and you can tell us a little bit about the history. A lot of people today are very interested in knowing about Tsutsu and La Bamba. We'll talk about that, but first Luis, tell us a little bit about how the actual Chicano was born. It was a real challenge for me, so I majored in English, changed my major to English. With Emerson's own playwriting, we got to write my first plays. I learned about the 1930s, and I consider myself to be an offshoot, really, of the theater of the 1930s. My inspiration was the Federal Theater Project, California Theater. My inspiration was John Howard Lawson, a Broadway playwright, founder of the Writers Guild in Hollywood, William Saroyan. These two playwrights saw my first play, The Shrong Head of Bancho Villas, under the estate. And so they kind of baptized me. They embraced me, and I felt the embrace of the 1930s generation. Later, I met Harold Kurman, leader of the group theater, and he also embraced me as a playwright. So really, I feel I'm an extension of the American theater of the 1930s. So those playwrights that wrote socially-oriented drama, Clifford Ordez, waiting for lefty, inspired me. And I thought that the theater could be activist. And so combining my farm worker roots with my education, I conceived of this thing called a farm worker's theater. It's just a generic name, a farm worker's theater, a capital casino. And the opportunity to make it a reality came when I met Sir Sir Chavez. He was at the beginning of the Lado Grape Strike. And I went to him and I pitched him an idea for a theater of buying more farm workers. And the first thing he said was, we know there's no money into the theater in Lado. There are no actors in Lado. There's no stage in Lado. There's no time to rehearse. There's no place to rehearse. We're on strike. Day and night. You still want to do it. And I said, absolutely, Caesar, what an opportunity, you know. The opportunity came and he was absolutely right. The opportunity came on the picket line. So he was on the picket line, then the General Commissito was born as an activist act, trying to get the scabs out of the fields. Nonviolent strikes, so we had to convince him. So we used to climb on top of cars and trucks in order to get them out of the field. Later on, we began to perform Friday night meetings, playing together what I called Actos. I didn't want to call them skits. We weren't Boy Scouts, you know. So I wanted something that could name what we were doing. So I had to name an acto. It's an act, you know. It seemed to be a political act. It was a theatrical act. It seemed to me that was the right thing to do. So I should say that I went back to the place where I was born. I was born in Delano. I mentioned Sar Chavez when I was six years old. So it was a coming home in every way. But Delano was transformed. Delano was a lot like the South Valley here in Texas. It was a lot like the South in 1965. It was segregated, it's where I grew up. Segregated schools, segregated movie theaters. And not much respect for people of Mexican descent or any people of color. So it was really a cry from the gut to do this theater. And since it was that kind of a political act, it ran into the kind of opposition that you might expect. And one day out on the picket line, a grower's son confronted me, pulled out a gun and put it to my head when we were acting. And he said, okay, act. And I almost did. I almost acted in my pants, you know what I mean? But the fact is that at that moment, at that split second, I said, it's what I'm doing worth dying for. And I decided that it was. That I was going to continue to do what I was doing. And that there was no way that I was going to stop. Well, you hear about dying on the theater, I almost literally died, you know. But there are ways to live, there are ways to go ahead. And I remain committed to the idea of theater out buying more farm workers because there's still a farm worker situation. Cesar Chavez has been dead for 20 years and Campesinos are still getting exploited in the fields. They move up, they move to the cities. They get other jobs and their children get educated and I'm very grateful that that takes place. But there's still more Campesinos coming in as Bisa Burton. And so there's still a need for a D'Andro Campesino and we're still there. We're still in San Juan Bautista where we've been for 42 years in the mouth of the Salinas Valley. We continue to work with farm worker youth. They're coming to us now from deep indigenous Mexico. But we used to get people from northern Mexico and from Texas and different places. We now get people from Oaxaca, we now get people from Chiapas. We now get people coming and speak, they can't even speak Spanish. They're so indigenous. They come speaking Misteco, they come speaking Tiki, their other languages. And so it's a real challenge for us. Theater is one of the most direct ways for us to continue to communicate and essentially bring them out. It's their children really that we're dealing with. So it's a long story. But I hope my manager will be able to hear what he says. The Pilgrims in Plymouth Rock claim that the first theater presentation in the United States was made by them to the Indians. However, we know better. Yeah, the very first theater done in what is now the United States was done on the banks of the Rio Grande, the Rio Grande in 1598, in my hometown El Paso. It was under the leadership of Juan de Oñalde. He's the son of a conquistador. He was married to the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, Luis Camina. So he was lined up, you know. He had a few pecadillos himself. He was also a conquistador, you know, and he raised some hell over here in New Mexico. But he was the son of New Mexico. But what they did is they performed, they had a whole contingent, 600 families coming from Mexico, Guadalajara, Zacatecas, to colonize what is now in New Mexico. And so they performed Los Moros y los Cristianos. That was most recently. Last year I was, my wife and I were in Zacatecas and we were guests at the Moriscada. Have you ever been at the Moriscada? How many of you? Okay, there you go, one percent. The Moriscada is performed on mountains. Literally it is the struggle between Los Moros y los Cristianos. The Moors, let's say Islam, and the Muslims, and the Christians. Because America was settled by the Spanish in 1492, exactly at the time that the Spanish were fighting the Arabs in Spain. And the memory of that historical moment is preserved in Los Moros y los Cristianos. I have seen the Moro Moro in Manila to the Philippines, and it is the Filipino version of the same play, Los Moros y los Cristianos. I went there under the aegis of the International Theater Institute by the way in 1971, which is my first contact with people that became TCG before TCG came into existence. But the thing is that Los Moros y los Cristianos is this gigantic play. It's so huge that in Mexico they continue to perform it on mountains. Hundreds of people are involved. And you stand on one mountain and you see the soldiers scaling this other mountain. They wear costumes that are down for the last few details. They've got the little knapsacks, they've got the fireplaces. And it's so huge as a matter of fact that there was a carnival on another hill. And then people were camped out there because these are poor caverns, so they come and they camp out. So anyway, this is the play that Juan Dioñate, probably on a smaller scale, performed with his contingent of people on horseback on the banks of the Rio Grande in 1598, the first theater in what is now the Continental United States. You may not know that, but now you know that. Actually, I was told he was on or about April 30, 1598. You're right. There you go. Luis, you are famous for many things, in my view, but one of the ones that Americans, or people in the United States, know you for is Tsutsu, which made Jameson almost a megastar. And La Bamba, which still resonates in my mind the music of La Bamba. Tell us a little bit about Tsutsu and La Bamba. Well, Tsutsu, I can connect with you actually, Tsutsu is about a historical event that they're celebrating this year, the 70th anniversary of the Tsutsu riots in Los Angeles. And actually, when I wrote the play, and when we staged it at the March Day Perform in Los Angeles in 1978, it had been 35 years since the events of the Tsutsu riots. It has now been 35 years since Tsutsu's play premiered. So we're really, you know, the history marches on. But I became very aware that the memory of the Tsutsu riots, the events of World War II, was still like a sore place in the public consciousness, in the city of Los Angeles. It was like a wound that had never completely healed. And there were still people that were, and again, not just Latinos, not just Chicano, but Anglos, you know, that felt that horrendous event. Nobody was killed during the Tsutsu riots in 1940, not in Los Angeles, anyway. The Tsutsu riots spread east and west and south, rather. So Beaumont, Texas, saw the Tsutsu riots here. And eventually it got the harm of five African-Americans were killed in the streets, and $500 was the damage. It was incredible in 1943. So there was a violent result. But the one in Los Angeles didn't kill anybody, but it injured people psychically. And I think it injured the city psychically. And again, the only way to expiate that sin that collective sin, the only way to begin to deal with the heal it, was to have a collective ritual. And this is where the theater, someone was talking about the importance of life theater this morning. And it is because we need it as a society, as any society, in order to heal ourselves sometimes from collective wounds and the Tsutsu riots with one of them. And of course slavery is another. The incarceration of the Japanese in World War II is a whole list. The treatment of gay is a list. The treatment of women in general, I mean, that's a whole list. That's a book, actually. But the thing is that you expiate and you exercise through the theater. And so I was invited to write a play by Gordon Davidson of the Mark Gaper Forum. He discovered this when Peter Brooke and his company, the International Center for Theater Research, came from Paris to spend the summer with us at the General Campestino in 1973. Now people have known that Peter Brooke was in the United States in 1973. He spent a month elsewhere. But of the three months that he spent in the United States with his company, two of those, we're in someone about these stuff. And a number of people were there. I mean, it's a wonderful exchange that we had, an incredible memorable exchange. There was a young blonde in her early 20s called Helen Mirren. She was part of that company. And they were in someone about these. Helen Mirren has an in-depth page. Quatro Movimientos. Now we're holding a tattoo that she had made before she left someone about these. And she still has it. In order to play the Queen of England, she has to put makeup on it. She still has it. She occasionally shows it on television. You may have seen it. But anyway, it was a tremendously moving experience for us. And we went to Los Angeles for Santa Barbara. And that's where I met Gordon Davidson. And so he invited the tattoo to come perform the next season. We did 10 days at the Mark David Forum. And then eventually he approached me to do a play about Los Angeles history that was starting a whole new series and starting to work with people of color. And this is where Gordon Davidson really became a pioneer. And he reached out to other people in the Los Angeles community. And that was one of the first. And so he said, are you willing to write a play? But it was here for now series. And of course, eventually he directed it. And so I agreed. And we almost simultaneously agreed that the Zootsoot riots were perfect. And that the Sweet Lagoon case, which had happened a year before, was really the kickoff. And so I wrote an early version of Zootsoot, which we staged in the spring of 1978. It was announced in a little tiny paragraph in the LA Times. I guess what impressed them is that the first 10-day run of Baby Zoot, as we called it in the spring, sold out before it opened. All the tickets were sold. And so the box office said, hey, what's happening here? And so we had a good run. It was just a play in evolution. But what really struck us all was that not only were people eager to see the play, they were desperate to see the play because of the psychic wound, because Chicanos needed to see themselves at the Music Center, because people that had seen the Zootsoot riots happen at the Sweet Lagoon case needed to see what I had to say about it. And the fact is that that excitement, that excitement really created a fire, a firestorm in Los Angeles. So I was invited to rewrite the play, which I did, and to become the first offering of that 78 fall season, 78, 79. And again, they announced the eight-week run, and before they even opened, the whole eight-week run sold out. It was completely sold out. So people obviously said, what's going on here? You know, hey, what is this? And so we couldn't close the play, so we found the old Aquarius Theater where Hare had played last in Hollywood, and their taper staff refurbished it, and we opened and stayed there for 11 months. Eventually, then, Zootsoot ran for a full year, close to half a million people saw it. Half a million people. It made enough money for the taper to purchase the Aquarius, E, Master of Zermones, Zootsooter, and he got out, and it was very brave, he got out in the middle of these two gangs in character. And he stopped it, which was amazing. After that, we were very careful which gang was coming to the show, you see. But the fact that it wasn't just gangs, it was grandmothers, it was grandfathers, it was, you know, and not just Chicanos. I mean, we had everybody in the city. Finally, the city of Los Angeles was seeing itself, not only on the stage, but also in the audience. The theater was happening in the audience. And, you know, I wanted, it was interracial, in the sense that we had Anglo, we had Chicanos, we had African-Americans. That was very important. The legacy again of the Zootsoot and all that swing music, all that jazz goes back to the African-American community. Very important. And I also needed to have some reflection of the war. So we had one Asian-American, dancer, Kim Miori, who had worked with Pat Verge, our choreographer, dancing with the sailor. And they became World War II. The Kim Miori and Japanese accented costumes. And then this sailor in a white uniform, dancing downstage as a light motif of the war, you know, interweaving with the action. The play itself is an offshoot of the work of El Quattro Campesino. I could not have arrived in 1978 with a play that did not have that influence because El Quattro had already been into existence for 13 years. You know, but we had cut our i-keys. I got a degree in English and in playwright. I mean, at San Jose State in 1964. And then I went up to San Francisco to work with the San Francisco Mime Group, which was also a wonderful year. I joined the Cultural Revolution in San Francisco. I became a hippie, you know. But the fact is that it was those years with El Quattro Campesino on flatbed trucks with no lighting whatsoever, except general lighting, in some cases headlights from cars. And confronting an audience that was in need of something, not just there to be entertained, but in need of a statement that fed Zootsoot eventually. Now I was able to construct the events of the Zootsoot riots and of the sleep-illegual incase into a play that is epic. I'm brekkian in spirit. I adopted Bertolt Brekkies, my ancestor, you know. My artistic ancestor a long time ago. And so it's an epic play. In a sense, it's got many levels. And it's historical in nature. And as far as El Quattro Campesino is concerned, we've gone through an evolution in the last 48 years. We started with the actos. We developed the mitos. Those are myths. Actos are mythical. Mythical actos, short pieces, the deal. Or long pieces, the deal with mythology. Corridos, the deal with music. They're already existing in Mexican culture, but we set them to the stage. We set them up and dramatize these corribles, because they have dialogue, they have music. And so there is a musicalized form of theater. And then finally, Zootsoot historias. Histories. I think it's really important to acknowledge the role of the theater in the creation and recreation of history. Not just with Shakespeare, and not just with Chikomatsu, or Simon in Japan, but also all kinds of playwrights that have come along and have captured an era. And so history has become really important. And so Zootsoot is an historia. Zootsoot is an epic play that deals with a chunk of history. My latest play, Ballet of the Heart, is also an historia. I just finished writing it. We're casting it now. It'll be performed in August-September of this year at the Catholic Campesino, in our first production of it, a workshop production. But it deals with Japanese-Americans and Mexican-Americans. And it's an opportunity for me to look in a different mirror, to see my face, not just my Mexican face, but my Japanese face. And I've been trying to do that all along, through my works. I think Zootsoot was an opportunity for me to see my African-American face. And I think that, even though we have vast problems in our prisons today, where you have mostly Latinos and African-Americans incarcerated as victims of a systemist right of profit of their incarceration, of their animalization, nevertheless, we have cross-cultured influence each other for many, many generations. And so Zootsoot was born out of cultural fusion. Fusion between Chicago's and African-Americans and the Jewish kids and the Irish kids and the Asian kids that took to swing and put on Zootsoot. There is a lot of us who are baby boomers and a little earlier too and they're about to, like my wife can attest. There is a phrase in American culture that brings a lot of memories. It's the day the music died. Why Ricardo Valenzuela? Well, because he was there. Let me just say that this happened. When we were opening Zootsoot on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater, you know, the last place I expected to land was the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway. As a matter of fact, I was telling Teresa earlier today that I was on the board of TCG in 1974. My son, Kenan, mentioned today that Peter Zeiser had invited me to join TCG. And I said, why should I join TCG when TCG has not joined me? Why should I deal with the American theater when the American theater doesn't even acknowledge me as a basket child? I don't have anything to do with the American theater. And he says, well, it never will unless you participate. And so I took him at his word. I liked him. I liked him a lot. And so I not only joined TCG, I was on the board. And Hal Prince was the president of the board at TCG when I joined. Stephen Sondheim was our vice president. So I went to my first meeting of the board in New York City on Broadway, some office going. And I had my opportunity to speak. And now I'm a new board member, you know? So I stood up and I knew who they were. They didn't know who I was. I knew who they were. So I said, you know, America needs to acknowledge it's Latinos. I said, I'm here. I don't want to be here, but I'm here because I need to be here. I said, we need a voice. We need to be part of this organization. We need to have our voice heard on Broadway and across the whole country. And we're part of the American theater. My objective is to build, to try to help build a new wing of the American theater that involves people of Hispanic descent or Chicano and Latina. And they all listen to you like this. And when I was finished, they all went back to talking about their business. And so it was an interesting moment. I never had one word of conversation, with Hal, or was even about what I had said. It was a little odd. I mean, I respected them. But I understood it as a sign of the times. That was quite a while ago. That was in 1974. And then I went to a meeting called the First American Congress of the Theater, the Fact Conference at Princeton University. And everybody from the American theater was there. I mean, Julian Beck, Joe Chacon, Jane Alexander. I mean, everybody was there. All the heavies. Everybody. Including David Merritt. People like that. Huge producers from Broadway. The main problem there was how to be safe Broadway. That was the question. And again, it was very frustrating for me. And so I got into a conversation with Joe Phab, the founder of the Public Theater and in the hallway that was eventually joined by Bernie Jacobs and Jerry Schoenfield. The Schubert's. I don't know if you know what these names are or what they mean to you. But anyway, they were in the hallway and then Jane Alexander and it was a very spirited discussion almost, evolved almost into an argument. And I was a bad guy. You know, I was the one that was I was the iconic last. I was a smartass. I was the kid, you know. And I was saying that I don't care if Broadway dies. I said, let it die. It has no value to me. Why should I care? And they were saying it's important for you. And I said, nah, you know. Anyways, it went on. Eventually Jane got us all together. Nobody made enemies. You know, we parted friends and stuff. But it was very spirited. Very passionate discussion. 1974. Five years later almost to the day. Opening night on Broadway. On backstage, Bernie Jacobs, one of our producers and of course Matt, the weather garden, the only man in the garden, comes up to me backstage and he says, this is the role of Henry Reina of Jiu Jitsu. We're up in his dressing room, second floor overlooking 7th Avenue and we're feeling good about ourselves. We're feeling nervous, but great to be there. And he's dressing and I'm dressing and we're kind of looking at each other and say, man, this is great. We've done the 40s. What are we going to do next? We've got to do the 50s and we've got to come back to New York on Broadway with the 50s. But what can we do to capture the 50s? And that exact moment when the door was open, we heard mariachi music coming from down below. And we looked up the window and down on 7th Avenue, there were mariachis and they were playing and I looked at my brother. The President of Mexico had said mariachis to serenade us on opening night on Broadway. And so La Bamba. So my brother, after that for the next five years, went looking for the family, went looking for details, story so we could do this musical on Broadway. It became a movie instead. It became my feature, you know, the La Bamba our feature, you know. We tracked down the family of Richie Valens. He kept looking for them all over Los Angeles, which is, you know, a couple of hundred miles away from San Juan. But they were next door in Watsonville, you know, in the next town over. And so we connected with them and eventually it became a movie. I would love it to become a musical on Broadway. But Hollywood is a complicated place. And so we're trying to unravel, you know, all the difficulties that are legally attached to it. But in any case it became a movie. And it is connected to in that sense. The story behind it, I'm sure if you've seen the movie, that's the story. There was no book. There was no book. There were no articles. There was nothing that I had to go on as a guide. So I did have Connie Valenzuela, Richie's mother and Bob Morales, Richie's brother as witnesses, so to speak. And so I interviewed them on videotape. They asked them to tell me the story of Richie. I also interviewed Bob King, Richie's agent, and I interviewed Donna Ludwig. Oh, Donna? Okay, Donna Ludwig-Fox. I interviewed her. She was looking good, actually. We're right. And so the four of them became the four corners of my story and I had to use everything that they gave me because that's all there was. And it went in shaping La Bamba as a movie. Now, you heard actually a discussion in the Pulitzer Prize when he playwrighted it this afternoon. I'm a what is it? That's him. He mentioned about his writing to the screen and stuff and how that has influenced him. As someone who has become a filmmaker over the years we started a long time ago, believe me on film, I think it's a very interesting interplay between writing for the stage and writing for film or for television. They tend to influence each other. I've gone from the most broad kind of theater that you can imagine which are the actos. Someone in Europe once said seeing the performance of the Chatro Campesino is like being at the birth of Comedia del Arte. And that's absolutely true. Because our audience were people that had never seen theater. And you know what it's like when you meet someone I was an organizer, you know when I was a serious threatening organizer people thought I was dangerous, you know but I get up there as an organizer and some of the men they come and say, some matter, you've got nuts. So, you know in Mexico if you're an actor I mean there's your suspect your sexuality is suspect to begin with immediately you're either homosexual or you're a letcher you know what other you but you're also kind of crazy, you know so we had to break through that and the only way that the Campesinos could understand what we were doing is they called us El Silco. I get El Silco, you know what I mean the circus which made us clowns so the actors of El Chatro Campesino were payasos and because we were payasos it was real hard to get women involved again, we might be letchers but we were certainly payasos, you know so their parents and husbands and boyfriends