Luis Valdez

Valdez was born in Delano, California, to migrant farm worker parents from Mexico, Armeda and Francisco Valdez.[3] The second of 10 children in his family, Valdez began to work the fields at the age of 6. One of his brothers is actor Daniel Valdez. Throughout his childhood, the family moved from harvest to harvest around the central valleys of California. Due to this peripatetic existence, he attended many different schools before the family finally settled in San Jose, California.[4]

Valdez began school in Stratford, California.[4] His interest in theatre began in the first grade. Throughout grammar school, Valdez organized plays at school and put on puppet shows in his garage, which, he recalls, were usually about fairy tales.[5] In high school, Valdez was part of the Speech and Drama department and acted in several plays. He described himself as "a very serious student."[5] Valdez graduated from James Lick High School in San Jose and went on to attend San Jose State University (SJSU) on a scholarship for math and physics. During his second year of college, he switched his major to English.[5] While in college, Valdez won a playwriting contest with his one-act play The Theft in 1961.[6] Two years later, in 1963, Valdez's first full-length play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, was produced by the drama department and debuted at SJSU.[7]

After graduation, Valdez spent the next few months with The San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he was introduced to agitprop theatre, guerrilla theatre, and Italian commedia dell'arte.[6] These two techniques greatly influenced Valdez's development of the basic structure of Chicano theatre: the one-act presentational acto (act).

In 1965, Valdez returned to Delano, where he enlisted in Cesar Chavez's mission to organize farm workers into a comprehensive union. Valdez brought together farm workers and students to form El Teatro Campesino, a farm worker's theater troupe.[4] El Teatro was known for touring migrant camps with their actos, one-act plays, which were usually around fifteen minutes long. The plays were used to educate and inform not only the farm workers, but also the public. Valdez believed that humor was a major asset to his plays in El Teatro Campesino as it was a tool to lift the morale of strikers.[5] Social and political commentary were intertwined within the humor to accomplish the goals of El Teatro Campesino.[5] Original plays of El Teatro were based on the experiences of farm workers, but by 1967 their subject matter expanded to other aspects of Chicano culture;[4] Los Vendidos, for example, discusses various Chicano stereotypes. Although Valdez left El Teatro in 1967, his legacy lived on. Thanks in large part to Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, the 1970s saw an explosion of Chicano theater. Theater groups sprang up with surprising speed on college campuses and in communities throughout the United States. What began as a farm workers' theater in the migrant camps of Delano flooded into a national Chicano theater movement.[4]

In 1967, Valdez established a Chicano cultural center in Del Rey, California. In 1969 he moved both theater and cultural center to Fresno, where they remained for two years. During this time, he made the short film I Am Joaquin based on the legendary poem by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzáles (it was later inducted into the National Film Registry in 2010 and preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2017[8]). While in Fresno, Valdez taught at Fresno State College and created TENAZ, the national Chicano theater organization, which was composed of many with theatre groups throughout the Southwest. Valdez moved the theater a final time in 1971, to San Juan Bautista, south of San Francisco. Combined now with the cultural center, it was called El Centro Campesino Cultural, and it became a fully professional production company.[4]

In 1973, he published his poem Pensamiento Serpentino, which drew on Mayan and Aztec philosophical concepts and argued that Indigenous ways of knowing were essential to the spiritual and material liberation of Chicana/os. The poem was later used in the highly successful Mexican American Studies Department Programs at Tucson Unified School District.[9][10]

In 1989, Valdez and officials from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences and Nosotros formed the Latino Writers Group to improve opportunities and pay for Latino writers in Hollywood.[11]

Luis Valdez is a founding faculty member and director (c. 1994) of the California State University, Monterey Bay Teledramatic Arts and Technology Department. He is credited with assisting in the development of a university program that prepares students in the entertainment industry: filmmaking, writing, sound, cinematography, and the like.[12]

His recent play Valley of the Heart, debuted October 30, 2018 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.[13]

He resides in San Juan Bautista, CA. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2015.[14]