It’s thrilling to recall that El Teatro Campesino, the most important Chicano stage in the nation, is nestled in downtown San Juan Bautista. It is not its original location, but the founding father of this particular theater – and Chicano theater in general – still lives in the area. The theater continues to operate, now preparing for Día de los Muertos, followed by its La Virgen del Tepeyac holiday performance.
Playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez is a living legend. There’s a new, 90-minute PBS documentary on his life and legacy, American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.
El Teatro Campesino (in English: The Farmworker Theater) was part of the California farmworkers’ movement and a landmark civil rights and labor campaign led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others. Huerta is part of the documentary; Chavez is now discussed in the context on the 2026 sexual abuse allegations that led to a rethinking of his legacy. For the first time, we learn about the true end of the relationship between Chavez and Valdez, who says he was asked to stop doing theater because everybody was needed on the boycott line.
Established during the 1965 Delano grape strike, El Teatro Campesino played a huge societal role, showing the world the poor treatment of Mexican-Americans in the U.S. It continued to play this role after separating from the movement, and Luis Valdez – with Zoot Suit, the first Chicano play produced on Broadway, and the global hit La Bamba, in 1987 – is the one who put a Chicano experience on stage and screen.
Born in a farm labor camp in California, Valdez joined his family in the field at age 6. He was an ambitious and intelligent child. He and his older brother Frank had big plans for the family and both went to college, but ultimately Valdez gave up on his dream to become an engineer. His time in college in San Jose and in San Francisco convinced him that the nation needed a playwright of his background.
The documentary traces the history of Valdez back to the moment he becomes enchanted with theater early in school. He was cast as a monkey and was very excited about the role. However, the family was evicted from camp and had to leave before the premiere. It was a heartbreak, and from that heartbreak stems the legend.
Valdez started to organize puppet shows, write scripts, poems and screenplays. He later joined a mime troupe in San Francisco. But it was farmworkers on strike who eventually captured his heart.
Footage in the documentary shows Valdez being interviewed on the condition among which farmworker children live. He pitched an idea of a theater for farmworkers to Huerta, and Chavez found the idea useful.
It’s not that the farmworkers were requesting theater. Valdez made it interesting for them, staging short, funny, highly improvisational one-act plays about farmworker exploitation. With audience participation, Chicano actors would play their white oppressors who punished them for not using English. And, on the margins of the movement, there was a growing recognition that Chicanos were not being accepted in America – even while serving as a cannon fodder in Vietnam.
After Chavez told Valdez to quit, El Teatro Campesino found a home in Del Rey. In 1969 he moved the theater and cultural center to Fresno, where they remained for two years before relocating to San Juan Bautista.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez has a narrator who tells the story, and it isn’t Valdez. It is Pachuco, the playwright’s creation, the man who became the face of the most famous Chicano play in history, Zoot Suit.
A Pachuco is a member of a Mexican-American youth counterculture, an outsider and an insider at the same time. He wears a zoot suit, a long, thigh-length jacket with wide padded shoulders and sprawling lapels, as well as high-waisted trousers. He might have been born in the U.S., but he speaks a distinct dialect from the streets of Mexico City, known as caló. He is first and foremost unapologetic about his complex Indigenous, European and American identity.
Zoot Suit goes back to World War II for inspiration. It is set in the background of the Zoot Suit Riots, during which young Chicanos were attacked on the street by American servicemen for perceived unpatriotic attire.
Zoot Suit was an absolute smash with every audience, but not with the Broadway critics in 1979, closing after a month.
During his time in New York, Valdez realized that he needed to tell the story of Ritchie Valens, a young Chicano who made rock ‘n’ roll hits. La Bamba follows Valens’ rise to stardom to his tragic death in what is known as “the day the music died.”
“We make America strong because we are America,” Valdez, now 86, says about being a Chicano.
Director David Alvarado met Valdez some 20 years ago at age 21, when he was inspired by Valdez’s remarks to pursue his own career in film.
“For six decades, Valdez has proven that Chicanos aren’t marginal to America – they are America,” Alvarado said in a director’s statement. “When power structures say we don’t belong, cinema becomes our most powerful tool to insist that we do.”
Valdez will be forever known as a man who drew Latinos to the theater, who brought hope and laughter to countless farmworkers and managed to send important political messages, without ever losing a sense of fun.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez is streaming for free on PBS until Wednesday, Nov. 4.