eres el mundo
y las paredes de los
buildings mas grandes
son nothing but scenery.
(Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino)
Why begin the study of American drama with the early Shakespeare performances, the bowdlerized versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the founding of the Provincetown Players? After an intense look at Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, a different approach suggests itself. Why not connect theater back to the very first theatrical performances in the United States in 1598 (Don Juan de Oñate), then on to the pastorelas, heroic dramas, amateur, and professional theaters operating continuously in the Southwest, California, and Texas right up to the present?
Let’s teach by tracing American theater back to its Spanish and Latino/a origins as well as to the rituals of Aztlan and the drama associated with the church. William Worthen argues that
Chicana/o theatre is a deeply hybridized theatre, drawing on a wide variety of formal traditions: Aztec ritual; Spanish and colonial drama; Mexican drama; pastorelas and other Church drama; the popular carpa and zarzuela shows operating in Mexico and the Southwest from the turn of the century through the 1950s; genres like the novela drawn from Mexican film and television; and forms derived from European and Euro-American drama, both a realism echoing Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams and an insistent reworking of formal and ideological "alienation" in the Brechtian mode. (101)
Studying theater by starting with Zoot Suit opens up the world and opens up drama.
Zoot Suit can easily be used to structure a course in American theater; studying it can also introduce a world drama class or provide a revealing case study within a literature survey.
I begin by suggesting an overall strategy and then turn to action – ideas for (literally) breaking into the world of the play.
Understandings and Goals
Teachers can use the study of Zoot Suit, placed in its historical and cultural context, to achieve the following understandings and goals.
Understandings:
Theatre began as (and ideally continues to be) a celebratory community event which helps to define the community and which serves to bring isolated individuals into the larger community (Frye and Barber).
In drama, the opposing forces come into creative opposition (Levi-Strauss).
Theatre can dramatize and clarify social injustice and be a force for change toward a more equal society (Boal).
Theater can function both to awaken the audience to the power of media and to critique its failings (Brecht).
Goals:
Students will
o build community within the class.
o understand and appreciate the theatrical, social, political, and personal significance of a people’s theatre and of Zoot Suit within the context of theatre history.
o see drama as more than entertainment – as action within the social/ political reality.
o awake, after reading or watching Zoot Suit, into awareness of the power of media and to their own conditioned responses.
Zoot Suit as a door into drama
Combining student presentations, lectures, and readings, I like to use the play to point toward the entire history of theater, and to see the sophisticated ways in which Valdez recalls and re-works that history.
The following points are examples of the connections that it is possible to make between Zoot Suit and the history of drama.
Ø The figures of El Pachuco and the Press, while absolutely specific to the story, also connect to the stock figures of Commedia dell’Arte, to the characters like God and the Devil in the medieval mystery cycles, and to the actos which Valdez himself developed on the picket lines of the 1965 United Farm Workers grape strike.
Ø The post-Zoot Suit riot scene in which El Pachuco is stripped almost naked connects to the tradition of the mito. Jorge Huerta claims that this scene “suggests the sacrificial ‘god’ of the Aztecs, stripped bare before his heart is offered to the cosmos” (“Introduction” 14).
Ø Valdez’s filmed version makes use of the Los Angeles theater in which Zoot Suit first played and looks backward to the history of theater in North America even before California statehood: Spanish and colonial theater.
Ø Realistic scenes such as the Reyna family argument over Lupe‘s dress length or the meeting between George the attorney and his prospective clients (the members of the 38th Street gang) recall the realism developed within the theater, a realism that moved out into film and television, what Worthen calls genres like “the [tele] novela drawn from Mexican film and television; and forms derived from European and Euro-American drama” (100).
Ø The musical numbers which punctuate the entire play point toward the connection of theater to corridos and the carpa and zarzuela shows, as well as opera, operetta, musical theater, and Saturday Night Live.
Ø The “stylization” by which action is halted while Henry and El Pachuco engage in psychological battle points toward the drive within drama from Sophocles on to find a sufficient form that could help the audience see into the soul of the character and which went through experiments like Strange Interlude (O’Neill), The Verge (Glaspell) and separation of characters into multiple “selves” (Gao Xingjian).
Ø Valdez’s meta-theatrical moves echo and complicate the theories of Brecht and Boal. “The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically . . . by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play. The production took the subject-matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation that is necessary to all understandings” (Brecht 71).
Ø Furthermore, the multiple possible conclusions to the drama, suggested but not conclusively upheld, make the play post-modern and deconstructionist, a term David Henry Hwang claimed for M. Butterfly.
Practical and specific suggestions: Studying Zoot Suit day by day
Cutting through language: first steps
1. Since the Press becomes the prosecutor in the trial, it is crucial for students to connect to the idea of media as a tool for a vendetta. I tape together at least eight double sheets of newspaper in a floor-to-ceiling curtain and then have one student, dressed as closely as possible to El Pachuco, rip through the papers with a plastic knife labeled “switchblade” and step through, then stop before speaking.
a. Ask the students to brainstorm what this action means. Whatever they come up with, they definitely will see anger directed against the Press (newspapers), 40’s clothes (setting the action in the past), possibly the idea of cutting through lies perpetrated by the Press, possibly showing what is behind those lies, and possibly thinking about what sort of “switch” El Pachuco is making with his blade.
b. Students who know that switchblades were not used in the 1940’s may force the class to think about why Valdez would deliberately use this anachronism when the rest of the play is fairly faithful to the period (Broyles-Gonzalez 183).
2. After the student portraying El Pachuco delivers his lines, ask students to brainstorm in small groups why Valdez begins with Spanish, and exactly what he means by referring to himself as “existential,” “profane and reverential,” “mas chucote que la chingada,” and, of course, the “Myth.” What world is created by the language? By the use of Pachuco slang? By the alternatives offered within the lines: “precursor of revolution” or “joke/ deserving of absolution”? A particularly telling story which informs Valdez’s emphasis on existential choice comes from an interview with his son, Kinan Valdez:
Valdez's vision of the pachuco was shaped by those he saw growing up in his hometown of Delano. One pachuco named C.C., a friend of his cousin Billy, stood out from the rest.
"My cousin Billy died a pachuco death, 17 knife wounds to the chest ... but C.C. survived," Luis Valdez said. "C.C. went from being a teenager to being a sailor to ... desegregating Delano theater to organizing the unions. He became Cesar Chavez. C.C. was Cesar Chavez and that's his picture right there, actually."
With that, Valdez points to a picture of a young Cesar Chavez, long before he became a famed labor leader, standing next to cousin Billy and another young pachuco. The trio look cool and tough at once, the classic pachuco profile.
"Cesar Chavez was a 'chuco," Valdez said with a grin. "It was great." (Cabrera)
3. Focus next on Henry Reyna’s name. Knowing that the actual character was named Henry Leyva, ask why Valdez chooses “Reyna.” What effect does that name have on the audience? Here, one might use ideas from Northrop Frye and Aristotle’s Poetics to set up the idea of a tragic hero. Or the students may simply consider the psychology implied by Henry’s name and by his family’s pride in him – and his own pride.
Taking on the Roles
After getting Cesar Chavez’s permission, Valdez worked with the striking farmworkers to develop the very first actos, realizing that violence could escalate easily on the picket lines of the UFW Grape Strike in Delano, California, 1965. Valdez began with Valdez’s belief that “Teatro / eres el mundo,” that drama could help the farmworkers to deal with the betrayal of the scabs (Esquiroles) and with articulating their own positions, for themselves.
Ask students to act out, in small groups, short scenes from Zoot Suit as if they were actos. Ask them to bring in costumes that fit the forties or what they consider equivalent costumes for the current year. Ask each group to connect Valdez’s goals for actos to the scene which they perform: “Inspire the audience to social actions. Illuminate specific points about social problems. Satirize the opposition. Show or hint at a solution. Express what people are feeling” (Valdez and Teatro Campesino 6). Some students may volunteer to perform their scenes for the whole class but the experience of acting, even within a small group, is in itself illuminating. Examples of scenes that can work well: “Pachuco Yo,” “Opening of the Trial,” and “The Incorrigible Pachuco.”
Follow-ups:
Writing, possibly online, about the experience of acting the parts
Developing, in small groups, original actos that respond to current issues
Debating the use of stereotyped, essentialized characters
Critical Thinking
In keeping with the courtroom setting of much of the play, setting up a situation for critical thinking can be accomplished using a courtroom structure.
An example of a possible debate topic is Ashley Lucas’s claim about the play:
In using the same images that stigmatize Chicana/os to promote a positive image of their ethnic identity, Valdez uses the tools of media terrorism, including language and visual imagery, to dismantle the ideology that stigmatized Mexican Americans in the mainstream media of the 1940s and to promote a positive conception of Chicana/o identity in the 1970s through the reworking of previously negative media images. In effect, he revises the historical memory of the zoot-suited Mexican Americans of the 1940s, transforming these youths from symbols of criminality into heroic icons of radical resistance against cultural oppression. (Lucas 61)
This claim could generate a great deal of research but it is also possible to argue the clause in bold by using lines and images and arguments from the play itself.
Preliminary preparation: Let all the students write down their thoughts and then argue their positions within a small group of 4 students.
The “Trial” itself:
1. Split the class into characters (witnesses), Judge, Prosecutors (a team), and Defensive Attorneys (a team)
2. Students should ask questions of the characters, including questions asked within the play.
3. Witnesses are questioned by both the prosecutorial and defense teams.
4. Each time a person is named, she or he (including the Press, Alice, and George) must stand up.
5. The entire class is the jury and will vote at the end.
If the Lucas quote does not appeal, then debate
Ø whether it matters that the play misrepresents some historic facts,
Ø whether the play reinforces or critiques misogyny,
Ø why Zoot Suit failed on Broadway,
Ø whether ideas in Zoot Suit could apply to the Trayvon Martin case or the Fruitvale Station case.
Latino/a literature
Although I have been contending that Zoot Suit is a gateway to all of theater, it is also true that that it is a text that connects specifically to Latino/a identity and culture. By focusing on one of the pivotal moments of twentieth-century Latino/a history, and by use of El Pachuco, in all his allusiveness, Valdez’s achievement may be seen as a defining moment in Latino/a literature. With his intense examination of the issue of identity, with his tri-lingual dialogue, with his fast-paced action, with his exposure of and satire on the American “justice” system, and with scenes that make visible internal psychological struggle, Valdez set a high standard for Latino/a theater.
Valdez says, “I have always believed that theater is the creator of community and that the community is the creator of theater” (KTEHTV) and he demonstrates that principal through the inclusiveness of Zoot Suit with “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” all part of the drama, with tragedy and comedy and music, with Brechtian alienation and heart-wrenching abuse of young men and women. Valdez welcomes the opening up of Zoot Suit to students. He embraced the selection of a female high school student to play the Pachuco (KTEHTV).
Follow Valdez’s lead. Let students bring in ideas from Anzaldua’s Borderlands/ La Frontera or Chela Sandoval’s thoughts about oppositional consciousness; let students read the harsh critique of Zoot Suit by Ingrid Mundel -- then think for themselves; let students bring their own experiences, their own languages, their own cultures to their understanding of the play. Then set them loose to write their own plays, to be actors in the world as well as on stage, to choose the roles they will play.
Works Cited
Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature.
London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Print.
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A and Maria-Odilia Leal
McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Print.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang,
1964. Print.
Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chiano Movement.
Austin: U of Texas P: 1994. Print.
Cabrera, Marc. “Wearing his Father’s ‘Suit’: Kinan Valdez stages a revival of ‘Zoot
Suit,’ the iconic Chiano-themed play made famous by his father Luis Valdez.
Monterey County Herald. July 20, 2007. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.
Huerta, Jorge. “Introduction.” Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Luis Valdez. Houston: Arte
Publico Press, 1992. Print.
Huerta, Jorge. “Luis Valdez: Overview.” Contemporary Dramatists, 5th ed. London: St.
James Press (1993). Print.
Jacobus, Lee A., Ed. The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St.
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KTEHTV. This is Us – Luis Valdez. Jan. 10, 2009. Video. YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPFm9A_xRM. June 12, 2014.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structural Anthropology.
Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic, 1963.
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Lucas, Ashley. “Reinventing the Pachuco: The Radical Transformation from the
Criminalized to the Heroic in Luis Valdez's Play Zoot Suit.” Journal for the Study
of Radicalism 3:1. (2009) 61-87. Print.
Mundel, Ingrid. “Performing (R) evolution: The Story of El Teatro Campesino.”
Postcolonial Text. 3.1 1-16. (2007). Web.
Pizzato, Mark. Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From ancient ritual to screen violence.
Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. Print.
Stavans, Ilan, Ed. Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. New York: Norton, 2011.
Print.
Valdez, Luis, and Teatro Campesino. Actos. San Juan Bautista: Menyah Productions,
1971. Print.
Valdez, Luis. Envisioning California: Peoples, Land, and Policies. February 9-11, 1989.
Sacramento: Center for California Studies, Fall 1995. Print.
Valdez, Luis. “Soldado Raso.” El Andar February 1991. N.p. Print.
Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Publico, 1992. Print.
Worthen, William B. “Staging America: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre.”
Theatre Journal 49.2 1997. 101-20. Print.