On Luis Valdez

ashley lucas university of north carolina at chapel hill Reinventing the Pachuco The Radical Transformation from the Criminalized to the Heroic in Luis Valdez’s Play Zoot Suit n 12 January 1943, at the highly publicized Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, a court wrongly convicted seventeen young men from Othe 38th Street neighborhood for murder and assault associated with the death of a young Mexican American named José Díaz.1 Th e Zoot Suit Riots occurred later that spring when members of the U.S. Navy and Marines attacked Mexican American youths, beat them, and stripped them naked in the streets of Los Angeles.2 In 1978, Luis Valdez’s landmark play Zoot Suit opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and in doing so became the first professionally produced Chicana/o play.3 All three events reflect the performance of terror in Mexican American communities and the processes of racial othering that create that terror. In his book Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Th eatre History, Anthony Kubiak describes the fundamental links between the performance of terror in life to the performance of terror in theater and the media.4 He sees acts of terror as necessarily taking place in view of a specific audience, those being terrorized. Acts committed with the intention of inspiring terror in others possess a theatrical or performative quality; they put on a show to elicit the specific emotional response of terror. This article examines the ways in which the play Zoot Suit reshapes performances of terror from the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2008, pp. 61–177. issn 1930-1189. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. 61 62 Ashley Lucas 1940s media, making the zoot suiter a symbol for resilience, creativity, and community pride rather than a threat to the safety of others. Th e Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots were both incited in large part by extremely negative media representations of Mexican American youth in the early 1940s. Historian Edward J. Escobar argues that the terrorizing acts committed against Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in 1943 caused the community to organize politically and to articulate their identity as Mexican Americans for the first time.5 isTh shift in community identity and political consciousness set the stage for the Chicano movement that would mobilize Mexican Americans more than two decades later. In theatrical expressions of identity politics, Luis Valdez and his theater company, El Teatro Campesino, used political performances to gain support for the United Farm Workers and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Zoot Suit builds on the political work done by activists and artists during the Chicano movement by refashioning the once criminalized zoot suiter as a symbol for Chicano power. Th e play attacks the 1940s media’s condemnation of young Mexican Americans and their culture, while also portraying the events that terrorized Mexican Americans literally and symbolically during the trial and the riots. Th e performance of Zoot Suit situates the judgmental media images of the early 1940s in light of a sociopolitical ideology from the Chicano movement that counters the hegemonic discourses that criminalize Chicana/o youth. 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 eff ect, 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. Criminally Fashionable: The Symbolic Resonances of the Pachuco Th e early 1940s media representations of Mexican American youth as dangerous criminals in stylized clothing set up Mexican Americans as Reinventing the Pachuco 63 ethnic others outside of U.S. hegemonic culture. Th is discourse is located in mainstream conceptions of the Mexican American zoot suiter, otherwise known as the pachuco.6 In an essay entitled “In Search of the Authentic Pachuco,” Arturo Madrid asserts, “From his beginnings the Pachuco has been a character endowed with mythic dimensions, a construct of fact and fiction, viewed with both hostility and curiosity, revulsion and fascination.”7 Historian Luis Alvarez also describes zoot suiters as figures to be understood in multiple ways. He argues that in the 1940s the media and government associated the zoot suit with “violence, drinking, premarital sex, and other immoral behavior,” whereas those actually wearing the zoot suit saw it as a “positive affirmation of one another.”8 eTh “mythic dimensions” of the pachuco stem from these contrasts in perception as well as from early media representations. Th e complex mythology of the pachuco as a cultural figure off ers up dramatically captivating images in the media and the theater because the pachuco is alluring yet frightening, working class yet dressed in expensive clothes, representative of a real community yet one imagined from the outside. Two of the more performative traits that defined the pachuco were his zoot suit and his language. Th e famous outfit of the zoot suiters consisted of “undershirts, baggy pants, long and colorful jackets, chains and little hats with a feather on the side.”9 Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz describes the appeal of the zoot suiter’s style: “One of the principles that rules in North American fashions is that clothing must be comfortable, and the pachuco, by changing ordinary apparel into art, makes it ‘impractical.’ Hence it negates the very principles of the model that inspired it. Hence its aggressiveness.”10 Paz’s emphasis on the zoot suit as art rather than mere fashion defines the pachuco as deliberately and overtly excessive. Th e flashy and performative quality of the zoot suit, whether read as aggressive or not, makes the pachuco a captivating subject for theater-makers. Long aft er real pachucos made their clothes into art, a Chicano playwright and his collaborators made art out of the pachuco himself. Luis Valdez and the Center Th eatre Group11 capitalized on the visual and dramatic potential of the stylish pachuco as a symbol of popular Chicana/o culture when they marketed the play Zoot Suit. Th e most famous poster for the play,12 designed by Ignacio Gómez, exoticizes the pachuco by advertising the boldness of zoot suit fashion and revealing its aesthetic attractiveness as a theatrical symbol. Th is full-color image outlines the pachuco’s black and red 64 Ashley Lucas zoot suit with a thin white halo eff ect, as though the pachuco had stage lights behind him. Th is pachuco’s body faces the spectator, whereas his head turns in slight profile, giving the impression that he is aware of his audience but does not feel the need to address them directly. Gómez depicts actor Edward James Olmos in his dramatic representation of the pachuco. In doing so, he glamorizes not only the pachuco image but Olmos himself, contributing to his status as a theatrical icon of pachuquismo. Gómez’s image markets the pachuco as a salable symbol of a popularized myth, a Chicano hero who battled the stigma of criminality and looked good doing it. Gómez and the show’s costume designers played up the fashion of the zoot suiters, while Valdez constructed characters whose radical use of language made the pachuco seem suave, defiant, and dangerously intelligent. eTh distinctive language practices of the pachuco capitalize on the fluidity of the youth culture and the hybridity of Mexican American identity. Pachuca/os in the 1930s and 1940s adopted archaic gypsy Spanish words and endowed them with new meaning.13 Th ey created new words from combinations of English and Spanish and started speaking in a form of slang called caló that was deliberately unintelligible to their parents’ generation. Th e dramatic shift s and improvisational nature of caló mixed with varieties of English and Spanish made the pachuco way of speaking excessive, like the zoot suit. Th ese qualities made the pachuco highly visible, creating an easily recognizable target for those who would persecute Mexican American youths. Terror in a Drape Shape: Pachucos in the 1940s Media Instead of headlining the failing economy and other huge social and political problems in the United States during World War II, the media targeted young Mexican Americans in distinctive dress as a major threat to the safety of the good people of Los Angeles.14 Th e pachucos were portrayed in the media as perpetrators of violence with enormous potential for further violent behavior. In the general public’s eyes, the racialized depiction of the pachuco in the news linked all ethnic Mexicans in the United States to crime, defining them as fundamentally outside of mainstream society. Th e zoot suiter became, in Anthony Kubiak’s terms, “an objectification of terror in the ideology of the violent image.”15 Th e media produced a false terror that helped to shift the Reinventing the Pachuco 65 national consciousness away from the real horrors of World War II, and ironically, as U.S. nationalism rallied against Hitler’s genocidal ideology, a new racially charged brand of terror arose in inner-city Los Angeles. Th e persecution of Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles media immediately follows, not coincidentally, the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. As historian Rodolfo Acuña succinctly states, “With the Japanese gone, Mexicans became the most natural scapegoats.”16 Prejudicial, race-based ideologies expressed in public discourse before the trial created the hostile climate from which the Sleepy Lagoon media frenzy erupted.

Load more