Geekscape Interviews: Luis Valdez on Social Injustice, Batman, and Influencing the Next Generation

“Injustices grows like weeds,” Luis Valdez tells me. “If you do nothing they’ll choke your whole garden, man.”

It’s a natural metaphor for Valdez to use. He spent his childhood following the harvests in central California valleys with his migrant farmer parents, and he stood on the picket lines with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers.

“It’s incumbent on every new generation to develop a social conscience and to really defend themselves.”

Hailed as the father of Chicano theatre, Luis Valdez’s voice has been heard on the theatrical stage, the cinema and on the front lines of protests. With a childhood background in theatre, he founded El Teatro Campesino, a theatre troupe composed entirely of farm workers for the United Farm Workers union. Their one-act plays toured migrant camps to entertain and enlighten both farmers and the public alike and were infused with social and political commentary. Valdez’s plays lifted the morale of the strikers during the toughest, most formative years in American history.

Eventually, Valdez would take his talents to the cinema, starting with the bombastic Zoot Suit (1981) starring Edward James Olmos. An adaptation of his smash-hit play, it was based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trials and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943.

In 1987, Luis Valdez captivated audiences worldwide with the American movie classic, La Bamba, his critically-acclaimed biopic of Chicano rock-‘n-roll star Ritchie Valens, whose untimely death alongside Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson became colloquially known as “The Day the Music Died.” Valdez’s film was nominated for Best Picture at the 1988 Golden Globes and currently holds a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The legendary Luis Valdez will be featured in the next episode of The Director’s Chair with Robert Rodriguez, set to air tonight at 8 PM EST/8:15 PT on El Rey Network. I had the chance to speak to Luis on his appearance on the show, his storied career, the Hispanic origins of Batman, and what the 74-year-old has next in store.

I apologize for getting a little meta as I interview you about your interview, but what went through your mind when you were first approached about being featured on The Director’s Chair?

Luis: I’ve been in this business for quite a while, I started fifty years ago. So to be invited to speak and have a conversation with Robert Rodriguez on a show on the network he started, I think it’s the mark of the tremendous progress that he has individually made but also for all the rest of us. I love his ambition, I love his grand vision, you know?

At the same time, I’m very appreciative of the fact that he has acknowledged my work in the line of succession with different playwrights and filmmakers and also in my relation to his work. All in all, it was a tremendously exhilarating experience.

Was there anything you discovered or rediscovered about yourself as you retraced your career?

Luis: When you do this, you start at the beginning of your career [that] was really focused on your own needs and obstacles, and ultimately you realize you’re not really doing it for yourself. I mean, if you’re lucky you realize it’s not for you. We love in a society, we live in a world that’s communal. We end up serving others and offer opportunities to your own work, and so the conversation [in The Director’s Chair] really underlined that, I think.

But at the same time that we’re talking about the past, we’re also servicing the future. There are all these young filmmakers, male and female that are watching the program, and looking at this interview between two filmmakers and I’m sure they come away thinking, “I can do this. I know what my future is.” In that sense, it’s a tremendous inspiration.

As one of those young filmmakers, that’s absolutely true. I’m itching to pick up a camera again.

Luis: [laughs]

So this is Geekscape and we’re all comic book nerds here. In The Director’s Chair you described El Pachuco as “Batman.” Can you elaborate a little more on that comparison?

Luis: You know, a lot of people don’t realize the roots of Batman are really Latino. They don’t go back to the bat god, the ones the Mayans had — they had one that was a “bat man,” they had sculptures of him, literally they had bats down there — but the other, more relatively recent inspiration for Batman was Zorro. But Zorro was based on the California bandits. Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburico Vásquez.

Tiburico Vásquez was a local, he lived in this town where I live now, [and] he used to wear all in black. He used to wear a cape, he was a dashing figure, he was hanged in San Jose in 1875 but he made the news. Even all the way to New York, they published the news about his hanging. But, the thing is, he was a romantic figure. So that was picked up, I think, [and] absorbed into the figure of Zorro which was a more fanciful, more romantic image of early California.

But then Zorro led to Batman, except now transplanted to the city and wearing a cape, but essentially dealing with crime, but still strange because he’s a “bat man.” So El Pachuco, in some ways, is also dressed in black, black and red, which are the colors of an ancient Aztec god, he comes from the school of hard knocks … I didn’t go exactly [into making him] as the bat god, but there are all these links and if you know history, particularly cultural history, you’ll see that there’s a continuity and it was important that we had a Latino superhero, who was above the constrictions of reality.

So, since Pachuco is mythical, even though they strip him he stands up like an Aztec god. Even though he can be confronted, no one can beat him. He says it’s gonna take more than the US Navy to wipe me out, because no army on Earth can defeat a mythological figure. And every people, in order to be free and to have sovereign power over their own destiny, has to have its own mythology. And so, I was just recapturing these roots for the Latino, but ultimately for all Americans.

You built your career on the picket lines, so to speak. Young Americans today have been very active, from Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson, Missouri. How do you feel about people speaking up in the way they’re doing it today?

Luis: It’s absolutely essential for every generation to capture that social responsibility. Injustice grows like weeds, okay? The injustices of the world are like weeds, and if you do nothing they’ll choke your whole garden, man.

It comes out of human beings, it comes from the dark side of the human being, when people don’t give a hoot about other people and they’ll steal and rob and rob the food out of baby’s mouths, so it’s incumbent on every new generation to develop a social conscience and to really defend themselves. And that takes demonstrations sometimes.

I wish they didn’t always have to go to the streets, but if we’re lucky we get representatives in Congress that can represent our interests. We have heavy obstacles in terms of the moneyed interests in Congress, there’s a lot of greed and corruption, let’s face it.

Of course.

Luis: So it is all important that young people stay aware and protect themselves.

In La Bamba you casted Lou Diamond Philips as Ritchie and faced a lot of criticism. I personally thought it was kind of cool because I’m Filipino.

Luis: Good for you! [laughs]

But in The Director’s Chair you said “the play’s the thing.” Even today, films are being criticized for racial miscasting. Do you believe audience anger towards those casting decisions are justified?

Luis: It depends on where it’s coming from. A lot of the public responses are based on the prejudices and ignorance, they’ve been inherited from previous generations. If you know anything about history, particularly California agriculture for instance, I grew up with Filipinos, Chinese and Japanese. California has always been a multicultural state, but the thing is, you’ve got to open your eyes and people in general need to get over their own prejudices.

One of the great things about the Delano grape strike is that it combined Filipinos and Mexicans together for the first time in that kind of intense and successful way. There had been strikes dating all the way back to the ’20s with Filipino workers, they were part of the … workforce, in the fields, they had a right to complain about the working conditions, they faced tremendous discrimination and yet, they’re related. They’re like cousins to Mexicans. Mexicans don’t realize that, the Filipinos are like the Asian Hispanics.

My last name is Francisco!

Luis: Yeah! So all that is really something that people can change their minds about if they’re educated. Part of our journey too is to educate people, [which] I like to do through the arts. That’s how you sweeten the lesson, you entertain people but you teach them about their own history.

You said in The Director’s Chair that you still have a lot ahead of you, that you’re in “Act Three” so to speak. Does that mean we might see you direct another film? If so, what kind of movie do you want to tackle?

Luis: I have a new play called Valley of the Heart’s Delight which is still making its way up the ranks towards LA. I would like to film that. I would love to make it a film. It’s a love story between a Mexican farm worker and the daughter of his Japanese employer in Silicon Valley.

It’s [set in] 1941 just on the eve of World War II. It’s intense, it’s based on one of my childhood friends on the love story of his parents because he was half-Mexican, half-Japanese, and so it has been a very successful play, we put it in workshops, and now it’s just starting to climb the ladder. It’ll get to LA, and I hope people will see the possibilities for a movie. I’d love to film that.

Thank you so much for speaking to me today, Mr. Valdez. It’s been a pleasure.

Luis: Thank you, man. Good luck on your career.

The Director’s Chair with Luis Valdez airs tonight on the El Rey Network at 8 PM EST/8:15 PT. It will be followed by La Bamba at 9 PM EST/ 9:15 PT. Check your local listings for El Rey.