Луис Вальдес: Отец Чикано-театра и кино

American writer and director

Luis Miguel Valdez (born June 26, 1940) is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and playwriting, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.

Valdez was born in Delano, California, to migrant farm worker parents from Mexico, Armeda and Francisco Valdez. 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.

Valdez began school in Stratford, California. 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." 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.

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.). While in Fresno, Valdez taught at Fresno State University 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. 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. 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. His recent play Valley of the Heart, debuted October 30, 2018, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He resides in San Juan Bautista, CA. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2015.

Valdez's first work that brought him attention to larger audiences was the play Zoot Suit which ran in 1978 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and played for forty six weeks to more than 40,000 people. With Zoot Suit, Valdez became the first Chicano director to have a play presented on Broadway in 1979. In 1981, it was made into a film. In Zoot Suit, Valdez weaves a story involving the real life events of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial—when a group of young Mexican Americans were wrongfully charged with murder—and the Zoot Suit riots. In 2019, the film Zoot Suit was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The film that brought Valdez his "breakthrough into mainstream America" was La Bamba which debuted in 1987. The film, about Ritchie Valens, a popular Chicano 1950s rock and roller, "was an overwhelming box office success" according to BookRags. It was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2017.