SOURCE: "Zoot Suit: From the Barrio to Broadway," in Ideologies and Literature, Vol. 3, No. 15, January-March, 1981, pp. 124-33.

[Davis is an American critic with a special interest in the theater. In the following essay, he and Diamond trace the evolution of Zoot Suit from its inception to Broadway and examine the reasons for its failure.]

Zoot Suit, by Luis Valdez, was the first Chicano play on Broadway. Valdez chose as his subject an actual event—the Sleepy Lagoon Murder case. On August 2, 1942, José Díaz was found dead in a dirt road near Los Angeles. There were no witnesses and no murder weapon, but twenty-four Chicanos were indicated for the murder of this one boy. The Hearst papers played it up as a "Mexican crimewave," and in the trial the Chicanos involved were referred to as members of a "gang." The prosecution charged that one of the members of the gang, Henry Leyvas, was beaten by members of a rival gang at the reservoir nicknamed "Sleepy Lagoon," and that Leyvas and his gang returned armed and organized for the purpose of revenge on the rival gang. Admitted as evidence was this statement from a report written by Capt. E. Duran Ayers, Chief of Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department:

The biological basis is the main basis to work from. Although a wild cat and a domestic cat are of the same family, they have certain biological characteristics so different that while one may be domesticated, the other would have to be caged to be kept in captivity; and there is practically as much difference between the races of man as so aptly recognized by Rudyard Kipling when he said when writing of the Oriental, 'East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,' which gives us an insight into the present problem because the Indian, from Alaska to Patagonia, is evidently Oriental in background—at least he shows many of the Oriental characteristics, especially so in his utter disregard for the value of life.

Ayers traces the "utter disregard for the value of life" back to the Aztec sacrifices. Of the twenty-four Chicano boys indicted, seventeen were convicted. Three were found guilty of first degree murder; two of second degree. One, asleep in his car through the whole incident, was given five years to life. All were sent to San Quentin. Two boys who had enough money for their own lawyers demanded separate trials, and their cases were dismissed for insufficient evidence. On October 4, 1944, the District Court of Appeals, in a unanimous decision, reversed the conviction of all the defendants and the case was later dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Valdez' choice of subject was thus clearly a political one. Zoot Suit, a docu-drama with music, focuses on the trial of Henry Reyna—the fictionalized Henry Leyvas and leader of the pachuco gang—on Reyna's relationship to his family and friends, and on the relationship of the pachuco to the Mexican-American community. The play gets its name from the exaggerated clothing that was the badge of the pachuco—high-waisted, baggy, pegged pants; square-shouldered, oversized jacket; and long, dangling key chain.

Zoot Suit began as an experimental production of the Mark Taper Forum's "New Theatre for Now" series in April, 1978. The response to the original fourteen performances was electric enough to convince Gordon Davidson, the Forum's artistic director, to move it to the theatre's main space, rework it, and have it open the Forum's twelfth season.

In October, 1978, after a successful six-week run at the Forum, Zoot Suit moved to the 1200-seat Aquarius Theatre in downtown L.A. where it remained until [summer, 1980]. It brought in an average of $90-100,000 a week. While still playing in L.A., a modified version opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden on March 25, 1979, and closed April 29, after 17 performances, at an $800,000 loss.

It is possible the play failed on Broadway, as Valdez contends, because of racist reviewers. Even though plays can endure despite negative reviews, New York reviewers are extremely influential figures and they almost universally panned the play. Focusing on the issue of racism, however, diverts us from a far more significant issue: that Zoot Suit, as presented on Broadway, was in fact a bad play, politically and aesthetically.

In case anyone has any doubts about this being "Brechtian" theatre—and we mention this because the work of Valdez is constantly described as being "somewhere between Brecht and Cantinflas"—Valdez opens the play with the disclaimer, mouthed by El Pachuco, the interlocutor and Spirit of the pachuco, that the theatre by nature is a place of pretense, a place of fantasy. The docu-drama is thus undercut before the newspapers which form much of the set (symbolizing the complicity of the Hearst papers in the racist hysteria of the period) are brought on stage. And at the end of the play, Henry Reyna, released from jail, finds himself in a dilemma: shall he marry Alice Bloomfield, the Jewish Communist working for the Defense Committee which grew up around the Sleepy Lagoon case, or his faithful Chicana, Della Barrios? (With such a name, Henry's ultimate choice is predestined.) The false love story between Alice and Henry, a love which never happened in the real case, is so badly written that the progressive Alice—and in turn her politics—is laughed at.

In the thirteen years of his work with El Teatro Campesino, Valdez was conscious of his social role, and in Zoot Suit, many social and political issues are touched upon: the complicity of the Hearst press, the racism of the judicial and penal systems, the nature of Chicano family relationships. But rather than politicizing the events by deepening the analysis, Valdez adds musical dance numbers to keep the spirits up, leaves the barrio behind, sentimentalizes all relationships in order to make his "message" palatable and saleable, and invests his Pachuco with Indian and Existential consciousness.

It is the pachuco, the 1940's street youth, who is the central focus of the play. In addition to the pachucos who make up Henry's gang, there is the larger than life character—El Pachuco—who speaks directly to the audience, wittily introduces and interrupts the play, criticizes the action and acts as Henry Reyna's inner voice, El Pachuco is the mythic spirit of "pachuquismo." Valdez claims this existential rebellious youth is the predecessor of the Mexican-American consciousness of the early '70's Chicanismo. This mythic interpretation of the real-life pachuco is one of the central political problems of the play.

To understand where this interpretation of the pachuco comes from, it is helpful to look briefly at the history of El Teatro Campesino. When Valdez started El Teatro Campesino in 1965, he was responding to immediate material needs: the U.F.W. needed workers to leave the fields and Anglos to send money for support. So Valdez and his campesinos created "actos," agit-prop pieces to do just that. After two years, he and his teatro left Delano and the U.F.W. because he wanted to devote more time to teatro; because he wanted to deal with broader issues—Viet Nam, racism, imperialism, the situation of the urban Chicano; and because he wanted to do teatro only about Chicanos, a position clearly untenable in the multi-ethnic U.F.W., yet in keeping with the increasingly nationalist thrust of the chicano movement at that time. Accordingly, the earliest works of Campesino are peopled by campesinos, patrones, coyotes, and esquiroles, but it is not long before the figure of the pachuco appears.

At first a minor character whose "bilingualism" consists of the ability to say both "En la madre la placa" and "Fuck you," and whose money is made by "liberating" purses, the pachuco becomes, in the person of the "vato loco," the contemporary street dude, a rebel-hero who, allied with a Black Panther, "liberates" the college that has refused him admission.

Once separated from the U.F.W., Valdez' plays come more and more to treat the question of ethnic identity and national consciousness. Actos begin to be accompanied by "mitos," religious rituals and plays with metaphysical themes. The shift in theme is not as dramatic as it first appears, however, for even in his U.F.W. days Valdez spoke of Chicano identity in terms which included Aztec Mayan and Christian religious thought, mysticism, and mythification.

Accordingly, the pachuco is, in one play, the character who is most sympathetic to the revolutionary cries of "Viva Villa" which emanate from a bodiless head with a Villa moustache and a voracious appetite for cockroaches; but in another, he appears as the unseen central character, Quetzalcoatl Gonzales, a cultural nationalist and community leader, whose name and activities suggest this vato is linked to the Aztec savior-god, Quetzalcoatl. The pachuco is rebel/hero/savior.

In 1974, by the way, because of such mitos, Valdez came under attack for "misleading the people" and ultimately left TENAZ, an association of Chicano theatres which he helped found, because he did not accept the increasing criticism of his essentially religious solutions to material problems.

It is in the 1976 touring version of El Fin del Mundo that the character of the vato, played, as in Zoot Suit, by Daniel Valdez, is given its closest examination. The story of Raymundo Mata, while a naturalistic story of union organizing in "Burlap, California," is also encased in an obvious symbolic framework. It is the story of the "end of the world" as we know it today, and of the literal "end"—the death—of Raymundo Mata, known in the barrio as "el Mundo." In the play, although Mundo is held up as a potential model, there is a serious study of the contradictions within him and of the complications of using such a figure as hero. Mundo, the local drug dealer, arrogant, rebellious in the face of authorities, violent, sexist, egocentric, is willing to do anything for money, even disrupt the U.F.W.'s organizing. Ultimately, he learns compassion, faith, and brotherhood, but at the very moment of his apotheosis, he is killed. It is clear that as a street dude, he is useless, even harmful, to his community. It is only after he has harnessed his rebelliousness that he becomes useful and admirable.

In Zoot Suit, however, the complexities are lost and the historical facts, distorted, in the service of mythification. El Pachuco is presented as a model, but just what does he model? In an interview with Valdez in New York City on December 30, 1978, R. G. Davis pointed out that El Pachuco is like Superfly, and that Superfly, the pimp hustler of Black exploitation films, is different from the working class Blacks moving up and buying a house in the white ghetto of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun. The regressing Superfly is a no-work character much like Zoot Suit's Pachuco. Neither one shows or demonstrated work; in fact, they secret their labor. How did they get their two hundred dollars for those threads? Such a model is not useful.

Furthermore, as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto point out in an unpublished paper entitled "Un Análisis Crìtico de Zoot Suit de Luis Valdez," not all pachucos were "lumpen." Some worked and "eran como pachucos de fin de semana." Thus, they continue, Valdez' portrait of El Pachuco and the pachuco gang members furthers a simplistic stereotype. (Valdez must have been somewhat aware of this criticism because he tries to avert it by having Communist Alice comment to Henry: "You're an excellent mechanic. You fix all the guy's cars. Well, at least you're not one of the lumpen proletariat." Her analysis is, at best, weak.)

The pachuco is also presented as a defender of Chicano pride and culture, as a rebel. He is meant to be seen, as we are repeatedly told, as the "home front warrior." But to what end? The only value he articulates is that he "takes no shit from anyone." True, the pachuco possesses a rebelliousness, but it is totally without direction; it is a blind lashing out. Richard A. Garcìa, a Chicano historian at UC-Irvine, argues with Valdez' interpretation of the pachuco. In a Los Angeles Times article [published on August 27, 1978], he wrote that pachucos are regarded by some as:

The first Mexican-Americans to have consciously celebrated their bicultural heritage. This view is dangerously romantic and historically false. Indeed, pachucos—far from being progressive—were among the most reactionary segments of the Mexican-American community…. The failure to distinguish clearly between criminal behavior and authentic political action underlies current attempts to turn pachucos into Chicano folk heroes.

Valdez' elevation of the pachuco to the status of social bandit is like Norman Mailer's encomium of subway graffiti as a grand existential assertion of "I am." There is much energy and much anger in such scrawling, but when the graffiti cover up the subway map, you get lost.

Valdez realizes that he has distorted the character of the pachuco. In the Davis interview, Valdez states that the pachuco is a creation of 1978, not of 1942; that he represents a consciousness that is present today. He also says that the pachuco does not represent an ultimate solution, but is only a phase, a symbol that change is possible, that Chicanos can do something with their lives. In Zoot Suit, however, the fact that the pachuco must be transformed before he can do something useful is undercut. One of the pachucos in San Quentin turns to the audience and declaims naively that he has come to a grand realization: when he gets out of jail, the thing he can do is become a union organizer (audience laughter)—or a professional baseball player (more audience laughter). The "message" is played for a laugh. Similarly, that the pachuco can become useful only when he changes and ceases to be a pachuco is contradicted by the insistence upon the mythic, i.e., static, nature of El Pachuco.

Valdez wants the figurative character and the documented imitation of Henry Reyna to carry all the weight of his own Chicanismo and Mayan Aztec mysticism. Henry is a tough blowhard, but loves his family. El Pachuco is a tough blowhard, but is beaten up by Marines and Sailors and ends up naked, except for a loincloth, on stage in a pool of light. The loincloth is supposed to represent, if you know Campesino's mitos, the Indian under the clothes of the city dude. The image is barely understood by those of us who know, giggled at by Chicanos in the Los Angeles audience, and viewed as melodramatic and confusing in New York City. Thus the confused politics produces confused art.

The other political problems in the play are also inseparable from the aesthetic problems. When a cultural nationalist goes to Broadway to reach a "wider audience," his message, which previously gained much of its force precisely from its cultural specificity, must be diluted to be intelligible to those not a part of that culture. Valdez, in other words, had to professionalize the "rasquachiness" that gave the works of El Teatro Campesino their unique force and vigor.

According to Valdez, the major changes in Zoot Suit were made before the trip to Broadway, between the original version as played on the Taper's experimental stage, and the version as performed on the main stage of the Forum. It is at this juncture that the barrio disappeared from the set and the Las Vegas shiny dance floor stage emerged; the love story between Alice Bloomfield and Henry Reyna came to dominate the historical/political material; and the production staff, formerly members of Campesino, was changed. (Pat Birch of Grease fame, for example, became principal choreographer; Thomas A. Walsh, a set designer, replaced Bob Morales; and Abe Jacob, a sound designer, was added.)

But the play was a great success in L.A. even after the professionalization and homogenization began. There is another, very slippery, issue here. The success of Zoot Suit in L.A. was due, in part, to the California audience—Chicano and non-Chicano—which could read the geography and personal Chicano experiences into the play, however simple the characterizations, just as Campesino's original farmworker audience could read into the agitprop "actos" in Delano.

In Valdez' earliest works, the people on stage and the people off-stage were the same. They came from the same place and their concerns were specifically those of the Huelga. Even when those concerns broadened, the effect of the actors and plays was great because the Chicano performers' persona gave an additional dimension to the plays. They were speaking the language of the audience, legitimizing its culture. So when someone on stage said "Chale, ese," the audience roared at hearing its private language in a public place; there was the laughter of recognition, of complicity.

Similarly, in Los Angeles, when El Pachuco came on stage and preened in his Zoot Suit, the largely Chicano audience went wild. In New York, however, there was an embarrassed silence, perhaps a chuckle or two. As Clive Barnes wrote, "Broadway is not the street where it lives." Though Barnes' comment may have been motivated by East Coast snobbery, it has a certain validity. Take away the Chicano audience and the Chicano actors, take away the Chicano locale, and all you have left is the play itself, a play which does not hold up to critical scrutiny.

Also, once on Broadway, the play had to be changed even further to reach not merely a wider "audience," but a wider "market." Culture, politics, become part of a product that must be packaged and sold. The Shubert Organization, owners of seventeen theatres on Broadway and the producers of Zoot Suit, was interested in developing the newly discovered Hispanic market, a market which Hollywood has also recently discovered (Gang, Boulevard Nights, Up in Smoke.)

The show had to be changed to fit both the white New York theatre scene, and to attract the Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican audience. Accordingly, it was cut and reshaped to fit what Valdez and Davidson would "work" in New York. But it is a tricky problem to reach a wider audience rather than cater to it, as one moves from local community to state and on to the national stage. "Once the Broadway machinery takes hold, other things happen," said Davidson.

The first problem was that of language. The Wiz, Ain't Misbehavin', Eubie, Timbuctoo are "Black" shows, but they are big musicals that attract both Blacks and whites to the theatre. But if a play is in Spanish, only the Spanish speaking will attend. Political problem: in the actos, one way in which the Good Guys were distinguished from the Bad Guys was their embrace of Chicano Spanish. We know "Miss JIM-enez" is a villain because she denies her culture and anglicizes the pronounciation of her name. However, the more Zoot Suit belonged to the Spanish speaking, the less it could be understood by the English speaking. And the more Chicano slang, the less it could be understood by Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans. Thus to reach a wider audience market, the language had to change. One political point down. Spanish/slang out: sentimentalized English in.

A different set of problems resulted from the marketing scheme of placing Zoot Suit in the Winter Garden, a large theatre which demands musical extravaganza. The play was too small for the house. In addition, the 1943 Zoot Suit riots in which white sailors and marines attacked pachucos in L.A. seemed a bit distant in this docu-drama interrupted by dance and song. The historical importance of these events was buried by flashback and flashy gimmicry. (The "minority" play most recently at the Winter Garden was Comin' Uptown, an all Black musical version of A Christmas Carol. Its politics? Scrooge is a black tap dancing slum landlord.)

Finally, problems in the play also came from Valdez' politics of cultural nationalism. He did not want Anglos to walk out,—to get his "message" to them and to sell them tickets. However, because Valdez does still experience the world as divided between "us" and "them," his ability to understand those outside his culture is limited. We get recreations of others experiences, i.e., characters from bad movies. In Zoot Suit, we have the heroic white liberal lawyer whose startling message is that the system works, and the feisty Jewish Communist who of course falls in love with Henry, ever true to the cheap theatrics that two who are antagonists at the beginning of a show will become lovers by its end.

Also, Valdez' cultural nationalism relies heavily on the "spirituality" that is, in his view, the inheritance of the Chicanos from their Indian past. He believes in his "mission": Zoot Suit, he said to R. G. Davis when asked how the play was going in L.A. "is doing what it is supposed to do, what it has to do." He has faith. He, by himself, would change Establishment theatre. Campesino would take over, though just how the takeover was to be accomplished and what would happen once it had, was vague, rather like the unfocused rebelliousness of the pachuco hero Henry Reyna. Valdez has faith, rather than a proposal. So too Zoot Suit.

It is not Valdez' success one criticizes, for who in the good world of the liberal left dare proclaim poverty is moral? But what Zoot Suit offers us is ultimately the pachuco. While the performance of Eddie Olmos on Broadway lent an alluring stature to El Pachuco, the real life pachuco was a kid, a clothes model, an image of political reaction and temporary identity rebelliousness. To select as truth only those elements one wishes to see as true, to ignore the historical reality of the central characters of a drama based on political fact, is to create a model of the Chicano as useless as the Frito Bandito.