When playwright Luis Valdez withdraws to rewrite a script, he envisions himself not as some great Spanish playwright, but like Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman in a stuffy room in New York City smoking cigars and eating Hershey bars. The only difference is that he loves cigars and hates chocolate. "I'm as American as the next guy," he says. "It's just a question of being perceived as such."

In the theater, where that very question can make or break you, Valdez has come triumphantly into his own. With a new immigration law creating millions of hyphenated Hispanic-Americans, he is a powerful interpreter of their search for identity in an Anglo culture. He has succeeded by shaping the experience of Chicanos into drama that speaks to all Americans. His latest work, I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, has been cheered in Los Angeles and San Diego. Corridos, a series of Mexican folk ballads that won critical acclaim on the stage, will air as a special on PBS this fall. La Bamba, a movie about '50s rock-and-roller Ritchie Valens that Valdez wrote and directed, is being talked about as one of this summer's hot movies.

Badges is as middle-American as Archie Bunker. Buddy Villa, the testy father in the play, even complains of Asians ruining the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where he and his wife have made a comfortable home as the "silentbit king and queen of Hollywood." Their son drops out of Harvard Law School to find himself. Determined to become a movie star, he attacks his parents for playing anonymous stereotypical Chicano roles.

If Badges has ethnic origins, its dreams are mainstream. The play is as much a story of generational conflict as of assimilation. Jorge Huerta, an expert on Chicano theater, is struck by the distance between Badges and The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, an early Valdez work about Mexican parents trying to find themselves in America. "These people in Badges are middle class," says Huerta. "This is an American conflict. All Americans have gone through it." What Chicanos don't have to do, Badges says, is apologize for wanting to assimilate.

La Bamba is set in the '50s. Ritchie Valens is all-American, a poor boy who makes it on raw talent and honest ambition. A third-generation southern California kid who doesn't speak Spanish and has never seen Mexico, he becomes a star and records "La Bamba," the first song in Spanish to be a rock-and-roll hit. The film soars from its grainy documentary-style opening to the final crash everyone knows is coming. It has established Valdez, 46, as an accomplished filmmaker and prompted talk of other movie projects.

From the time Valdez first made it to Broadway with Zoot Suit, no one has done more to change how America perceives its Hispanic citizens. With Corridos, he brings to television the tradition of the Mexican-American folk ballad—densely textured weavings of story and song. "My work comes from the border," he says. "It is neither Mexican nor American. It's part of America, like Cajun music." With songs in Spanish and dialogue in English, Corridos features Linda Ronstadt, who is half Mexican. Smiles Valdez, who went over Ronstadt's songs with her word by word, "She sounds very authentic. You wouldn't know she doesn't speak Spanish."

Valdez's early plays mix Spanish and English. "I was on my way to being acculturated," he says of growing up in San Jose, Calif., in the '50s. "By the time I graduated from high school, my Spanish was in tatters. I got it back because I wanted it back." His ultimate concern, however, is not which language he uses, but what he has to say: "I'm writing in English now. It took me a long time to get to that. I needed a few Spanish words as an anchor." He switched when he found Chicano audiences, particularly the young, didn't want Spanish, didn't understand it. "My characters can speak English and be very Chicano at the same time," he says. His message is his medium: "I have something to give. I can unlock some things about the American landscape."

Valdez started as a migrant worker picking cotton and staging agitprop skits on the back of a flatbed to support Cesar Chavez's farm workers' union. His success and the direction of his recent work have caused some critics to accuse him of selling out. He admits to ambition. "There was a time when I spoke only to Chicanos. Now I want a national audience." But he also retains a firm grasp on his roots. During the filming of La Bamba, he was intrigued by the thought that he and Valens may have worked together in the orchards near San Jose. When the labor camp set was built, he took his parents on a tour. "It was so real," he says, "it was like stepping back into the past."