The biographical documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” turns a spotlight on the career of a stage and screen director who broke ground in providing performance platforms for Chicano voices. He is Luis Valdez, who is now in his 80s, and who, along with his siblings and collaborators, in the movie explains how he came to have a life in politically charged theater.
Valdez describes being born in 1940 to farm workers at a labor camp in California; his brother Danny remembers how Luis would perform puppet shows at such camps. Valdez and the labor organizer Dolores Huerta — one of several famed talking heads — recall how, in 1965, Valdez convinced Huerta that the Delano, Calif., grape strike should have a theater group that could encourage workers to join the cause.
A 1978 stage production that Valdez directed, “Zoot Suit,” played to crowds in Los Angeles before a short-lived Broadway transfer the next year. A movie version followed, as did his Ritchie Valens biopic “La Bamba” (1987).
The documentary, directed by David Alvarado, is unabashedly celebratory, and the narration, read by Edward James Olmos in character as the master of ceremonies he played “Zoot Suit,” can be grating. But the trajectory of Valdez’s work and its activist emphasis only look more revolutionary in retrospect.
We see clips of a satirical TV broadcast that cast actors as automatons to offer a multivalent commentary on assimilation. The film describes Valdez’s early stage work as having a quality of rasquachismo, defined in the film as a sort of rundown funkiness — “so funky that nothing can undermine you,” Valdez says. “American Pachuco” leaves you wanting to dig through whatever footage remains.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
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