Zoot Suit - agitprop esthetics thirty years later

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Zoot Suit, the seminal film written and directed by Luis Valdez about the Mexican American experience in Los Angeles, the Latin American Cinemateca has teamed with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series for a special screening of this picture at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, on Wednesday June 22, 2011. Created in 1987 by the Los Angeles Conservancy to showcase historic movie palaces, “The Last Remaining Seats” offers a window into a vanished era, glimpsed through the faded splendor of impressive theaters built in the teens and twenties, some of which have been beautifully restored.

Below are the program notes I wrote for this screening.

In 1979, the Mexican American theater collective Teatro Campesino, founded by actor/playwright/activist Luis Valdez in 1965 to support the farm workers union’s Delano grape strike organized by César Chávez, staged a bilingual musical play about the experience of Mexican Americans in the United States in the 1940s: Zoot Suit. It had a very successful run in Los Angeles and later moved to Broadway, the first Chicano play to open in New York.

Imaginatively mixing Brechtian agitprop techniques with melodrama, allegorical dialogue, Aztec myth and song and dance numbers, Zoot Suit hinged on El Pachuco, a narrator/chorus and alter ego of the protagonist, used to explore issues of ethnic, cultural and political identity. Zoot Suit tells the story of the racially-charged trial of a group of Mexican-Americans sentenced for a murder in Baldwin Park in 1942, and the related riots of the following year. For the Chicano Movement of the 1960s both episodes were landmarks in the oppositional narrative developed to critique the Anglo treatment of Hispanics. In this sense Zoot Suit offers a counter version of the events that became known as The Sleepy Lagoon Murder case and its aftermath, the Zoot Suit Riots.

Looking to break into the Hispanic market, Universal Studios struck a deal with Luis Valdez for a film version of the play. Shot in less than two weeks, with a budget of 2.5 million, and using the same non conventional narrative structure, and preserving the politics of contestation at the heart of the play, Zoot Suit was released in 1981 – 30 years ago – and became the first Chicano feature film made by a Hollywood studio. It paved the way for subsequent more mainstream Mexican American productions such as El Norte (1983), La Bamba (1987), Born in East L.A. (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), American Me (1992) and Mi familia (1995).

Edward James Olmos plays the pivotal role of El Pachuco, an unconventional character and emblem of the urban Mexican American youth of the 1940s, clad in a flashy “zoot suit” - baggy pants, oversize jacket, chain, cross and big black hat. (The zoot suit is still with us, morphed into the attention-grabbing attire of today, low-cut jeans, ample t-shirts, baseball caps, chains and crosses).

El Pachuco is in charge of making the story move forward, literally at the snap of his fingers. A sassy, street-savvy truth-teller, he can be seen only by the protagonist Henry “Hank” Reyna (played by the director’s brother Daniel, and based on Henry Leyva, one of the original Zoot suiters jailed and later released for lack of evidence) and the audience. In the heated conversations between El Pachuco and Reyna, Valdez passionately explores what it means to be a Mexican American immigrant in the U.S., an ethnic community that suffers discrimination and racism. In the film’s climax, a mythical Aztec is used to symbolize the Chicano experience – an Indian in a loincloth, in a fetal position savagely beaten up by white men. The anger cannot get more explicit than that.

Seen 30 years after its release, this cri de coeur has not abated, but the context to understand the play and the film has seismically changed, as has the Latino-immigrant experience in the U.S. Films that explore it in mainstream Hollywood cinema are: Maid in Manhattan (2002), Spanglish (2004) and Under the Same Moon (2007). The world has moved on: none of these films would even remotely qualify as Chicano cinema today, following the parameters set by the first films to voice a radical, anti-establishment perspective - The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) is a case in point. None of them, either, pack the brutal punch of American Me (1992), Edward James Olmos' unflinching look at Latino gangs and incarceration.

Zoot Suit offers the audience the pleasure of listening to composer Lalo Guerrero’s wonderful boogie-woogie-influenced songs. The striking images of ace cinematographer David Myers give this combination of ideology, melodrama and music a sharp flavor.

For those wishing to further explore this film, U.C. Santa Cruz professor Rosa Linda Fregoso offers an intelligent and accessible analysis of the play and the film, in The Bronze Screen (1993). It is an indispensable text to understand not only the beginnings of Chicano cinema but also the role played by Luis Valdez and Edward James Olmos in cementing a Hispanic film culture open to mainstream audiences, blending activism and art.