With his second film La Bamba, Chicano playwright and political activist Luis Valdez went after mainstream American audiences to tell the story of an almost forgotten Mexican-American rock-and-roll star, Ritchie Valens. It was an overwhelming, unexpected box office hit. Made for under $10 million, it grossed $60 in the US. In the late 1980s, its success coupled with that of Stand and Deliver and Born in East L.A. seemed to augur a renaissance of Hispanic-themed films.
On the strength of Zoot
Suit, first a play and then a 1981 film, Luis Valdez and his brother Daniel
as associate producer brought the project to Columbia Pictures and Taylor
Hackford, who produced the picture for a modest $6 million, with a then unknown
Lou Diamond Phillips in the lead role.
With close cooperation from his family, the film tells the
story of Ricardo Valenzuela, the teenage rock-and-roll sensation, who in less
than a year and still in high school, recorded three songs – two original, one
a rock version of a Mexican folk song – that became top ten hits in 1958: “Come
on, let’s go”, “Donna” and “La Bamba”.
Renamed Ritchi Valens by record producer Bob Keane,
Valenzuela is the sweet tempered, straight-arrow protagonist of this
rag-to-riches story, emblematic both of the American Dream and the struggles to
jump into the melting pot. His life was
tragically cut short at age 17 in February 1959, by a plane accident that also
killed other young rock sensations Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson, “Big
Bopper”.
La Bamba is both a
rock-and-roll picture and family drama, tightly centered on the efforts of
Connie Valenzuela, a young widowed matriarch (Rosana de Soto), to promote the
strong musical talent of her second son.
She, her other son, the rebellious Bob (Esai Morales), and two young daughters
portray a recognizable Mexican American family from Pacoima, in the San
Fernando Valley. Shot on location in Los
Angeles and the Central Valley – where the Valenzuelas are first seen working
as orange pickers – La Bamba looks
affectionately at the struggles of a family in postwar Los Angeles to carve a
piece of the American Dream.
The film’s somber side is provided by older brother Bob,
almost a caricature of Hispanic machismo, and an ambivalent carrier of Chicano
pride, headed in the wrong direction.
This competitive relationship provides a dramatic counterpoint to the
blandness of the story: eight months in a clean-cut teenager’s life.
The East L.A. phenomenal
group Los Lobos was enlisted for the musical numbers, with member David Hidalgo
standing for Valens. Their four songs
for the soundtrack were released in an album that sold a record 2 million copies
and spent 3 weeks at number one on the pop charts, as reported by Los
Angeles Times music critic in September 1990.The musical numbers are exhilarating, especially its electrifying rendition of the joyful “La Bamba”, originally a song from Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Twenty-five years after its original release, La Bamba lends itself to an interesting
re-evaluation. Viewed today, the film has
lost none of its freshness and the genuine emotions it evokes in mainstream
audiences. It has acquired, however, a
patina of nostalgia tinted with a somewhat rosy view of working class life in
the 1950s. The conventional aspects of
the picture have become more salient: a by-the-numbers, carefully crafted
biopic about a non-rebellious teenager with a musical cause. The Mexican-American aspects are rooted on
features that have become standard in film and television when Hispanic types
are involved: strong matriarchs, males unhinged by drugs and anger, suffering
but passionate females, resilient family bonds.
The character of volatile brother Bob allows for a remark on
the evolution of Chicanismo, a passionate political and cultural cause three
decades ago, when Valdez wrote Zoot Suit for the theatre and began to
conceive of the Valens film with his brother.
Now practically reduced to an academic specialty in the American
university, Chicanismo is carried in La
Bamba by the Esai Morales character, incarnating – in the words of Dr. Rosa
Linda Fregoso – “the revolutionary subject of cultural nationalism”. A 1980s version of the ‘pachuco’ – flashy
clothing, the motorcycle a muscular extension of unbridled, unfocused energy –
Bob is passionately attached to the mythical pre-Hispanic roots of Chicanismo,
as personified by the ‘curandero’ he and Ritchie visit in Tijuana. Seen twenty-five years later, what Bob
perhaps represents is the identity crisis of the Chicano who makes a stand
against assimilation … and cannot partake of the American Dream his brother
began to savor, albeit briefly.
The current musical reemergence of 1970s singer Sixto
Rodríguez, described as the “Chicano Bob Dylan”, thanks to the Academy Award
winning documentary Searching for Sugar
Man (2012), also invites some intriguing analogies. Valens and Rodríguez – the son of a Mexican
worker who immigrated to Detroit – are both emblematic of their times: the former embodies the breath of fresh air
brought by rock-and-roll in the fifties, a truly American style born of mixing
popular musical styles. Rodríguez is
fully immersed in the counterculture of the sixties and seventies, a poetic
walking scream for the dispossessed and the broken-hearted. Their music and lyrics are also
representative of the singers’ working-class background – which comes out with
pride in La Bamba and the bonus
materials of the DVD release, and the Rodríguez documentary. Both create their
memorable songs from a position of American-ness, not Other-ness. They bring spice to the melting pot, but are
fully immersed in it.
La Bamba will
offer the younger audience the opportunity to get acquainted with some great
pop music. Courtesy of the digital revolution, they will have an incentive to
explore very easily the rock-and-roll world to which Ritchie Valens made a
remarkable contribution. Filmography – Luis Valdez
The Cisco Kid (1994)
La Pastorela (1991)
Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution (1987)
Zoot Suit (1981)
Bibliography – La Bamba
Fregoso, Rosa Linda, The Bronze Screen – Chicana and
Chicano Film Culture, 1993.
Hillburn, Robert, “Blame it on La Bamba”, Los Angeles
Times, 2 September 1990.
“La Bamba opens the door for Latino films”, Los Angeles
Times, 4 April 1988.
Lasley, Paul; Harryman, Elizabeth, “La Bamba director sees Hispanic culture joining mainstream”, The
Christian Science Monitor, 14 September 1987.
Maslin, Janet, “Brief Candle: La Bamba, a musical biography”, New York Times, 24 July 1987.
Los
Angeles Times, 13 August 1987 Mathews, Jack, “La Bamba: Lyp-synced for success”,
Van Gelder, Lawrence, “The Birth of La Bamba”, New York Times, 24 July 1987.