At 25, Luis Valdez' "La Bamba" resonates differently ...

The following are the program notes I wrote for the screening of La Bamba, organized by the Latin American Cinemateca.  It is part of the Los Angeles Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", to unfold next June in historic downtown theaters.

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.