Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez was born in Delano, California to migrant farmers. The second of 10 children, he rarely stayed in one place long enough to become acquainted with a specific school system, since his family constantly moved to follow the best seasonal crops. All the same, Valdez was a good student and even appeared rather frequently on a local television show when he was a teenager in high school. He then attended San Jose State College and focused more seriously on theater, producing his first play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho, when he was a senior. After graduating, Valdez spent some time in the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and then he founded his own theater company, El Teatro Campesino. The company was made up of farmers, and Valdez served as its artistic director, primarily putting on short political plays about the importance of farmers’ unions. El Teatro Campesino quickly became popular, but Valdez decided to leave the company in 1967, at which point he founded a Chicano cultural center in Del Rey, California. He then moved to Fresno, where he reestablished the cultural center while teaching at Fresno State College. Valdez also founded another theater organization called TENAZ, which he moved once again when he resettled just south of San Francisco in 1971. All the while, he wrote political plays that were comedic yet emotionally striking, including The Dark Root of a Scream in 1967, Bernabé in 1970, and Zoot Suit in 1979, to name just a few. He has since directed many films—including the well-known La Bamba in 1987—and won a number of awards. Valdez lives in San Juan Bautista, California and received the National Medal of Arts in 2015.