From "Horse Opera" History to Hall of Mirrors: Luis Valdez's Bandido!

From "Horse Opera" History to Hall of Mirrors: Luis Valdez's Bandido! RICHARD WATTENBERG Luis Valdez's approach to theatre production and dramaturgy has changed considerably since his early work with EI Teatro Campesino. As the leading theatrical voice for the Chicano movement of the I 960s and early I 97os, Valdez focused on raising the social and cultural consciousness of Chicano fann workers and Barrio dwellers through performances, often of an agitprop nature; however, beginning in the mid-seventies, Valdez began a new phase of his career with EI Teatro Campesino - a phase which Jorge Huerta has described as "the infiltration of the regional theaters.'" At this time Valdez sought to broaden his audience base by producing plays and films that might appeal to white, middle-class, mainstream viewers as well as to his traditional audiences. This new strategy has prompted some criticism. Indeed, critics such as Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez suggest that advocating a Chicano socialpolitical agenda and seeking mass audiences are incompatible projects. While Broyles-Gonzalez's "either-or" position may indicate an unnecessarily reductionist view, it is certainly true that Valdez's latest plays represent a political complexity not seen in his earlier theatre work. This complexity is nowhere more evident than in Valdez's exploration of the nature of history in his recent play Bandido! (1982)' - a play he describes as "the latest revision of the History of the Old West" (98). As its subtitle, The American Melodrama of Tiburcio Vasquez. Notorious California Bandit, indicates, Bandidol focuses on Tiburcio Vasquez, a nineteenth -century bandit, who was publicly hanged in San Jose on 19 March 1875. Inasmuch as the play provides Valdez with an occasion to challenge a negative Chicano stereotype - in this case the villainous Mexican-American outlaw disseminated through Anglo-American popular culture - it is similar to Valdez's work of the 1960s; nevertheless, Bandidol clearly exemplifies the shift in direction Valdez has taken since that eatly period. Most importantly, the playwright does not portray his bandit protagonist as an idealized culture Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 411 4 12 RICHARD WATTENBERG hero but instead presents him as a rather ambiguous character. This kind of dramatic strategy has led Broyles-Gonzalez to assume that In shaping the play Bandido! Valdez appears to have followed a mainstream entenainment fannula: avoid controversy and keep things simple.... The effort to avoid anything that might seem confrontational 10 Euro-Americans is so extreme that the history of Mexicans (and Olhers) in nineteenth-century California is wholly distorted by omissions.j Broyles-Gonzalez primarily criticizes Valdez for failing to explore the social and political context which molded the play's protagonist into a bandit and which, if explored, would allow him to be viewed as an early Chicano revolutionary hero. In so viewing the play, Broyles-Gonzalez evaluates the Valdez of the eighties and nineties by means of a standard Valdez himself defined in the sixties and seventies. In other words, Bandido!. which was meant for a larger. more heterogeneous audience than Valdez had sought earlier in his career, would seem to demand from the viewer a somewhat different critical perspective from that Valdez himself defined when, in 1970, he called for a revolutionary Chicano theatre that would in no way duplicate "the limp. superficial, gringo seco productions in the 'professional' American theatre."4 Perhaps inadvertently, Broyles-Gonzalez suggests a more appropriate approach to Bandido' when she follows her own critique of the play with a quotation from the musical director for the play's first production, Francisco Gonzalez, who asserts that "One of the problems with Bandidol is that it never jibed. What you ended up with was a mishmash of ideas that didn't come together. There is so much about stereotyping that the piec~ becomes a stereotype ."5 To a certain extent, Francisco Gonzalez's comments seem to contradict those offered by Broyles-Gonzalez: on the one hand, the play avoids controversy and keeps things simple for the Anglo audiences and, on the other, the play becomes a "mishmash." This contradiction is somewhat muted by the fact that bOlh assessments respond to the play's failure to limit itself to an unqualified condemnation of negative Chicano stereotypes. However...