Brehm, J., (2006). Luis Miguel Valdez. Magills Survey of American.docx

Brehm, J., (2006). Luis Miguel Valdez. Magill's Survey of
American Literature, 1-6. Biography
One of the most influential Chicano playwrights of his time,
Valdez created a drama dedicated to social progress and to the
full exploration of Chicano identity.
Luis Miguel Valdez was born on June 26, 1940, in Delano,
California, the second of ten brothers and sisters. His mother
and father were migrant farmworkers, and Luis began working
in the fields at the age of six. Because his family traveled to the
harvests in the San Joaquin Valley, Luis received little
uninterrupted schooling.
In an interview, Valdez discussed one significant, and
ultimately fortunate, consequence of such a disruptive early
life: His family had just finished a cotton harvest; the season
had ended, the rains begun, but because their truck had broken
down, the family had to stay put. Leaving school one day, Luis
realized he had left behind his paper lunch bag, a precious
commodity in 1946, given the paper shortages and the family’s
poverty. When he returned to get it, however, he found his
teacher had torn it up. She was using it to make papier-mâché
animal masks for the school play. Luis was amazed by the
transformation. Although he did not even know what a play was
at the time, he decided to audition and was given the leading
role as a monkey. The play was about Christmas in the jungle,
and the following weeks of colorful preparation were
exhilarating. A week before the show was to begin, however,
his father got the truck fixed, and the family moved away.
Valdez has said of the experience: “That left an unfillable gap,
a vacuum I’ve been pouring myself into ever since.”
The pang of that early disappointment sparked a fascination for
the theater and a wealth of creative energy that was to bring
Valdez remarkable success in the years ahead. Despite his
intermittent schooling, he won a scholarship to San Jose State

College in 1960. There he studied theater history and developed
a lasting enthusiasm for classical Greek and Roman drama. His
own work also began to take shape, and his first one-act play,
The Theft, won a regional playwriting award. In 1965, he
directed his first full-length play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho
Villa, which audiences greeted warmly.
After receiving a degree in English in 1964, Valdez spent
several months traveling in Cuba before joining the San
Francisco Mime Troupe. In 1965, he returned home to Delano
and joined the newly formed United Farm Workers Union under
the leadership of César Chávez. During this time, Valdez began
fully to explore drama as a vehicle for social justice. He
developed a form suitable for his migrant-worker audiences: a
short skit, or acto, designed to inspire Chicanos to political
action.
These actos, often improvised on flatbed trucks for workers in
the fields, proved so powerful as political weapons that
Valdez’s life was threatened during the grape strike of 1967.
Immensely popular with the workers, the actos aroused hostility
in the growers, whose exploitative labor practices the plays
satirized. Valdez has recalled being “beaten and kicked and
jailed. . . . essentially for doing theater.” Still, he persisted, and
the actos gained so much attention that the Teatro Campesino,
or Farmworker’s Theater, toured the United States performing
the works in 1967.
From then on, Valdez’s work began to reach increasingly larger
audiences. He left the fields late in 1967 for Del Rey,
California, where he founded the Centro Campesino Cultural.
Between 1969 and 1980, the troupe toured Europe four times
and won an Obie Award. Despite such acclaim Valdez remained
true to his Chicano, migrant-worker roots. Moving the troupe to
Fresno, California, in 1969, Valdez founded an annual Chicano
theater festival and began teaching at Fresno State College. As
its audience grew, the troupe became more technically
sophisticated but continued its efforts to “put the tools of the
artist into the hands of the humblest, the working people.” The

troupe moved in 1971 to rural San Juan Bautista, from which it
toured widely among college campuses, while remaining deeply
involved with the concerns of its own community.
Having spent his entire career well outside mainstream,
commercial theater, Valdez decided in 1978 to reach for a still
larger audience. The result was Zoot Suit, a Broadway-style
dance musical about the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the
riots that followed in Los Angeles in 1943. Though still quite
political, the play succeeds in being genuinely entertaining,
particularly in its film adaptation. Like Zoot Suit, Bandido!
(1981) and “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!”
(1986) both reach for more general audiences and explore the
Chicano struggle for identity against the limiting stereotypes
imposed by an Anglicized history and American media. Such
plays, as well as the successful 1987 film La Bamba, which
Valdez wrote and directed, speak not only for Chicanos but also
to white audiences, forcing them to reexamine their
preconceptions about who Chicanos really are. These works also
testify to Valdez’s extraordinary journey from migrant
farmworker to one of the most vital Chicano voices in American
drama.
Analysis
From the earliest and simplest actos to the complex
sophistication of “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking
Badges!” nearly three decades later, Valdez’s plays have
displayed a remarkable consistency of theme and purpose.
Certainly, his work has evolved in scope, depth, and technique,
but his basic objectives have remained constant: to expose
social injustice, to satirize the oppressors, and to dramatize, in
all of its fullness and variety, the struggle to achieve a viable
Chicano identity.
Born into a family of migrant farmworkers, Valdez knew
firsthand the effects of oppression and exploitation. It was
therefore quite natural that his first short plays would deal with
the struggles of the farmworkers to unionize. These early actos
were improvised using a unique collaborative method: Valdez

would simply ask striking workers to show what had happened
to them during the day. Employing masks or crude signs to
indicate different characters — workers, scabs, growers, and so
forth — the strikers, under Valdez’s direction, produced skits of
engaging immediacy, broad humor, and a pointed political
message. Their purpose was to raise consciousness, deflate the
opposition’s authority, and point to a solution. Yet the plays
were quite entertaining as well, often transforming and
releasing the workers’ immediate feelings of fear and
frustration through comedy and withering satire.
Though some of the actos, such as Vietnam campesino (1970),
can seem too bluntly didactic, Valdez learned much from them
about making theater a vehicle for inspiring social action. He
also sensed, eventually, the need to ground the Chicano
experience in something more enduring than immediate political
struggle. He returned to the ancient wellsprings of Aztec and
Mayan culture to provide such a groundwork for the
contemporary Chicano identity.
In his introduction to Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican
American Literature (1972), Valdez frames the problem of
Chicano marginalization explicitly:
His birthright to speak as Man has been forcibly stripped from
him. To his conqueror he is patently sub-human, uncivilized, or
culturally deprived. The poet in him flounders in a morass of
lies and distortions about his conquered people. He loses his
identity with mankind,
and self-consciously struggles to regain his one-to-one
relationship with human existence. It is a long way back. . . .
Such is the condition of the Chicano.
That “long way back” took Valdez to pre-Columbian Mexico.
What he found there were the achievements of Aztec and Mayan
civilization, their astonishing developments in medicine, art,
poetry, hygiene, urban planning, and religion, all of which he
compares favorably to their European counterparts of the time.
To combat the degradation of centuries of Anglo racism, of
being seen as “foreigners in the continent of their birth,” Valdez

wants to reconnect Chicanos to an ancient, proud, and venerable
culture. Chicanos must, in his view, revive this connection and
rethink their history if they are to maintain an identity in Anglo
society.
Valdez attempts this reconnection in a variety of ways. In
Bernabé (1970), he creates a character, the village lunatic, who
physically and metaphorically marries La Tierra (the Earth) and
thus reestablishes the Mayan reverence for it. In Zoot Suit and
Bandido!, Valdez reexamines history from the Chicano and
Mexican perspective. Thus Tiburcio Vasquez, whom history had
portrayed as a mere bandit working the California countryside
from 1850 to 1875, becomes in Bandido! a revolutionary bent
on political rebellion. Zoot Suit retrieves for the American
conscience an overlooked period of intense racism culminating
in the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the riots that followed.
Both plays try not only to set the record straight but also to
discover a source of pride for Chicanos in a history that has
been unjustly debased.
The consequence of Chicanos being cut off from the life-giving
power of their history and culture is brilliantly dramatized in “I
Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!,” in which
Valdez explores the deeply problematic nature of assimilation
into Anglo culture. In their desire to fit in with middle-class
America, the members of the Villa family find themselves
silenced and marginalized. Bit-part actors who rarely receive
speaking roles, Buddy and Connie Villa have achieved a
comfortable success, but their only connection with their own
culture is the stereotyped Mexicans they portray on film. Their
son, who enrolled in Harvard Law School at age sixteen,
represents the possibility for the epitome of Anglo success. Yet
he rebels against this assimilation and drops out of school, only
to discover just how rigid the limitations are for Chicanos who
reject an Anglo identity.
Stylistically, Valdez is clearly not a realist, though some of his
plays — those, for example, depicting actual historical events
— employ elements of realism. In all of his plays, however,

Valdez takes pains (often in the manner of Bertolt Brecht) to
ensure that his audiences never forget that they are watching a
play. He does not want to create the illusion of reality or to
manipulate the audience into emotional identification with the
characters. Plays within plays, characters who speak directly to
the audience, radical shifts in time, and many other devices all
serve to disrupt the illusion of reality and focus the audience’s
attention on the artifice before them. Such strategies serve
Valdez’s purposes well, for he wants audiences to maintain the
necessary distance to reflect on the problems that his plays
present and to relate them to the world outside the theater.
Often the plays are open-ended or have multiple endings, and in
this way, too, the audience must actively engage the play and
resolve it for themselves. These methods do not provide a
comfortable or easy theatrical experience, but the rewards of
thinking hard about Valdez’s plays are indeed worth the effort.
Las dos caras del patroncito First produced: 1965 (first
published, 1971)
Type of work: Play
The boss trades places with one of his farmworkers and
discovers how exploited they are.
Las dos caras del patroncito (the two faces of the little boss)
typifies, in many ways, Valdez’s early actos. The piece grew
out of a collaborative improvisation during the grape strike of
1965 and dramatized the immediate and intense feelings of its
audience. Like all the actos, it is brief, direct, didactic,
intending not only to express the workers’ anger and urge them
to join the union but also to satirize the growers and reveal their
injustice. The play succeeds brilliantly by enacting a total
reversal of what Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche termed the
master/slave relationship.
The play begins with an undocumented Mexican worker being
visited by his patroncito, or “little boss,” who appears wearing a
pig mask and smoking a cigar. Initially, both play their assumed
roles of intimidating master and cowering slave to perfection.
Soon, though, the patroncito waxes poetic over his Mexicans.

Seeing them “barreling down the freeway” makes his “heart feel
good; hands on their sombreros, hair flying in the wind,
bouncing along happy as babies.” “I sure do love my
Mexicans,” he says. The patroncito reveals a typical
condescension, romanticizing the migrant workers’ lives and
regarding them essentially as children. When the farmworker
responds by putting his arm around him, however, the
patroncito says; “I love ’em about ten feet away from me.”
Their conversation takes a peculiar turn as the patroncito
verbally coerces the farmworker into agreeing that the workers
have it easy, with their “free housing” (labor-camp shacks),
“free transportation” (unsafe trucks), and “free food” (beans and
tortillas). The boss asserts that he himself suffers all the anxiety
that comes from owning a Lincoln Continental, an expensive
ranch house, and a wife with expensive tastes. At one point, he
asks the farmworker, “Ever write out a check for $12,000?” The
audience of migrant workers struggling to raise their wages to
two dollars an hour would have felt the irony of such a
question; the agony of writing out such a check is not something
they would experience anytime soon, given their exploited
condition.
Yet the patroncito actually envies the farmworkers’ “freedom”
and wishes to trade places. After some coaxing, the farmworker
agrees, and the patroncito gives him his pig mask, whereupon
the power relations between them are reversed. The farmworker
now gives the boss a taste of his own medicine. He insults him
and proceeds to claim his land, his house, his car, and his wife.
The patroncito soon realizes that the game has gone too far. He
does not want to live in the rat-infested shacks he so generously
provides for his workers, or ride in his death-trap trucks, or
work for such low wages.
By the play’s end, the farmworker has so thoroughly abused his
patroncito, calling him a “spic,” “greaseball,” and “commie
bastard” — all the slurs the workers endured — that the
patroncito calls for help from union activist César Chávez and
screams “huelga” (“strike”). Thus the play brings him full circle

from callous owner to union supporter and suggests that if the
oppressors could put themselves in the place of the oppressed,
they would see their own injustice.
Zoot Suit First produced: 1978 (first published, 1992)
Type of work: Play
The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1943 shows young Chicanos
to be the victims of prejudice.
Zoot Suit, though perhaps Valdez’s most commercial play,
retains the political spirit of the early actos and anticipates the
struggle for Chicano identity of Valdez’s later works. Because
it is a musical, with terrific song and dance throughout, it is his
most conventionally entertaining play, but because it dramatizes
an overlooked episode in American history that reveals a
pervasive racism against Chicanos, it is also one of his most
powerful and socially relevant plays.
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1940’s, the play centers around
the trial and wrongful murder conviction of Henry Reyna and
three other Chicano gang members, or pachucos. Act 1 explores
the trial and, through flashback, the violence that leads up to it;
act 2 deals with the efforts to appeal the conviction and free the
pachucos. Throughout the play, Valdez gives the action an
added dimension through the use of two extraordinary devices.
One is the mythic figure of El Pachuco. He is larger than life,
the zoot-suiter par excellence, the embodiment of Chicano
pride, machismo, and revolutionary defiance. He dominates the
play, though he is seen only by Henry and the audience. Indeed,
he may be understood as a layer of Henry’s personality
externalized, a kind of alter ego who continually advises Henry
and comments on, at times even controls, the play. The second
device is El Pachuco’s counterpart and antagonist, The Press. In
Zoot Suit, the news media functions as an actual character who
symbolizes the racist hysteria of public opinion during World
War II. Significantly, it is The Press, rather than a prosecutor,
that tries and convicts Henry.
This racist hysteria (“EXTRA! EXTRA!, ZOOT-SUITED
GOONS OF SLEEPY LAGOON! . . . READ ALL ABOUT

MEXICAN BABY GANGSTERS!”) provides a crucial context
for understanding the play. As the United States fought Nazis
abroad, it imprisoned Japanese Americans at home, denied
African Americans basic human rights, and harassed Mexican
Americans in Los Angeles. The irony of Henry’s being arrested
on trumped-up charges the night before he is to report to the
Navy to join the fight against racist Germany is cynically
pointed out by El Pachuco, who says that “the mayor of L.A.
has declared all-out war on Chicanos.” In this climate, racial
stereotypes, media-inspired fear, and repressive forces
unleashed by war are quite enough to convict the pachucos,
even in the absence of any real evidence.
The trial itself is a mockery, a foregone conclusion, and thus
Henry finds himself at the mercy of forces he did not create and
cannot control. Even those who try to help him — his lawyer,
George, and Alice, a reporter from the Daily People’s World —
earn Henry’s resentment, for they, too, seem to be controlling
his fate. In this sense, El Pachuco represents a compensating
fantasy. He is always in control and indeed is able to freeze the
action of the play, speak directly to the audience, rerun
dialogue, or skip ahead at will. He is a kind of director within
the play, and however vulnerable the other young pachucos are,
El Pachuco remains invincible. Even when he is tripped and
beaten by Marines, he rises up undaunted, clad only in a
loincloth, like an Aztec god.
Henry Reyna and the other pachucos are vindicated in the end,
winning their appeal and a provisional kind of freedom. Yet
Valdez presents multiple endings to Henry’s life story. He does
so to make the audience see that Henry’s character still exists,
as do the forces of racism that torment him, and the defiant
spirit and cultural pride that will not allow his will to be
broken.
“I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” First
produced: 1986 (first published, 1986)
Type of work: Play
In a rebellious attempt to create his own identity, a young

Chicano finds himself trapped by stereotypes.
“I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” is Valdez’s
most complex, ambitious, and satisfying play. Satirical, comic,
filled with puns and painful insight, the play explores the search
for an authentic Chicano identity against the limiting
stereotypes and restricted possibilities afforded Mexican
Americans in the 1980’s United States.
The play is set in Los Angeles in the home of Connie and Buddy
Villa, middle-aged Chicano bit-part actors. The conflict is
sparked by the unexpected return of Sonny, their son. Defying
his parents’ dreams for him, Sonny quits Harvard University
Law School and thus forfeits his chance at the kind of Anglo
success his parents have not been able to achieve. His return
home, with his Chinese American girlfriend, and his announced
intention to become an actor, writer, producer, and director —
“the newest superstar in Hollywood” and “the next Woody
Allen” — creates a crisis in the family that the rest of the play
tries to resolve. In a tempestuous family quarrel, Sonny derides
his parents’ acting; they have made careers playing stereotyped
nonspeaking parts as maids, gardeners, bandits, and prostitutes.
He proclaims his desire to surpass them. “I Don’t Have to Show
You No Stinking Badges!” then moves to a play within a play.
Sonny films his parents and his girlfriend, Anita, but when his
parents are called off to a Latino Actors Guild meeting, he
decides to act in another way. He takes his father’s gun and
holds up several fast-food restaurants. The climax of the play
occurs when police and news crews arrive at the Villa home; a
standoff ensues, replete with gunfire, bullhorns, and live
coverage. The play then offers three completely different
endings, with Sonny either killing himself, becoming a
television director, or returning to Harvard, via spaceship, to
finish his law degree.
Valdez gives the play’s most compelling theme, the struggle
against racial stereotypes to find a viable Chicano identity, a
complex and layered treatment. Even the characters’ names —
Buddy, Connie, and Sonny Villa — suggest a divided identity.

“Villa” recalls the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, but
their first names are all too typically Anglo. Their cultural
frame of reference, moreover, is almost exclusively that of
white films and film stars. Throughout the play, they compare
themselves and one another to Otto Preminger, Woody Allen,
James Bond, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and many others. Their
understanding of themselves and their world seems to have been
defined not by Chicano role models but by Hollywood film
stars.
Sonny alone recognizes this problem, and he rebels against it.
He sees that his parents’ roles as “silent” actors signify their
powerlessness, their marginalized stature in Hollywood, and the
invisibility of Chicanos generally. Sonny also understands that
by acting the film roles of Mexican stereotypes, his parents
have achieved in their private existence nothing more than a
“low rated situation comedy” and “a cheap imitation of Anglo
life,” with a comfortable home, swimming pool, and all the
other trappings of middle-class America. Sonny wants no part of
it. Yet he knows how limited his options are:
Here’s the main event: the indispensable illiterate cholo gang
member-heroin-addict-born-to-lose-image, which I suppose
could account for 99 percent of my future employment in TV
land. Just look hostile, dumb, and potentially violent. Preferably
with rape on the mind, know what I mean?
Thus Sonny’s decision to leave Harvard and create his own
films is an attempt to create and control his own identity, not as
an imitation Anglo but as a Chicano. For all of his insight and
ambition, however, Sonny feels trapped. When his parents
abandon his home movie, titled Types in Stereo, Sonny decides
to make his acting real. Yet he merely assumes another role, and
a stereotypical one at that, of the Chicano bandit. He robs fast-
food restaurants, symbols of the emptiness he sees in American
life, and thus gives in to the pressures against which he had
fought.
The play’s multiple endings leave readers and audiences
perplexed. Clearly, though, Valdez wants audiences to step back

and reflect on the relationship between acting and reality and to
consider the options open, or perhaps closed, to someone like
Sonny. Ultimately, the play forces audiences to think deeply
about their own stereotypes and to see, in all of its painful
complexity, the damage such stereotypes can do.
Summary
Unlike many of his contemporaries who prefer to explore
psychological conflicts or the complexities of personal
relationships, Valdez has devoted his work to dramatizing social
problems. His plays, early and late, expose the injustice endured
by Chicanos — not to elicit pity or to portray them as victims
but to focus attention on the forces of oppression and to make
Chicanos fully visible in American society. In plays that are
satirical, unconventional, unpredictable, painful, and often
hilarious, Valdez succeeds in abolishing the stereotypes and
showing not only what Chicanos have suffered but also who
they really are.
Discussion Topics
•Compare Luis Miguel Valdez’s use of history in Zoot Suit and
Bandido!
•What does “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!”
say about American society’s view of Chicanos? What does it
say about the effect of American popular culture on ordinary
lives?
•How do Valdez’s plays show the influence of the dramatic
methods of Bertolt Brecht?
•How does Zoot Suit continue and expand upon the themes of
Valdez’s actos?
•In Zoot Suit, how does El Pachuco embody Chicano pride?
•Does Valdez’s film La Bamba look at Chicano culture
differently than his plays?
Essay by: John Brehm
Bibliography
Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in
the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994. Study drawing on previously unexamined materials, such

as production notes and interviews with former ensemble
members, to demystify the roles Valdez and El Teatro
Campesino played in the development of a Chicano theater
aesthetic.
Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest
Theatre of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001. Explores the political,
cultural, and performative similarities between El Teatro
Campesino and Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater. An
intriguing examination of the political theater of these two
marginalized groups, Chicanos and African Americans, and
their shared aesthetic.
Flores, Arturo C. El Teatro Campesino de Luis Valdez. Madrid:
Editorial Pliegos, 1990. This five-chapter study examines the
importance, gradual development, theoretical considerations,
touring, and “return to identity,” and the “steps to
commercialization (1975-1980)” represented by Zoot Suit. A
strong study with a bibliography. In Spanish.
Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms.
Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. Well-written and-
illustrated study that begins with Valdez’s experiences in
Delano in 1965. It contains an excellent immediate description
with dialogue of these first energies and is written in the
present tense for immediacy and energy. Provides some
discussion of the beginnings of the San Francisco mime troupe
and strong description of the actos and their literary history in
Europe.
Huerta, Jorge A. “Labor Theatre, Street Theatre, and
Community Theatre in the Barrio, 1965-1983.” In Hispanic
Theatre in the United States, edited by Nicolas Kanellos.
Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1984. Placed at the end of a longer
study of Hispanic theater, this essay takes on more importance
by indicating Valdez’s contribution in a continuum of history.
Good on contemporaries of El Teatro Campesino; strong
bibliography.
Kanellos, Nicolas. Mexican American Theater: Legacy and

Reality. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press,
1987. Begins with an examination of Valdez’s transformation
from director of El Teatro Campesino to the urban commercial
playwright of Zoot Suit in 1978. Cites Valdez’s contribution to
the “discernible period of proliferation and flourishing in
Chicano theatres” from 1965 to 1976, then moves on to examine
other offshoots of the impulse.
Morales, Ed. “Shadowing Valdez.” American Theatre 9
(November, 1992): 14-19. Excellent essay on Valdez, his
followers, his film plans, his shelved Frida Kahlo project, and
later productions in and around Los Angeles, with production
stills. Includes an essay entitled “Statement on Artistic
Freedom” by Valdez, in which he defends his nontraditional
casting.
Orona-Cordova, Roberta. “Zoot Suit and the Pachuco
Phenomenon: An Interview with Luis Valdez.” In Mexican
American Theatre: Then and Now, edited by Nicolas Kanellos.
Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983. The opening of the film
version of Zoot Suit in 1982 prompted this interview, in which
Valdez reveals much about his motives for working, his view of
Chicano literature and art, and his solutions to “the entrenched
attitude” that will not allow Chicano participation in these
industries. Much on Pachuquismo from an insider’s point of
view.
Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theater in the United States and
Puerto Rico: A Report to the Ford Foundation. New York: Ford
Foundation, 1988. This volume provides a brief history to 1965
and discusses the Hispanic theater during the upheaval of the
Vietnam War. Also examines the theater’s activities and budget
and pays homage to the inspiration of El Teatro Campesino and
Valdez. Supplemented by an appendix and survey data.
Valdez, Luis Miguel. “Zoot Suit and the Pachuco Phenomenon:
An Interview with Luis Valdez.” Interview by Roberta Orona-
Cordova. In Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, edited
by Nicolas Kanellos. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983. The
opening of the film version of Zoot Suit prompted this

interview, in which Valdez reveals much about his motives for
working, his view of Chicano literature and art, and his
solutions to “the entrenched attitude” that will not allow
Chicano participation in these industries.
Peck, D., (2006). Helena Maria Viramontes. Magill's Survey of
American Literature, 1-5. Biography
Viramontes is one of the most important Latina writers to
emerge at the end of the twentieth century, a short-story writer
and novelist who addresses some of the most significant
American issues, particularly for Latinos.
Helena María Viramontes was born in East Los Angeles,
California, on February 26, 1954, one of six daughters and three
sons born to a construction worker and a homemaker. After
graduation from Garfield High School, Viramontes earned her
B.A. degree in English literature at Immaculate Heart College,
also in Los Angeles, where she was one of only five Latinas in
her class, graduating in 1975. She enrolled in the Master of Fine
Arts Creative Writing Program at the University of California at
Irvine in 1981 but left and completed her M.F.A. requirements
after the publication of her first collection of short fiction, The
Moths, and Other Stories, in 1985. In 1989, she received a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship which allowed her
to attend a workshop given by the famed Columbian writer
Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute in Utah.
Viramontes has not been a prolific author, but she has published
consistently over her career. In 1988, with María Herrera-
Sobek, she coedited Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting
New Frontiers in American Literature (second edition, 1996), a
collection of both creative work (including Viramontes’s short
story “Miss Clairol”) and criticism inspired by a literary
conference held at U.C. Irvine; in 1995, the two writers edited a
similar collection titled Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film.
In 1995, she published her short novel Under the Feet of Jesus

and in 2007, a second novel Their Dogs Came with Them, about
the brutality of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. By the
early twenty-first century, she had been a visiting professor at a
number of universities but lived in Ithaca, New York, with her
husband, the well-known environmental biologist Eloy
Rodriguez, and their children. She also serves on the faculty at
Cornell University, where she teaches creative writing. Her
stories have appeared in a number of periodicals and
anthologies, and she has won numerous awards, including the
John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 1996. As her fiction
grapples with contemporary social issues, Viramontes herself
has gotten involved in a number of cultural and educational
projects, including as literary editor of XhistmeArte in the early
1980’s; cofounder of the nonprofit group Latino Writers and
Filmmakers, Inc.; and coordinator for the Latino Writers
Association.
Analysis
In most of her fiction, Viramontes focuses on the struggles of
Latina characters within the family, their culture, and the larger
society. All of these institutions can be seen as oppressive,
usually retarding the growth of the central characters. In “The
Moths,” for example, it is the family unit from which the young
protagonist must break free; in “The Cariboo Café,” it is
poverty, racism, and abusive governmental policies; and in
Under the Feet of Jesus, it is economic, familial, and social
injustices in the Central Valley of California. Viramontes’s
stories, in short, communicate the overwhelming trials that
Latina mothers, wives, and daughters face as they attempt to
grow up, raise families, and discover their own identities, but
her dual focus is always on the cultural and social values by
which these women attempt to live as well. The narrative
technique in these fictions is not always easy to follow, and the
writing can be dense with poetic imagery. Viramontes uses
shifting points of view, and it is sometimes difficult to
reconstruct the temporal sequence of actions within the rapid
changes in narration (as in “Cariboo Café”), but characters

define themselves by their speech and thought in vivid and
revealing ways (not only Latina protagonists such as Estrella in
Under the Feet of Jesus, but Anglo characters such as the café
owner in “Cariboo Café” as well), and in language that is often
personal and poetic. Viramontes’s focus on the larger social and
cultural context that her characters inhabit resembles the
viewpoint of many contemporary Latina writers: Viramontes’s
“Miss Clairol,” for instance, is a harsh indictment of consumer
culture and its underpinning of the American Dream for Latinos
and it reminds readers of stories by Sandra Cisneros, such as
her often-anthologized “Barbie-Q.” As with most Latina writers
(including poets like Cherrie Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes),
Viramontes is never far from the social reality that Mexican
Americans and other immigrant cultures have experienced in the
twentieth century — not only the economic injustices, but also
the discrimination and prejudice that often follow. On the other
hand, her young women characters are capable of spiritual acts
which carry her fiction to another, often mystical level. Her
fiction has created a unique voice in American literature.
“The Cariboo Café” First published: 1985 (collected in The
Moths, and Other Stories, 1985)
Type of work: Short story
Illegal immigrants and other disoriented characters collide
violently in a city diner.
“The Cariboo Café” is a powerful short work that is
representative of many of Viramontes’s fictional concerns and
techniques. The story is complicated by a shifting point of view,
which moves from past to present without explanation, and
readers may have some difficulty following the plot initially.
However, this technique is exactly what Viramontes wants the
reader to feel in order to experience the kind of displacement
and alienation that her characters share. The first section of the
three-part story is told from somewhere within six-year-old
Sonya, who is supposed to be taking care of her younger
brother, Macky, after she comes home from school. Sonya has
lost the key to her apartment, however, and does not notice the

loss until after she picks up Macky from Mrs. Avila, who
watches him during the day. Sonya and her brother are
immigrants, both their parents work to support the family in this
adopted country, and the story portrays powerfully the dangers
of this new life. Sonya decides to walk back to Mrs. Avila’s to
wait for her parents to return, but she only knows the route the
other way, and she and her brother are easily lost in the garment
district of Los Angeles. When the police stop a man on the
street, Sonya and Macky — following their parents’ iron rule —
run and hide and are further lost in “a maze of alleys and dead
ends, the long abandoned warehouses shadowing any light.”
Across some railroad tracks, Sonya sees “the zero-zero place”
and drags Macky toward it.
Part 2 of the story moves to the perspective of the owner of the
Cariboo Café where the story’s action will take place, a run-
down diner whose sign has been reduced to “the double zero” of
its original name, a symbol which comes to stand for all the
losses in the story. The café owner describes himself as
“honest” and “fair,” but readers hear the anger and bitterness in
his voice. Like all the characters in this story, he is oppressed
by the conditions of his life and blames the outcasts and misfits,
the “scum” around him, with whom he shares more than he
admits.
Beneath this recital of his woes, readers learn what has
happened in his café. A woman has brought the two children
into the place for something to eat. (Readers assume that the
three met outside in the interstice between the first two parts of
the story.) The owner does not like the watchful Sonya, but he
is immediately attracted to her brother, whom he dubs “Short
Order,” and he brings hamburgers for them all. He later learns
from the television news that the children have been reported
missing by their parents, but he does nothing except drink beer
and fall asleep. The owner had a son himself, “JoJo,” who was
killed fifteen years before in Vietnam, and thus his attraction to
Macky. A drug addict overdoses in the café bathroom the next
morning, and the police swarm in — further reason, the owner

explains, why he never told them about the woman and the
missing children. A few hours later, three other illegal
immigrants run into the café to hide from the immigration
authorities in the bathroom, but the police find them. After they
are arrested, the woman and the two children return to the café,
and part 2 ends.
The last third of the story is narrated from several shifting
perspectives. The first part comes from within the old woman
who, it turns out, is herself an illegal alien from Central
America who has come to the United States because her young
son was taken by the military authorities. Part 3 is, if anything,
murkier than the first two parts, because this narrator has
become unhinged by recent events in her life and moves
between past and present with no transitions. She clearly
confuses Macky with her five-year-old son Geraldo (the same
way, ironically, that the café owner confuses the boy with his
dead son JoJo). She has left El Salvador because, “Without
Geraldo, this is not my home; the earth beneath it, not my
country,” and now she sees Macky as a returned Geraldo. She
takes the children back to her hotel room, bathes Macky, and
watches both children sleep.
With no break (except a new paragraph), the narrative shifts
back to the consciousness of the café owner. He cannot believe
how the three have cleaned themselves up this morning, but he
takes their orders and goes into the kitchen to prepare the meal.
There, suddenly, “For the first time since JoJo’s death, he’s
crying” — in anger for his son, for his wife Nell who apparently
left after JoJo was killed, even for the old woman who is going
to bring more trouble on him. “Children gotta be with their
parents, family gotta be together, he thinks.” At this point, he
apparently calls the police.
Again with no noticeable break, the story shifts back to the
deranged woman as two black-and-white police cruisers pull up
to the café, and officers enter, guns drawn. She grabs Macky,
thinking that she is reenacting the terror in her home country
when Geraldo was taken. She throws hot coffee on the police,

but the story ends when she hears “something crunching like
broken glass against my forehead and I am blinded by the liquid
darkness.” Still, she will not release Macky/Geraldo’s hand;
“you see, I’ll never let go. Because we are going home. My son
and I.” Evidence in the beginning of part 2 indicates that she
has been shot and killed.
The story has been anthologized often, including in one of the
most popular college literary surveys titled The Heath
Anthology of American Literature, and for good reason, as the
story not only raises a number of relevant social issues but at
the same time is representative of the concerns of many Latinos
living in the United States. U.S. authorities are seen as
threatening collaborators with those in Central America,
immigration becomes a dangerous choice, and all the characters
are victims of exploitation and oppression. Sonya and the old
woman are the focus here, but even the male characters —
Macky, the café owner, the drug user — share the oppression
and alienation.
“The Moths” First published: 1985 (collected in The Moths, and
Other Stories, 1985)
Type of work: Short story
A young Latina finds her own identity as she nurses her dying
grandmother and holds her in the bathtub as the soul escapes.
“The Moths,” the story that would become the title work in
Viramontes’s first collection of short fiction, is even more
representative of her central concerns and develops more deeply
her feminist themes. Again two women play central roles: an
older woman and her fourteen-year-old granddaughter. The
technique of the story is less complex than “The Cariboo Café,”
for the girl is the narrator throughout the short piece, and the
structure of her story is fairly straightforward. However, the
story is full of rich sensory detail (of sight, sound, smell, and
touch), as well as the magic realism that infuses so much of
Latin American fiction and that influences so many Latino and
other writers.
Essentially this is a coming-of-age story, of a young girl who,

in rebellion against her own patriarchal family, seeks comfort in
the company of her grandmother and, in easing the grandmother
through death, finds her own spiritual core. It is clear from the
opening of the story that the girl is different, not “pretty or
nice,” she admits, nor even “respectful.” She clashes with her
family often, especially with the older sisters who try to bully
her, and with a father who tries to make her fit a conventional
mold, as by attending church. Her grandmother has requested
her help, however, as the girl says in the story’s first sentence,
for Abuelita is dying. Traditional religion is no solace here: The
girl goes into a local chapel but only feels “alone” there; in her
Abuelita’s house, by contrast, she feels “safe and guarded and
not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel.” The girl’s
mother is hardly able to cope with her mother’s imminent death,
but the narrator rises to become the caretaker, bathing Abuelita
and holding her hand for hours. When her grandmother dies, the
girl cleans her body and then, in a mystical ritual of ablution,
undresses herself and carries the naked body of the grandmother
into a full bathtub and holds her. “There, there, Abuelita, I said,
cradling her . . . .” At this point in the last paragraph of the
story, the Magical Realism takes over:
Then the moths came. Small gray ones that came from her soul
and out through her mouth
fluttering to light . . . . The bathroom was filled with moths,
and for the first time in a long time I
cried, rocking us, crying for her, for me, for Amá, the sobs
emerging from the depths of anguish,
the misery of feeling half-born. . . .
She is “half-born” but she is in the process of giving birth to
herself through her devotion to her Abuelita. In a powerful and
complex poetic metaphor (for the bath is also a kind of
baptism), Viramontes has imagined the emergence of this young
girl through her grandmother’s death (as the moths emerge from
Abuelita). It is a spiritual image which defies translation, but
beneath the image, readers can sense Michaelangelo’s “Pieta,”
the statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ,

another image of death and transfiguration. (Viramontes has
acknowledged the influence of W. Eugene Smith’s famous 1972
Life magazine photograph, “Tomoko in the Bath,” of a Japanese
woman holding her child deformed by industrial poisoning.)
Viramontes’s fiction is ripe with this kind of religious imagery.
The girl and her grandmother have created a separate,
alternative, and sacred family based on love, and Viramontes
draws on Christian iconography to confirm it. In contrast to her
own home (where her father abuses the women), the girl finds
her true self here.
Under the Feet of Jesus First published: 1995
Type of work: Novel
A young girl holds her fragmented and exploited family of
migrant farmworkers family together after one of them is
sickened by pesticides.
Under the Feet of Jesus is a novella telling a powerful story
about California’s migrant farmworkers. Viramontes has
dedicated this work to her parents, who met while picking
cotton, and to the memory of César Chávez, the revered leader
of the United Farm Workers. The work centers on Estrella, a
thirteen-year-old girl traveling with her family from job to job
in California’s central San Joaquin Valley. Estrella’s father has
abandoned the family of five children, and her mother is
pregnant again by the seventy-three-year-old Perfecto Flores,
who drives them to their new job in his aging car but dreams of
getting away himself. The family moves into a dilapidated
house near an aging barn, works picking grapes, and befriends
two cousins, Alejo and Gumecindo. Estrella and Alejo have an
immediate attraction, and the novella’s drama builds when
Alejo is sprayed by pesticides one night while he and
Gumecindo are stealing apples from a nearby orchard to sell.
Alarmed by his worsening illness, the family drives him to a
clinic, where a nurse takes their money, only to direct them to a
nearby hospital. Knowing they need their money for gas,
Estrella takes a crowbar from the car and shatters the nurse’s
glass-topped desk. It is Estrella’s symbolic rite of passage; the

nurse gives back their money, and Estrella and her family drive
Alejo to the hospital. Estrella comes out of the hospital entrance
to her waiting family, and Viramontes underlines the religious
imagery she employs throughout the novella: “she stepped
forward and the glass doors split open before her as if obeying
her command. . . . Estrella parted the doors like a sea of glass
and walked through . . . .”
When they return to their camp, Estrella climbs onto the roof of
the old barn, and, in a continuation of this rich religious
imagery, the shingles feel like “the serpent under the feet of
Jesus” and Estrella stands on the roof “as immobile as an angel
standing on the verge of faith.” In this symbolism that
Viramontes has taken from Christian iconography, Estrella has
gained the strength, not to save Alejo, perhaps, but to hold her
family together. She has become a star, like her name, and a
savior.
Readers may be reminded here of another Latino coming-of-age
classic, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and there are
a number of similarities, including the mixed use of religious
and folk images. Under the Feet of Jesus is even closer in
subject and sympathy to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), however. Estrella’s migrant farm family, Viramontes
assures readers — as Steinbeck did with the migrant Joads a
half century earlier in the same region — has its spiritual
figures and power in spite of what society does to it, how it is
pummeled and poisoned. Estrella’s growth to young adulthood
at the end of the novella, like much of the symbolism in
Steinbeck’s work (both books end in barns, for example), gives
a power to the migrant family and its transformative potential.
“If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of
us?” her mother asks earlier. “We have to look out for our
own.”
Summary
In the last decades of the twentieth century, Helena María
Viramontes became one of a handful of Latina writers to voice
the concerns of a growing Latino population. Her fiction deals

with issues such as immigration and farm labor, but her
particular focus is on the women in the Latino family and the
ways in which they find their identity in spite of the oppressive
institutions they inhabit. Viramontes, in short, is recognizable
for the ways she merges her feminism with ethnic
consciousness.
Her stories are not always easy to follow, but her language is
poetic and powerful, and her message is unmistakable. In a
Long Beach, California, Women Writers Conference in 1984,
Viramontes read aloud the story she had just completed writing,
“The Cariboo Café.” She felt foolish because she could not stop
crying as she read it, she later said, but when she finished she
looked up and everyone in the room was crying as well.
Discussion Topics
•What is the role that institutions, such as government, church,
and family, play in the fiction of Helena María Viramontes?
•How do protagonists find their identity in the stories of
Viramontes — through traditional assimilation into these
institutions or through resistance and rebellion?
•What is coming-of-age like for Viramontes’s young
protagonists?
•What role does gender play in these stories? Social class?
Ethnicity?
•What characterizes the structure and style of Viramontes’s
stories?
Essay by: David Peck
Bibliography
Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llarona to Gritona: Coatlicue in
Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24
(Summer, 1999): 53-74. Analyzes the representations of the
Mexican goddess Coatlicue and the folkloric figure of the
wailing ghost La Llarona in the works of Mexican American
women writers Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros.
Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason. American Women
Writers. New York: Continuum, 1994, 463-465. The editors
provide a brief biographical sketch as well as an analysis of the

short stories in Moths. They emphasize the portrayal of Chicana
women with their strengths and weaknesses as they struggle
with the restrictions placed on them because they are women.
They note that many of the characters pay a price for rebelling
against traditional values.
Moore, Deborah Owen. “La Llarona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe:
Structure and Legend in the Works of Helena María
Viramontes.” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (Summer, 1998): 277-
286. Contrasts the distant and close-up narrative perspectives in
Viramontes’s work.
Richards, Judith. “Chicano Creativity and Criticism: New
Frontiers in American Literature.” College Literature 25
(Spring, 1998): 182. In this review of the anthology edited by
Viramontes and María Herrera-Sobek, Richards argues that the
book provides a good starting place for those who want to
evaluate the Chicana literary movement. Points to the
emergence of urban working-class women as protagonists, the
frequent use of child and adolescent narrators, and
autobiographical formats that focus on unresolved issues as
characteristics of Chicana literature.
Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. “Helena María Viramontes.” Dictionary of
Literary Biography. Chicano Writers series. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1992. Summarizes and analyzes several stories from
Moths, stressing the cultural and religious traditions that
restrict women’s lives. Discusses the patriarchal privileges that
the father assumes in the story when he shouts at his daughter
“‘Tu eres mujer’” (you are a woman) in order to control her.
Calls “Snapshots” a “scathing critique of the politics of
housework” and refers to the divorced Olga as “an alienated
laborer whose value has decreased.”
Swyt, Wendy. “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two
Stories by Helena María Viramontes.” MELUS 23 (Summer,
1998): 189-201. Discusses the short stories “The Broken Web”
and “Cariboo Cafe.”
Yarbo-Bejarano, Yvonne. Introduction to “The Moths and Other
Stories.” Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1995. Discusses

Viramontes’s portrayal of women characters who struggle
against the restrictions placed on them by the Chicano culture,
the church, and the men in these women’s lives. Provides a brief
analysis of each story in the collection, showing that the stories
deal with problems Chicana women face at various stages of
their lives. Notes that, although Viramontes addresses the
problems of racial prejudice and economic struggles, the
emphasis is on the cultural and social values that shape these
women and suggests that most of stories involve the conflict
between the female character and the man who represents an
oppressive authority figure.

Brehm, J., (2006). Luis Miguel Valdez. Magills Survey of American.docx

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