Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012 - 14

What the theatre does is to bring these two entities together into a
common moment that is the living and breathing essence of what I call
the theatre. Theatre for me occurs in the audience, not on the stage. It is
a vibration that occurs. These ideas come from a lifelong search for my
own cultural identity as an American, as a modern, twenty-first century
American, but also as a continental, ancient American. My roots go back
20,000 years in this hemisphere. Even though today the descendants of
my ancestors are described in a number of different ways that are really
quite misleading-undocumented immigrants, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans,
Hondurans, what have you-really what you're dealing with here is the
beginning point of the great melting pot that is America today, the indigenous peoples, the survivors of the holocaust of five hundred years ago
and the blends that have occurred with all of the races of humankind in
the last five hundred years to produce the so-called Latinos. But the Latino
is really the product of the melting pot.
In my search to find meaning in my life, I discovered that theatre, for
me, was my search engine. Theatre for me was a way to explore not only the
mentality of my life experience but also the physicality and the emotionality
and ultimately the vibration of my life. And I discovered this quite intuitively.
It wasn't something that I knew. I went to Cesar Chavez in 1965 and pitched
him an idea for a theatre of, by, and for farmworkers, and his first response
was very characteristic of his honesty and his humility.
He said, "Fine, I like your ideas, but you know there's no money to
do theatre in Delano." He said, "There're no actors in Delano, there's no
stage in Delano. There isn't even any time to rehearse. We're on the picket
line night and day. Do you still want to take a crack at it?" And I said, "Absolutely, Cesar, what an opportunity."
What I was tapping into was the spirit of this movement that he and
Dolores Huerta had begun in the south-central San Joaquin Valley in Delano, California, where I was born. I was born there in 1940 in a labor
camp, in what is today Highway 99. They sliced right through the town.
The west side of it was right in the middle of town in Chinatown. This is
where I returned in 1965, and for me it was that circle, it was completing
and closing a circle in order to tap back into my life.
Let me start by sharing a little story, a little-Luis story, about how I got
into theatre. Now a lot of us got into theatre in school, in first grade. Now
in my case, the same thing happened to me but under rather extenuating
circumstances. I was born into a migrant family, and our life took us all
over the state. In 1946, even though World War II had come and gone,
we were still on the road. I was in the field, in my mother's arms, before
I could walk. But that's another story. In 1946, we were in a place called
Corcoran, on the west valley, and cotton was still king in Corcoran, and
it was picked by hand.
There's a great big prison in Corcoran, where Charles Manson
resides and where Robert Downy Jr. was a guest not too long ago. The
problem is that the whole west valley, all of California, has discovered the
profitability of building prisons. So these are private enterprises. Now, in
order to build prisons, you have to have someone to put into them, so you
put Latinos and African Americans in them. So the criminalization of Latinos and African American youth is part of the puzzle. It's been my lifelong
effort to try to unravel all of that. That's why I wrote Zoot Suit. But back
in 1946, there were no prisons, there were just a lot of cotton camps, and
there were a lot of migrant families living in army-surplus tents and picking cotton. There must have been 2,000 people.

theatre design

& technology

summer 2012

In those days, everybody was out there. There were Oakies from the
Midwest, from the Dust Bowl, and there were African Americans from
the South. There were Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese. Can you believe there
were Japanese-American farmworkers out there? And Sikhs from India,
American Indians, and Puerto Ricans, we were all out there. When I was a
kid, I thought everybody was a cotton picker. You know, we were all equal
out there. But what happened to so many people out there was this. The
cotton season came and went in a flash, it lasted only about a month, and
then everybody started to leave. The tents started to come down. There
were cabins that were there originally, and they started to empty out. So
my family moved into one of them. We couldn't move on because my dad's
pickup truck that we were traveling in had broken down. Farmers worked
from hand to mouth, and that's what happened to my family. We were fishing in the San Joaquin river and surviving on beans and tortillas and fish.
Fish tacos before they were trendy. One morning out there, early in the
morning, I almost drowned, and my mother got really frightened and said,
"Maybe you and your brother better go to school." Now it was already late
October, and we knew we weren't going to be there for very long, but we
climbed onto the yellow bus.
Once I was on the bus, my focus went to my lunch. What's my mom
packing for lunch? Somehow she commandeered a little brown paper bag
at the company store. You know, paper bags were a rarity in 1946; there
were still paper shortages. So I really treasured this little brown paper
bag, which I used to take Mama's tacos. There's nothing like Mama's tacos
you know; they were incredible on a cold day. So I took them to school,
and I would eat my lunch.
Now I had a shock, because it was the first time I'd ever seen lunch
pails. Some of the kids had lunch pails, the Anglo kids especially. They
were these metal things that had Hopalong Cassidy emblazoned on the
side or Mickey Mouse. Then they'd open them up, and this treasure would
come out, two pieces of white board-oh no, white bread, sorry-and
with the baloney and the lettuce, it was amazing. I had never seen sandwiches like that. Then they'd pull out an apple or an orange or a cupcake!
And here's the kicker, a thermos, my god, you open up the thermos and
out comes milk or Coca-Cola. And suddenly my tacos looked sadder and
sadder. So I pulled a taco out, called a burrito today, we didn't call them
burritos then, they were tacos, and I'd eat them like a wino drinks his
wine, one bite at a time. When a kid would say, "What are you eating?" I'd
say, "Oh, nothing!" And they would look at my tacos, and I would look at
their sandwiches, and they'd look at my tacos, and I'd look at their sandwiches, and one day the inevitable happened. We exchanged lunches! And
the rest is Taco Bell history!
Well, one day, my bag is missing from the closet, and the bus is leaving.
The teacher sees me running around. She says, "What are you missing?" "My
brown paper bag." And the teacher said "Yeah, well, I took it." And I said,
"Give it back." She said, "I can't. Come with me." She escorted me to a little
room behind her desk, and there was my bag all ripped up floating in a basin
of water. I thought she'd gone nuts, you know, the teacher went berserk, "loco
la maestra," as you'd say in Spanish. She said, "No, look at this," and she
reached in, grabbed a little piece of the bag, dipped it in some white paste,
and for the first time, I noticed a mold, clay, a face, an animal, a monkey. Then
she laid it out, smoothed it out, put on another piece, smoothed it out, then
another piece. "You wanna try it?" "Yeah!" So I tried it out, and at that moment
I discovered one of the secrets of the universe. It's called papier-mâché.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012