Zoot Suit (Style)

Style

Valdez’s Mexican Theatre Forms

Zoot Suit is a combination of actos (or “protest skits”), mitos (“myth”), and corrido (“ballad”); the combination draws upon traditional Mexican songs and dances, traditional stories, and the political activism of Valdez’s previous work with the socially active El Teatro Campesino. The play also has a strong documentary element with its basis in historical events. The result is musical docudrama of epic proportions.

In the beginning of his career, Valdez wrote, or rather orchestrated, since he did not always commit the actos to paper, simple and brief political protest pieces aimed at audiences of migrant workers. Most lasted only fifteen minutes. These actos used masks, simple but exaggerated storylines, and minimal settings and props. Often the actors sported cards proclaiming their generic roles — “worker,” or “patroncito” [manager] — rather than adopting an actual character. Characterization is not important in social protest plays, since the purpose is to condemn acts committed against a people, not a person. Thus Henry Reyna “is” El Pachuco, representing the tragic and self-destructive genre of pachuco gangs as well as their victimization by a xenophobic society.

The mitos moves the allegorical agenda of the actos into the spiritual realm. Valdez created mitos to fulfill his vision of “a teatro of legends and myths.” He told David Savran in an interview for American Theatre that to him, myth is “so real that it’s just below the surface — it’s the supporting structure of our everyday reality.” In a Valdez mito, a mythical character interacts with the other, human, characters and sometimes takes controls the play like an onstage director. El Pachuco was not the first mythical character Valdez used: the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl and a precursor to El Pachuco, La Luna (“the moon”), appear in his allegorical play Bernabe (1970), and a child named Mundo (“earth”) is born to skeletal figures in Elfin del mundo (1976; the title means “The End of the Earth”). Comet sightings and symbolic sets and rituals further underscore the presence of myth in these plays. The mythic quality of El Pachuco in Zoot Suit is signaled by his ability to stop and start the action with a snap of his fingers; it is confirmed when he rises, Christlike, wearing the Christian cross but also dressed in an Aztec loincloth, in Act II, scene vii.

The corrido has a long history in Mexican culture; its presence adds an element of folk art to Valdez’s plays, being the Hispanic version of the American musical. Valdez’s fusion of these unrelated theatrical forms into a fresh, new, dramatic concept put Chicano theater onto the American theatrical map.

Brecthtian Influences and Epic Theatre

In addition to historical and traditional Hispanic elements, Valdez also looked to the Epic Theatre technique pioneered by German playwright Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and Her Children). Brecht’s best-known plays were socially conscious works that sought to make audiences think about the playwright’s political agenda. To achieve such results, Brecht turned to “alienation” techniques that prevented the audience from judging his plays on an emotional level, thus freeing them to judge a play’s concepts in a purely intellectual, empirical manner. These techniques included placards that informed the audience of the major plot points that would be unfolding within each act. Brecht also broke up his narratives with satirical songs that jarringly diverted the audience’s attention from episodes that might allow them to form an emotional connection to characters. El Pacucho functions as an alienating device in Zoot Suit, often stopping the action and directly addressing the audience. Valdez’s play also qualifies as Epic Theatre in its use of a wide range of characters across a considerable time period.

Mixing Spanish and English

In areas of the United States with significant Spanish-speaking populations, the practice of mixing Spanish and English in newspaper journalism, radio programming, public signs, and schools as well as in drama has become a hotly contested topic, raising issues of cultural hegemony — whether one language should dominate another. In 1978, to use whole lines of Spanish in a play was to address it primarily to a bilingual audience, although the non-Spanish-speaking members of the audience had little trouble understanding the context of the Spanish. In Zoot Suit, the characters switch to Spanish in moments of intimacy, teasing, and emotional outbursts, as when the 38th Street Gang routs the Downey Gang, and Tommy elatedly proclaims the victory in mixed Spanish and English: “Orales, you did it, ese! Se escamaron todos! [you ran them all out!].”

Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, mixes English with Spanish in her novels. She explained that Spanish is “the language of sensations and emotions, of the day to day.” Duke University professor and poet Gustavo Perez Fermet, author of a collection of poems called Bilingual Blues agreed, saying that “English is very concise and efficient,” while “Spanish has sambrosura, flavor.” In Zoot Suit, the scenes of the trial and the boys’ discussions with George are primarily in English, while the dance and fight scenes have whole passages in Spanish, especially the insults. Official business is communicated in English, while “street” business is communicated in the gang’s vernacular Spanish, which is not formal Spanish but “pachuco” Spanish, full of slang expressions.

Topics for Further Study

• What kind of influence does El Pachuco have over Henry? Is his a positive effect or a negative one?
• Revolutionary theater attempts to move the audience to reform social injustices. What techniques does Valdez’s play employ in its attempt to sway the audience?
• What is the impact of the bilingual aspect of this play on Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish speaking audiences? What does this device say about American culture?
• Compare Henry Reyna’s fictional life with the historical Henry Leyvas’s life. Speculate on why Valdez made the choices he did in fictionalizing Henry’s life for the stage.