Opinion: Anaya and Valdez honors long overdue

Two of my favorite writers of all time, Rudolfo Anaya and Luis Valdez, were among three Hispanic writers awarded National Medals of Arts/Humanities by President Obama at The White House last week. A third writer, Sandra Cisneros, was also honored.

I’ve shared many times how influential Rudolfo Anaya, author of “Bless Me, Ultima,” has been to me. However, when I saw a news story last week about these three writers, I realized it was Luis Valdez who had actually been my first inspiration to write. Many people know Valdez’s greatest work, writing and directing the movie “La Bamba,” based on the life and death of Ritchie Valens. But I first knew Valdez as the founder of Teatro Campesino, a traveling Hispanic theater group who brought their plays of social justice to the campus of Eastern New Mexico University in the 1970s.

Under the directorship of Valdez, Teatro Campesino performed their first play in the back of a pickup truck in 1965 on the picket lines of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union in Delano, California. Valdez’s Teatro Campesino proved to be a useful outlet in getting the farmworkers’ messages across. Teatro Campesino means theater of the farmworkers.

After Valdez took Teatro Campesino touring across the country, many towns started similar street theaters. In Portales, my aunts and several friends were founding members of Teatro de la Comunidad, which means theater of the community. They practiced at the old North Portales Community Center at Lindsey Park and my mom and dad often provided their stage music. When I was in grade school, my friends and I wanted to mimic the older teens, so they formed a Teatro de Los Ninos (theater of the children) for us. We performed our plays in Muleshoe, Brownfield, Roswell and a few other towns.

The North Portales Community Center building was torn down in the early 1980s and, by then, our theater groups had stopped performing. But I had read many of Valdez’s scripts, which my mom had, and that inspired me to try my pen at writing my own scripts. I showed my friends some of my plays and tried to get them together to reform a teatro group, but by then, many of my friends were interested in other things.

I kept writing though, and when I got to college, during my sophomore year in 1987, some friends and I performed a play I had written at ENMU’s annual Festival Romanico called “La Llorona: Fact or Legend.” We had a hilarious time practicing for it and performing it. That same year, I was ecstatic to see Valdez rise from his stage in back of pickup trucks to the big screens. His motion picture, “La Bamba,” was released. I had been following Valdez’s career, proudly watching him take “Chicano theater” from the bed of a pickup truck to Broadway. Prior to “La Bamba,” Valdez’s musical “Zoot Suit” made it to Broadway in 1981.

I would say that both the deep, Hispanic-rooted writings of Valdez and Anaya have opened the doors and set the stage for our culture to be showcased in mainstream America. These medals were long overdue.

Helena Rodriguez is a Portales native. Contact her at: [email protected]