and now latinosandos proud to Welcome to the stage our 2022 mix talks headliner Luis Valdez Luis Valdez is an internationally and acclaimed and celebrated playwright and director who's often called the father of Chicano film and theater his many works like zoot suit and La Bamba reflect unnecessary and Powerful Mexican voice as one of the founders of the renowned El tietro Campesino known for being the culture arm of the United Farm Workers and the Chicano movement Luis valdez's vision and craft has transcended his work to that of a true revolutionary art [Applause] I've always believed the theater is a creator of community and the community is a creator of theater [Music] myself [Music] [Applause] regardless of economic status should have access to a theater I Am The Ballad The Ballad sings and my voice is of the streets and the Cantinas and the dancehalls and all the places where I am heard for I am the soul of the common people that sings of tragedies and melancholy but also happiness please join us in giving a warm shift to the one and angry Luis Valdez buenos noches it's such a pleasure to be here again in Chicago on Michoacan Avenue I've always enjoyed that link between Michigan and Michoacan it's the same word brilla the place of the fish all right well I want to thank Mexico and all the wonderful staff for this opportunity to come and speak to you tonight what a what a pleasure what an honor especially in this lineup of such talented intelligent leaders and artists and the future is a organ because our future depends on the young people I'm going to share a couple little stories with you actually I was born in 1940 in California my folks came out of Sonora they were yakis once upon a time and they came to Arizona to Tucson and Mesa and they were doing whatever they could even working in the mines picking cotton eventually they made their way to California in the 1920s to create basically King Cotton and King grape the big corporations were getting started and they needed labor and so they used the trains to truck in Dar rasa to come in and develop the agribusiness you know it's a multi-billion dollar industry in Khalifa and and it's on the backs and on the sweat and on the Good Will so I was born in a labor camp a farm labor camp in Delano California and it was my actually it was my grandmother's Little Shack and my mother went there and she took me there before they tore the camp down they put Highway 99 right through there right through the audio but anyway I was born there and a year later uh a family moved in across the street from that labor camp uh to one of my tias and and into one of the cabins that belonged to one of my ideas and uh it was a fun family from uh Arizona from Yuma Arizona they were the Chavez's and they were two teenage boys one uh was called Cece and the other was called rookie and so they turned out to be Cesar and Richard Chavez and uh so that link you know right across the street there it is has defined my life you know sometimes but if life puts you in a you know punches you in the face or or gives you a kick you know you'd find your list you know pretty quick and so but I didn't wasn't there to receive and I was only one year old because we were already on the migrant path that was on the migrant path before I could walk I was in my mother's arms like a lot of Campesino babies you know sleeping in a fruit box you know in the fields and then we were staying in a little Barn uh in a little town in in Northern California picking prunes and my Tio and Matia were there was my cousins and we were there they moved the cows out and moved the Mexicans in and so uh we we used to cook my mother and my my tea I used to cook on Athena uh Tim tub with a hole cut in the side it was a portable kitchen man it was a portable grill and so it used to ride on top of the truck real easy it was Heavy it was light and so that morning uh that one morning they were there cooking and and undes cuido you know that something was careless and and they didn't notice that I was crawling around and I had a little cousin little baby girl who came she's starting to walk and someone had put a little panita you know of water uh and and um my cousin grabbed the handle and she found it really hot and she lost it and dropped it and it fell on my back and I screamed and I don't remember this you know but they tell me and I passed out my mom and dad came running they wrapped me up in a blanket and they took me to the nearest hospital in a little town called Gilroy you know garlic capital of the world and uh and when they got to the hospital they opened up the blanket and all of the skin on my back sloughed off and my mother was really scared to death 20 years old and she had just lost the baby before me my another brother that I had who died and so she said you know and so they took her into the emergency there was no burn unit or anything it's 1941. this is before Pearl Harbor and we were Mexicans we were migrant workers you know so they put some kind of treatment on my back and and released me I I guess today I'd be in a burn unit I'd be in the ice in the ER you know they would have taken care but in those days that was the way it was and it's both good and bad you know that they released me I've always believed that you can take the negatives in your life and turn them into something positive and this was my first real experience because two things happen on the one hand that water that hit me that boiling water hit me right here in the back and uh scalded me but you know what I mean it really it was a wake-up call it was more than a kick in the ass man it was a wow you know with hot water and the other thing though is that for the next six months I slept on my mother's stomach 20 years old she was afraid that I would roll over holding me and I took in all that love that she was giving me there's nothing like Mother's Love nothing your mothers are blessed things and so they they Empower their kids until my mother did that and she had 10 kids you know I was only number two or number three really but two out of ten kids five brothers Five Sisters but my brothers and sisters always felt a little bit jealous of me because you know my mom you said you you know you were always our favorite but that's not true but thing is that she did Empower me you know she did Empower me so after the war of 46 we're still on the migrant path and this is when I got hooked in the theater because what we were doing is picking cotton and uh you know the cotton seasoning came and went like that because there were thousands of people of all colors but they were blacks from the south there were Japanese they were coming out of the concentration camps Chinese even you know they were white people Okies were out there I thought everybody was a cotton picker you know so the cotton season went like Batman and we couldn't move on out of the labor camp because my dad's truck was uh was broken down we had a little pickup truck so he had it up on blocks and and you know we're leaving hand to mouth hand to mouth and so what happened is we were living off of the fish talking about police of the fish at the San Joaquin Delta in in in California we used to fish and and uh take them home to my mom and we were eating fish tacos before they were trendy you know so one one morning you know I'm almost drowned I fell in the river and uh fortunately my dad reached Melo you know pulled me out like a fish and so my mother got really scared and she said maybe you and your brother better go to school because the school bus used to come into the camp so we went to school and she found a little brown paper bag and there were paper shortages in 1946 but she used to make the tacos the tortilla you know the the arena and our fish tacos or once in a while eggs if you can find beans and that's what I took to school you know really because they had no cafeteria but the Anglo kids had uh lunch boxes you know metal boxes and and sandwiches you know uh I I used to eat them the way a wine or drinks is wine you know the kid just said what are you eating no no no nothing you know one day one day uh they kept looking at me and I kept looking at the sandwiches and they kept looking in my tacos and I kept looking and we exchanged lunches and the rest is Taco Bell history you know anyway what happened is that one day I went to get my bags I'd take it back to my mom and and I wasn't there it wasn't in the closet and the teacher saw me running around Morocco you know she says uh what happened and I said I told oh a little brown paper bag yeah she said I took it so let's give it back and she says I can't and she escorted me back into a little room behind her desk and there was my bag all ripped up floating in a basin of water I said well if you're local you know what I mean she went berserk but no and she said look at this and she picked up a little piece dipped it into some paste and the first time I noticed the mold it was a face it was an animal a monkey and then she put another piece on it smooth it out another piece moved it out and at that point he says you want to try it I said yeah okay you know and at that moment I discovered one of the secrets of the universe it's called paper mache and I said what past Halloween it's already November what what is this for and she said uh it's for a play and the whole school is involved It's called Christmas in the jungle and we need two first graders to play monkeys so I forgave her about the bag I auditioned and I got my first role in the theater it was amazing she made a beautiful mask out of my mama's Taco bag you know she it was she painted it and I got a costume that was better than my own clothes I mean I I had uh a little green vest you know red pants you know and then little shoes a little hat you know man I was in heaven and I I converted the old school auditorium into a jungle and I couldn't believe it I couldn't wait to go to school this is great so we were rehearsing and then I came back from school the week of the show about early in the week it was about a Monday or Tuesday and my mom says we're leaving tomorrow what well there's the show's on Friday you know it and she says I know but we're being evicted mijo we're being thrown out we gotta go position you know what I mean I ran out crying she cried with me and the next morning I was in the back of the pickup truck you know with my brothers and sisters as we pulled out and passed by the school in the San Joaquin fog and I felt this hole open up in my chest I thought I was going to be destroyed you know again but I've always believed that a positive you know can a negative can be turned into a positive because that hole became the hungry mouth of my creativity I took with me the secret of paper mache my unrequited love of the theater and also anger residual anger because we had been evicted from the labor camp approximately 20 years later I went to Cesar Chavez and I pitched him the idea for a theater of by and for Farm Workers El tiatro Campesino it was born out of the dreams of a child a Campesino child I was speaking to a bunch of superintendents years later and the president superintendent of that school district in the San Joaquin Valley of the Stratford School District heard me speak and he went back and checked his records and he sent me a mimeograph copy of the attendance record of 1946 first grade and there on the bottom says Louis Valdez the kid was in school for 30 days that was it I was a migrant kid in and out but it shaped my life and at the top of the page is the name of the teacher Ruth Tremaine and God bless her she must be about 50 150 years old by now but you know but she launched my career so I've always told teachers you never know who you're teaching you never know who you're inspiring and as a teacher myself I feel that way about my students I don't care how old they are or how young or old it's always the same you never know who you're talking to because our destiny and the Creator puts these opportunities before us your life is full of opportunity your life is full of treasures your life is full of power if you only know how to pull it out now speaking of campesinos you know we we have suffered uh the greatest disgrace because of the LA Colombian you know the colony the the Distortion that they put on the people that work in the fields now over here in most of the industrialized World workers are wage slaves you know they work in the factories they pluck chickens they they cut up meat or or they work in the fields or they wash dishes and they're considered to be manoda you know you're just working hands but in campesinos in Mexico were a lot more than that you know agriculture did not develop all over the world you know it developed in the areas where there was water where there was fertility and what are the wonders of Mexico is our agricultural Treasures is what we created you know what we created the the camote the sweet potato saved China from starvation once it was discovered and taken to Asia just like the potato from the Incas saved Europe and Russia this is an American Creations the Indique in us that have fed the world but we don't get any credit for it and we don't get credit for the hydroponic system that our pre-columbian ancestors had we don't get credit for knowing something about the relationship between the stars and the seasons and when to produce enough food to create cities of a hundred thousand people they're discovering there were a lot of them all over Mexico Mexico is a treasure you know if people go to Europe they got to know about Rome they got to know about the Greeks but people come to the Americas and they don't know about the Rome and the Greeks of the new world those are our people and so it has been my mission you can applaudible so it has been my mission as a poet and as a writer as a filmmaker as a man of the Teatro is to understand what it is that we're doing I have a new book out called theater of the sphere the vibrant being it's it's you can find it on Amazon you can look it up I recommend it to you it's not just for theater people because it's a way of life based on the ideas of our ancestors okay Juan Carlos okay we're going to see some images up here from the book I'm going to go flip through them real quick because I want to refer them this is uh the title page one of the not the cover of the book but a title page and you can see we have the wellga eagle there one of the reasons I wanted to start with this because the interlocking Eagles you know represent four movement cuatro movimiento but you know what's interesting is the the the flag was designed by Richard Chavez and he put five steps on it so what's interesting about this is five in the Mayan mathematical system is is represented by a line it's a DOT bar system and so it's very much like our our zeros and ones today you know the Mayas were way out there but the thing is that if you compute and and add the five five five and five you get 20. okay next slide we go up and this is more familiar this is this is now we ordin this is this is cuatro movimiento now this is the essence you know of of the dynamic philosophy of our ancestors we understand the symbols but you got to understand them with your whole being and this is why I have made this a study and we have worked with the theater campus you know for more than 50 years to to learn and elucidate all these thoughts next slide por favor Juan Carlos and uh our ancient answer to this is but you know all of the ceremonial Center 400 cities of stone in mesoamerica are based on this design it's also the circle in the Square but you can see the pyramids they had a shape and they were lined up to the stars because they were in fact Children of the Stars you know I once uh toured uh the Lucas ranch with George Lucas you know he's a friend filmmaker and and and this is of course after Star Wars but he went to this library and I was amazed that his Library he has three-story library in the Lucas Valley Ranch he had all kinds of books about Tamaya and he the term Star Wars comes from the Maya the Maya fought battles according to the Stars they gave birth according to the stars because they were calibrating the according to the universe well it's an interesting that Star Wars became a world famous movie but it's a Mayan concept you should know that because it's part of your culture moving on por favor next this is this is this is then this is this is a hunabu the square inside the circle move on please next slide here we go now what this refers to is the two calendars the sacred calendar is the the medium Circle there and this is the solar calendar 360 days and then we have the turkey the sacred calendar which is 260 days what's interesting about 260 days is that you add it up and it's equivalent to the nine months that a child spends in the Mama's womb that's why they needed to have the sacred calendar because this calibrates human behavior according to the solar calendar now they say at the Mayas were of stone age people that they didn't have the wheel what is this this is this is the cosmic wheel they understood wheels are you kidding me this is our people you know we were led to believe that we can't do anything that we don't understand anything but there it is next slide please so we took the 20 days of the Sulkin and broke them apart this is the solar calendar the khab and this is the sacred calendar of the turkey image what does that have to do with us these are the vente pasos that we have used in order to explore the physical and philosophical language of our ancestors next slide please next slide here we go and this is how we broke it down this is all in the book this is why I I don't want to spend too much time but you can read about this 20 days of the soaking the Mayan sacred calendar 13 months or 20 days each for 260 days four columns next slide please next slide and we have taken these then and broken them down into what they mean the body image image is pregnant womb is breathing is flow like water gun is balance is gather all your life strength like a serpent and move and move because everything is a spiral everything is a spiral so we've studied the language of our ancestors in the Teatro and this is the only way that you can do it you can't sit on your butt and study a book you got to move okay I'm 82 years old folks Mira okay and then all of this relates to the heart is death because fear of death is where it begins where you begin your feelings and then number 10 here is love so you you go from fear of death to love as you develop your heart Oak backwards you turn it inside out the Minds used to do this it's KO which means serpent which is God now the English word for God Inside Out turns into dog dog God okay the mind chuen the monkey this is why it's coincidental that my first role in the theater was a monkey because it's a sign of intelligence all the way down to men which is foreign revealed to me that the word amen that we pray all over the world amen what does it mean it means your creation ah men and then finally the spirit or the soul keep kaban is you got to believe in something bigger than yourself Mother Earth You Got to Believe In Mother Earth Mother Earth because she's alive and snob speak the truth this is all moral this is morality kawak you turn yourself Inside Out giving birth is turning yourself inside out and what's Curious here is that what UAC is number six and they have palindromes which means you can take a word and turn it inside out so kawak coming and going is the same word it's number six turned inside out and then finally ahau which is flower we flower at the end of it now this is a whole way of life but this is a philosophy that was given to us by our ancestors but you need to apply it physically and in action and in relationship to your community with your brothers and sisters in your family and your brothers and sisters in your community moving on please one more and the ball game or pizza you can see the ancient symbols and then the modern players because they're still playing it in Sinaloa they're playing this game very important you know this is the game required putting a rubber ball through a hole in a in a circle again they say we didn't have the wheel well the wheels all over the bulk chords and the thing is that they use vulcanized rubber they used to balkanize the rubber by putting ashes human ashes into the rubber it wasn't Goodyear that discovered balkanization it was Amaya 2 000 years ago you know they used to make raincoats they used to make medicine out of rubber so discover the treasures of your people discover the treasures of America and so moving on please one more and you can use these soccer balls these are all pictures and soccer this is the big rubber ball the original one this hard rubber from the Maya and we use rubber balls in when we do this at the theater we have number five or number four soccer balls and you know when they played the ball game it was like playing basketball without being able to use your hands and playing soccer without being able to use your feet all they had was their Cadera that's how they that's how they knocked the ball through you know the game is coming back in Mexico people are beginning to play it again but what this does it whips your spine it whips your spine and when you whip your spine you send the current all the way up to the base of your skull and you become more intelligent you become more aware you become more alive and this gets me back to the child that I was back there one year old when that hot water hit me right here and it's the Lord that burned the hell out of me to say wake up Calderon wake up okay moving on one more and this is what we do we get on the ball literally so you learn how to work with the ball and and you do the spiral and you know this becomes all the dance forms it is ballet it is hula it is rock and roll it is dollar you know it's a U-joint you know what I'm saying Pakistan you know without this there's no human race you know [Music] so again learn learn your culture and learn where you're coming from because these this is very deep our ancestors gave it to us one more please and this is Domingo Martinez Paredes my Mayan master who died in the 80s he wrote the book he wrote the books that I learned from him in the 1970s I just want to give him honor give him honor for these ideas because he was the mind master that passed these ideas [Applause] I want to close I want to close with a poem in three languages we're bilingual you know if you're bilingual the synapses on your brain learn to go you know this English only nonsense you know forget it what language is not enough you got to have at least two three or four or five or be really nice you know you can learn French you can learn German you know all the cultures of the world are beautiful just because I celebrate my culture doesn't mean I don't appreciate European culture we're speaking in English I'm speaking in English you know I think so you know fine you know we we connect to the rest of Asia incredible everything that you put into motion here begins to look like Asian martial arts because there's a link in Africa the jungle was the Bible of African people and they move man they're Geniuses this is why they're such great athletes because they're in contact with their buddies okay and then we need to we've already Blended genetically actually in many areas but we need to continue to learn from each other and so a poem in three languages first in nawat which is the Aztec language out now what plane um in Espanol o [Music] is [Music] and now in English what is it that your mind was looking for where is your heart for this you give your heart to everything your heart is without Direction you are destroying your heart on this Earth do you suppose that that you can go in search of anything and find it that is a poem by Prince Coco in 14 something or other three languages so the message is very clear America find your heart and discover the joy of being Mexican [Applause]