In his musical drama Zoot Suit, playwright Luis Valdez fashions a theatrical experience around two dramatic elements: the historical event of the "Zoot Suit Riots" of 1943 and the commanding image of an icon-like narrator called "El Pachuco." The first is a largely-overlooked historical occurrence of blatant anti-Chicano racism that happened in Los Angeles during World War II. The second, El Pachuco, is a dramatic creation designed to combat the image of the stereotypical Chicano by overstereotyping. Valdez utilizes the Bertolt Brecht-influenced formula of the 1930s' "Living Newspaper" to recreate Zoot Suit's historical events in a presentational, agit-prop style (Huerta 15). In such a style, according to Mordecai Gorelik in New Theatres for Old, "Theatre is a tribunal" (378). That is, it is a deliberate "trial" wherein the playwright is the prosecutor, judge and jury, righting a social wrong through the power of dramatic indictment. Accordingly, as a tribunal, Zoot Suit is very successful in its endeavor. The facts of the racial injustice in this era are tersely summarized, humanized and condemned in a thoroughly theatrical manner. But Valdez intends more for his play than simple condemnation of a past injustice. Via the narrator El Pachuco - and the "pachuco" gang characters presented in Zoot Suit - the author attempts to paint a portrait of the complex forces shaping the Mexican-American - i.e. Chicano - immigrant culture. He is less successful in achieving this goal, for two primary reasons. First, the play itself is unclear on what that Chicano character should be. Second, and equally important, Zoot Suit loses sight of the complex forces that play on Mexican-American immigrants because it creates dangerous stereotypes of another immigrant culture, the Irish, in order to justify the Chicanos' victimization.
What should the Chicano character be? Valdez' ambivalence about this is apparent from the beginning even as...