I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges

Luis Valdez is the founder and artistic director of the internationally-known El Teatro Campesino, the theatrical troupe he created during the Great Delano Grape Strike of 1965. The productions of this group have been acclaimed throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe and have received an OffBroadway Obie Award and numerous Drama Critics Circle Awards in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1977, Valdez wrote the play Zoot Suit, which became one of the most successful plays to originate in Los Angeles and which would later become the first play by a Chicano to be produced on Broadway (Andelman http://www.invsn.com/fotpl/valley4e.htm). His play "I Don't Have to Show you No Stinking Badges" was first produced at the Los Angeles Theater Center.

The title comes from the 1948 movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre in which the leader of the bandits delivers this line after claiming to be a federal officer and being asked for his badge

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s, and at the same time the set evokes an image of the play as a sitcom. Performance in this play therefore exists as a duality and is self-referential. The parents are presented with a typical sitcom premise as their son, tired of being the token Chicano at Harvard, leaves school, and returns home with his Japanese girlfriend, intent on becoming a dancer in the movies: This is, of course, very close to a typical sitcom premise. We see mom and dad, fresh from work, in servant's rags, meeting son's girl. We see dad forgetting himself and displaying an anti-Japanese bias. We see mom overlooking life's harsh realities to admire the rainbow at storm's end. The audience does its part, reacting to Valdez's humor as automatically as would a TV laugh track (Lochte 44). The sitcom premise lives way in the course of the play to a more violent image as the son becomes more and more out of control, terrorizing the other three with a gun and delivering "a diatribe about the self-delusions of Chicanos who think they're actually achieving some progress in the performing arts while, in fact, they are still in the same cinema ghetto" (Lochte 44). Luis Valdez responds in this play to the realities of Hollywood as he perceives them. Mi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2418
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)