“American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” features the suavest shot you’ll ever see of Cesar Chavez, a split-second scene in vivid color of the labor activist behind shades and smoking as if he were Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Breathless.” As it turns out, it isn’t the only time Valdez, the future director of “La Bamba” contributed something to make the labor activist look cool, remembering the man he first knew as CC as a soft-spoken type whose strength wasn’t in public speaking and felt he could be of help to the movement if he pitched a theatrical troupe that could whip up excitement for the cause. El Teatro Campesino, which Valdez imagined would move people in a way they couldn’t be with mere rhetoric, proved to be a success at picking up the spirits of those fighting for a fair wages when the cause could be understood with emotion — it would even end up invigorating Valdez as much as it would anyone else when Chavez no longer found it useful and mainstream success proved fleeting as he remains committed to it even to this day, continuing to stage plays in San Juan Batista, California.
The galvanizing power of art isn’t only illustrated in “American Pachuco,” but intimately felt when the biography has plenty of panache to get its story of the groundbreaking Chicano artist across. Director David Alvarado enlists Edward James Olmos to reprise his career-launching role from Valdez’s “Zoot Suit” as the slippery narrator Pachuco to help move Valdez’s life story along, its main subject’s playful spirit honored as is his decisiveness when the director avoids a cradle-to-grave overview where trying to cover everything usually results in spreading things too thin. There isn’t a slack second in “American Pachuco,” where a boisterous score often has competition from interviewees for giving the film energy and it is rigorously built around Valdez’s early epiphany of the arts as a vehicle for activism within the farm workers’ push for a union contract and his two most prominent works, “Zoot Suit” and the Richie Valens biopic “La Bamba.”
The intense focus occasionally has its drawbacks — it becomes both impressively expedient yet slightly odd that the film uses clips from the film adaptation of “Zoot Suit” without ever going into Valdez’s experience of making it, instead deploying movie scenes as illustration for a description of the stage production and essentially presenting “La Bamba” as the director’s first time on a film set. It also is mildly disappointing – for a variety of reasons that don’t entirely have to do with the film – that Valdez’s work since “La Bamba” is given less than five minutes of screen time when Valdez has remained active, surely a casualty of an mercilessly brisk run time that the storyteller himself would probably appreciate when it keeps things snappy.
However, Alvarado shrewdly seizes on an unexpected throughline in Valdez’s close but sometimes fraught relationship with his older brother Frank, who offered a parallel experience to his when they both sought to transcend their youth spent in a farm labor camp. While Luis went into art, Frank went into science and became an engineer and the two measured themselves by different benchmarks relative to what they thought the American dream as Luis pushed for the freedom to express himself and Frank sought assimilation with a nice car and a fancy house made possible by a successful career. Those who remember how Valdez made the bond between Ritchie Valens and his brother Bob the core of “La Bamba,” may not be surprised that the film places as much emphasis on this connection as it does, but following the thread becomes all the more moving when expressing how the Mexican-American experience is hardly monolithic even within the same family, and Luis’ ability to bring people together and his dedication to it is all the more impressive.
“American Pachuco” is by no means comprehensive, nor does it intend to be, but it captures the director’s fire and desire to entertain, likely to inspire deep dives into his work that remain relevant to this day and just as importantly, getting creative in standing up to injustice.
“American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23rd at 3 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas, January 30th at 3 pm and January 31st at 3:30 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas. It will also be available to stream via the Sundance virtual platform from January 29th through February 1st.