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Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.
Trailblazing Chicano filmmaker and theater director Luis Valdez has frequently experienced, first hand, the refrain that life imitates art. When Zoot Suit premiered, the first Chicano play on Broadway (at the Winter Garden Theater, no less), Valdez's work was excoriated in eight reviews by critics who used coded (and not so coded) language to strip him of his artistry. It was a play that loosely dramatized elements of the Zuit Suit Riots, in which young Chicano men were stripped nude from their trademark threads; in the press, Valdez felt tarred and feathered.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez aims to revivify the extraordinary career of a genuine pioneer, and does so with feel-good aplomb. Valdez, who is now most well known for his work on La Bamba (to this day the most profitable Chicano film of all time) and for his company Teatro Campesino, has always seen his artistry as part and parcel of protest. "We are America," he is seen saying on more than one occasion, and in his work he firmly plants his foot like an astronaut planting a flag on the moon.
David Alvarado's loving and truly joyous portrait of Valdez is as big and as exciting as the man's theatrical output, but it is also frustratingly topographical and abrupt. Alvarado glosses over the bulk of Valdez's career in favor of deeper dives on Zoot Suit and La Bamba, which makes sense if you're introducing someone to the director's work and not so exciting when you're hoping for something a bit more complex. As fun as it is to see Lou Diamond Phillips and Edward James Olmos wax poetic about their friend, it would be nice if some of Valdez's lesser known theatrical output was given the attention it deserves. Dolores Huerta calls him a "social arsonist," but we don't really get that impression from the film.
Strangely, the film is best when highlighting Valdez's work as an activist. Before he really established himself as an artist, Valdez was on the front lines in protest with the AFL-CIO, helping Cesar Chavez and scores of farmers protest for better wages and working conditions. It was, amusingly, Chavez's lack of charm as a speaker which led Valdez to establish Campesino as a stage upon which to make protest art.
Untrained and unrestrained, Valdez, alongside his siblings Daniel and Socorro, created an avenue for Chicano theater artists to express their frustrations with a country that refused to see them as one of them. At the same time, Campesino allowed Chicano artists to internally wrestle with the tension between assimilation and cultural preservation, putting on shows which expressed anger over the use of Chicanos as cannon fodder in Vietnam.
At the present time, as anyone even remotely Brown is in danger of being plucked off the street, and as anyone with a public point of view can be legally threatened by the state, Valdez embodies someone in both camps — someone whose very nature and voice is a beautiful, boisterous threat to the status quo. If American Pachuco leaves you wanting more, perhaps that's not a bad thing; Valdez deserves the last word, anyway, and he's not finished.
English (US) ·