San Juan Bautista resident Lupe Valdez,78, has been an actor in El Teatro productions since its early days when she also became a farmworker and human rights activist and was an integral part of their becoming headquartered in San Juan Bautista. Since then she has continued supporting the theater and her husband Luis, particularly with her most recent work as a costume designer.
To celebrate her achievements, the Poppy Jasper Film Festival took a moment during the Mexican-American Filmmaker Showcase on April 17 to bestow well-deserved honors on Lupe.
She was chosen for honors by festival founder Mattie Scariot after having dinner with members of the Valdez family. She is married to playwright Luis Valdez.
“During dinner, Luis said, ‘Well, you know, Lupe wrote this, and she did that, and she produced this,’” Scariot said. “I’m thinking, ‘Wait, why haven’t I heard about her life?’ I’ve heard all about Luis, and we are all very proud of him. But I didn’t know how much she had done, and I thought, ‘I want to honor her.”
In a BenitoLink interview, Lupe herself initially brushes off talk of her own accomplishments, saying, “I’ve had a front-row seat to the career of an amazing man. But when I think of the evolution of my life with him over the last 54 years, I look back and say, ‘Oh, my God, I did all these things, too.’”
Lupe was born to farmworker parents in Cutler in Tulare County. She first met Luis while attending the nearby College of the Sequoias in Visalia when he came through Cutler during the farmworker march to Sacramento. Her mother had seen a grower approach Luis and tell him, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” and Luis responded in English to him.
“She didn’t understand what he said because she only spoke Spanish,” Lupe said, “But when she came home, she told me about him and that he spoke such beautiful words. So that night, I went to see El Teatro for the first time, and it was a political event that awakened something in me: this was social justice, something that I had never been part of.”
Later, transferring to Fresno State College, she attended a class taught by Luis, saying she fell in love with the politics, the social justice, before she fell in love with the man.
“There were about four of us taking that class,” she said. “He asked me to perform in ‘The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.’ This was the first time Luis did that play outside of San Jose. He played my father, and I played his daughter. It was the first play I had ever seen, and here I was performing in it. I was really just a student, and I had no training whatsoever.”
She soon became an active member of the troupe, traveling with them as they educated farmworkers through theater.
“We were fighting for a cause,” she said. “And it wasn’t so much the artistic cause, it was a political cause. We were fighting over what was happening with farm workers, and it was a remarkable movement. And it is vital—when you put your body on the line, that’s the most incredible piece of theater there is.”
Lupe and Luis worked well together, but it was not until she found herself on his lap at a party that the sparks were ignited.
“I said, ‘I’ll probably end up getting married and living a middle-class life,’” she said. And then he said, ‘Well, we’ll have to do something about it. We’ll have to get married.’ And the minute he said that, I knew he meant it. I said, ‘Okay,’ and I think at that moment we were inseparable.”
They were married just before El Teatro Campesino’s European tour, and the couple honeymooned in Paris.
“Of course, we heard, ‘They are actors, it’s not going to last,’” she said. “But the strength of our marriage is respect. I have always had great respect for Luis, no matter what, and I think he has for me. We always see what is important in our life, and our family and nothing is ever going to destroy that.”
Lupe and Luis had three children, Anahuac, Kinan, and Lakin, all having the theater ingrained in their lives from birth, taking part in El Teatro productions and independently creating their own works and teaching.
But as the years went by, Lupe found her own niche in an area of the theater she never suspected she would: costume design.
“It is really the third chapter in my life,” she said. “It started off slowly, with the first female production the theater ever did. They asked me if I would do the costumes, and agreed, and so I have been doing it now for over 15 years.”
She took over the costume design for such audience favorites as “La Pastorela” and “La Virgen de Tepeyac,” but the first large-scale original play she designed for was the workshop production of her husband’s play about the WWII Japanese internment, “Valley of the Heart” in 2013.
“Luis asked me if I would do the costumes for it,” she said, “and I thought, ‘He’s used to professional designers, but this was just a workshop production.’ I told him, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ and it was amazing to me. I’ve always been a thrift store junkie anyway, and I had my own collection of things from the period, so it was an exciting time for me.”
Lupe said it had really been the first time she was on her own and charged with creating something new for El Teatro.
“What it brought to mind is the fact it doesn’t matter how old you are if you are able to find a passion for something,” she said. “I mean, you can be a 16-year-old trying to make films or a 70-year-old woman that is doing something new. It doesn’t matter because age is just a number. I didn’t start off saying, ‘I’m gonna be a costume designer’ when I was 18 years old or in college. So that’s been a revelation.”
The workshop production led to a full-scale sold-out production of the play in 2018 at The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles—and more design work for Lupe.
“Other people started asking me,” she said. “One of the first was Diana Rodriguez, who did her play ‘Sweetheart Deal’ at the Latino Theatre Center. Luis went with me and stayed with me while I worked on it.”
As he traveled to Los Angeles to be with her on that production, Luis said Lupe has joined him on his journey through life in every way.
“On the human side with family life,” Luis said, “it has been a partnership of equals. And professionally, with El Teatro Campesino, she has been one of the mainstays for over 50 years. I’ve got a lot of attention over the years, and it’s only half the story, you know. The other half is Lupe, and her humility is part of her grace.”
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