This month at UCSB, undergraduate student Angel Diaz and graduate student Mayra Gomez-Labrada celebrate the shared history of Mexico and California through food, historical discovery, film, and theater in a festival of Chicano culture. The main event is a full theatrical production of Luis Valdez’s classic (film and play), Zoot Suit.
Zoot suits were associated with a subculture of Chicanos in the first half of the 20th century. Diaz watched the Zoot Suit film in a Chicano studies class, which planted a seed of inspiration in his mind. “I was in a trance,” he says. “It was real. It was crushing. It was beautiful. It was that self-evident nature of ugly, surface-level truth that is paradoxically empowering.”
Gomez-Labrada is the production manager and co-director with Diaz (who also acts in the show). “When you think of Chicano theater, you think of Zoot Suit,” she says. “Shows like this really do show what it is to be an authentic Mexican.”
This series of events promotes education about the Latinx community and identity, and, in the interest of accessibility, are free to the public.
Beyond the play, events include film screenings of Zoot Suit and Dolores (about agricultural labor activist Dolores Huerta), a guest lecture on May 15 by Chicano scholar and Emeritus Faculty Member Jorge Huerta (who earned his PhD at UCSB), and historical exploration at the Teatro Campesino archives on campus. Teatro Campesino was a theater troupe made up of laborers who taught striking farmworkers about the rights they were fighting for. Luis Valdez, the Zoot Suit author, worked alongside Cesar Chavez during this strike.
Zoot Suit runs on Saturday, May 18, at 7 p.m. and Sunday May 19, at 1 p.m. at the Hatlen Theater at UCSB and boasts an impressive rotating set designed by student Maya Rosenberg. Admission is free. For more details on these events, check out the organization’s Instagram page, @Zoot.Suit.UCSB.
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