La Bamba: American Dreaming, Chicano Style

La Bamba then focuses on the Chicano star’s eight-month journey from a high-school kid with a crush on a blond, white girl named Donna to a pioneer in rock en español, making history with the first Spanish-language rock song to “cross over” to English-speaking, white audiences. Though these sequences are upbeat and joyful, Valdez doesn’t hesitate to depict the racism that Valens faced. The song “Donna,” based on his brief relationship with his classmate, was a hit for Valens. But the film depicts the couple having to meet in secret after her bigoted father forbids her from seeing him simply because he is Mexican American. When Del-Fi Records producer Bob Keane first meets Richie after a gig his mother set up at an American Legion Hall, Keane assumes Richie and his family don’t speak English. Then Keane suggests changing the singer’s name to the more “marketable” Ritchie Valens (as famously happened in real life)—a suggestion that in the film is met with protest from Richie’s brother, Bob, who says, “That’s for shit, man! I mean, Valenzuela was our dad’s last name; you can’t just cut it in half.”

Valdez, just a year older than Valens, is similar to him in many ways. Both were born in California right after President Herbert Hoover’s violently racist Mexican Repatriation policy came to an end. Repatriation largely affected border states like California, and while it was never a federal law or executive order, the Hoover administration implicitly approved of the raids that still affect the Chicano community today, with the generational poverty, loss of land, and inherited trauma that ensued. The government used the Mexican American community as a scapegoat for widespread 
unemployment during the Great Depression, and as many as two million Mexican and Mexican American people were rounded up and deported, regardless of citizenship status (up to 60 percent are believed to have been American citizens). Still, once the repatriation policy effectively ended in 1939—during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term—violence and other forms of discrimination against Chicanos didn’t just disappear.

When Valens and Valdez were toddlers, white Americans found another reason to lash out against Chicanos. In June 1943, in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots—after the style of clothing popular with Black and brown youth at the time—white mobs in Los Angeles attacked and stripped the baggy outfits off children, teens, and young adults, claiming the suits were unpatriotic, during wartime, because they used so much fabric. These rampant acts of white supremacy and hatred divided the Chicano community, with some choosing to assimilate for safety. Others fought back—through music, like Valens; through theater, like Valdez; and through clothes, like the pachucos of the zoot-suit period. Again, in 1954, the U.S. government issued orders to remove Mexican immigrants (many of whom were citizens) in what was called “Operation Wetback.” It’s hard to imagine how the constant attacks from authority figures didn’t consume their every waking moment, yet both Valdez and Valens used their art to make Chicano culture recognized and celebrated.

Growing up in Delano, Valdez had few options. At the age of six, he began working in the fields with his family, in addition to going to school every day. After high school, he headed to college, where he started to seriously pursue theater. He graduated shortly after having his first play—The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, a satire about the problems facing a Mexican family in America—produced by the school. After college, Valdez learned the concept of agitprop (agitation and propaganda) theater, in which a play expresses a clear political agenda and tries to spur the audience to act. By that time, the movement for social justice that was growing and spreading throughout the country had reached the farmworkers in California. The National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the leadership of which included Cesar Chavez, held its first vote to strike in protest of strenuous and unhealthy working conditions, and demand higher wages, in September 1965. Valdez joined Chavez two months later, and soon after, El Teatro Campesino was born. Initially used as an organizing tool within the NFWA, the theater company brought together farmworkers and theater students to teach the workers how to find their voices.

Valdez emphasizes Valens’s love for his family and his complicated relationship with his older brother. Of course, there’s Donna, too, and the teenage romance adds to the film’s charms. But overall, La Bamba is an American-dream story in which a genuinely good kid makes it simply because of his talent. Then-newcomer Lou Diamond Phillips, who won critical acclaim for his lead performance, portrays a Valens full of youth and life, ready to take on the world. Still, the film is filled with nuances that Chicanos might well recognize as something out of their own story. The toxic machismo that favors men and leaves women alone to raise families, working low-wage jobs, often disrespected and unrecognized, like Bob’s girlfriend, Rosie (Elizabeth Peña). The unconditional dedication, but in-your-face tough love, of a Latina mother, like Richie’s, Connie (Rosana DeSoto). The way people in our own community rush to judge our darker-complected brothers and sisters. The effect of being raised by a single mother or an abusive father, and of being dismissed as bad fruit, like Bob (Esai Morales). The strength of a family still dreaming, despite a world pushing them and their joy down whenever it possibly can.

La Bamba was released on July 24, 1987, with low expectations from Hollywood executives but high anticipation from the representation-starved Latino community. The film’s backing studio, Columbia Pictures, opted to give the production a negative pickup, an agreement to purchase the film for a fixed price upon its completion. (Hackford had already agreed to fund the film for $6.5 million through his New Visions production company.) A brilliant marketing campaign aimed directly at the Latino community—including private screenings for Latino journalists and for high-school kids in Latino-heavy areas, and the simultaneous release of English-language, Spanish-dubbed, and Spanish-subtitled versions of the movie, marking a first for Hollywood—helped lead to the success of the film, which opened to $5.7 million at the box office, ultimately grossing over $54 million in the United States.

And then there was the title song. While Mexican American rock icon Carlos Santana created the film’s evocative and haunting score, the track that would take the world by storm was performed by another Mexican American rock institution—Los Lobos, a group that had been associated with Chicano rock, a very defined but blended style, since its younger days. “La Bamba,” as covered by the group (though Phillips lip-synched his parts so well that audiences often believed it was him singing in the film), reached no. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. (Valens’s version peaked at no. 22.)

In telling Ritchie Valens’s story in a mainstream film, Valdez created a path for other representations of Chicano life to be not only welcome in pop culture but viewed as American culture as well. Filmmakers who have followed in Valdez’s footsteps include Robert Rodriguez, who entered filmmaking with the critically acclaimed low-budget indie El Mariachi; Patricia Cardoso, who introduced audiences to star America Ferrera in Real Women Have Curves; and, more recently, Eva Longoria, the proud ninth-generation Mexican American actress, who turned first-time feature film director with Flamin’ Hot, the story of a Mexican American family reaching for the American dream. I can still remember my uncle and grandparents excitedly taking me to a midnight showing of the film (because all the others were sold out) and afterward being able to enjoy singing in Spanish on the school playground. Not a small feat in the late eighties! Three decades after its release, in 2017, La Bamba was added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and recommended for preservation. Today, the film remains both a portrait of Chicano life and a testament to the survival of the community through the opportunity to tell our own stories. As Valdez’s friend Cesar Chavez once said, “Sí, se puede!”