SOURCE: "Looking for a Third Space: El Pachuco and Chicano Nationalism in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit," in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 215-25.

In the following essay, Babcock focuses on the significance of the figure of the pachuco in Zoot Suit.

In Zoot Suit: An American Play (1978), Luis Valdez emphatically reasserts the figure of the pachuco, which, as Jorge Huerta, Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, John Tagg, and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian have all theorized, marks the limit of the first stage, or wave, of Chicano cultural nationalism. As an outgrowth of Valdez's work with El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworker's Theater), Zoot Suit also represents the culmination of what is generally recognized as the first stage of his work (1965-1978), which, not coincidentally, parallels the initial period of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the Southwest.

Valdez began his "professional" writing and...