"Valdez’s Mexican Theatre Forms Zoot Suit is a combination of actos (or ‘‘protest skits’’), mitos (‘‘myth’’), and corrido (‘‘ballad’’); the combination draws upon traditional Mexican songs and dances, traditional stories, and the political activism of Valdez’s previous work with the socially active El Teatro Campesino. The play also has a strong documentary element with its basis in historical events. The result is musical docudrama of epic proportions. In the beginning of his career, Valdez wrote, or rather orchestrated, since he did not always commit the actos to paper, simple and brief political protest pieces aimed at audiences of migrant workers. Most lasted only fifteen minutes. These actos used masks, simple but exaggerated storylines, and minimal settings and props. Often the actors sported cards proclaiming their generic roles—‘‘worker,’’ or ‘‘patroncito’’ [manager]—rather than adopting an in social protest plays, since the purpose is to condemn acts committed against a people, not a person. Thus Henry Reyna ‘‘is’’ El Pachuco, representing the tragic and self-destructive genre of pachuco gangs as well as their victimization by a xenophobic society. The mitos moves the allegorical agenda of the actos into the spiritual realm. Valdez created mitos to fulfill his vision of ‘‘a teatro of legends and myths.’’ He told David Savran in an interview for American Theatre that to him, myth is ‘‘so real that it’s just below the surface—it’s the supporting structure of our everyday reality.’’ In a Valdez mito, a mythical character interacts with the other, human, characters and sometimes takes controls the play like an onstage director. El Pachuco was not the first mythical character Valdez used: the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl and a precursor to El Pachuco, La Luna (‘‘the moon’’), appear in his allegorical play Bernabé (1970), and a child named Mundo (‘‘earth’’) is born to skeletal figures in El fin del mundo (1976; the title means ‘‘The End of the Earth’’). Comet sightings and symbolic sets and rituals further un-derscore the presence of myth in these plays. The mythic quality of El Pachuco in Zoot Suit is signaled by his ability to stop and start the action with a snap of his fingers; it is confirmed when he rises, Christlike, wearing the Christian cross but also dressed in an Aztec loincloth, in Act II, scene vii. The corrido has a long history in Mexican culture; its presence adds an element of folk art to Valdez’s plays, being the Hispanic version of the American musical. Valdez’s fusion of these unrelated theatrical forms into a fresh, new, dramatic concept put Chicano theater onto the American theatrical map"

- Drama fro Students Volume 5