Written by Luis Valdez | Directed by Kinan Valdez
"Mummified Deer" is a surreal and ancestral exploration of family dysfunction and Chicano history, spanning from the dawn of time to the present, through the border upheavals of the 1920s, 1930s and 1969.
Written by Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino, the work delves into Mexican-American identity with unwavering honesty and great theatrical imagination.
In the center stands a silent Yaqui dancer representing a deer, embodying all that a family has buried and refused to name for generations. This is theater as an ancestral reckoning.
My relationship with El Teatro Campesino extended beyond this single production. As an intern, I immersed myself in the practices and philosophy rooted in the community that Luis Valdez built from the farmworker camps of Delano in 1965.
It's not entertainment, it's testimony. It's not acting, it's an act. Art made in direct service to the people from whom it originates.
I played Mama Chu, the main character, in this production directed by Kinan Valdez, artistic director of El Teatro Campesino and son of playwright Luis Valdez.
Mama Chu is the matriarch who controls everything: the guardian of family secrets, the vessel through which generations of silence, survival, and repressed traumas flow. Playing this role demanded complete presence, cultural specificity, and the ability to embody the history of an entire family in a single body on stage. Being directed by Kinan Valdez meant training within a living lineage, not studying the history of Chicano theater from the outside, but inhabiting it from within.
Mummified Deer is situated at the intersection of indigenous acting, Chicano history, and intergenerational trauma... Playing Mama Chu taught me something that I carry into every work I do: that the body remembers what the mind tries to forget, and that theater is one of the few spaces where that memory can become collective, witnessed, and transformative.
Esa comprensión vive directamente en El Tesoro de la Raíz, donde otra mujer, otra familia, otro conjunto de verdades enterradas finalmente logran regresar a casa.
