Jorge Huerta introduces the play by outlining a history of the playwright, Luis Valdez. According to Huerta, “no other individual has made as important an impact on Chicano theater as Luis Valdez” (vii). Huerta explains, “Before discussing Zoot Suit, I would like to trace Valdez’s aesthetic, spiritual and political development, placing the director/playwright and this play in a historical context” (vii). Valdez’s work, including plays, poems, essays, books, films, and videos, comments on the Chicano/Mexican-American experience in the United States.

Born in 1940 to a family of migrant farm workers in California, Valdez managed to excel at school despite his family’s frequent relocation for work. Valdez developed an interest in theatre that solidified at San Jose State College, where he produced his first full-length play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964). Huerta divides Valdez’s career into five phases. In Phase One, Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker’s Theatre) in 1965 with a group of farm workers who were on strike. The troupe performed “brief commedia dell’arte-like sketches called actos about the need for a farm worker’s union” (viii).

Phase Two began in 1967, when Valdez and El Teatro Campesino shifted focus beyond the union in order to address broader social issues that were affecting Chicanos in the United States.