"I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!" by Luis Miguel Valdez

First published: 1986

First produced: 1986, at the Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The late 1980’s

Locale: Monterey Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, California

Principal Characters:

• Buddy Villa, a Chicano and a career bit-part actor in Hollywood
• Connie, his wife, also a bit-part player
• Sonny, their son, a law student
• Anita, Sonny’s friend, an Asian American

The Play

Buddy and Connie Villa are Chicanos who, after thirty years of marriage, have risen from the barrio of East Los Angeles to a comfortable middle-class life in Monterey Park, a suburban enclave once wholly Anglo-American but now populated by successful immigrants. Buddy and Connie have achieved the American Dream of material success through their careers as Hollywood bit-part actors, having played those stereotypical roles of maids, gardeners, and bandits which Spanish actors have rarely been able to transcend. Buddy and Connie have few complaints, however, for their careers have enabled them to put their daughter Lucy through medical school and to send their son Sonny to Harvard Law School. Indeed, Buddy proudly refers to himself and Connie as the Silent Bit King and Queen of Hollywood.

The den of their tract home, where the entire play is set, is fitted with all the modern equipment of the good life, most notably a large console television and video recorder. This could be the den of any American home, since the only sign of the family’s ancestral heritage is an imitation Aztec calendar stone hanging above the fireplace. This artifact is less prominent than an old framed poster of the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which starred Humphrey Bogart.

A short prologue introduces Buddy Villa and reveals the allusion of the title. It is late at night, and Buddy, who is fifty-seven with a slight paunch, is sitting asleep while the video recorder plays a scene from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It is the scene in which Bogart and his companions are trapped in the mountains of Mexico by bandits, who are trying to prevent their escape with the gold they have mined. When the bandits approach, pretending to be federal police, Bogart asks to see their badges, to which a bandit responds: “I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges!” The scene ends with a gun battle, but throughout Buddy has remained asleep in his easy chair. Later in the play, Buddy reveals that he had his first professional part as one of the bandits in the film.

The first scene of act 1 opens on an early morning that finds Connie, an attractive Chicana of forty-eight, talking on the telephone to a friend when Buddy enters from his morning jog. Though Connie banters good-naturedly with Buddy, several serious issues form the subtext of their conversation. Buddy once had a “drinking problem,” and he continues to drink beer heavily, which may in part account for episodes of impotence. Buddy becomes annoyed when Connie rejects as unsalable his idea for a film script that would feature a Chicano spaceman. Buddy’s annoyance manifests itself in several racist comments directed at his Mexican and Chinese neighbors. Clearly, he feels trapped. Connie, on the other hand, seems content with having achieved middle-class status, and now she has identified her own goal of seeking bigger acting parts. One opportunity that may be offered her would take her on location to Panama for her first speaking part and first job without Buddy. Buddy unequivocally refuses her permission to take the role, and a clash is avoided only when her agent calls to offer both of them parts in a soap opera. Buddy’s attempt to defuse Connie’s dream by reminding her they “haven’t gotten this far” by fooling themselves is decidedly ironic, since the scene ends with Buddy referring again to his film idea.

In act 1, scene 2, Sonny arrives home in the evening of that same day with his new girlfriend, Anita, an Asian American who is intent on breaking into Hollywood. Buddy and Connie are out on a job. As Sonny and Anita settle in, it becomes clear that he loves her as a symbol “of everything beautiful in my life,” though Anita does not return this love. When Anita goes to take a shower, Sonny reveals in dramatic monologues that he is tired of meeting his parents’ expectations and that he sees that it is time to reach inside himself and grapple with the “white whale.” Moments later, his parents return; Buddy is enthusing about yet another film idea, about a Chicano James Bond. After ridiculing his parents for taking roles as gardeners, Sonny reveals that he has dropped out of Harvard Law School to pursue a career as an actor, with the specific goal of “becoming the newest superstar in Hollywood.” He has come to the realization that all the world is indeed a stage and that the most “real” work one can do is to act. Crushed by this decision, Buddy violently opposes his son. Anita enters at the end of this family fray, and Buddy begins to relent, perhaps because he charges Sonny’s decision to his love for Anita. Anita’s Asian heritage is significant for Buddy because he fathered a child as a soldier in the Korean War.

By act 2, scene 1, two weeks have passed, during which Sonny has experienced the bitter reality that Hollywood was not waiting for a Chicano superstar. Indeed, Sonny is dressed for a bit part as a cholo (a tough young gang member). If Sonny has become cynical about the “arrogant, preppy-ass, alligator shirt bastards” who run Hollywood, then Anita’s experience serves as a counterpoint, for she has made progress toward her own dream. Sonny becomes so angry at his plight as a Mexican American who is “living on the hyphen” that he menaces her with his father’s gun. Buddy and Connie arrive home from an awards banquet for Latino actors, only to have Sonny hold them all at bay with the gun while he vents his frustration at the death of his dream. At the heart of his protest is a feeling of isolation from his ancestral roots, the result of an American ethic in which all life becomes a crude imitation of images conveyed by television and films. Buddy, Connie, and Anita are in some doubt whether Sonny is acting, but when he shouts, “The white whale must die,” it is clear that he is not acting and intends to kill himself. As he trains the gun on himself, the scene fades.

The play’s final scene takes place six months later and serves more as a metadramatic epilogue or appendix than an extension of the play. Here the Villa den is presented as the set for a television production, a new situation comedy titled Badges! Buddy and Connie enter like characters in a conventional situation comedy, and they proceed to run through a series of tired routines greeted by canned laughter. Buddy and Connie reveal that Sonny is alive and well and being considered for a good part in a television series, The New Advocates. Sonny returns from his audition. He has not won a leading part, but Anita has. Sonny will take a lesser role in the same series. Anita enters, and there is general rejoicing, as at the end of many situation comedies. Then Sonny steps out of the play-within-a-play to protest to the show’s director: “This sitcom ending is totally unbelievable.” There ensues a debate between Sonny and the director, with the director winning the point that eliciting “lots of laughs” is more important than realism. Thereupon, Sonny announces that he is going back to Harvard to become a show-business lawyer, with the goal of establishing his own production company. For better or worse, he has realized that his identity rests in his role as son to Buddy and Connie. Sonny and Anita go out for dinner, leaving Buddy and Connie to savor this “happy ending.” They head for the bedroom; the final words go to Buddy, who snarls to the audience, “I don’t have to show you no stinking badges!”

Dramatic Devices

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this play’s primary dramatic device to the central themes of the play. This novel device is one of setting, for the play’s opening note states, “The entire set sits within the confines of a TV studio.” The intent is to draw an audience’s attention to “the theatrical reality at hand in our story.” In other words, this is a play—that is, a representation of life—that is inscribed within the unreality of a television situation comedy, and yet such comedies are themselves a constructed reality in which all too many American lives take place. The premise here is that life indeed imitates art, with the play continually calling attention to the theatricality and fictionality that underlies life.

This device is only a contemporary way of interpreting the Shakespearean metaphor that “all the world’s a stage.” Thus, near the end of act 2 Sonny rants that “Hollywood’s just a metaphor. . . . We’re locked into an image—HOLLYWOOD’S IMAGE—of us.” The difference, however, is that William Shakespeare’s metaphor implies a degree of volition granted to an actor free to choose a role, while Luis Valdez seems to deny that one can act anything but a predetermined role.

The crucial aspect of this device of the set as a television studio lies in the self-consciousness with which all the characters clearly see their lives, as determined by the fictional genres of Hollywood. At the end of act 1, after Sonny’s confrontation with his parents, he remarks, “I’ll keep the situation comedy from turning into a soap opera.” Later, in act 2, Sonny complains to Anita, “I grew up in this low-rated situation comedy.” This self-conscious attention to “theatrical reality” is a prelude to the play’s final scene, in which the drama becomes a metadrama—that is, a play that comments on its own processes. Sonny’s debate with the director over how Badges! should end is designed to destroy the illusion that real life is being represented on the same stage, at the same time that it points to the power of this illusion to shape people’s lives. There can be little mistake that the happy ending of the play-within-a-play that is “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” is wholly ironic.

Critical Context

“I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” can be viewed as a departure, if not an evolutionary step, in both the career of Luis Valdez and the development of American drama by and about ethnic minorities.

Since 1965, when he founded the Teatro Campesino, a California theater group that grew out of the United Farmworkers’ struggle, most of Valdez’s plays can be classified as social protests. His earliest plays were agitprop pieces that championed the economic causes of Chicanos. Such plays bear the tenor of such works as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (pr., pb. 1935). He followed these strident pieces with longer works that sought to present a fuller and deeper reality of the Chicano experience in America. In The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (pr. 1965, pb. 1967), Valdez depicts the conflict between two brothers, one an assimilationist and the other a pachuco. He attempts the construction of a personal Mexican mythology in Bernabé (pr. 1970, pb. 1976), and in his best-known play, Zoot Suit (pr. 1978, pb. 1992), he renders vital and visible the Chicano subculture. Each of Valdez’s plays stand as part of a larger historical project in which the playwright seeks to force upon the American consciousness an awareness of the Chicano experience and in so doing to write an American history that is more “real.”

“I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” is also an ahistorical work that presents another cause of the historical invisibility and marginality of Chicanos: a televisionized American culture that acts as a maw into which all ethnic identity falls. Members of the Villa family are cut off from their ancestral heritage, and more than this, they have cut themselves off from their past by their tacit acceptance of Hollywood’s images of them. Thus, the play becomes a complement to Valdez’s historical project. Whereas before he sought to inscribe history in his plays, here he has advanced to a causal analysis of why such history has never been written. This play shows that the writing of history is first and foremost a personal responsibility, which the “New Americans” in the Villa family are yet incapable of discharging.

Sources for Further Study

Bigsby, C. W. E. “El Teatro Campesino.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Drake, Sylvie. “Valdez—A Life in the River of Humanity.” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1986, p. 36.

Elam, Harry J. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977.

Herrara, Jaime. “Luis Miguel Valdez.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook and Dan Flores. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997.

Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982.

Savren, David. “Luis Valdez.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.