Luis Valdez’s play ‘Valley of the Heart’ takes on new life as immersive, educational multimedia

How do you make history truly come alive?

It’s a question that’s perplexed teachers as long as there have been students. But it is generally agreed that the best way to teach history is via primary sources — through the voices of the people who lived through it.

One such project, just released, has created an immersive online historical curriculum for California students — using the Luis Valdez play “Valley of the Heart” to illustrate the history of the federal government stripping property from Japanese-Americans and putting them into camps as “enemy combatants” during World War II.

“This is really the first one that really takes on the whole potential of education and teaching history and letting people know the specifics of the story, and I think it’s very helpful,” said Valdez.

The project is an effort of the California State Library system’s state-funded Civil Liberties Program, which seeks to tell the stories around the Japanese-American experience during World War II, often parallel to other civil rights violations or injustices. 

‘Valley of the Heart’

The project tells the story of Japanese incarceration through a multimedia adaptation of “Valley of the Heart,” the play by Luis Valdez, about two immigrant families — the Montanos and the Yamaguchis — struggling to provide a future for their American-born children in the fraught years after the Great Depression.

“It was a story I needed to tell to honor my dad and mother’s memory,  but also this piece of history which I remember from when I was a kid,” Valdez said.

It is a fictional story built over a true history, with many of its elements taken from the playwright’s own early life, which is the topic of a documentary of its own, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.” The film opens locally at the end of this month at Digital Gym Cinema.

“My dad was a farmworker working for a Japanese-American farmer in 1941,” said Valdez, describing how he came up with the story behind “Valley of the Heart.” He spent his earliest years on a ranch that he thought belonged to his own family. 

It didn’t. 

The farm had belonged to a Japanese family, but it had been expropriated by the United States military and the family had been interned. The government then tasked Valdez’s father with running it in their absence.

Then the war ended.  “Everything crashed and we lost the ranch, but my father never owned it — it was leased to him — and eventually we left, and before we knew it we were back on the migrant path.” 

But this time they had more children, and everybody had to do their part, Valdez said. 

“So I found myself working as a migrant farm worker going from camp to camp … That was a big part of my life.” 

He was never able to find out what happened to the family that originally owned the ranch, but he did discover that they never got it back. 

A few years later, in 1947, his family was following seasonal jobs to harvest fruits and vegetables and ended up in a little town on Highway 99. A young couple with a little boy around his own age moved in down the street, he said.  “So we became friends.”

Valdez soon discovered that his new friend Esteban had mixed ethnicity: his mother, Thelma, was Japanese-American, and his father, Benjamin, was Mexican-American. 

“They had all gone into a labor camp,” Valdez said. “They all ended up in a concentration camp in Arizona. They were there for two years and then they were released … they were migrant workers, so that’s how they ended up on the migrant path.”

He remembered the family years later, while writing “Valley of the Heart.” The play tells the story of a couple in 1940s rural California from two very different ethnic backgrounds — hers Japanese, his Mexican — who fall in love against a backdrop of the federal government’s internment of Japanese-Americans.

Valdez named his two main characters Thelma and Benjamin in honor of the real couple he had once known.

‘Make history come alive’

The play now has been transformed into a multimedia educational module that can be accessed free of charge and used to teach history to California students from fourth through eighth grade. The curriculum guide features historical photographs and context, suggested activities and a podcast styled like an old-time radio play.

“Our goal was to make history come alive in a way that we could illuminate through a broad outreach,” said Marcela Davison Avilés, a cultural consultant and managing partner with TomKat Media, a nonprofit media group founded by former gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor. The group focuses on educational multi-platform initiatives that support, in its own words, the common good.

Davison Avilés, a longtime friend of Luis Valdez, said that they felt partnering with schools was the best way “to extend our storytelling (so) communities can take the information and make it useful within their local communities or regional in a broader way.” 

Davison Avilés said that they try to focus on disparate communities with a shared experience of oppression, such as activities intended to erase communities, move them out of their homes or ranches, and detain them — just as the federal government did to at least 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“We felt it was a perfect fit,” she said, and the state library system agreed, awarding a grant that was administered by Valdez’s nonprofit, Teatro Campesino.

San Diego’s connections

San Diego does not figure into the Valdez project, but it is essential to understanding the history thanks to a local librarian named Clara Estelle Breed, who corresponded with interned children until they were released.

“One thing I haven’t thought about very much was that her saving all of those letters and postcards was activism in itself,” said Monnee Tong, a supervising librarian at the San Diego Public Library. “She was saving history.”

As a children’s librarian, Breed was in contact with, and cared for, many young people. So when Japanese-American youngsters began to come to her and tell her that they were moving, she gave them her address and asked them to write.

They did, and in return Breed sent them care packages and carefully saved all their letters. Breed even stayed in touch with many children into adulthood, all the way until her death in September 1994.

Before she died, she gave all the letters to one of her original correspondents, Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada, who donated them to the Japanese American National Museum, where they can be read online.

Breed was forgotten for a long time, and the forced removal of people with Japanese ancestry often was not acknowledged in mainstream American culture. Tong wanted to change that, so, with one of her colleagues, Marc Chery, who oversees the humanities section at the Central Library, she applied for a grant.

That led to ‘The Rebellious Miss Breed,’ funded by California Humanities, a series of programs that educated the public about Japanese internment and the story of Clara Breed. One feature, the SDPL’s annual Clara Breed Civil Liberties lecture, includes a discussions of human rights and dignity, freedom of expression and more.

Tong — who also sits on the California State Library advisory council that approved the project grants for the “Valley of the Heart” educational module – said the “goal for the Clara Breed program was always to make the public more aware and bring resources that could potentially be made into a curriculum,” she said.

Each letter has become a story, and every story is now a lesson of its own, or “primary resources,” as Tong calls them.

“It’s another reason why it’s so important to be investing in archives and history, so that we can learn from our mistakes and from past atrocities,” she said.