Although Chicano identity has been Luis Valdez's theme since all but the earliest years of El Teatro Campesino, the guerrilla theater he founded in the 1960s, getting a clear sense of his roots became doubly important to him when his parents died in the mid-1990s. Valdez, the first Latino playwright/director to reach Broadway and the creator of the bellwether Hispanic film Zoot Suit, had always been told his people were Yaquis from Sonora in northern Mexico, but he realized he knew very little about how they had come to be California Chicanos.

So, in the late 1990s, he began to search his family's history and its secrets, and what he discovered about the myths and contradictory stories that had been handed down and about the little-known history of the Yaqui wars in Mexico led him to write Mummified Deer, in some ways his most personal play and his first new work for the theater in a decade and a half (just ending its run at El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista). It's a play that uses the mythic, presentational elements we've come to associate with Valdez's work, here present in a Yaqui deer dancer, who together with the long arm of history defines identity for the play.

Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino as an organizing and fundraising arm of the United Farm Workers during the 1965 grape strike in Delano, where he was born. The actors then were strikers who played type characters in actos, short satirical sketches on strike issues performed at work sites and in union halls.

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