David Alvarado's "American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez" opened at the Roxie and plays the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael through early August, with the director in the room for Q&As at all three.

At 3117 16th Street, the Roxie's single marquee this weekend carries a name that spent decades without a documentary to its own: Luis Valdez, the playwright who founded El Teatro Campesino out of the farmworker movement and wrote "Zoot Suit," the first Chicano play to reach Broadway. The film — "American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez," directed by David Alvarado — opened at the Roxie on July 31, and the 88-year-old Valdez himself turned up for the sold-out first screening. That the marquee sits in the Mission, the historic Latino heart of the city, is not incidental to why the room filled.

From here the run fans out across the Bay. The Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, at 2966 College Avenue where Berkeley meets the Ashby line, screens the film August 1 and 2. The Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, at 1118 Fourth Street in downtown San Rafael, held its opening-night screening Saturday at 7 p.m. Alvarado, who narrates the film's making as much as Edward James Olmos narrates the film, appears in person for a Q&A at all three houses, with additional Roxie shows carrying his name on August 2, 5 and 6.

The origin story Alvarado has told — in Time magazine and to SFGATE — starts far from any of these corners. He was a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of North Texas when Valdez gave a campus keynote that, as he wrote, struck him less for its content than for the fact of a Mexican American artist standing there at all. He went on to a Stanford MFA and a filmmaking career in New York, including "Bill Nye: Science Guy." Learning no documentary on Valdez existed, he found him through a Google search and, by his account, "reached out cold." Valdez, who had turned down other directors, took to Alvarado's angle about belonging in America and said yes.

The film arrives with a pedigree — the U.S. Documentary Audience Award and Festival Favorite at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival — and with the voices to match. Dolores Huerta, in the film, calls Valdez "a social arsonist," per Mission Local. "Zoot Suit," built from a real 1942 Los Angeles murder case, "hit L.A. like a bomb," Alvarado told SFGATE.

Someone walking 16th Street on Sunday will still find the name up on the Roxie's marquee — one weekend, three cities, before the run moves on.