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Some instances of actors changing their names to hide their ethnic roots have become legendary: Perske became Bacall, Schwarz became Curtis, at least one Estevez became Sheen. When Philippine-born Ching Valdes began to pursue an acting career in New York in the late 1970s, a manager who handled only Asians also advised her to change her name, but for different reasons. "She said, 'No one will know what you are if your last name is Valdes,'" the actress recalls. "'You have to change your name to something Chinese or Japanese so you can get hired.'"
But not only did she decide to keep her Spanish surname, she added "Aran" to it to strengthen her ethnic identity. According to the mythology of the Ibaloi, an extinct tribe from the Philippines, a devastating flood once swept across the islands, leaving a lone woman survivor, Aran, perched high on a mountaintop. The race was regenerated when a man was created from her rib.
So when casting agents suggested she didn't look either "Chinese" or "Spanish" enough. Valdes-Aran; like her namesake, didn't allow herself to go under. Early on she worked in experimental theatre, which, like the dance world she had come from, tended to be more colorblind. As she performed in downtown New York at places like La Mama, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and Theater for a New City, she began to look at her ethnicity in a different light.
"I realized that I could do everything, that the way I looked was an advantage instead of a disadvantage. When that clicked in my head, it freed me. In the end, it's really the work that matters."
And work she has. Over the years, Valdes-Aran has refused to allow herself to be pigeonholed, playing a wide range of classical and contemporary roles, usually strong women, at theatres across the country. Her Greek heroines have included Hera, Athena, Medea, Jocasta and Agave. She played Lady Macbeth opposite F. Murray Abraham in Joseph Papp's Shakespeare on Broadway series. This...