AFTER 30 YEARS OF PROGRESS, IT CAN STILL SEEM LIKE 1994
The San Diego Latino Film Festival was born out of a bubbling political and artistic cauldron in the 1990s. There was something in the water in San Diego in those years, and I’m not talking about the Imperial Beach outflow from the Tijuana River.
Alex Rivera, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles who was awarded the MacArthur Foundation grant in 2021, told me recently “Going to San Diego was absolutely going into kind of enemy territory.”
“The borderlands in the ‘90s were a hotbed of racist vigilante organizing,” he said. “The border wall was going up with bipartisan support. And Prop. 187 was seeking to have school teachers check the papers of their students ... but it was also a time of a lot of creativity.”
Rivera visited San Diego in 1996 because Cine Estudiantil (as the San Diego Latino Film Festival was initially called) accepted and screened “Parapapá,” a 28-minute video he produced and directed while at Hampshire College.
“This experimental documentary examines how bodies (people and vegetable) are remade within the new societies they encounter,” read the description in the festival catalog.
In 2008, Rivera broke ground again with “Sleep Dealer,” a story of immigration set in the U.S.-Mexico border, told through a science fiction lens laced with digital effects. A young Tenoch Huerta — Namor in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — was in the film.
Did the festival fill Rivera’s sails with a strong wind or did Rivera imbue the festival with his artistry? Both, Rivera says. And he’s on a long list in the festival’s history.
I’ve been asking myself a similar question about the festival’s impact on me. I edited the festival’s catalog in 1994, its first year.
Did the festival pump me up in 1994 or did I give it the best of my multiple, complicated artistic and political selves?
I brought my bilingual, binational National City and Pacific Beach selves to the festival program.
What weighed on me and lifted me in 1994? Growing up in Tijuana and San Diego. Being undocumented until 1986. The assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994. Tijuana No! and the rest of the Rock en Español wave of music bands. Wanting to be a writer. Seeing filmmakers, painters and performance art members of the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo use the region as their canvas. Watching the stomping into oblivion of the tuna cannery-smelling waterfront and Navy shop-lined downtown of my youth, by San Diego redevelopment funded gentrification.
Co-festival directors Ethan van Thillo and Gene Chavira (my UC San Diego fellow student) wrote in that first catalog, “As in the depression of the early 1930s, the current economic crisis has seen growing resentment against ‘minority’ populations and more specifically towards the undocumented Chicano/Latino populations.” That resentment was growing in 1994, they said.
“There have been few (if any?) images of gay or lesbian Chicana/os in Chicana/o films,” Anthony Navarrette, another fellow UCSD student, wrote in an essay in the catalog. “While it is a generalization, there has yet to be a major Chicana/o film which featured a strong, fully developed, non stereotypical Chicana (straight, Queer or otherwise), in a starring role.”
“Selena: The Movie” would be in movie theaters in 1997, and “Real Women Have Curves” in 2002. In 2012, the breakthrough “Mosquita y Mari” featured fully-developed, non-stereotypical female roles.
“What is it to be Chicana/o? What is it to be Queer? What is it to be working class?
And what happens when these identities and others clash, mix, and rupture?” Navarrette asked in 1994. “That is why film festivals such as this one are important.”
Three decades later those questions remain woefully unanswered in major films. And too often we hear: Who needs an inperson festival when you can watch more movies at home than ever before?
Rivera argues that festivals provide curation of the best of the films out there.
My go-to video and film platforms are Netflix and Kanopy. I also record episodes of “POV” and “Independent Lens” on PBS, showcases for independent nonfiction films. I see more Brown faces on screens but don’t let that fool you. In many regards, it’s still 1994.
“Hollywood has expressed what can only be characterized as disdain for the practice of U.S. Latinos telling stories about ourselves,” Rivera told me. He was hired to write and direct a Zorro-themed, cybervigilante film recently, but when it came time to meet with studios and streaming services to get it made, all passed.
Maybe for the San Diego Latino Film Festival’s 60th edition, it will seem odd that studio executives saw no place for a Latinothemed story like that.
The San Diego Latino Film Festival was born out of a bubbling political and artistic cauldron in the 1990s. There was something in the water in San Diego then.