Filmmaker to speak about stories on Latino community

Those romcoms about the lighthearted love story problems of privileged people? Telling those kinds of stories never appealed to filmmaker Alex Rivera. Growing up in upstate New York in a home filled with the culture and language of his Peruvian family, Rivera’s phone conversations with his grandmother, who was still in Peru, included stories about the guerrilla warfare and bombings in Lima in the 1990s. Those stories, alongside the contentious media rhetoric he was hearing about immigrants, gave him a much broader awareness about the world around him.

“I grew up with the sense of a bigger world out there on the other side of these lines on a map, so that connection and that curiosity was the seed, ultimately, for my artistic exploration,” he says.

Rivera, who was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship last year (often referred to as the “genius grant”), as was his wife, filmmaker Cristina Ibarra, is the featured lecturer in the Adam D. Kamil guest lecture series from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at UC San Diego’s Price Center Theater. His first feature film, “Sleep Dealer,” is a science fiction story set at the U.s.-mexico border about the use of technology to access the labor of workers, without the workers themselves being physically inside the border. His 2019 collaboration with Ibarra, “The Infiltrators,” is a documentary-scripted hybrid about a group of undocumented immigrant activists with temporary conditional residency, who go undercover in immigration detention centers to help detainees get out.

At UC San Diego, Rivera will talk about his work and focus on the process of cultivating an idea to executing the final version of a story in film. Here, he took some time to talk about the focus he places on issues of globalization, migration and politics in the Latino community in the United States, and the responsibility he feels to tell stories about his community that offers a broader and deeper view of the humanity, resilience, creativity and joy within it. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderickstaff.html.)

Q: Can you talk a bit about your point of view as an artist, and why it’s been important to you to focus on issues of globalization and immigration in your work?

A: For me, like I think a lot of artists, it all started at home and starts with the family, with what you intimately know. I grew up knowing I came from a family of immigrants. I grew up knowing I had undocumented, immigrant family members, so when I started to listen to the world, I could just hear this hateful rhetoric attacking us. I never really considered a career of going to make rom-coms about people in Beverly Hills. That was never interesting to me. What was interesting was the fact that the attacks on immigrant communities happen through a system, which is a media system. It happens through the way that TV news is packaged, and happens through repetitive narratives about narcos, and even happens through high-end documentaries like “Cartel Land.” We get constant stories that are produced that attack our community, so I always thought, ‘Well, what’s the opposite of that? What does it look like? What does it look like to create narratives that historicize the border? That remind people that there was no fence there just a few decades ago? To remind people that there’s no deportation clause in the constitution, that this entire system that is attacking our communities was constructed to carry out an ethnic cleansing regime against people of color?’ These are not my opinions, these are historical facts, but that are totally outside the frame of our media system. So, a central question for me has been how we can use the media form to disrupt the racist and violent border narrative and disrupt it with creativity, with joy, with truth.

Q: In a Macarthur Foundation video about your work, you talk about how you believe that the people and communities facing violence and alienation are the ones who will imagine a way out of that crisis, and as a filmmaker, some of your work has been about listening and trying to understand those imaginings and strategies of resistance. What led you to this understanding, that the most marginalized communities are the ones who will be able to figure a way out of that crisis?

A: It partly comes from history. For example, if we think about the crisis of anti-black racism in this country embodied in slavery, embodied in Jim Crow, can we imagine anybody challenging that system other than visionary Black leadership? The impacted communities always take a decisive role in their own liberation. So, we live with this reality today where the most prosecuted crime that sends people to jail and prison in this country is crossing the border. We live in a system where, every night, tens of thousands of people sleep in detention centers not knowing if they’ll ever get out, not knowing if they’ll see their families again. The violence is being felt by the immigrant community, so necessarily, that community, their family members, the people who are feeling that impact are going to be the people who produce alternatives, who produce a way out.

Q: Can you talk about your lecture at UC San Diego

Wednesday? What that it’s going to be about and what people can expect?

A: I’m going to try to explain a little bit about my work and where I’ve ended up, but really focus on process. How do you read your own family in a social way? How do you read your own life in a social way so that you start your artistic practice, or your filmmaking process, with the knowledge of who you are in the world and what you have to offer? Then, the process of turning that into a story, turning it into a piece of media, so I’ll be talking about some core creative questions that sit at the nexus of personal reflection and political analysis. I think, ... what we need in this moment, are stories that connect our daily lives and connect the experiences of, especially, historically marginalized communities to these national political crises. Part of the conversation is going to be about that early creative gesture, that moment of birthing an idea and then it’s going to be about strategies. Once you have an idea for your film, how do you get it made? Do you write the big script and take it to Hollywood and wait for them to give you the money, or do you work in other ways? I’ve always worked in other ways. I’m still interested in Hollywood, I’m interested in industrial film, but I’ve also never wanted the decisions of other people to stop me.

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com

Alex Rivera