The passion of a Mission District poet
The recently reopened Roxie Theater plays host to a Mission District legend, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia, when “Keeper of the Fire” screens Saturday, June 5, as part of the 20th San Francisco Documentary Festival — the city’s annual showcase of documentary cinema running June 320.
Still a work in progress, the cut of the film that is slated to screen at the Mission District theater is only 33 minutes long. But that sparse run time is packed with details of the writer and activist’s life, while also depicting the Mission District as a cultural flash point, delving into current pressures on the neighborhood, and touching on recent Latin American history and the Chicano movement.
Murguia’s life ties these elements together. He is a cofounder of San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts and served as its first
director. He is a political force, involved with the movement against gentrification in the Mission. In the 1970s, he was a soldier fighting alongside the Sandinistas in Nicaragua against the forces of dictator Anastasio Somoza. Murguia is a professor of
Latino/Latina studies at San Francisco State University. He is a writer of fiction and nonfiction prose as well as a poet, and he mentors younger writers.
“It’s a film about Alejandro, but it’s also a film about poetry, about activism, about identity,” said Raymond Telles, who produced “Keeper of the Fire” with David L. Brown and Louis Dematteis. “It’s not a straightforward documentary in terms of the story line,” Dematteis added. “What we tried to do is develop montages to go with Alejandro’s poetry and his prose, and not be literal about what we are seeing.”
It was Murguia’s appointment as
San Francisco’s sixth poet laureate in 2012, the first Latino to hold the post, that planted the seed for “Keeper of the Fire.”
Brown, an Emmywinning documentarian, and Dematteis, a photojournalist turned filmmaker who was then coproducing “The Other Barrio,” a 2015 neonoir adaptation of a Murguia short story, attended the poet laureate’s inauguration at the time. It was Brown who approached Dematteis with the idea of codirecting a documentary.
“I knew Alejandro socially; we’d had some great times together, but I didn’t really appreciate his skill and artistry as a poet, writer and activist,” Brown said. “I was just really impressed by his community, and the power and passion of that community.”
Telles, a documentary filmmaker and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, was the last to join the project, but the first to know Murguia. They met in 1973, shortly after Murguia decamped from Los Angeles to the Mission.
“I had stayed in touch, so I was thrilled to be asked to join the team. I knew the work and admired it,” Telles said.
For the subject of “Keeper of the Fire,” being part of the film meant taking a deep dive into his past, not just his writing or activism but going all the way back to his childhood. Murguia was born in the United States and raised in Mexico until he was 6 before the family settled in Southern California. One striking image in the documentary shows Murguia, now 71, as a toddler dressed in an ornate cowboy outfit atop a stuffed horse. The writer’s work is personal and some of it is nonfiction, but this film explores corners that he had kept to himself.
“It’s interesting, because I tend to be kind of a private person,” Murguia told The Chronicle. “A lot of what is revealed in the documentary, for example, the death of my mom, are things that really just my immediate family knows about me.”
It was Murguia’s writing that framed the filmmakers’ approach to their subject during interviews. At first, they concentrated on his poetry, but they soon moved on to his short stories and other writings, discovering a mix of fiction and factual nuggets that suggested their way forward.
“Alejandro didn’t really tell us a lot of things,” Dematteis said. “It was the fact that we did the research that allowed us to come up with questions to ask him, and by asking him the questions he gave us fantastic insights into his work and into his view of society and his view of identity as a Chicano Latino writer.”
For Murguia, what delights him about “Keeper of the Fire,” more than his own story, is the way the film celebrates the Latino culture of the Mission District, from the 1970s until now, as he and others push back against displacement and gentrification.
“We made it that vibrant neighborhood that it is now,” he said. “And by extension spread that vibrant art around San Francisco. That’s why you see murals now all over the city. That’s why you have cultural centers all over the city, a lot of the impetus coming from the Mission District.”
Pam Grady is a Bay Area freelance writer.