Patricia Cardoso stood on a stage in a Park City, Utah, library 21 months ago, bathed in one of the most emotional ovations the Sundance Film Festival had ever seen. Cardoso’s debut feature, Real Women Have Curves, a story of female garment workers in East L.A., had brought the Sundance audience to its feet with tears of joy and relief. “Finally someone has put real Latino women up on screen!” a female audience member shouted.
“Thank you for embracing this little film beyond all our expectations,” the soft-spoken director called back. “And thanks to Geoffrey Gilmore for pushing the deadline to apply to Sundance,” she laughed. “Six weeks ago we were still cutting this film and the thought of standing here on this stage was unbelievable.”
Since Sundance is the film industry’s point of discovery for young moviemakers, Cardoso knew her life was about to change. She flashed back 90 minutes to just before the lights went down. “I first met Patricia Cardoso at UCLA,” said Gilmore M.A. ’79, director of the Sundance Festival, as he introduced her film. “Her editing room was across from my office [at UCLA’s Film and Television Archive], and from the moment I saw her student work, I knew this was a filmmaker with something to say.”
Real Women Have Curves — based on a stage play written by Josefina Lopez M.F.A. ’00, who co-wrote the screenplay — had plenty to say for Latino cinema: Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance, special jury honors for Lupe Ontiveros and America Ferrera, the mother-daughter team at the heart of the film’s Mexican-American appeal, and a $6-million U.S. box office. Cardoso M.F.A. ’94, an archaeologist from Bogotá, Colombia, came to UCLA as a Fulbright Scholar in 1987. The first Latina filmmaker to make a meaningful mark at the American box office, she joins an astounding roll call of UCLA moviemakers — Carlos Avila M.F.A. ’91; Neal Jimenez ’83; Moctesuma Esparza ’71, M.F.A. ’73; Luis Meza ’96; Sylvia Morales ’71, M.F.A. ’79; Gregory Nava ’71, M.F.A. ’76; Victor Nunez M.F.A ’71; and David Valdes ’76 among them — who shape the past, present and future of Latino cinema.
“UCLA’s production program in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media has the highest Latino-student ratio (25 percent) of any film school in the nation, and most likely the highest percentage of Latino students of any other professional school on campus,” notes Chon Noriega, professor of critical studies in the department and the director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. “It has always nurtured those voices who struggle most to be heard — African Americans, Asians and Latinos. There’s a direct link between the diversity programs begun at UCLA three decades ago and the impact Latino filmmakers have in today’s marketplace.”
Noriega, the nation’s preeminent scholar of ethnic media and Chicano cinema, points to late ’60s/early ’70s-era undergraduate programs like ethnocommunications, created by film students to attract minority talent to UCLA, as watershed events. According to Noriega, ethnocommunications gave rise to politically active Latino filmmakers like Morales and Jose Luis Ruiz, who were involved in ethnocommunications as undergraduates before entering the M.F.A. program and diversifying that student body. These same students would go on to produce some of the most effective public-affairs and community programming of its time. Ruiz is notable for having served a lengthy stint as executive director of the National Latino Communications Center; Morales returned to UCLA for her M.F.A. degree and made the groundbreaking PBS documentary Chicana, which focused social and political attention on Mexican-American women.
Gregory Nava may be UCLA’s most famous Latino film graduate. Before Nava made Mi Familia, Selena and Why Do Fools Fall in Love, he cracked the art-house market for Latino cinema wide open with his raw, emotionally compelling independent film, El Norte. Released in 1983, the English-subtitled El Norte, about two young Mayan Indians, a brother and a sister, who travel from their remote Guatemalan village to Los Angeles, was slow to find its audience, but once it did, it triggered a landslide of low-budget features that led to American independent cinema’s current place on the world stage. Nava’s most recent project, American Family, was slated to be the first Latino family drama on network TV before CBS had a change of heart. Nava resurrected American Family on PBS in January 2002, with a cast of the best Latino actors in the industry — Edward James Olmos, Sonia Braga, Esai Morales and Constance Marie, among others. American Family is modeled after Nava’s own Mexican-American upbringing. The non-commercial PBS time slot more closely resembles the director’s independent-film roots he first explored as an M.F.A. candidate at UCLA.
Indie Latino cinema is not the only segment of the industry impacted by UCLA moviemakers. Film and television veteran Moctesuma Esparza has compiled producing credits that include Price of Glory, The Milagro Beanfield War, Selena, Gettysburg, and Gods and Generals. Esparza is emblematic of Latino filmmakers who attended UCLA in the 1970s. Compelled by the social activism of the era, Esparza brought a new political awareness to television with his Emmy-winning Cinco Vidas, a documentary that explored the Chicano civil rights movement in East Los Angeles. Esparza also produced the Oscar-nominated short Agueda Martinez: Our People, Our Country — he would later marry the director of that film, Esperanza Vásquez ’73 — and the landmark American Playhouse drama The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
“By the early ’80s,” Noriega explains, “filmmakers like Moctesuma were funneling the money they had made in documentaries to bring Latino stories into theaters. Greg Nava, Moctesuma Esparza and Victor Nunez pushed the curve toward the more cultural, biographical and regional stories destined for the big screen.”
A blend of the personal and cultural is the hallmark of a new generation of Latino moviemakers. Artists like Cardoso, Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros), Salma Hayek (Frida) and Carlos Carrera (The Crime of Father Amaro) are, according to David Valdes, the Oscar-nominated producer of The Green Mile, “indicative of filmmakers who relate to their cultures on many levels, and are individualistic in their storytelling. I go back several times a year to talk with [TFT] students,” Valdes notes, “and I see filmmakers with ethnic pride and a burning desire to delve into this treasure chest of untold Latino stories.”
A.P. Gonzalez, head of production and vice chair for Film, Television and Digital Media, echoes Valdes. He says UCLA’s film school “has moved away from the issue-oriented films of the past toward a more artistic and free-spirited approach that mirrors independent cinema as a whole. These Latino films are visually adventurous and humanistic. They’re honest and based on real stories, so they feel more universal than the sociological work of the past.” Like Professor of Theater Jose Luis Valenzuela, who directed the critically acclaimed 2000 indie feature Luminarias, a Latino Waiting to Exhale that focused on upwardly mobile Latinas in Los Angeles, Gonzalez — winner of UCLA’s 2003–’04 Distinguished Teaching Award — is a big part of why the industry’s most accomplished Latino artists first find their voices at UCLA.
Carlos Avila is a prime example. Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Echo Park, Avila completed his B.F.A. at Loyola Marymount University and cruised up the 405 to complete his M.F.A. “Making narrative films with Latino themes and characters was on my mind,” Avila recalls, “and UCLA had a tradition of [racial and ethnic] diversity with people like Victor Nunez and Haile Gerima ’72, M.F.A. ’76 [from Ethiopia] who had developed their own filmmaking philosophies at UCLA. The best possible outcome for my thesis film happened with Distant Water.” The film won an award at the Film Festival of International Students in Japan that provided $175,000 to spend a year making another film to be screened in Tokyo. “I approached PBS, who co-financed and eventually aired the script for that film, La Carpa. I hired all my classmates at UCLA to shoot La Carpa! It was my first professional film and my first association with public television.”
La Carpa became the first in a highly successful series Avila developed for PBS called Foto-Novelas. Inspired by Avila’s love for Mexican comic books, Foto-Novelas was sold to PBS based on the network’s history with Latino projects. El Norte, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, and Stand and Deliver had all preceded Foto-Novelas, and they had all been produced or directed by UCLA filmmakers. Two more lasting connections to Avila’s success came from UCLA faculty members — Edit Villarreal, currently a professor of playwriting, was one of Avila’s “creative beacons” and co-wrote La Carpa; A.P. Gonzalez directed Mangas, among the episodes of Foto-Novelas when that series won the Narrative Award at the San Antonio Cine Festival and a 1998 Alma Award. Avila calls his years at UCLA and the relationships he formed “some of the most creatively nourishing I’ve ever experienced.”
How does UCLA foster success stories like Gregory Nava and Carlos Avila, born decades and generations apart, in an industry where finding work, regardless of ethnicity, is almost impossible? Robert Rosen, dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television, cites dual tenets of “excellence in training and fulfilling a public mission” as the prime factors.
“We are unique among the nation’s elite film schools in that we are a public institution,” Rosen explains. “We have a responsibility to encourage and foster diversity that reflects the community. The evolving demographics of America as a whole, and Los Angeles in particular, direct us toward people who can tell stories about their experiences that will reflect back out to the popular culture. That mission, combined with our mandate to provide the very best hands-on training, facilities and faculty, is what, I believe, attracts such quality artists. Not just Latinos, but African and Asian Americans, and filmmakers of different orientations; these individuals know they’ll learn their crafts at one of the best film schools in the world, and be encouraged to find their own voices within their different cultures and personal experiences.”
That’s cultures, with an s. Contrary to what the advertising industry might have us believe, Latinos are not part of one homogenous ethnic group that spans the globe. Luis Meza, who made the hilarious and little-seen Staccato Purr of the Exhaust, about a car-cruising slacker from East Los Angeles, has little in common with a Colombian archaeologist like Patricia Cardoso, other than they both studied film at UCLA.
Cardoso won the Student Academy Award for her thesis film, The Water Carrier, and was recently voted Filmmaker of the Year by TFT students. Yet the director says she was “alienated” from her Latin American culture when she arrived in the U.S., and had trouble finding common ground with L.A.’s homegrown Latino culture.
“After I left UCLA, I got a job developing the Latin American film program at Sundance because it was one of the few places [other than UCLA] that recognized the differences in Latin cultures,” Cardoso explains. “I did not speak much English, and the film school was my main support in Los Angeles. UCLA and Sundance were both like family to me when I was homesick for my own country.” Cardoso credits teachers like four-time Academy Award-nominee Richard Marks and his wife, Barbara, with instilling the confidence to keep making films, and with classmates like Avila for getting those films out to a wider audience.
“Carlos was the one who gave me the application for the San Antonio Cine Festival (the longest-running Latino film festival in the nation), because I didn’t even know you were supposed to submit your film,” Cardoso laughs. “My UCLA classmate Francisco Velasquez M.F.A. ’01 brought the camera and all the film stock down to me in Colombia so I could shoot The Water Carrier. My classmates were the ones I thanked when I won the Student Academy Award. We’re still close and give feedback on each other’s films almost 10 years after leaving UCLA.”
The bond filmmakers like Cardoso and Avila experienced at UCLA often carries over into a business that continues to marginalize Latinos both in front of and behind the camera. Alex Nogales ’73 is in his third term as president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a Los Angeles–based group that monitors Latino representation in the entertainment industry. Nogales notes that of the 15 Latinos in his UCLA undergrad film class of the early ’70s, only two or three were able to sustain a career of 10 years or longer in the industry. Nogales says it was not due to any lack of talent or training, but simply a woeful lack of opportunity.
“Certainly there are more options now than when I was entering the business in the 1970s,” he observes. “But the 2003 U.S. Census numbers show Latinos as the nation’s largest minority group at 13.6 percent (36 million), with an estimated buying power of $650 billion. Yet Latino directors still only account for 2 percent of the entertainment industry, and Latino writers less than 1 percent. The Screen Actors Guild numbers for Latinos working in the industry are the highest they’ve ever been at 6 percent. But that is deceptive; regular or recurring roles on any of the six television networks are closer to 1 percent. It’s amazing that Latinos make up 47 percent of L.A. County, literally right here in Hollywood’s backyard, yet we are still so vastly underrepresented in this industry.”
Nogales calls UCLA an “incubator” for up-and-coming Latino talent and admits that without a new generation being nurtured and trained, Latino stories would have zero chance of getting on screen. But he cautions that “young filmmakers coming out of UCLA need jobs and opportunities in their chosen field to make a difference; otherwise, where does all that education go? To work in a florist’s shop, as one of my old classmates now does?” Nogales notes impatiently.
The son of migrant farm laborers, Nogales says there’s more at stake with Latino representation than TV ratings or box office. “This is about the way a population is going to be portrayed if they are absent from the tube or screen, or are depicted in a stereotypical fashion. State, federal and county resources are allocated to communities for job development, education and small-business infrastructure,” he says, “and if we, as Latinos, are not visible in the industry that creates popular culture, that can have a negative outcome.”
Changing Latino stereotypes in the media is a mission for most of the Latino filmmakers associated with UCLA. Valdes has worked with Clint Eastwood on 17 films, and has tried to “replace racial and gender stereotypes wherever and whenever we could.” He recalls that in the early ’90s he was asked to help Latinos gain ground in Hollywood. “At that time, there was no Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas or Jennifer Lopez, and going into a studio with an all-Latino cast and story was impossible,” Valdes says. “Latinos were being cast, as they still are today, in roles that didn’t fully represent our culture — gardeners, maids, car thieves. The usual stuff. There was definitely an imperative to try and make a difference.”
The gains may seem minor, at times, but Valdes insists they leave their mark. For his current film, Open Range, Valdes convinced director Kevin Costner to cast Diego Luna, the young Mexican star of Y Tu Mamá También, even though the part was not specified as Latino.
“It’s a more realistic version of the Old West [having Diego in the role],” Valdes intones, “yet it was an afterthought that I had to suggest because Latinos are so far off Hollywood’s radar. The studios are not rushing to make films about Ruben Salazar or César Chávez, even though these men were great Americans and heroes to millions of people. Los Angeles is not rushing to support its own Latino museum, even though it is a city named in Spanish and was in the hands of Mexicans for centuries. I tell Latino filmmakers at UCLA that they are part of a special place that values their heritage. I tell them to follow their dreams and make films about their culture, even if Hollywood is not always receptive. Change comes slowly in this industry. But without film programs like UCLA that celebrate diversity, it may not come at all.”
Ask Dean Rosen about the future for his many Latino moviemakers, and he talks up his dream to create a center that would unite theater, film and television. Rosen says this new Latino Center could forge ties with existing UCLA entities like the Chicano Studies Research Center, the Latin American Center, the César E. Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Latino Business Student Association and publications like La Gente and Aztlán. “Our film school must be both a resource and a link,” Rosen explains, to a statewide Latino community that makes up 33 percent of California’s population.
Faculty members Noriega and Gonzalez are on the same page as Rosen. Noriega’s Chicano Studies Research Center has, in partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, raised nearly $200,000 over three years to preserve lost or forgotten Latino films. Noriega is also in talks with UCLA grads Esparza and Nava to bring their films into the UCLA archives for future generations. Gonzalez, who first came to UCLA in 1990, started the Chicano/Latino Film & Television Association in 1993. The group now hosts the largest festival of films made by Latino students in the nation. Workshops and master classes by UCLA grads like Valdes, as well as Latino directors like Alfonso Arau, who made the art-house hit Like Water for Chocolate, are other activities of the student-run association. Gonzalez says the torch continues to burn among members of each new generation. He praises recent graduates like Yolanda Cruz M.F.A ’03 and Maria Murillo M.F.A. ’03, among others, and current UCLA filmmakers like Alberto Barboza ’97, Joel Juarez, Archie Hernandez, Deana Mesa, John Covarrubias and Aline Franco-Flores.
Barboza, who will complete his thesis film in a few months, has been active in the Chicano/Latino Film & TV Association since he entered the M.F.A. program in 1997. As an undergraduate, he created an independent major that sampled Latin American studies, fine art and Chicano street theater, where his mentor, Professor Jose Luis Valenzuela, left a lasting mark. Barboza feels the Chicano/Latino Film & TV Association, as well as UCLA’s relationship with Latino moviemakers, is ever growing.
“The great thing about Latino moviemakers at UCLA is how we have evolved,” Barboza explains. “In the early ’90s, when I arrived as an undergraduate, our goal was primarily admissions — increase the amount of students in the department. Once that was fulfilled, we decided that it was time to showcase our work and bring the community over to UCLA. The Chicano/Latino Film & TV Association accomplished that with the many film festivals we’ve held almost every year. Now, we are thinking about creating an alumni association that will help with networking jobs after school, and perhaps create an archive of films from these great filmmakers who came before us. Latinos at UCLA want to feel connected to the past.”
Barboza chaired the Chicano/Latino Film & TV Association in 2000. He feels that the identity of Latino moviemakers at UCLA has solidified and the need to rekindle the sociological films of the 1970s is no longer present. “Now it’s all about personal storytelling,” Barboza relates. “I’m amazed when I see movies about Los Angeles and there are no Mexican faces. I have an extended family of 150 from my community who work on all my films and rally behind every project. A film is not just about the director; there’s a band of artists — actors, designers, writers, costumers — who are holding me accountable. After training at UCLA for the last 10 years, they tell me I have to continue to make films and tell people about my experiences.”
As M.F.A. candidates like Barboza indicate, Latino moviemakers are as diverse as the stories they bring to the screen. Their work tends to share a deep humanism — a respect for people that often waltzes hand in hand with the magic of nature and dreams. Episodes from real life, handed down through the core of Latino culture — the family — take on the quality of a darkened movie theater and an audience hungry to be told a story.
It was like that for Patricia Cardoso at Sundance when the audience shed tears for her film, set in East Los Angeles but echoing the relationship with her Colombian mother. And it was like that for Alex Nogales, who experienced racism and segregation as an 8th grader in his Imperial Valley border town.
“When people ask why I chose UCLA,” Nogales concludes, “I tell them the story my father told us about how he would follow the work around the state — cotton in the Imperial Valley, grapes in Delano, plums in Gilroy and Hollister, the Central Valley for tomatoes. One day he was picking oranges in a grove in what is now Westwood. He looked up and saw this gorgeous university called UCLA. He promised himself one of his sons would study there.”
Nogales laughs. “Of course, he told the same story to my brother, who went to Stanford. But like a great movie, it was beautifully told and from the heart, so who could resist it?”
