Pelicula y Platica
Willie Velasquez: Your Vote is Your Voice
William C. Velásquez was the founder of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in 1974. He envisioned a time when Latinos would play an important role in the American Democratic process. His legacy began in Texas.
Read more: wcvi.org/wcvbio.htm
Read more: wcvi.org/wcvbio.htm
The Canary Effect: Kill the Indian, Save the Man
The grim legacy of America's treatment of its native peoples is explored in detail in this documentary. Filmmakers Robin Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman take the perspective that if one is to define "genocide" as the a deliberate effort by a government to exterminate a people, then the United States is clearly guilty of the crime given their actions against America's indigenous population over the past 300 years. Davey and Thunder Woman back up their argument with footage detailing the economic marginalization of American Indians, the consistent violation of legal agreements reached with native tribes, the mismanagement and consistent neglect of Indian reservations, the brutalization of Native Americans as they were segregated onto flinty soil and forced to live under substandard conditions, and the refusal of the mass media to report stories of suicide and Columbine-style school shootings among reservation youth. The Canary Effect was screened in competition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
Walkout
Sal Castro was a Chicano activist and social studies teacher at Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles who played a leading role in the 1968 Chicano students walkouts. With Castro's advice and guidance, more than 20,000 students walked out of five East L.A. schools demanding educational and systemic reform within the Los Angeles Unified School District -- more Mexican American history courses, more Mexican American teachers and more schools - this at a time when schools were run-down and drop-out rates were high. Although the Supreme Court had ordered an end to segregation, nothing had ended the discrimination that schools still practiced routinely - students were not allowed to speak Spanish otherwise they would be swatted, girls were nudged into secretarial courses and boys funneled into industrial arts. The "walkouts" or "blowouts" was the first major mass protest against racism by Mexican Americans in the history of the United States.
This short film was produced for the National Hispanic Media Coalition's Impact Awards Gala in 2006 of which Sal Castro was awarded the Impact Award for Outstanding Service and Commitment to the Latino Community.
This film is written by and narrated by Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Patt Morrison, produced by documentary filmmaker Alison Sotomayor, and edited by Noe Carillo.
This short film was produced for the National Hispanic Media Coalition's Impact Awards Gala in 2006 of which Sal Castro was awarded the Impact Award for Outstanding Service and Commitment to the Latino Community.
This film is written by and narrated by Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Patt Morrison, produced by documentary filmmaker Alison Sotomayor, and edited by Noe Carillo.
Salt of the Earth
Salt of the Earth is a 1954 American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their alleged involvement in communist politics.
This drama film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc," and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico." The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.
Teaching Resources http://zinnedproject.org/materials/salt-of-the-earth-grounds-students-in-hope/
This drama film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc," and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico." The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.
Teaching Resources http://zinnedproject.org/materials/salt-of-the-earth-grounds-students-in-hope/
The Lemon Grove Incident
The struggle to end school segregation is usually linked to the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v the Board of Education. However, many of the nation's earliest desegregation cases occurred in the American Southwest and they involved Mexican American students.
The Lemon Grove Incident is the true story of one of those cases.
The Lemon Grove Incident is the true story of one of those cases.
La Tejana Pasionaria
Emma Tenayuca
1916-1999
"I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice."
Born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca lived at a time when Mexican-Americans were allowed few freedoms and fewer privileges. Her close relationship with a grandfather who read the newspapers with her and took her to rallies for the rights of the poor fed the young girl’s profound hunger for both learning and social justice.
At age 16, already determined to challenge injustice, she became involved in community organizing and was jailed and threatened numerous times. In a time when neither Mexican-Americans nor women were expected to speak out, she spoke out fearlessly, and was soon known as a fiery orator and a brilliant organizer.
By age 21, Emma was considered to be the most effective organizer for the National Workers’ Alliance. That same year, 1938, when the wages of the city’s lowest paid workers were cut almost in half, they decided to strike. The city’s 12,000 pecan-shellers, most of them women, elected Emma to lead their strike. In less than two months, the pecan-shellers forced the owners to raise their pay. The Pecan-Shellers’ Strike is considered by many historians to be the first significant victory in the Mexican-American struggle for political and economic equality in this country.
Emma was so articulate and outspoken, that the Workers´ Alliance replaced her when she was 22. There was only so much at that time for a woman -- a Mexican woman -- to be an ambitious and intellectual champion for justice.
In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.
Black-listed, Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.
In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-long community service, becoming a reading teacher for migrant students. Emma always focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are called social justice.
Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her “La Pasionaria”. And they kept her story alive, even when so many others tried to erase it from history.
Listen to "Interview with Emma Tenayuca, 1987" http://digital.utsa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15125coll4/id/1172
Click on the photo to view http://video.pbs.org/video/1246558583
Teaching Resources https://zinnedproject.org/materials/thats-not-fair-no-es-justo/
1916-1999
"I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice."
Born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca lived at a time when Mexican-Americans were allowed few freedoms and fewer privileges. Her close relationship with a grandfather who read the newspapers with her and took her to rallies for the rights of the poor fed the young girl’s profound hunger for both learning and social justice.
At age 16, already determined to challenge injustice, she became involved in community organizing and was jailed and threatened numerous times. In a time when neither Mexican-Americans nor women were expected to speak out, she spoke out fearlessly, and was soon known as a fiery orator and a brilliant organizer.
By age 21, Emma was considered to be the most effective organizer for the National Workers’ Alliance. That same year, 1938, when the wages of the city’s lowest paid workers were cut almost in half, they decided to strike. The city’s 12,000 pecan-shellers, most of them women, elected Emma to lead their strike. In less than two months, the pecan-shellers forced the owners to raise their pay. The Pecan-Shellers’ Strike is considered by many historians to be the first significant victory in the Mexican-American struggle for political and economic equality in this country.
Emma was so articulate and outspoken, that the Workers´ Alliance replaced her when she was 22. There was only so much at that time for a woman -- a Mexican woman -- to be an ambitious and intellectual champion for justice.
In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.
Black-listed, Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.
In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-long community service, becoming a reading teacher for migrant students. Emma always focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are called social justice.
Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her “La Pasionaria”. And they kept her story alive, even when so many others tried to erase it from history.
Listen to "Interview with Emma Tenayuca, 1987" http://digital.utsa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15125coll4/id/1172
Click on the photo to view http://video.pbs.org/video/1246558583
Teaching Resources https://zinnedproject.org/materials/thats-not-fair-no-es-justo/
Cesar Chavez
|
Born near Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927, Cesar Chavez employed nonviolent means to bring attention to the plight of farmworkers, and formed both the National Farm Workers Association, which later became United Farm Workers. As a labor leader, Chavez led marches, called for boycotts and went on several hunger strikes. It is believed that Chavez's hunger strikes contributed to his death on April 23, 1993, in San Luis, Arizona. |
Chicano! A Quest For A Homeland
Full-length documentary: Reies Lopez Tijerina and the movement to return the Tierra Amarilla land grant to the residents of the town of San Joaquin de Chama; Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez and the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference.
Chicano! The Struggle In The Fields
Full-length documentary about César Chávez and the UFW Grape Boycott.
Chicano! Taking Back the Schools
Full-length documentary about the Chicano Student Movement in East L.A. in 1968
Chicano! Fighting for Political Power
Full-length documentary about the politics of the Chicano Movement, and the Raza Unida Party.
The Zoot Suit Riots
Zoot Suit Riots Written and Produced by Joseph Tovares, Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, 1942.
A Class Apart
From a small-town Texas murder emerged a landmark civil rights case. The little-known story of the Mexican American lawyers who took Hernandez v. Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow-style discrimination.
John F. Kennedy's Address to Lulac, 21 Nov 1963
|
|
|
A newly rediscovered audio recording of President John F. Kennedy speaking at the Rice Hotel the night before he died has been released.
Associated Press reporter Russell Contreras, who is working on a book about JFK's remarks to the League of United Latin American Citizens on Nov. 21, 1963, said he found the recording a couple months ago on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Read more at: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Newly-rediscovered-tape-of-JFK-s-Houston-speech-4565921.php#item-19596
Associated Press reporter Russell Contreras, who is working on a book about JFK's remarks to the League of United Latin American Citizens on Nov. 21, 1963, said he found the recording a couple months ago on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Read more at: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Newly-rediscovered-tape-of-JFK-s-Houston-speech-4565921.php#item-19596
The Longoria Affair
Sixty years ago in Three Rivers, Texas, the only funeral home in town refused to hold a wake for Felix Longoria, a decorated Mexican American soldier killed in battle during World War II. Longoria’s widow was told, simply, “The whites wouldn’t like it.”
Those words became front-page news across the country, sparking outrage and setting off a series of events that would come to be known as the Longoria Affair. The incident fueled the rise of a national civil rights movement led by Mexican American veterans, and bitterly divided Three Rivers for generations to come.
PBS Documentary
Click on the photo to view http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/longoria-affair/film.html