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It is now three decades since affirmative action-style programs provided Chicano and other racial minority students with access to film schools and local television stations. While these efforts ended or were significantly reduced by the mid-1970s, it is important to re-examine this history in order to understand its unique, if also unappreciated, characteristics: a) the ambivalence about class rise for working class students, b) the negotiation of racial and sexual difference among "non-white" students, and c) the contradictory influences of U.S. mass culture and Third World radical politics.
Between 1968 and 1973, media trainee programs and film school admissions policies brought Chicano student activists into the "industry" within the context of the ongoing Chicano civil rights movement. These programs were notable for being multiracial, and they brought together mostly working class students who often had limited interaction with other racial groups, and limited experience with higher education. These students did not know the "class" codes -- that is, the confluence of social class and the classroom -- that made professional training as much an issue of social networking as it was of acquiring technical expertise. Furthermore, given that their access to higher education was secured by and tied to a social movement predicated on cultural nationalisms, minority film students challenged an educational system based on class rise (or maintenance), "addressing issues of culture, identity, and social protest."(1) But class rise took place, too, and that goes some way toward explaining the conflicts and contradictions inherent in this period. Thus, when we write about "Chicano cinema," it is important to remember that its "pioneers" were not just militant activists, but also first-generation college students caught up in the "shock of the new," and who were, above all, quite young and inexperienced. In other words, these agents of social change -- these veteranos of the movement -- were also, as Maricio Mazón notes about the Pachuco zoot-suiters of the 1940s, "youth facing problems of maturation, rebellion, and identity confusion."(2) And it is this combination that generated social change.
In addition to direct confrontations with faculty members and the administration, minority film students challenged their programs' object of desire: Hollywood. As Luis Garza explains, "We were going to revolutionize the whole film industry, present opposite points of view and document what had never been documented before."(3) Thus, Chicano film students, whose personal motivations were to make Hollywood feature films, nevertheless devoted themselves to documenting ongoing social protests, among other organizing activities. In this respect, Sylvia Morales's account of her own career is typical: "I am an artist, and my goal has always been to make feature films, [but] I got sidetracked into documentaries...."(4) She explains: "The non-color students were involved with films concerning personal relationships, personal films. But for us there was a sense of urgency. So we set aside our desire to make personal films in order to make ones which reflected our communities."(5) The decision was a political one -- made in contradistinction to the personal, affiliated with the communal, and laden with professional consequences.
As an experiential cohort entering the film and television industry through its professional schools, these non-white students were both thrown together and segregated from whites within minority programs. The situation was somewhat similar to the minority hiring pools established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its settlement agreement with the industry in 1970. For the most part, however, the classroom became secondary to ongoing social protests and the students' own social parties, both of which brought together different racial groups as well as male and female students. These encounters expanded affinities and affiliations, but also revealed conflicts based on "insensitivities" and "personalities" that were often presented as ideological differences.(6) Whites were not the only ones who had to learn to deal with racial and sexual difference, but the minority students had political, curricular, and professional reasons for undertaking the effort.
Two Los Angeles-based programs provided the main entry points for Chicano filmmakers: New Communicators (1968) and the UCLA Ethno-Communications Program (1969-1973).(7) These programs, especially the latter, are often credited with giving rise to independent film movements based on racial identity groups: Chicano, African American, Asian American, and Native American.(8) While these "cinemas" are often relegated to separate histories and read as distinct race-based genres, the students' shared experiences of social crisis and change during their formative years provide the basis for a sociology of a multiracial "political generation"in the U.S. cinema. As historian Mario T. García explains, "a political generation consciously and politically reacts to its historical era. ... Moreover, a political generation emerges not just in reaction to history but in order to make history -- that is, to produce and consolidate significant social changes in an environment conducive to such changes."(9) Between 1968 and 1973, film schools provided a space within which a political generation emerged for whom race organized a loose set of socio-aesthetic influences that are consistent for being largely auteur-driven. These influences included: a) the "Golden Age" of television documentary, b) the Mexico Western of the Vietnam era, c) a "new wave" within the industry (including recent UCLA graduate Francis Ford Coppola, "the first major American director to have graduated from a university film program"(10), d) the rise of U.S. independent cinema, e) and exposure to Third World films (especially as theorized by the filmmakers of the New Latin American Cinema).
The students in the UCLA Ethno-Communications Program were largely conscious of being a "generation" within this milieu. In fact, Chicano filmmakers often refer to each entering class between 1969 and 1973 as a distinct "generation," indicating the volatility of social change in the period, but also marking internal distinctions within a common historical narrative that is shared by an experiential cohort who are now working in the industry. Indeed, it is this generation that produced the major Chicano public affairs series, social documentaries, and feature films in the 1970s and 1980s. It also created national media institutions and professional advocacy groups, in an effort to secure long term access to an industry that continues to exclude Latinos and other racial minorities.
Note: Noriega teaches in the UCLA Department of Film and Television. This essay is excepted from his forthcoming book, Shot in America: A History of Chicano Cinema (Minnesota).
This article was originally published in the 1998 festival program of the San Diego Latino Film Festival.
1. Presentation by Moctesuma Esparza, Stanford University, March 13, 1990.
2. Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), p. 8. Mazón is actually writing about the zoot-suiters and the servicemen who attacked them.
3. Personal interview with Luis Garza, Los Angeles, October 10, 1990.
4. Personal interview with Sylvia Morales, Los Angeles, November 16, 1991.
5. Renee Tajima, "Ethno-Communications: The Film School Program That Changed the Color of Independent Filmmaking," in Tajima, ed., The Anthology of Asian Pacific American Film and Video (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1985), pp. 38-42, quoted on p. 38.
6. Esparza, Morales, Ruiz, Treviño, and others make this point.
7. In this same period, the University of Southern California also initiated a special admissions program. See Jesús Salvador Treviño,"Chicano Cinema," New Scholar 8 (1982): 167-180, see p. 171. Stanford University is another film program with several Chicano film students on campus in the early 1970s. These include Richard Soto, Francisco X. Camplis, Ralph Maradiaga, and José Camacho, a Guamanian who identified as Chicano in the years before Pacific Islanders were considered U.S.minorities.
8. See Tajima, "Ethno-Communications"; Clyde Taylor, "The L.A. Rebellion:A Turning Point in Black Cinema," The New American Filmmakers Series 26 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986); Clyde Taylor, "The L.A. Rebellion: New Spirit in American Film," Black Film Review 2 (1986): 2; and Ntongela Masilela, "The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers," in Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.107-117.
9. I am deeply indebted to Mario T. García's review of the literature on "political generations" and his application of the concept -- "generally.... applied only to national or international movements" -- to specific national minorities. See García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 3-7.
10. Jack C. Ellis, A History of Film, 4th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995), p. 386.
For more information regarding these articles and/or to submit an article yourself,
please contact Ethan van Thillo at sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com
San Diego Latino Film Festival,
c/o Media Arts Center San Diego,
2039 29th Street,
San Diego, CA 92104
TEL: 619.230.1938, FAX: 619.234.9722,
sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com, www.sdlatinofilm.com
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