Last summer, in a 400 year-old building in Mexico City, a group of young brown people waited patiently for Lourdes Portillo. Like her, they were filmmakers – of the North American variety. It was the third day of a U.S. Chicano academic conference set deep in the heart of the motherland and this was a screening of their student films.

All that week, while walking through el centro historico, a fun game was spotting Chicanos among the Mexicans. Not hard to do when faced with the gringo obviousness of a crisp UCSB T-shirt or a pair of Gap Khaki shorts. But then, sometimes not. Post-Nafta, a Dallas Cowboy T-shirt for sale in the Zócalo was just as Mexican as its Che counterpart. Even if it was a Rage Against the Machine version. We all looked the same: it’s just the pesky signifiers that were melding.

I mention this because distinctions of identity, or, rather, the drama of their erosion, are important factors in the accumulated work of Lourdes Portillo. The students wanting to show her their films that day understood that. Instinctively. Self-described queers, feminists, an old school Chicano nationalist or two, a Nuyorican single mom, narrative filmmakers, as well as documentarians, all recognized in Portillo, and her work, their own melding lives and their own eroding catorizations.

The three films in the festival’s program – Columbus on Trial, Sometimes My Feet Go Numb, and the world premiere of Corpus - represent Portillo’s various artistic, personal, and political preoccupations over the years. And stand, too, as prime examples of the filmmaker’s continuing challenge to Chicano/Latino film expectations - in form, subject matter, and gendered point of view. Works that also – it can never be overemphasized – stand on their own as contributions and counterclaims to the discourse of American independent film.

Early Years

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, California since the age of thirteen, Portillo began her filmmaking after moving to San Francisco in the mid-’70s.

Fresh out of art school, the Latino Bay Area was a formative element in her development as a filmmaker and a thinker. Unlike the more nationalistic fervor of the ongoing Chicano movement, San Francisco in the mid-70s embodied a more encompassing Third World perspective. Artistic groups such as the Editorial Poche-Che collective, flourished.

It was a political and artistic sensibility that fostered solidarity rather than differences; shared goals for people of color rather than counterproductive, I, me, mine agitation. And it informed the encompassing, status-quo challenging aesthetic strategy that Portillo has carried with her throughout her subsequent body of work.

Columbus on Trial

Columbus on Trial (1993), Portillo’s collaboration with the Chicano comedy group Culture Clash, is an irreverent Quincentennial fantasy that imagines putting the famous Italian explorer up for literal historical judgement. While the political critique of the humor is firmly in the historical theatrical tradition of old time carpas and ’60s actos, the look of the film is cutting-edge in terms of its use of projected video for more implicit cultural commentary.

Sometimes My Feet Go Numb

This short video film experimental hybrid is an expressive and moving interpretation of a poem by the same name by African American poet Wayne Corbitt. The piece utilizes dramatic, wide-angle shots of the poet’s various body parts over his autobiographical restrained voice over detailing the physical and psychological effects of AIDS drugs on his body. Portillo’s combination of non-Latino subject matter as well as her inventive approach to form demonstrate her willingness to challenge cultural as well as documentary expectations.

Corpus

This Tejano film opens with a shot of a Japanese mural and words from Rene Tajima-Peña. Audacious once again in its transgression of Latino film the opening also works on a thematic level, telling the larger story of how Selena, in her death, was/is truly something to everyone. Like Lourdes is. It’s no wonder she’s found herself here.

Corpus is a groundbreaking new documentary on legendary Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. Lourdes Portillo calls Corpus “my most Mexican, Chicano, Tejano film to date; it’s community-based, talking about subtle things like color and representation.”

A sensitive exploration looking into the almost cultish fascination of the post-Days Inn Selena, the documentary, among many other things, embodies the self representing power of unmediated storytelling. Of telling the unique story about a Tejana by a Chicana.

With Corpus, Portillo goes deep into the familiar People Magazine/Entertainment Tonight level of mythmaking that has ’til now simplistically represented the famous singer’s story of fame and death. Among the complex Tejano/Latino issues Portillo explores are musings on body image among Mexican American women; of the empowering self worth Selena’s unique career gave to young brown girls everywhere; and, of course, a true life folk tale told from a specific region of America rarely heard from.

Portillo’s fascination into the media frenzy of Selena’s death set the stage for this latest project. “Corpus was devised as a tape to say certain things about Selena, with no frills whatsoever,” Portillo says. But for a dynamic visual stylist such as Portillo — one who decorates her office with Wong Kar-Wai film posters — “no fancy cameras” is a relative term.

“It’s a purely Tejano piece,” Portillo says. “This is not a film for Sundance, or those other festivals, this is more a film for us, for ourselves as a Mexican American community.”

With this latest doc, Portillo continues a two decade long filmmaking struggle to “be that kid that came to this country (from Mexico), that wants to explain herself to the white people ... of trying to make sense of who I am and make them understand the jewel of what my culture is.”

“With Corpus,” Portillo told me, “I want to say that there was a deeper story than the one being regurgitated by the mainstream media. About an unsophisticated girl and her unsophisticated father and about how as much as he wanted money and wealth he didn’t know, ultimately, how to protect his daughter in the most sublime way. He allowed evil to enter the picture.”

Jim Mendiola is a free-lance journalist, filmmaker, and Tejano-based member of the new Chicano intelligentsia.