Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Lourdes Portillo

227 Lourdes Portillo orn in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1944, Lourdes Portillo moved with her parents and four siblings to Los Angeles when she was thirteen. Her father worked as a newspaper administrator in Mexico, and Portillo was exposed from an early age to stories. As one of the oldest of her siblings, Portillo soon took on the role of family interpreter in L.A., and she took easily and quickly to storytelling. Inspired by her Los Angeles movie environs, she set her sights on the visual art of telling stories . Having experienced racism and sexism as a Latina, she hoped to tell stories that would be conscious of issues of race and gender. During the late 1960s she pursued an M.F.A. at San Francisco Art Institute and in the 1970s apprenticed with several documentary filmmakers. During this climate of great civil rights activism, Portillo’s politics and visual artistry began to galvanize. She was a participating member in the 1970s of the Marxist collective Cine Manifest; in 1976 she established her own company , Xochitl Productions. Since her first documentary, After the Earthquake/Después del terremoto (1979), she has produced and directed nearly a dozen others that together represent her complex vision as visual artist, investigative journalist, and activist. Her many documentaries move back and forth across the U.S.– Mexico border, representing diverse and complex Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and identities. Her award-winning, fact-based storytelling documents human rights struggles both large and small, from archiving the mothers’ struggle to get answers from Argentina’s government regarding los desaparecidos, to the effect of Latina pop star Selena’s death on young Tejanas, to affirming the important place of cultural traditions like the Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebrations on both sides of the border. Frederick Luis Aldama: You’ve been working on documentary journalism since the late 1970s—from After the Earthquake to the more recent Señorita Extraviada. Can you speak to changes in your own work, audiences , funding, and so on, during this stretch of time? Lourdes Portillo: I think that I’ve been unusually lucky to be able to get funding for my work. It has enabled me to share my vision out in the world. But in the film world, it has become more difficult to find money to do films. It’s not as easy as it was, say, in the ’80s and ’90s. It has become more challenging. And we’ll see what happens during this next phase of work because I’m transforming my style once again, so it’s going to be more challenging to raise the funds. I feel that it’s a time in my life where I need to go even deeper into the whole notion of creating rather than to continue to focus on the themes that have characterized my work so far. I’m old enough now to begin to reflect on the role of the artist in the greater society. All this filmmaking activism has brought me to this point of self-reflection on the role of the artist in an ever-changing world. F.L.A.: Given the big juggernaut of mainstream America, how much of a role can a documentary filmmaker interested in questions of race, ethnicity , gender, and sexuality play in society? I’m thinking of Mike Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which has just gotten huge publicity and which places questions of race and gender very much more in the background. Where do you think your work touches people? L.P.: The documentary has traditionally been marginalized—especially documentaries that touch on all the subjects that I touch on. There are a lot of people that have been so influenced on seeing the world a certain way that they aren’t interested to see other forms of inequality represented on film; they’re not interested in my point of view. But there are a whole lot of people who are interested, who are curious, who want to hear and see the other side of the Hollywood-style American dream story. My work, along with that of other independent filmmakers, has other concerns: to show another side of life not being represented by Hollywood 228 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Lourdes Portillo 229 and other conglomerate media. And even now, with a documentary like Michael...