Building Precious Knowledge: An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Eren Isabel McGinnis

Eren Isabel McGinnis and Ari Luis Palos (see Figure 1) have been telling distinctive ethnic stories for well over a decade. Partners in the Tucson, Arizona-based film company Dos Vatos Productions (McGinnis produces and does sound; Palos shoots and directs), the two make documentaries and shorts that bring local color, human complexity, and a keen sense of historical context to the kind of urgent social issues—immigration, race relations, and public education—that are too often misunderstood or oversimplified in contemporary discourse.

Figure 1.

Ari Palos and Eren McGinnis on location at the Catedral Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Kirsten Waa Earley.

One of their earliest collaborations, Beyond the Border (2001), movingly chronicles the struggles of four Mexican immigrant brothers to make a living in the Kentucky Bluegrass region while coping with cultural barriers, homesickness, alcoholism, and the potential erosion of their Mexican identity. In The Spirituals (2007), Palos and McGinnis examine the history and vitality of African American spirituals through the performances of a choral ensemble whose majestic renditions of slave songs help keep the music alive. Shot in a poetic visual style and rooted in a concrete sense of place—be it Lexington, Oaxaca, or their current home base of Tucson—Dos Vatos's films "give voice," as McGinnis puts it, "to communities often silenced or stereotyped by mainstream media." In doing so, they affirm the vibrant but unheralded contributions of Latino Americans and African Americans to the cultural heritage of the United States.

In their rich and varied body of work, their current project—Precious Knowledge, a documentary about the fight to save the embattled Ethnic Studies program in Arizona's Tucson Unified School District—may be their most politically urgent film to date. Filmed at Tucson High Magnet School during the 2008-09 school year as the controversy over Ethnic Studies began to reach a fever pitch, Precious Knowledge details the dramatic efforts of students, teachers, and community activists to prevent state legislators from gutting Mexican American (Raza) Studies at Tucson High and shutting down Ethnic Studies across the state. (At this writing, a legal effort is underway to challenge House Bill 2281, the legislation that was signed into law last May by Arizona governor Jan Brewer that calls for a ban on K-12 Ethnic Studies classes in the state's public and charter schools.) While much of the public face of the controversy has been dominated by opportunistic politicians who condemn Ethnic Studies as reverse-racist or anti-American without bothering to understand its true aims, Precious Knowledge takes us inside classes at Tucson High to capture lives transformed by a socially conscious curriculum. We meet flesh-and-blood students whose words and actions testify to the role Mexican American Studies has played in helping to reduce dropout rates among Chicano high schoolers and to equip the students with the personal agency and critical self-awareness to become productive citizens in their communities.

As McGinnis and Palos neared completion of Precious Knowledge last fall (the film is slated to air nationally on PBS in 2011), I interviewed McGinnis about the film and her work. McGinnis earned her BA in Anthropology from San Diego State University and a certificate in film and video theory and production from University College, Dublin. In addition to her Dos Vatos projects, she has also made several documentaries as one half of Café Sisters Productions, a collaboration with director Christine Fugate that has yielded, among other films, the PBS POV documentary Tobacco Blues (1998). In our interview, conducted over e-mail in October and November 2010, McGinnis reflects on the challenges of making Precious Knowledge; the role that her own Mexican-Irish-American background has played in the movies she makes; and some of the intricacies of telling socially relevant stories through the medium of documentary film.

Andrew Sargent:

How did you and Ari originally come up with the idea to make Precious Knowledge?

Eren McGinnis:

I met Sean Arce, Director of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District...