By snoadmin
Chicano/Latino studies professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos was invited to participate May 11 and 12 in California: Roots, Presence and Future of the Latino Essence, an international colloquium that will be hosted by the Spanish government in Madrid.
Vazquez-Ramos was recommended by “A Day Without a Mexican” film director Sergio Arau to present a dissertation on the California Latino population and the film industry and show several films to make his argument.
“The emergence of Chicano films are now becoming very successful because of the size of the population [and] the size of the market,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “The films in the last couple of years are touching on key topics of concern and have a different perspective, a different presentation.”
The first film Vazquez-Ramos will show is “La Misma Luna,” meaning under the same moon.
“I’m going to make a reference to how successful this film in particular has been,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “The image of this 12 million-plus ‘illegal aliens’ has been treated by the media largely in a very negative way. What a film like ‘La Misma Luna’ is is a human face, a human story.”
Another major film Vazquez-Ramos will touch on is an HBO film called “Walkout,” which is about the East Los Angeles high school walkouts that occurred in March 1968.
The high school walkouts took place for three weeks at 16 different high schools and it involved close to 20,000 students who declared a boycott to fight for educational equality.
“By walking out they protested the racist and discriminatory conditions in the schools that led to major reforms in the educational system,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “How does that relate to this? It created the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.”
Vazquez-Ramos said the educational changes helped created the power to push for the Chicano/Latino studies department at CSULB in 1969.
“To me, this will probably be my greatest contribution in life,” Vazquez-Ramos said, “that we are able to create a department where I’m teaching now, and where I’m dedicated to inform, educate and politicize our students to do the same.”
Vazquez-Ramos said some students coming out of high school do not have any idea who they are, and that films such as “La Misma Luna” can help shape a person’s identity.
“Films such as ‘Walkout’ and ‘A Day Without a Mexican’ had the impact of influencing the mentality of ‘Sí, se puede,’ that Cesar Chavez taught us, and even stimulated the marches in 2006,” Vazquez-Ramos said.
After discussing the films, Vazquez-Ramos talked about Chicanos and Latinos being the largest ethnic minority in the United States at 45.5 million, and linked it to how that number represents voting power and economic power.
“We have something to teach them,” Vasquez-Ramos said of the Spanish. “We have something to offer them in gaining a greater understanding of this population, which is important for all kinds of reasons.”
