Friday, November 10, 2006
Colloquium explores the symptoms of immigrant protests in film
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Dr. Chad Tew, assistant professor of online journalism, will present “Clash in Paradise: Exploring the Symptoms of Immigrant Protests in Hollywood's Portrayal of Latinos” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, November 17, in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center. The lecture is part of the Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium Series. In the wake of nationwide immigrant protests in spring 2006 sparked by U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner’s Immigration Enforcement Bill, Tew looks to the movies and finds evidence of building tension in U.S. Anglo-Latino relations since the 1980s. “I’m going to look at 25 years of Hollywood, and see how films have given us a signal that not all is well between non-Latinos and Latinos in this country,” he said. “This didn’t happen all of the sudden.” The 1980s was the decade Mexicans became the largest foreign born population in the U.S., and when filmmakers such as Luis Valdez, Gregory Nava, and Cheech Marin started addressing Latino-Anglo issues in film. A more recent film by Sergio Arau, called “A Day Without A Mexican,” was released two years before the immigration protests but become a touchstone for the movement. In Arau’s film, “A Day without a Mexican,” all the Latinos in California disappear. “California really relies on Mexicans. The economy can’t exist in southern California without them,” Tew said. “In the film, the Latinos want to be appreciated, but the problem is the whites don’t appreciate the Mexicans until the very end, when the whole country is in chaos.” The protests triggered by the Sensenbrenner bill were dubbed “A Day without a Latino.” “There was something brewing out there long before these protests, but it took the bill to actually anger people. Non-Latinos were taken by surprise by the protests. But if you look back to the 1980s at these early films, you can already start seeing that there is anger building. They were trying to say, ‘Appreciate us; we’re important.’ But that message never got across to such an extent that people were surprised when the Latinos started protesting.” Some of the lecture is based on Tew’s collaborative research with Dr. John Marambio, professor of foreign languages and literatures at the University of San Diego. For more information contact Dr. Teresa Huerta, associate professor of Spanish, at 812/465-7053. |
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