Sound Taste

"The filming took a hold of me": Puerto Rican neorealist film

The Hungarian lunch lady at school was shocked after hearing a radio report on Vieques. "How could the U.S. have Puerto Rico as a colony for 110 years? How is it that people don't know?"

For all the hoopla about the rehabilitated West Side Story and thankfully fading obsession with the girl from the block and her twins, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans are rarely visible in any kind of media.

All day today, NYU is screening movies from the closest thing the island has ever had to a film studio, the DIVEDCO (División de la Educación de la Comunidad), a New Deal-spawned Puerto Rican government agency that produced posters, films, festivals and other multimedia materials to educate rural populations about civic engagement, health and community development.

Like the WPA, because the DIVEDCO had incredible artists working for them, the project produced some aesthetically stunning stuff. I'm more familiar with the posters produced than with the films, which toe that line between documentary and melodrama familiar from Italian neorealism. Beautiful stuff.

Samples of the incredible silkscreen posters here (skip the intro). And should you ever be inside the Hunter College library, they have lots of DIVEDCO posters hung in the stacks.

Below is a trailer from "El Tiempo," a short which revisits the sites and players from the Jack Delano-directed "Los Peloteros" 50 years later. Beautiful use of split-screen to show how much and how little has changed in towns like Comerío.

RIP Edgardo Vega Yunqué

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into Ed Vega on the B67 heading into Park Slope. I was in a rush, he looked like just another melancholy boricua, I would have passed him by had he not been wearing a De La Vega t-shirt.

We rode together for a couple of stops, talked about how he had finished yet another mss., this one in response to the brouhaha with his publisher over the novel that was supposed to come out in July, "Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak." The rest was small talk. I kissed him goodbye and said I'd call in a couple of weeks. Here's a brief obit.

We had met about a month before, when he had found me and asked me to write about the dispute over "Rebecca Horowitz." He claimed the publisher was trying to censor the book. I promised to look into it, but the story never quite jelled.

We talked a long time in that lunch in Olive Vine's cool garden, and the conversation was quintessential Vega: it had near-conspiracy theories, child-like wonder over the birds visiting the garden, lots of bitterness, lots of charm and tons of digressions peppered with obscure facts he'd gathered in unorthodox research, facts that sounded off but I did not challenge him on.

Ed was angry that even now, he was not getting his due. Talking about the literary market, we of course talked about Junot Diaz. We also talked about Abraham Rodriguez, about the near-extinction of Nuyorican prose writers. I knew better than to bring up Latina writers -- it would only have triggered the reflexive anti-feminismo that had gained him a bad reputation among Latina artists citywide.

The truth is, he did not get his due. Prior to any of the half-dozen "Latino booms" I've lived through, he wrote stories that refused the "when I was ethnic and poor" identity politics formula. Writers like Diaz, Rodriguez and Ernesto Quiñonez, tried to rescue his reputation, which had been buried in the 90s by his contentious relations with almost everyone in the Latino arts world when he ran the Clemente Soto Velez Center, one of the last bastions of LES Latin bohemia.

His doorstopper novel, Bill Bailey (for short), finally got him some critical acclaim in 2003. You can hear a funny interview with Leonard Lopate here.

But he kept thinking his subsequent novels, Blood Fugues and Omaha Bigelow (also for short), were even better. In this humble reader's opinion, they were not, even with their inventiveness, even with the complexity they tried to introduce to his beloved LES universe.

As my friend Marco, fellow writer and teacher, often says, Ed seriously needed an editor with a firm hand. I always read Ed's work with a virtual machete in hand. But I really appreciated how he didn't want to leave out a single word, thought, image, to render his world in its full humanity.

But now I feel like another link to that unspoken history of NY's Latin bohemia has broken. Yes, Ed was cranky and impolitic. He had alienated so many people that it took his agent a week to find out he'd died, in Lutheran hospital, alone. But Vega lived through all the fights of the 70s, 80s, 90s, the ones that get marginalized as "ethnic concerns," but really are epic struggles over whose city this is, whose stories matter, and how badly we disrespect artists.

UPDATE: Check David Gonzalez's clear-eyed, touching tribute to Ed here. David is not only a colleague and a friend, but one of the best chroniclers of Nueva York out there. There will be a memorial Monday Sept. 15, 6-8 pm at the SGI-USA Culture Center, 7 E 15th St, Manhattan.

Dominican Body Snatchers

When I saw melanin-gifted actor Tristan Wilds among the cast of the "90210" revival, I was poised to hit the save-get key I have for TV programs and films that address their unbearable whiteness by adding a token.

At least "South Park" not only cut the pretense by naming their Franklin-equivalent character Token, but Chef was always the repository of all common sense and sexy cool.

But looking over info about Wilds, who plays Dixon Wilson, a "troubled youth" adopted into the safe bosom of a white Kansas family that moves to BH (which is supposed to explain his presence in lilly-white land), I ran into an intriguing factoid: turns out Tristan's mom is Dominican, and he grew up in Staten Island (tip of the hat to Remolacha for pointing me to the NYDN story on Wilds).

Which gives me a perfect point of entry for a subject I've been meaning to hit for some time -- the Hollywood invasion by stealth Dominicans. Turns out that over the past couple of decades there's already been a bunch of us in prominent and/or critically-acclaimed roles.

The catch is, most of these performers have not come out of closet as Dominican, either because there is some embarrassing/painful family situation involved (usually absentee fathers) or because most of the people involved are dark-skinned enough to read as Black, and interviewers rarely ask what kind of Black they are. So they pass as Black or "biracial."

I'm not counting here people like Zoe Saldaña, Dania Ramírez, or Michelle Rodríguez, my favorite f'ed up Dominican halfie (who can never shake off rumors of hiding other parts of her identity). It's pretty clear they are Latin, and whenever anyone asks, they acknowledge their Dominican roots.

And though Alfonso Ribeiro, aka Carlton Banks, whose big break came as a 12-year-old in The Tap Dance Kid, has always been open about his Dominicanness, he is so strongly associated with the African-American milieu of "Fresh Prince" that no one ever remembers he's a carajito from Washington Heights (his wikipedia entry identifies him as Trinidadian).

Here I mean more folks like amazing chameleon Sarah Jones, who I hear has been slowly embracing the Dominican heritage she was disconnected from most of her life.

The top stealth Dominican? None other than favorite sci-fi antihero Vin Diesel. He has never acknowledged any Dominican blood, but the first tip-off was the amount of time he has been spending down in Sto. Dgo. in the past couple of years, the film school he has funded and been involved with there, and his god-awful promo spots for Leonel.

My sources claim that his biological father is Dominican, but I have never had enough time (or inclination, or motivation) to confirm. He definitely has a tiguerazo vibe about him, and it would explain my otherwise irrational attraction to his meaty charms.

Know about any other "stealth Dominicans"? Out 'em.

[pix of Tristan Wilds from 90210news.com; pix of Token, Alfonso Ribeiro with Michael Jackson and Vin Diesel liberally clipped from sites with very long urls]

Latinas opened the door for gay marriage, Pt. 2

This week we found out New York has opened a back-door way to legalize gay marriage in the state. And once again, like I wrote about here, there's a courageous Latina setting precedent.

Gov. David Paterson's decision to have state agencies draw up rules consistent with accepting same-sex marriages performed in places where it is legal to do so (such as Canada, Massachusetts and, maybe soon, California) was based on a court case decided a few months back, Martinez v. Monroe County.

Rochester residents Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden won the right to have Martinez's health benefits as a community college administrator extended to her spouse, who she'd married in Canada in 2004. Not a shocker that health insurance has become important enough to warrant enduring a rough, invasive court proceeding.

The case was reported when the decision came down, and was clearly recognized as a precedent-setter. The news this week in the low-key directive drafted by the gov's legal counsel was that by asking state agencies to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere, Paterson was institutionalizing a potentiality.

Let me be clear. I'm not a defender of the importance of marriage as a concept. After all, the institution was invented to control women and property (thanks, Engels!). But seeing families and couples denied rights automatically granted to any random married couple is just wrong.

[Pix of Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden via NYT]

Latinos opened the door for gay marriage

I have to admit, I only read the headlines in California's Supreme Court gay marriage decision this week.

So I did not notice the revealing tidbit that Gary Dauphin footnoted a couple of days ago: the Supremes' decision was largely based on the 1948 case Perez v. Sharp, which challenged interracial marriage bans way before Loving v. Virgina (1967) and involved a Mexican American woman and a Black man.

The reason the couple was denied a wedding license and the case went to court was that Andrea Perez was considered "white." Gary posted her picture. I'm re-posting it here. If she's white, I'm downright Aryan.

Like Mendez v. Westminster, the school desegregation case that predated Brown v. Board of Ed by almost a decade, Perez v. Sharp was also a key precedent-setter with Latino plaintiffs that crowbarred the door open to extend fundamental civil rights to others.

Gary argues that it's no coincidence that this case (I would argue both cases) took place in the other state I consider home, California. This supports Roberto Lovato's theory that California is ground zero for Latino-led radical social change in this country.

Yet another instance in which we are erased from the history of fighting for American civil rights, human rights. Been here all along, time to make sure others notice.

Friday Go Gos

When I first started this blog, I thought I'd stick to my public writer's persona. But slowly, my dear readers, you have been finding out about my obsessions with accordions, with lucha libre, with Kal Penn.

And now, another confession: before I was a punk, I was a preteen lover of new wave. Bow Wow Wow, Adam Ant, Depeche Mode. And no band did I love more than the Go Gos.

Listening to them recently, I was shocked at how good some of the songs in Beauty and the Beat are. I especially love "Lust to Love," "This Town" and the eternal teen heartbreak of "How Much More." God bless Jane Wieldin's guitar.

Though I didn't know it in 1982, the band had both punk and Latin roots. Under the name Dottie Danger, full-cheeked Belinda Carlisle sang for the Germs for a bit, and two of the original members of the band had suspiciously Chicano-sounding names: Margot Olaverra (bass) and Elissa Bello (drums). Any more details from your files on the Secret History of Latinos, Jim?

In the past few years, there's been more examination of the Latin role in the LA punk scene, in this book, this exhibit and this one. I've only seen the American Sabor exhibit and don't have Spitz's book. But I assure you this subject'll be part of my summer research.

So, for that punk-new wave link (and to see how nicely these gals' looks have held up), here's a recent live cover of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated." (Sorry, embedding was disabled.)

And below they perform "Has the Whole World Lost Its Head?" in Tops of the Pops in 1995. The song, which sounds like vintage Go-Gos (and that's a good thing) was one of three originals in the 1994 2-disc retrospective Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's.