Rodriguez doesn't think PBS is intentionally failing to grasp the significance of population shifts. "It's just very difficult to translate culture, to be sensitive to culture that you can’t see.”
Latino voters: a story of ‘high hopes and dashed hopes’
Los Angeles producer Phillip Rodriguez is two programs deep in what he hopes will become a provocative PBS series about the country’s growing Latino population.
His new Latinos ’08, an examination of Latino voting and politics, airs Oct. 8 and follows last year’s Brown Is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream, about Latinos and the American media market.
Rodriguez pitched the series idea to PBS execs more than two years ago because he thought a Mexican-American from the West Coast — where the cultural shift is so dramatic — should be documenting this change. Public TV has difficulty representing Latinos, he says, because it’s trying to grasp and script the changing demographics of the West and Southwest from places like New Hampshire — referring to the home of Ken Burns.
“I’m not one of those people that feels PBS is intentionally failing on this count,” he says, “but ... it’s just very difficult to translate culture, to be sensitive to culture that you can’t see.”
So far, PBS has provided most of the funding for the two programs but not for further installments. Rodriguez wants to examine immigrants’ origins — where they’ve come from and how long ago—and how the assimilation process has changed since the decades when far fewer Latinos lived in the United States.His earlier Los Angeles Now—about the city’s “post-Anglo” future — and Mixed Feelings: San Diego/Tijuana also aired on PBS. Rodriguez is also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism.
Latinos ’08 surveys the presidential campaigns’ efforts to garner Latino votes and the capacity of Latino voters to mobilize, says Rodriguez. Using what he calls “entertainment/political reportage” and drawing on Latino culture’s tradition of bold visual expression, Rodriguez is aiming for a fast-paced doc laced with animation to help the audience understand concepts — much like the sometimes humorous, sometimes cutting Brown Is the New Green.
“I cannot sit through — nor can lots of young people sit through—that slow pan over a black-and-white image,” he says, and he wants the film to feel relevant to the new generation of Americans he’s representing.
“He has a very strong, clear vision for what it is he wants to do, and that’s what we signed on for,” says John Wilson, v.p. of programming at PBS. “Regardless of what the subject matter is, Phillip brings a very different and surprising approach to his filmmaking.”
A series of disappointments
Latinos ’08 begins in 1960 with Jackie Kennedy speaking Spanish at a campaign rally for her husband and frames the story of Latinos and politics as a perpetual cycle of “high hopes and dashed hopes.” For example, says Rodriguez, George W. Bush discussed immigration, open borders and a stronger relationship with Mexico at the beginning of his presidency, stoking Latinos’ hopes. But after 9/11, all that talk went out the window.
Current efforts by political campaigns to demonize immigrants have forged cultural and even political bonds among Latinos who might otherwise have little in common, notes Rodriguez, and caused an exodus of would-be Republican voters to the Democratic Party. According to a July survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, “Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-G.O.P tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade.” About 65 percent of registered Latino voters now identify with the Democratic Party, compared to 26 percent who lean Republican. In 2004, about 40 percent of Latino voters cast ballots for George W. Bush.
Because Latinos’ identity is contingent upon where they settle in the United States and the concentration of immigrants in those areas — not to mention which of the 21 countries in Latin America they come from — Rodriguez’s team has been filming in Texas; Illinois; Washington, D.C.; and other urban and rural places in between. But the film is more about expert analysis than on-the-ground anecdotal reporting, he says. Leaders and scholars such as Roberto Suro, former head of the Pew Hispanic Center; Rodolfo de la Garza, professor at Columbia University; and political commentator Leslie Sanchez offer thoughts on these and other issues:
- Latinos’ relationship to Barack Obama’s biracial identity: Latinos approach blackness differently than, say, liberal whites, says Rodriguez. For some Anglos, supporting Obama is a way to absolve themselves of the sins of their fathers, he says, but Latinos didn’t enslave blacks.
And while America is historically locked into concepts of blackness and whiteness, Latinos are by nature a mestizo — mixed race, mixed origin — people. Any notion of racial purity, says Rodriguez, is lost on most Latinos. Obama’s candidacy may signal a move toward a “post-racial” America, but that’s already a reality for many Latinos.
- Obama’s message of hope: This concept is nothing new for most Latinos, says Rodriguez, so the campaign’s mantra doesn’t necessarily resonate with them. They already have hope. “There is nobody more hopeful in America than a new immigrant,” he points out.
- Latinos’ relationship to John McCain: Because McCain is a Southwesterner, Latinos are familiar with him and remember what they see as his positive track record on immigration issues. But with his presidential campaign, McCain abruptly turned his back, says Rodriguez. So how should Latino voters feel about him? What’s in it for them if they support McCain?
Can PBS keep pace?
PBS is billing Latinos ’08 as part of its Hispanic Heritage Month programming, though Wilson says the main aim was for it to precede the presidential election. “It’s a part of trying to keep pace with the changing population of our viewers,” says Wilson. Rodriguez isn’t thrilled to be used as part of this diversity marketing.
Other new programs on the heritage-month bill are the P.O.V. film Calavera Highway and Los Lonely Boys Cottonfields and Crossroads, a film by Hector Galán, who was brought in to add Latino-focused content to Burns’ The War.
Several other programs this season, including the one-off Chicano Rock!, produced by Jon Wilkman and narrated by Edward James Olmos (December), and the series Latino Music USA from WGBH (January) make this a good year for Latino programming on PBS, but the breadth is still “insufficient,” says Patricia Boero, executive director of Latino Public Broadcasting.
LPB struggles for funding and distribution from PBS’s National Program Service, she adds. And LPB can afford to fund only about 10 of the more than 80 proposals received through its recent open call. Boero and other minority consortia leaders hope that CPB’s current study of public broadcasting’s service to minority groups could result in increased funding (Current, June 23). LPB, for example, would like to offer a new season of Voces, its Latino culture series, every year. Its first and only season debuted in 2006.
In addition, the better-financed major strands such as American Masters and American Experience should make more Latino-focused programming, says Boero. Rodriguez agrees that PBS’s major content producers are behind the curve. During the making of Latinos ’08, he says Latino leaders expressed unease and skepticism about PBS’s performance.
For Rodriguez, quelling this unease doesn’t mean airing innocuous films. Too much coverage of minorities on PBS and elsewhere “has regrettably been bathed in a feel-good, disingenuous, ‘let’s say nothing about them for fear of offending anybody’” kind of attitude, he says.
Web page posted Oct. 30, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
