WHAT IS YOUR IMMIGRATION STORY?

Ruben Guevara is a documentary filmmaker, and the director and producer of Far East LA.

In 1941, my grandfather came up here from Mexico City, and he met my grandmother, who at the time was 19 years old. He was in his mid-20s, and she was a performer. And so, they met literally at a performance that he was doing at the Million Dollar Theater. [My dad] jokes that he was like a backstage baby because literally the next year he was born. And then he had three more sisters. [My grandfather] ended up having another family in Seattle. And they now live in. British Columbia in Canada. So, we try to see them as often as possible, but it is kind of like a crazy cultural remixing because they're actually indigenous and they have a tribe up there and a reservation and they live on this land, so we have native uncles and aunts. 

And then on my mother's side her mother, my grandmother, got a scholarship to study medicine in Boston so she left Mexico City, much to the chagrin of the rest of her family because she was the only one who wanted to learn English. But that opened up a lot of opportunities for her in particular, a scholarship that had her go to Boston University. And it's there that she met my grandfather who was a pharmacist, and he has ancestry from Ireland and England. And so, they were already a mixed couple when they got together. And a year later, my mother was born. Interestingly enough, they moved back to Mexico City to have my mother, her brother, and her sister. 

Legend has it that my grandfather was doing things with pharmaceutical drugs he wasn't supposed to back and forth over the border. So, every time he was going back to visit his family in Boston, he was doing things a little under the radar. And finally, there was a big raid. and our entire family was deported out of Mexico back to the U.S. And that's how they all ended up in L.A. And so, my father and my mother met kind of at the height of like the Chicano uprising movement of 1968. It was the first time they were hyphenated as Mexican American, but they were adopting this kind of like colloquial term "Chicano" and the older Mexican American generations didn't like that word. It was seen as kind of a derogatory term.

But they were trying to reappropriate it for themselves by creating their own music, their own art, basically trying to create their own culture because they weren't accepted by white society here. But then they found that when they would go to Mexico, they weren't accepted there either and that they were considered white. So here, they were considered "dark skinned", and people would call them "negros" sometimes. But then when they thought, you know, maybe we'll go to Mexico, and we'll try to embrace our culture and our identity there. And they were also met with a lot of hostility. So, when they came back, the 80s and 90s was really about like, let's just do it ourselves and let's not rely on, you know, white America here to tell us, you know, who we are. But let's also not rely on Mexican nationals telling us who we are, because we are this hybrid identity, and we have to really lean into that.

WHY NOW?

What is your path towards the many different communities in your family's story?

Yeah, I think that's what America is and has always been. I mean, we were Native American first. Then there were settlers that came in and decided through Manifest Destiny they had to take over. But Mexico itself, you know, if you look at the history of, you know, the conquest by the conquistadors, the Spaniards, with these, you know, indios who just now are starting to kind of embrace, you know, the Aztec warrior identity part of them, before it wasn't really allowed and they've had to deal with a lot of, you know, fascist dictators. and so you know they're kind of this like bastardization of conquest and they're figuring out who they are and I think America is constantly changing, constantly figuring out you know what is a real American but it's just kind of an idea right it's these people who came together who wanted to for better or which for a long time was this ethnic enclave that included African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and it was all because of redlining. You know, they couldn't live anywhere else outside of that neighborhood. And then Little Tokyo, which happened to be, you know, just down the street on First Street, Japanese-Americans could go there. These neighborhoods are little microcosms of the broader country.

My wife is from Madrid, Spain. So, we're an international couple and we're talking about, you know, if we have kids at some point, what is that going to look like? Are they going to be English speakers, Spanish speakers? Are they going to be born here? Are they going to be born in Europe? And just the course of my life and my family's immigration story has been about finding people outside of your own culture and kind of leaning into that, embracing that and then creating something new together.

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