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05/02/06
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
It was a massive turnout, but are sheer numbers enough to send a message to Washington?
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Val Zavala>> And then, it's their turn to be stars, so what have they done? Written their own scripts. We look at "Native Voices" at The Autry.
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> When it comes to immigrants' rights, it's clear that southern California's Latino population is quiet no longer. They've proven they can make a point. They can even make history, but can they make a difference in Washington? That's a tougher question to answer.
From the air, it was an anonymous ocean of humanity. But from the ground, they were individuals, families, labor unions and church groups. An estimated six hundred fifty thousand people turned out for two marches, the first beginning in downtown Los Angeles, the second down Wilshire Boulevard, but they quickly melded into one long demonstration.
Nativo Lopez>> Probably never a time in the history of America have immigrants, themselves and their families and friends, in our life taken to the street in the manner in which they have, the massive numbers that they have.
Val Zavala>> An estimated ten million illegal immigrants live in the United States. In California, one in fifteen residents is undocumented. Thousands are now coming out of the shadows galvanized by an immigration reform proposal in Congress called HR 4437. Nativo Lopez is an immigration activist with the Mexican-American Political Association.
Nativo Lopez>> HR 4437 not only criminalizes the immigrants themselves, but criminalizes the employers. It criminalizes the priests, the doctor, the nurse, the teacher, the social worker. My organization would be criminalized by HR 4437. We would be accused of a felony for aiding and abetting an undocumented immigrant.
Val Zavala>> HR 4437 also proposes reinforcing the border with a seven hundred mile fence. There were plenty of signs against that idea, "Todos Contra El Muro", meaning all opposed to the wall, accompanied by the popular chant from a farm worker movement, "Yes, We Can".
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Val Zavala>> By three in the afternoon, droves of people were flowing into MacArthur Park, an area home to thousands of newly arrived, mostly from Central America, and you could see signs of that in the crowd. Flags from Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and, of course, Mexico. But this time, foreign flags were far outnumbered by American flags and, beyond that, marchers were sending a wider international message as well.
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Val Zavala>> Police were on hand ready to respond to any problems. There were none. As the demonstrators headed west down Wilshire, they passed through Koreatown, another community made up largely of immigrants, some of whom joined in the opposition to HR 4437. A mile or so later, the crowd passed through Hancock Park only a block away from the elegant mansions that many of the protestors know well from gardening, house cleaning and childcare jobs.
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Val Zavala>> As the crowd grew, the mood became more celebratory, but the larger question remains. Can Latino leaders turn these numbers into political clout? Angelica Salas is with CHURLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrants' Rights in Los Angeles.
Angelica Salas>> There are going to be more marches. There are going to be more voter registration activities. We're going to continue being active and being public until we actually win fair immigration policies in this country.
Val Zavala>> There were plenty of signs of "Today we march, tomorrow we vote", and yet more than sixty percent of Latinos in the United States are not eligible to vote and, of those who are, only about half go to the polls. Still, organizers say the power of the demonstrations here and in a dozen other cities is sending a message that politicians can't ignore.
Nativo Lopez>> That we do not want a deal cut by the Democratic party leaders, by the Republican party leaders, half a sandwich, half an enchilada, that sends immigrants to purgatory and forces them to pay two thousand dollars to get into purgatory, a wait of five to ten years for them eventually to legalize their status. We believe that they should be legalized today. They don't have to wait any longer and they shouldn't have to pay a fine.
Val Zavala>> That will be a hard victory to achieve. Immigration is a divisive issue. A few brave souls with anti-immigrant signs ventured into the crowd.
Linda Carrillo>> My husband is a house painter. He's working and struggling down in Long Beach today. When he tells his boss he needs more money, his boss says, "Hey, I can fire you and hire a couple illegals for six bucks an hour."
Catherine Herrara>> You know, they're saying that they take their jobs. Well, you don't see other races or other nationalities out there, you know, mowing your lawns, and their nannies, and their gardeners and chefs and anything else that they can make money on.
Linda Carrillo>> You know, we're paying tremendous rent that we shouldn't have to pay and, if we weren't competing with illegals for housing, we could pay a fair rent.
Catherine Herrara>> Most of them come here to build a better future for themselves, a future for their families.
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Val Zavala>> But this was just one side of the protest. The other side was a boycott, a job boycott. The produce market only a couple of miles away stood in stark contrast to the streets. Here one boss gave his five workers the day off. It cost him four thousand dollars, but then he himself came from Mexico.
Ruben Calderon>> It's lot of hard times for the immigrants right now and I think it's the right time to, you know, let them talk, you know, let them notice that they're here and they're here for good because they're hard-working people. So I think they need, you know, some kind of a legal status to be here.
Val Zavala>> Scores of day laborers took the day off.
Tomas Lopez>> If we crossed the border, crossed the deserts, risking our lives to get here, why not give up a day of work for something that can help us all?
Val Zavala>> And thousands of stores, mostly small businesses, closed to allow workers to participate or to show solidarity. But back at the rallies, there were some who did go to work and were doing a thriving business.
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Val Zavala>> By six o'clock, the massive trail of human beings came to a slow stop at Wilshire and La Brea where speakers took the stands.
Fabian Nunez>> "Today millions of people across this country are walking out and protesting throughout the nation to send a message to America that we want to embrace the American dream."
Nativo Lopez>> I would have to say that, between March and April, probably more than six million people have marched throughout the country, nary an incident with the law. How is it possible that millions of people marching through different types of communities in all the four corners of the country and not one incident? People wearing white, people waving American flags.
Fabian Nunez>> "And the promise of opportunity ought to be made available to immigrants who want to embrace the promise of America in full citizenship for all."
Val Zavala>> Despite the triumphant atmosphere, immigrants' rights leaders say their main task lies ahead.
Nativo Lopez>> But we haven't won anything. Nothing is yet on the table. We haven't defeated HR 4437.
Angelica Salas>> We will continue to inform our community about what is being discussed and what is being moved forward.
Val Zavala>> In the meantime, these demonstrations are turning an effort on behalf of immigrants into a movement, a movement that will impact the future of southern California for generations to come.
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Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> Earlier this year, student violence erupted at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles. Last year, it was Jefferson High. Now most of the student fights have been attributed to racial tensions, black versus brown, but is it that simple? And what about all that multicultural training we hear about? Didn't it do any good?
We brought three talkative people together in a kitchen over coffee -- caffeinated -- for a frank conversation. John Hill is president of a mentoring program called Fathers Heart Committee. Gary De La Rosa is with the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission where he's also their liaison to troubled schools. And Joe Hicks is with CommUnity Advocates, Inc., an organization that encourages innovative approaches to race relations. The topic? Black-brown conflicts.
Joe Hicks>> You know, it seems like we spend an awful lot of money on multicultural and, you know, tolerance training in our schools. This is not going on in the jails, obviously, but certainly it's been happening in our schools. Either we waste a lot of money here or something isn't working. What do you guys see going on here? What's the problem?
John Hill>> Well, I think that the problem is that, yes, you've done some training, but the issue is society and, in society, there's still the problem. There's still the problem of race. There's still the problem of discrimination. I think that --
Joe Hicks>> -- so you're still saying we've wasted a lot of money on this.
John Hill>> I don't think we've wasted a lot of money. When I look at the issue, I'm looking at the issue of, let's say, Fremont High School where you only had a hundred kids fighting out of a population of maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand. So I always look at that. I want to know, did the entire school fight or just maybe fifty kids who got up this morning and came there to fight anyway? So I don't look at these things --
Joe Hicks>> -- but fifty guys throwing down is a problem.
Gary De La Rosa>> -- I'm going to say, look, part of the issue about training is the kind of training you get. You know, Joe, when we're working together, the touchy-feely stuff, we're not on to that, right? You know, we're not going to eat each other's food or sing Kumbaya and love one another. It's really about walking the walk and a lot of people don't understand a lot of the new communities that are coming in here.
A lot of people have been sold on that when you're here, you should be a certain way. I don't even say, since September 2001, there's very strong nationalism in this country which also helps to feed into this. But in times of great change, everyone thinks they're a victim and people are afraid and don't necessarily understand what's happening. So I think the training and the style of the training -- look, the training you used to give at the school district, right? Well, sometimes it was pretty bad --
Joe Hicks>> -- but we keep doing the same old thing. Right now we're talking about peace teams at Fremont High School. Is that going to work?
John Hill>> Wait a minute. The training that has been done at school is not going to work unless you have training in the home. I mean, that's ridiculous of people sitting out here talking about training, training, training and kids are going home and listening to their parents.
Joe Hicks>> But you guys have both said something, I think, really interesting. It's clear that all the kids on these campuses, in fact all the people in the jails, are sometimes unwillingly participating in the fighting. So then we got knuckleheads, obviously, in the schools and in the jails, so are we really talking about finding ways to deal with knuckleheads as well as maybe finding a way to get to the parents about the message --
Gary De La Rosa>> -- excuse me. One way of doing that, again, I always talk about the great middle in the schools. All these kids in the middle -- you have programs for the A students, you have programs for the "bad" kids, but the kids in the middle often get overlooked. If you could start to give these young folks the tools that they need to deal with these things so that they can separate what my argument or issue with you is from the negative.
Look, every time there's a throw-down, what happens? They go to a negative. They go to something that's going to hurt. What's going to hurt your feelings, okay? Hey, I know a lot of older African Americans who, in their day of growing up, they knew to use the word Mexican and that was a negative, right? So everybody knows those terms. You do it to kind of, you know, hurt the other side.
John Hill>> Hispanics are fighting over a prejudice that someone taught them about African Americans, and African Americans are doing exactly the same thing about Latinos.
Joe Hicks>> But, but, but --
Gary De La Rosa>> Let me finish this. You do have to unlearn prejudice, right? We know Los Angeles is an area that's been conquered, taken over three times, right? I come from my Indian brothers (laughter). So it's changed hands three times. But you just used the term right now that I find offensive: Hispanic. When I hear people use Hispanic, it's like you're saying we don't want to acknowledge your ethnicity or whatever. See what I'm saying? So you're right.
Joe Hicks>> Negro, African American, black.
Gary De La Rosa>> Yeah, but here's the piece. It's understanding who feels comfortable. Who feels comfortable with Hispanic? Mostly Latino. Okay, that's fine. That's who they are.
John Hill>> Latinos feel, number one, we want to be accepted based on who we are. African Americans feel the same way. We want to be accepted into society based on who we are. We don't want to become white and Latinos don't want to become this. That's the training that needs to take place.
Joe Hicks>> Well, what's white?
Gary De La Rosa>> What's white? What does that mean? Does that mean part of --
John Hill>> -- There's a perceived dominant group in the United States and that perception --
Joe Hicks>> -- but that's not the operative model in southern California.
John Hill>> Give me a break. It's still there.
Joe Hicks>> The mayor of the city is Latino. The sheriff of the county is Latino. Look at the --
John Hill>> -- do the young people see that? In other words, do the young people see you becoming elected and then becoming -- do they really see you as being a part of us?
Joe Hicks>> But here's what you got to have here. There's got to be some over-arching structure that everyone buys into. That's got to be the way we go.
John Hill>> Kids must learn how to diffuse their own issues. We're not teaching them that. We're bringing in everybody in the world, including the media. Eighteen trucks are outside waiting on the next problem and the next problem probably is going to happen because you're facing the camera, so the guy starts the problem. It's not to say the media is at fault here, but --
Joe Hicks>> -- Chris Rock told us that we can't be blaming the media all the time now (laughter).
Gary De La Rosa>> It's not about blaming the media all the time. You know, there was a report that came out when I was teaching and they were saying how they went to all these little towns from Chicago all the way down to New Orleans. They kept asking people, "What's the major issue?" Oh, violence. There's people outside my house ready to kill us. Then they went back to those little towns and they talked to the sheriffs, right? They hadn't had a murder there since like the Civil War.
So what is it? They're seeing the perception, right? And they're going to make decisions based on that. But at the same time, it's about how do you tear that apart? I don't look at every American that walks down the street and think that's the Unabomber, right? Well, maybe once in a while (laughter). Not all the time.
Joe Hicks>> But I'm the emperor of Los Angeles County and I give both of you the deal with this. What do you do? Because they hear you talking about issues of households and parents and the kind of ethnic or racial message might be inside those households coming to school with those kids.
John Hill>> I'm bringing in the school and I'm bringing in the community, but I'm bringing in the leadership. If I know there's gang leadership on my school, I'm bringing them in to have a discussion to listen --
Joe Hicks>> -- You're going to have a discussion on gang leadership. I hope you'll be packing, brother (laughter).
John Hill>> I don't worry about you packing during school time because I already got you searched before you come in, but sometimes you're breaking in anyway (laughter). But the part that I'm trying to say is that we have got to have discussions among the young people on these campuses about the issues and let them talk about these issues not just, you know --
Gary De La Rosa>> -- I think you're also bringing in here, Joe, the piece about civic engagement. How do we become a part of a community? When you become a part of something, then you want to help it, right? And you want to make sure it survives. We all want quality of life. Everybody does. I don't know anybody who's going up and saying I don't want good quality of life.
Joe Hicks>> Well, we're not going to solve this here today.
Gary De La Rosa>> Why not?
Joe Hicks>> I wish we could.
John Hill>> We're trying to.
Joe Hicks>> I've run out of coffee.
Gary De La Rosa>> There's the media again taking away the time (laughter).
Joe Hicks>> But we got to go. I want to thank you guys for coming in and having this conversation. We'll do this some more. Come on back.
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Val Zavala>> It's their turn to be stars and they're not waiting for Hollywood casting agents to discover them. Native Americans are writing their own plays and stepping onto the stage. Vicki Curry goes to The Autry in Griffith Park to see what "Native Voices" is all about.
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Vicki Curry>> American Indians. We know what they're all about, right? They fought cowboys in buckskins and beads. But today's Native Americans are challenging that tired stereotype and this group is using theater to do it.
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Randy Reinholz>> In Native American culture, so many times our history, our everything has been interpreted by someone else and then represented by someone else. I mean, we needed live people instead of always Indians caught in time, somebody's image, somebody else's portrayal of Indians.
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Vicki Curry>> This is "Native Voices at the Autry" and it's the only theater program in the United States dedicated to putting on plays written by Native Americans.
Jean Bruce Scott>> I think that the stories were out there and I think that the desire was out there, but there was no formal program or project that actually provided that time and that arena to develop the work.
Vicki Curry>> Randy Reinholz and his wife, Jean Bruce Scott, are the founders of "Native Voices". It started by chance in 1994 when they were teaching at Illinois State University and looking to produce an Indian play.
Jean Bruce Scott>> So we started to call people at the different regional theaters and they knew of a couple of plays that had been done maybe fifteen or twenty years before, but nothing really current.
Vicki Curry>> They eventually found five plays and decided to put on a festival.
Randy Reinholz>> Pretty soon, we realized we were serving a really important purpose for these Native American authors to bring them together, let them hear their work out loud, let them hear each other's work.
Vicki Curry>> "Native Voices" became an annual event and quickly gained a national reputation. In 1999, Reinholz and Bruce Scott began a partnership with the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. They moved to southern California and started turning their projects into a full-blown theater company.
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Randy Reinholz>> Coming here and trying to develop new work in Los Angeles, you have great acting talent that's under-utilized, underpaid and eager to work. The writers really liked what they were hearing. The actors liked being a vibrant part of things. They're able to prove that they can do a lot of different things. A lot of Native American actors find themselves going out for that kind of stoic part, a couple of lines here, a lot of looking and squinting, and they really wanted to be the star of the show rather than, you know, like all actors. So these playwrights were Native characters of the stars.
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Vicki Curry>> "Native Voices" has become a place where Hollywood looks for new talent. Several of the company's actors appeared in the Steven Spielberg series, "Into The West", including the star, Tonantzin Carmelo, who was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award.
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Vicki Curry>> Another alum starred in the 2005 film, "The New World", and Q'Orianka Kilcher performed with "Native Voices" when she was just twelve years old.
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Randy Reinholz>> And that's the kind of group of actors that we see that were growing and we're anxious to introduce to other people in town and in the industry.
Vicki Curry>> But the focus here is on writers and on helping them fine-tune their work before it hits the stage. Arigon Starr acted in several "Native Voices" productions before writing her first play, a one-woman show called "The Red Road".
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Arigon Starr>> The playwrighting process was hard and difficult and it was something I wasn't sure that I could do, but I knew that I could do it with "Native Voices" because they've encouraged me.
Jean Bruce Scott>> We've really discovered that there's a lot of new talent out there. There are a lot of people who have told stories in different ways. They've been story-tellers. They've been traditional dancers. They've been songwriters like Arigon who are also good story-tellers. You sit at a taping with them and they tell a story and they're interesting. So we've worked very hard to nurture and encourage them.
Vicki Curry>> They do this through full equity productions, workshops, readings, new play commissions, radio plays, young playwright projects and playwright retreats where writers can work on their material with theater professionals.
Jean Bruce Scott>> So what we discovered was, as we started to work with these playwrights and give them an opportunity to be in a room with a drama coach and playwrights and have an audience hear it, that their imaginations were excited and they went back and they re-wrote and reworked things. Then they started to be produced in other places.
Vicki Curry>> "Native Voices" productions have started going on tour and winning national competitions while being produced by some of the best theaters in the country.
Jean Bruce Scott>> We encourage our playwrights to submit their scripts through the traditional channels because, again, it needs to stand up with the rest of the work. So what we're doing now is we're helping to create those entrees into those other institutions.
Vicki Curry>> But the goal here isn't to write the next Broadway hit. It's about giving Native Americans a place to speak their mind.
Jean Bruce Scott>> I haven't found a playwright yet here that's afraid to attack the hard work or the hard questions. While they may want it to have a broader appeal, the initial impetus for the creation of the work really comes from the idea that I have a story to tell.
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Vicki Curry>> Although the stories focus on Native American characters, you don't have to be a member of a tribe to enjoy them. Audiences have included people of all ages and ethnicities.
Randy Reinholz>> So it's a really diverse kind of cross section of meeting grounds. Then we get to sit in the dark and then we laugh and smile and cry at the same things and find sort of commonality out of that.
Vicki Curry>> So "Native Voices" will continue to give voice to Native Americans and they hope to chip away at the stereotypes one play at a time.
Randy Reinholz>> It feels like, no, we're not doing near enough. We have to do more. At the same time, I never thought we'd get this much done.
Arigon Starr>> The importance of this particular program is, A, to have a place where our native community can come see themselves on stage. We have so many stories to tell and it's time. It's time for us. It really is.
Val Zavala>> "The Red Road", the play you saw featured in Vicki's story, will be at The Autry through April 30. For more information, you can go to their website at autrynationalcenter.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
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