Colorado State University - Pueblo event features film, producer of The Longoria Affair
PUEBLO – In conjunction with the American GI Forum, Pueblo Chapter, Men and Women's Forum, the Chicano Studies program at Colorado State University-Pueblo, will host a showing of The Longoria Affair as well as a question and answer session with John Valadez, the film’s writer, director, and producer, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8 in the Occhiato University Center Cottonwood Room.
The Longoria Affairs relates the story of a key injustice -- the refusal, by a small-town funeral home in Texas after World War II, to care for a dead Mexican American soldier's body "because the whites wouldn't like it" -- and shows how the incident sparked a nationwide outrage. Two stubborn and savvy leaders, newly-elected Senator Lyndon Johnson and veteran/activist Dr. Hector Garcia, formed an alliance over the incident. Over the next 15 years, their complex, sometimes contentious relationship would help Latinos become a national political force for the first time in American History, carry John F. Kennedy to the White House, and, ultimately, led to Johnson's signature on the most important civil rights legislation of the 20th century.
More information about the film is available at www.TheLongoriaAffair.com
and www.itvs.org/films/longoria-affair
Writer, director and producer John J. Valadez will answer questions after the screening. Valdez lives in New York and has been producing and directing award winning, nationally broadcast documentaries for the past 16 years. In November, his film The Longoria Affair aired on the Emmy-award winning series Independent Lens. Last year, his film The Chicano Wave, a history of Mexican American music aired on the PBS/BBC series Latin Music USA. This year, Valadez will work with the U.S. State Department, traveling with The Chicano Wave to screen the film with U.S. embassies abroad. In June, Valadez begins work on a six-hour PBS series on the history of Latinos in the U.S., Latinos Americans.
Valadez had two films on the acclaimed PBS series POV: Passin It On about the false imprisonment of a former leader of the Black Panther Party and The Last Conquistador about an artist creating a controversial statue of a Spanish explorer who committed genocide. Valadez was a director for the PBS series Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture and a producer of the prime-time PBS special Beyond Brown, which explores the re-segregation of American schools 50 years after the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Ed.
At CNN, Valadez wrote, directed and produced the award winning film High Stakes Testing for their prime-time documentary series, CNN Presents. The film was an hour-long investigative work about the Bush administration’s education policies.
For more information about the event, contact the Chicano Studies Coordinator Fawn-Amber Montoya at fawnamber.montoya@colostate-pueblo.edu or 549-2620.