Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (2003)

spokespeople for the community. Here we were taking the voice of those people we had interviewed. That was the power inequity played out again. I felt there was no progress, that what we had done had not created a forum of discussion of what it meant to be Puerto Rican in its diversity. That started my revolt against identity politics as a way of framing questions. I experimented with ways of getting out of that middle. I immediately did a no-budget video for a community organization, and I followed everything they told me to do. I did what they wanted me to do. When the piece was finished, it served their purposes. It was a piece that documented an AIDS quilt project that was going to tour hospitals, schools and so forth, to stimulate other people to make quilts. It was community media to the extent that I was the facilitator of the media and not the generator of the media for my own artistic expression. But the result proved to me unsatisfying as well. It was what the community organization wanted to project, and what they wanted to do. I was fine because that was the purpose, but a lot of things that I wanted to point out were not part of the equation. I began to see clearly that there were going to be two kinds of media that I was going to make. One was to make media-making accessible to a community that I felt a part of in some way—because the representational needs of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are enormous, and that was a kind of activism or symbolic activism. The other was to use media to explore and experiment about questions I personally had. How do you feel about AIDS in the Barrio now? I feel ambivalent. I felt that the film represented the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia, but it was a massive abstraction of that community. It’s an imagined community. There are many different communities even within that geographic boundary of North Philly. Members of those different communities expressed that they were very happy with the film, that they felt for the first time in memory that they were respectfully represented and had a voice. So to that extent I felt that the film definitely did what it was supposed to do on a basic level which was to provide a tool that AIDS educators could use in order to provoke discussion about certain issues. That didn’t entirely erase the other problems I mentioned before. After the documentary was done, I wrote articles about the process of making the film and how it felt at different junctures of the process. That was a way of expelling my discomfort and making it part of the discussion about this kind of media. It’s not to say that I disinherit the film. It was as important to talk about the process as it was to use the finished video in a particular context. I find that writing about the process is a very important part of it all for me. That’s the only way I can navigate a problem. 32 @ ANGLES American TV ignored who I was, my language, culture, history, but it informed who I was going to be—at home with American culture. When I’m forced to write about it, I see my own contradictions, ambiguities and gaps. I felt community media was not going to solve the problems for me. I mean those power inequity problems of framing subjects. Questions like: Who are Puerto Ricans? What do they do? Where do they come from? What do they look like? What are their problems? I didn’t share those questions in the same way because I wasn’t a Puerto Rican on welfare in North Philly. That was not my reality although I had an alliance in transforming that reality. Aren’t you dealing with these same issues in the narrative form with Brincando el charco? To some extent Brincando was a way of reinventing myself as a filmmaker because the process was so much different. It was a much bigger project that included fiction and documentary forms. It was an exploration, a way for me to find a style, find a way to work. Brincando began as an exploration of identities in the plural. I started by exploring issues that had to do with race in the Puerto Rican community. I narrowed it down. I didn’t want to make universal statements about this. I just narrowed it down to my own experiences, which ultimately were superseded because my own attitudes and practices about sexuality and all kinds of other things changed during the making of the film. So the whole attempt to frame myself even as an autobiographical subject, as a middle class, light-skinned Puerto Rican lesbian saw itself undone. In those five years, I couldn’t even fix myself on the screen for even a very small limited amount of time. So how can | expect my identity narrative to be anything but rhetorical in the best sense of the word. How does Brincando fit into the context of other Puerto Rican work? Part of the problems I encountered in conceptualizing Brincando had to do with not having Puerto Rican models. I wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. Whereas if you are a black filmmaker or gay filmmaker or trying to represent issues of sexuality you have context, you are referring to other people, other work. In our case, although we definitely have gay writers, actors, etc., there’s no public discourse. In a way talking to gays outwardly would almost be outing them. It’s not that we don’t have a gay culture or context, but there are no previous open texts that you can refer to that are immediately picked up on. I felt somewhat lonely. That changed, and it’s going to continue to change. I wrote an article on Latino lesbian and gay filmmaking in the U.S. and found there was more film production in the last few years than ever before. This state of affairs is in constant flux and is changing for the better in diversity of representation, point of view.