Late astrologer and iconic TV personality Walter Mercado is the subject of Mucho Mucho Amor a new Netflix documentary. By Alci Rengifo For the average Latinx millennial Walter Mercado was a constant presence on the living room television. The late Puerto Rican psychic left his mark on ’90s Spanish-language television as a trailblazing cultural figure, known more for his flamboyant charisma than his horoscope readings. Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado , a new documentary on Netflix, charts Mercado’s rise and eventual fall, as well as his emerging place as a Latinx queer icon. Directors Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch, along with producer Alex Fumero, approached the project as both objective filmmakers and Latinx artists who grew up with Mercado as a constant pop culture presence. The three recently shared about how they came about making a documentary about a man who had been so present in Latin media before suddenly vanishing. “We all grew up watching Walter with o...

A Sacred Journey , Fernando Barragán 2008, exterior wall, Sacred Heart Elementary       By Abel M. Salas Ernesto Quintero entered the world a year-and-a-half behind his brother Juan. Of the six children born to Micaela and Roberto Quintero, they were the nearest in age. “Growing up, we did everything together,” says Quintero, an independent filmmaker from Lincoln Heights, the cornerstone East Side community his family has called home since 1966. “We played on the same [Little League] baseball team… Pop Warner football… basketball…  we  were inseparable.” There, nestled below Flat Top, Montecito Heights and Elephant Hill—hilltop vantage points the pair of brothers explored as a duo—the Quintero family grew and prospered in the wake of the Chicano Movement and the fervent tide of cultural arts expression it spawned. As a result, the brothers would come of age in an era and an environment that validated their heritage and their identity even as their ...

by Rocío Maya Dozens of South East L.A community members gathered on Tuesday, April 11th at the Ricardo F. Icaza Workers’ Center in Huntington Park for the southern California premiere of The Long Ride , a documentary film on the 12-day journey taken by a group of 106 riders from Northern California to the nation’s capital in 2003. Produced and directed by Valerie Lapin Ganley, the 77-minute, Spanish subtitled documentary details the caravan more than 900 immigrants and allies embarked upon from various states and cities across the country. Traveling by bus, the solidarity riders concluded their bold trek with a march onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. where they demanded that immigrant labor be treated with dignity.  The cohort of activists known as the Immigrant Workers Freedom Riders (IWFR) sought to spark the birth of a new Civil Rights Movement for immigrant workers in response to the anti-immigrant sentiment that sprang from the 9/11 terrorist attack...