 Attendees of Pass Forward 2016, please welcome to the stage documentary filmmaker, John Valadez. Thank you for having me here today. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you about history and historical preservation, but from maybe a little bit different perspective. What I do is I don't really deal with buildings or places or spaces or objects. I'm a filmmaker. I make documentary films. And it's a very peculiar profession. I approach things in terms of story, so I think it's very different from what you do. I'm Mexican American. For most of my life, I've been pretty much the only Chicano filmmaker that I ever met. It's been very lonely. And I grew up in Seattle, Washington. I come from a family of migrant farm workers. So the idea of becoming a filmmaker was something completely absurd. It was something that you really didn't think about. It just wasn't within the realm of human possibility. And so I grew up and my family had fled eastern Washington because they were migrant farm workers and they wanted to escape the migrant farm working life, which is horrendous in case you don't know. And so they fled and they fled the Yakima Valley and they went to Seattle, and that's where I grew up. And I grew up in a community that was all white and I was the only Mexican kid. And this is very difficult for me and it's kind of embarrassing to say and I really don't talk about this publicly. But I feel like it's kind of necessary. I had a nickname when I was a kid. My nickname was Spick. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the term. A lot of people aren't. But it's, I don't know, it's a racial epithet. It's like chink or kike or gook or nigger. It's one of those words. And that's, I mean, that's what people called me. And the really embarrassing part is that I had no idea what that word meant because my parents never used those words. And so I just thought that they were like using this funny nickname. And I thought, oh, well, that's funny. You know, that's cool, I guess. And I just had no idea. And so growing up throughout my entire educational process, through elementary school and middle school and high school, I never learned about any Mexican American in American history. Not one. And so I grew up thinking, and so did my white counterparts. We grew up thinking that it was other people who had built America. It was other people who had forged democracy. It was other people who had moved westward and tamed the wilderness. It was other people who had marched for civil rights and died for that cause. It was other people who had built the great industries of America, who had fought our wars. It was other people who were the inventors, who were the tinkerers, who really created the American story. But it wasn't Mexican Americans. We were the losers of history. While other people were fighting the good fight to bring freedom and democracy, not only to North America, but to the world, we were kind of hanging out on the sidelines with our hands in our pockets, watching history roll on by. And then, once a great nation was built, we were kind of jumping in to snatch the goods. We were taking the jobs. We were taking the benefits. We were kind of stealing. We weren't legitimate, because we hadn't fought that fight. So if some of us were citizens like me, we were really citizens in name only. We really didn't earn our American-ness. We were outsiders. We were foreigners. In other words, I kind of, as I found out what that word meant, spick, on some level, all the evidence seemed to indicate that, yeah, that's true. I am a spick. That's what the history, the story of America, told me. And so we were kind of in agreement in a way. So I finished high school, and I went to college, and I dropped out after about a year. I became a Latino dropout statistic. I pumped up the numbers that year. And a friend of mine had this crazy idea. We were hanging out, and he said, you know what? I was into photography. That was like my thing. I love taking photographs. And my friend said, hey, you know what? He had heard about a school in India, and he said, hey, why don't you write to them and see if they, if you can teach there. You can teach them photography. It was like a stupid idea. It was like ridiculous. And so, but I thought, okay, whatever. So I wrote a letter. I got the address. I put it in the mail, you know, and I forgot about it. I went back to my job at the sandwich shop. And then a couple of months later, I got a letter back that said, yeah. Come on. And I was like, oh, crap. Right? I had never been away from home. I didn't know any India. What do I know about India? I saw the movie Gandhi. You know? So anyway, so I decided to go. And back then, what you could do is you could take a one-way trip. You could get a ticket. And as long as you went one direction around the globe, you could make as many trips as you want, going one way. And so I started to go. And I went to Paris for the first time. And I went to Greece. And I spent a month in Israel. And I landed in India. And so I got the students who could speak English because most of them spoke Hindi. And I taught them photography. We built a dark room. I showed them how to process film, how to print pictures. It was cool. And then one evening, they came to me and they said, hey, the villagers in Susara, the next village over, have never met an American. And they would like to meet you. And I thought, OK, well, let's go. So we walked through the jungle. It was evening, about two kilometers to get to Susara. And we got there. And the villagers had built a huge bonfire. And around the bonfire, they had pulled their beds from out of their huts. And they were around this bonfire. And they motioned us to sit on their beds. And I felt very uncomfortable. I didn't know what to do. But we sat on the beds. And then they started telling these stories. And they were speaking in Hindi, so my students were translating for me. And they were stories about the gods and the goddesses. Hanuman and Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and Lakshmi and Krishna and Ram. And I thought, what the hell is going on? What are they talking about? But I just kept listening. And as the evening wore on, I began to see that what they were doing is they were telling these stories. And the stories were like little parables. Parables about what it is to lead a life well-lived and what it is to lead a life squandered. They consecrated what was worthy of remembrance and what was not and what should be forgotten and returned to dust and be gone with the wind. And so that evening, we went on until about 3 o'clock in the morning. And that evening we were walking back through the jungle. Maybe, yeah, like I said, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. I don't know. And we're walking back and I began to think about the United States. I began to think about America. And I thought, what happened to our ability to gather around the sacred fire to tell the stories were so divided? And it seems like we always had been. And I thought, how do we capture that beautiful sense that I saw in India? And then it struck me. It seemed so clear. We do gather around the sacred fire. We gather around a burning box. And that burning box is television. And we gather around a burning wall. And that burning wall is cinema. And I guess now we gather, you know, around these, right? And it is through these fires that we tell the sacred story of our people. It's through these fires that we try to figure out what it is to lead a life well-lived and lead a life squandered. It's through these fires that we figure out what is worthy of remembrance and what shall be forgotten and turn to dust. And so I became a long story short. I ended up becoming a documentary filmmaker. And I had this idea that it was... that what I should do is tell the story of my people. Now, I didn't know what the hell that meant. I mean, you know, and I'm still figuring that out. I don't know what that means exactly, but that's what occurred to me. And it kind of set me off on a life journey. And interestingly enough, as it turns out, and it's just purely by accident, I'd been shooting something, a work in progress, here in Texas, part of it. And part of it was actually shot not far from where we sit today in a little town just south of here called Goliad. And I thought, you know what, since we're in Texas and you probably come from all parts of the country, maybe I could share with you just a little clip and show you what I'm working on because I think it actually has something to do with why we are gathered here today. So let's go ahead. Can you guys dim the lights and can we show the clip real quick? This is what I wanted to show you because it is considered by many to be the most famous tree in all of Texas. Okay. This is the famous hanging tree of Goliad County. It was a site of extrajudicial executions. In other words, this is where they lynched Mexicans. How many Mexicans were there? Some say 80, 90, 100, but we really don't even know. And of course, on the other side of there is a famous whooping post where they would tie Mexicans and other people blacks and whoop them for transgressions against the social order. Over there, we have a tree where it is said that they hung the blacks because I don't know, it's kind of crazy. Even, you know, in Texas, we had standards. You can't lynch a black person from the same tree that you lynch a brown person. You know, it just ain't fitting. It ain't fitting. It just ain't fitting. So, yeah, I mean, this is the kind of crazy racism that fueled all this. And why? It was economics. And it was also the fact that they wanted our land. In fact, they came here to take our land and they were very successful. It's a tourist thing now here. Everything's named hanging tree around here. But, I mean, when you really think about it, it should give you the creeps. This is, I mean, this is horrible. You know? Yeah, it is horrible. It is what it is. It is what it is. The events that took place here in Goliad weren't unique. Over the next 70 years, there were 871 documented lynchings of Mexican Americans in 13 western states. And yet the violence found in the rest of the southwest didn't compare to the horror of South Texas. In a single decade, from 1910 to 1920, historians estimate as many as 5,000 Mexican Americans were murdered in a brutal wave of terror and mass executions. In proportion to their numbers, Mexicans were lynched in the west as often as blacks were lynched in the south. All right, is everybody totally depressed now? I mean, I didn't mean to bring you down, okay? This happened a long time ago. Okay, right, okay. But it's important. But it's important. This information that's in this film that I'm still making, it's a work in progress, right? It's something that most Americans don't know anything about. They've never heard this. How do you think Mexican Americans feel? Now, the story gets a little worse. Okay, I just want to prepare you. After I leave here today, I'm actually going out to west Texas, not far from Marfa, which is out in the desert, way out there. And I'm actually going out there because I'm scouting what is, I guess you could call it, an unmarked mass grave. Okay? In 1918, really in the midst of all of this racial violence against Mexican Americans that was taking place, there was one incident that was sort of stands out for its egregiousness. There was a small little village near the, they're in Texas near the Mexico border called Porvenir. And there had been a robbery a month earlier, about 40 miles away, and some law enforcement folks got a tip that maybe in that village there might be someone associated with that robbery. And during the robbery, the shop owner got shot and was killed. Terrible thing. And so the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Cavalry came into Porvenir in the middle of the night, and they ended up rounding up the entire male population of the town which was all Mexican and Mexican American. And they took them to the edge of the desert and they killed them all. Executed them. Arms blown off, heads, the whole thing, it was really bad. And then they left. And the next day, the women and the kids went out to find, you know, what had happened and they found the bodies. And they loaded them onto a cart and they went just across the river which was no more than, you know, a couple of blocks away, city blocks away. And they dug a mass grave and they put all the bodies in there and then they fled to parts unknown. They were too scared to return to their homes and good thing they didn't because the soldiers and the Texas Rangers came back and they burned the whole place down. Now, because of this period of violence in American history, Mexican Americans across the country were traumatized, really scared. And they did something very interesting, actually. They began to organize and they founded an organization not far from where we are today. Down in Corpus Christi, called Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens and they founded this place called Lulac. And what they ended up doing is they ended up creating a program called Little Schools 400 which we know today as Head Start. And they started to sue. They brought more than 81 civil voting rights lawsuits and they won everyone. And then what they did is they sued in the courts over segregation and they ended up doing in 1947 a case Westminster versus Mendez versus Westminster. And they desegregated public schools in California and they worked with a young attorney an African American dude who came out there to work with them on the case. And that guy took all of those legal precedents that Mexican Americans had been doing across the country and the strategies and that architecture. And when he had a chance, he went before the Supreme Court and argued a case called Brown v. Board of Ed. His name was Thoreau Good-Marshall. Mexican Americans worked with that guy. We worked together. And it made this nation a better place. It transformed the lives of millions. When I was growing up in Seattle with those kids who called me Spick, I wish we had known that story because I don't want to see other kids called that. I don't want to see black kids called that. I don't want to see Muslim kids called that or Native American kids or transgender kids. I've been there. I've been a Spick. I know what that is. And I don't want white kids called that either. Most of the young people in the state of Texas today under 18 are Latino. Most of the young people in California today are Latino. And by the time they reach middle age, by 2050, we will be a majority minority country. And soon to follow, we will be a Latino country. Now we can go kicking and screaming, and we can become the United States of anxiety, the United States of acrimony, the United States of suspicion. We can figure out how to find our common humanity, how to span divides of difference and find new connections for positive change and understanding in an America that welcomes all of us. And I guess that's why I'm here today. Because I think what you do is so vitally important. You can tip the balance. Because when we have an understanding of who we are, the horror and the beauty, we can understand our common story and how complex it is. In my opinion, historical preservation is not really about buildings or places or things. What it really is, it's about the stories that those buildings and places and things represent. Because they tell us what it is to lead a life well lived and what it is to lead a life squandered. They tell us what stories are worthy of remembrance and what stories shall be forgotten and turned to dust. And so I feel like you and I, we do the same thing. We're in the story biz, right? And so much depends upon us, and that's why I love that tagline. Where is it? It's not a past forward. By understanding and reconciling the past, we can find a beautiful road forward. But we have to be honest and truthful about it. And that's why that other name is so important to me. The National Trust. That's heavy. So can we do it? Well, as my friend Dolores Huerta once told me, si se puede, yes we can. Thank you.