Arts & Culture

At Acceso Hispano we believe that Arts and Culture play an important role in our mission of improving the quality of life of Hispanics in the United States. The arts are powerful mediums for self-expression, which often profoundly reflect both prevailing culture and intimate personal experiences. Art can enrich lives, promote self-esteem and self-discovery, link communities together, and create bridges to understanding.

Our Response
Acceso Hispano highlights different artistic expressions of the Hispanic community through our media partnership with Hispanic Communications Network, in our newsletters, community outreach activities, and our information and referral hotline. We encourage Hispanics of all ages to participate in the arts as creators or observers, and offer ways for people to get involved in social issues if they are so inspired after seeing a particularly moving work of art.

There many Hispanic filmmakers, writers, and playwrights whose creative narration of their stories about being Latino in the United States has dazzled critics and audiences alike. In doing so, these artists have brought important social justice issues such as immigration, identity, and acculturation to the forefront of our public dialogue. The socially conscious works included here are just a few examples of some of the recent expressions of the rich cultural kaleidoscope reflected in the U.S. Latino community.

Literary Arts
The 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Junot Díaz for his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book chronicles the life of a Dominican-American boy growing up in New Jersey caught between two fantasies: that of science fiction aOsnd that of Caribbean fukú. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This is Díaz’s second highly acclaimed work after the premiere of his first book, a short story collection entitled Drown (1996).

Diaz’s novel is emblematic of the East Coast Latino literary tradition, which draws primarily from the Caribbean Diaspora. By contrast, the West Coast Latino literary tradition is centered around the Mexican Diaspora. Great works of that canon include Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street, and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros; Brown by Richard Rodriguez; The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia; and Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario.

Film
Enrique’s Journey provided the plot basis for the recent film La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon), which chronicles the journey of a fictional, Northern Mexican equivalent of Enrique as he crosses the desert through El Paso and Tuscon, to eventually reach his mother in Los Angeles. La Misma Luna writer Ligiah Villalobos won the Norman Lear’s Writer’s Award for this film, and helped raise awareness about immigration issues which are now being addressed by a joint civic initiative between Hispanics in Philanthropy and the Mexican government.

Theater
Dominican-American playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights swept the 2008 Tony awards, winning Best Musical, Best Choreography, Best Original Score, and Best Orchestrations. In the Heights is about the Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper New York City. It is a musical about making a home, sticking around, and in the process finding oneself. While it has received critical praise for its original scoring, sharp acting, and expert storytelling techniques, it deserves even more praise for marking a new phase in American musical theater by portraying – and celebrating – the modern Latino community as it is, on stage and in triple-time. In the Heights displays an aspirational community that celebrates and communicates in dynamic reggaeton; that sends some people off to Stanford University and tends to others who will live within the same five-block radius their entire lives.

Last year, the Los Angeles, California-based Cornerstone Theater Company premiered Los Illegals, an original community theater production about the documentation debate. Los Illegals kicked off Cornerstone’s Justice Cycle, a two-and-a-half year series of plays revolving around themes of justice. Fueled by true stories gathered from rallies, protests, job centers, work sites, and individual interviews, Los Illegals was performed in a vibrant mixture of English and Spanish by a cast of professional actors and community participants.

Photography
The Border Film Project is an Arizona-based art collaborative that distributed disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border - undocumented migrants crossing the desert and American Minutemen trying to stop them. To date, the Border Film Project has received 73 cameras — 38 from migrants and 35 from Minutemen — with nearly 2,000 pictures in total. The pictures are stunning, as they show the human face of immigration and they challenge us to question our stereotypes and to see through new and highly personal lenses.