Author: Nathan

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Chicano History on KPBS

I produced a segment today for KPBS Radio’s talk show These Days. I brought on Sal Castro, a key figure who led student walkouts in the 1960s, and two UCSD professors to talk about Chicano history and identity.

Student Walkouts Hark Back to the Chicano Movement

Sal Castro, youth motivator and volunteer teacher. He mentored the students who staged walkouts in 1968. He joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Sal Castro will be at UCSD to lead a discussion following a public screening of the HBO film Walkout on Wednesday May 10 at 7 p.m. Walkout is directed by Edward James Olmos and is based on the true story of the 1968 walkouts.

Jorge Mariscal, director of the Chicano Studies Program at UC San Diego. His latest book is Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement.

Tomás Jiménez, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSD. His research focuses on immigration, race, ethnicity, inequality, assimilation, and the Mexican-origin population in the U.S.

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Immigration Rally in San Diego

Sunday afternoon, tens of thousands marched through downtown San Diego. The news wires report over 50,000 attended, while others estimate the count at over 80,000. I was at the march to gather sound for NPR’s Morning Edition, KQED’s California Report, and KPBS News. On site, people were saying 15,000. I have no idea how they estimate these things, and I’ve never been in a crowd that large, so I can’t really say how may people were there. Here are photos I took:

Immigration Rally in San Diego

The march was completely peaceful. The organizers handed out free bottled water. The police presence was very low. Most people wore white to symbolize peace and unity. People shouted “Si se puede,” “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” and other chants. I spoke to a journalist who writes for the media in Mexico City, an actor from the film A Day Without A Mexican, local residents, and several undocumented immigrants. I met a husband and wife who held a sign that read, “My wife is not a criminal.” The man served in Iraq and the woman was undocumented. She was brought to the U.S. at an early age and spoke perfect, unaccented English. She said she considers herself an American.

Immigration Rally in San Diego

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borders culture crit photo tijuana

Scenes from Tijuana

It is not my intention to perpetuate myths of a city well-known for its demons. Most people learn about Tijuana from news reports on TV about crime, violence, and corruption. No one can deny that these things exist here, just as they do every other place on earth. But life in Tijuana is much more than that. It’s an amazing place, teeming with life. It is a hybrid of dollars and pesos, English and Spanish, McDonalds and tacos.

In the past six months, I’ve been photographing pieces of this complicated cultural landscape. A work in progress, I hope the images in this series focus the viewer’s gaze on both the creativity of the city’s residents and the role of mass media culture brought to México by the U.S.

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history music news

Behind the music: Editing the WBC anthems

Stadium

By now, everyone knows that Japan won the first ever World Baseball Classic. What no one knows, is that the music that graced San Diego’s Petco Park sound system as the players entered the field was being played from a CD; the San Diego Symphony Orchestra was on the field performing, but the amplified audio was pre-recorded (and edited by yours truly).

Orchestra

The day before the final game, the orchestra was recording the national anthems for Cuba and Japan (not knowing who would win), the host country (USA) as well as the entrance music for the parade of flags. After recording several takes of each theme, classical music guru Doug Dillon brought the recordings to me and we started editing at about 9pm Sunday night. He layed out the music scores and worked off his notes from the recording session. Taking a few bars from one take, a section from another, we weaved together the best pieces to create the final versions. We finished six hours later, at 3am Monday morning. Only a few hours after that, the sold-out stadium was listening to the CD I burned that morning.

You can hear the Parade of Flags theme in this video montage from the World Baseball Classic website. I’ve worked on a lot of freelance projects in recent years, but this one had by far the widest circulation yet.

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culture crit news photo web

NowPublic.com adds my photo to a story

NowPublic

I got an email from Calder Lorenz, Director of Contributor Relations at NowPublic.com asking me for permission to attach this photo (from Flickr) to a story about Mexico extraditing drug lords to the U.S. I’m glad he at least asked and let me know he wanted to use (or share) it.

The image is (sort of) protected by a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike License. I’m a believer in sharing ideas. At this point in time, I am not overly concerned with making money on my creative work. That Creative Commons license is basically an “open source” license for media. If someone decides to use my photo/video to make money, they’ll have to negotiate with me before being legally free to use it. If it serves a non-profit or educational purpose, feel free use it or twist it into something new. Just let me know about it. If my work becomes so massively distributed and culturally important that I could actually make money on it, I suppose I might renegotiate with my conscience.

This is the first time I noticed NowPublic.com and I’m not sure yet what I think of it. Will it be a citizen journalism media frenzy? Or get clogged up with people ranking hot chicks as news?

“We are not just a digg, where we are focused on the editorial stuff, or a Flickr, where we are focused on photography, or YouTube, where it is just video, or Blogger, for that matter, where it is just written stuff. We are pretty much everything…. We organize all of the information around these news events and people can collaborate and report on news stories from whereever they are with whatever device they are using.” Michael Tippett, CEO Founder of NowPublic.com [source]

At a conference for public broadcasting in February, a panelist asked this question: Which is more real, 200 cellphone pictures of an event or a 30 second story by a reporter? The question draws attention to the bias any individual has in telling a story. Hundreds of people telling the same story adds credibility. So giving people a platform should be a great idea… but I’m still a little sceptical of the process. I still think there is a cultural divide of people who are consciencious and those who just don’t care. At the moment, NowPublic’s top stories are about burlesque, sex symbols, fashion, and tattoos. Go figure.

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Los Cielos

Los Cielos