“The dean was very progressive, and we created this program Ethno-communications.”Įsparza spoke to The Undefeated about his iconic career, his role in civil rights, his Maya Cinemas and the lack of minority, especially Latino, representation in the film industry. “Happily, we didn’t have to sit in too long,” Esparaza said. He recruited a diverse array of students (four African-Americans, four Asian-Americans, four Native Americans and four Latinos) and staged a sit-in in the dean’s office until it was approved. Unimpressed by the numbers, he wrote a proposal to create a program called Ethno-communications and submitted it to the film department. “Somebody in the group said, ‘Why don’t you go look at the film school theater arts department?’ There was an African-American professor there who recruited me onto a campuswide research study on the images of minorities in media back then, and of course, the report came back that there were very few images and the few that existed were all negative.” ( Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) while focusing on establishing diversity in the university’s education, history, Spanish and social work departments. Deeply engaged in civil rights, he helped found a campus organization called M.E.Ch.A.
SALINAS CA MAYA CINEMA MOVIE
He was one of the 13 indicted students who organized the successful 1968 student walkout in East Los Angeles aimed at improving substandard public education for Latinos that focused on training them to be manual workers, not professionals - the premise for the 2006 HBO movie Walkout.īefore producing iconic films such as Selena starring Jennifer Lopez, HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge starring Halle Berry, The Milagro Beanfield War, Gettysburg and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, he was a community organizer and a student at UCLA in the 1960s. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Ohio State Award and a Cine Golden Eagle. He has been nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award and has received more than 200 honors and awards, including a Clio, the John F. The new development provides a $20 million real estate investment, as well as jobs for the community and, of course, first-run, quality movies for the whole family, a mission that’s dear to Esparza.Įsparza is revered for his contributions to the movie industry and his commitment to uplifting and preserving Latino communities. It’s been 10 years since Delano residents have seen a theater in the area. The grand opening event included more than 500 attendees, activists Dolores Huerta and Paul Chavez, United Farm Worker leaders and community leaders.
Our goal is to be everywhere that’s underserved.” We have another theater under construction in north Las Vegas, Nevada, and we’ll soon be in Texas and Arizona. We’ve got theaters in Bakersfield, Fresno, Salinas, Pittsburg, now Delano. “I’m honored that I’m able to bring a quality, beautiful, state-of-the-art cinema to a working-class family community like Delano, California. The fact that he did it also encouraged me that I could do it,” Esparza said. “Seeing that Magic Johnson had done this was an inspiration to me.
Maya Cinemas was chartered in 2000 to develop, build, own and operate modern, first-run megaplex movie theaters in underserved, family-oriented, Latino-dominant communities. Now having produced some of the most prolific Latino and black films of society’s culture, he’s preserving a home for those moments. So it’s no surprise that was the motivation behind Esparza opening his fifth theater in Delano, California, as part of his Maya Cinemas chain. “It left many communities without any nearby entertainment venues at all, because the multiplexes went to the suburbs and then the megaplexes went to power centers and huge power malls, and the inner cities and the working-class communities and rural communities were left pretty much without any first-class entertainment.”
… All died in the ’90s and closed,” he said. “Every neighborhood in the country had a great theater. Growing up in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, award-winning Mexican-American filmmaker, producer, entrepreneur and activist Moctesuma Esparza could walk to three movie theaters.
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