Not long before Mirasol Riojas left San Antonio for UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, she talked to a friend who had done an interview with Efrain Gutierrez, a fellow Texan who produced the first feature-length Chicano film: Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive. So, she says, "his name was fresh on my mind" when she was asked to compile a bibliography on Gutierrez as part of her work for the Chicano Studies Research Center.

As someone with a particular interest in Tejano film-making, Mirasol couldn’t have picked a better time to arrive at UCLA. The Chicano Studies Research Center has launched a multi-year collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive to identify, preserve, and distribute independent productions of Chicano and Latino filmmakers. Gutierrez’s films are first on the list. Indeed, although Mirasol has read a great deal about Gutierrez, "I haven’t had an opportunity to see much of his work," she says, because it is relatively inaccessible.

Now, barely half a year into her doctoral program in critical studies, she finds herself playing a significant role in changing that and in pursuing her long-term goal to raise the public profile of her fellow Tejanos. In a general way, Chicanos have had little access to mainstream American culture, and "Tejanos are even lower on the ladder," she says. "I’m very proud of my culture and my Tejano roots. Considering how large the group is and the richness of its culture, Tejanos’ contributions aren’t recognized by the mainstream nearly as much as they deserve."

Mirasol was drawn to UCLA by two factors: the richness of the UCLA Film Archive, which she’s now helping to enlarge, and the opportunity to study with CSRC Director Chon A. Noriega—"he’s the Chicano film expert," she says. She is now working as his graduate student researcher, handling a variety of research projects including developing information on laws related to unaccompanied illegal minors and on cultural outlays related to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act programs of the 1970s and ’80s.

In the same period when the National Endowment of the Arts was getting under way, CETA spent hundreds of millions of dollars on jobs programs for artists, many of them women and minorities. "Mirasol’s report taught me a lot about CETA, presenting a different perspective than the anecdotal one that circulates within the arts sector," Professor Noriega says.

If Mirasol has recently been moving toward her goals with lightning speed, it took her several years of exploration to settle on her direction. Her postsecondary career began at Cornell University, where she was a fine arts major until "I realized there was no real work," she says. "I wasn’t quite so hip on the idea of having this unstable future. I want to be able to sustain myself."

Given that personal experience with the potential conflict between personal goals and America’s work culture—"it’s suffocating a lot of the creativity people have"—Mirasol began to look at things in "a more complex way." That examination took her to Stanford University, where she completed an undergraduate degree in feminist studies, looking at "the interlocking systems of oppression—race and class and gender"—that influence how women of color contribute to art, film, and literature.

After college, she took several jobs in social services around the Bay Area before she realized she wasn’t "working on my own art any more—I had become one of the working drones." That assessment led her into graduate studies at the New York University Film School. While she was there, she worked for Nielsen Media Research. Nielsen’s clients have "a huge interest in the Hispanic market because it’s an exploding population," she says. However, in part because workers may sacrifice accuracy in the interest of getting their job done efficiently, Latinos remain underrepresented and misrepresented in the ratings that form the basis of programming decisions, she explains.

Back in San Antonio, Mirasol did film programming and festivals for the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. While she enjoyed her work, she decided that she needed more education to achieve her long-term goals. Eventually, she hopes to join with others in "creating an organization, a space, for people to build community and be empowered in terms of culture," she says. "Having those letters behind your name helps you when you’re trying to get funding."

Following the example of her parents—a social worker and an engineer who returned to San Antonio to create jobs and do environmental work in his hometown—Mirasol believes her work should serve a social purpose. "It makes me happy to be part of my community," she says, "and to work for its improvement."

First, however, she has to complete her course work and write her dissertation. She’s still undecided about a topic—"there’s so much unexplored territory in Chicano film," she says, "not just critical analysis but issues of preservation and distribution. There’s so much work to be done."

The first wave of Chicano filmmaking grew out of the Civil Rights Movement and conceptualized film as a tool of social change. "Activists were picking up cameras and saying, let’s document our situation and bring attention to our struggle and our culture," Mirasol says. Over the years since then, Chicano film has, in many ways, "been stripped of a lot of the political content."

Mirasol looks at Chicano film not only as a tool for social change but also as "a way to empower your community and as a creative outlet for personal satisfaction. All those different levels need to be validated."

For the time being, Mirasol’s own creative outlet remains on hold. Her easel and her box of paints came to Los Angeles with her, but they remain in a corner for now. She’s been far too busy—with her studies, her work at the Chicano Studies Research Center, and an extra assignment working on a resource guide for the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. "I’ve been here just a little more than a quarter," she says, "but what a quarter! I already have things to write home about."

Published in Winter 2006, Graduate Quarterly