Film giving small town big arts boost

American children can’t get much farther from the Mexican border than Orient, Wash., but the northeast Washington community soon will get a taste of Mexican- American culture, if only for a week.

With the help of a Washington state Arts Commission grant, Latina filmmaker Nancy De Los Santos will present a workshop on the Mexican celebration, Dia de los Muertos, to Orient students Monday through Thursday.

The Nov. 1 holiday with its candy skulls and dancing skeletons may appear morbid to some, but in many Hispanic cultures it is a celebration of ancestry and the continuity of life.

“The Day of the Dead is very dear to Chicanos and many in the U.S.,” De Los Santos said in a recent Spokesman-Review interview.

De Los Santos, who is of Mexican-American ancestry, was associate producer of “Selena,” the 1997 film starring Jennifer Lopez and Edward James Olmos, and co-wrote and co-produced “The Bronze Screen,” a 2003 documentary about the Latino image in Hollywood that aired on HBO.

“I really feel that part of my mission in life is to continue changing the image of Latinos in the media,” she said.

But no one arrives in Orient, nestled in the woods of northern Ferry County, by accident.

De Los Santos is the sister of artist Gloria Geary, the coordinator for the Orient, Inchelium and Valley Arts Consortium. Funded in part by the Arts Commission, the consortium provides art, music and drama to the 400 children in the three school districts

In the past year, the string section of the Spokane Symphony and the Missoula Children’s Theater performed in Orient.

“We are trying to reach populations that traditionally are underserved,” said Geary, who moved to Orient from Los Angeles with her family in the late 1990s. Without the program, she said, students in the remote part of Ferry County would not have been exposed to Prokofiev or Louis Armstrong.

Like her sister, Geary has ties to Hollywood, having worked as a graphics artist.

“She worked on ‘Titanic,’ ” De Los Santos said. “I was out there 10 years, and within a month she was working on this big film.”

The ocean liner may have sunk in the frigid North Atlantic, but the 1997 James Cameron movie was filmed in balmy Mexico. Geary added the “puffs of breath” when the actors spoke.

This week, De Los Santos brings to Orient School some movie magic of its own.

On Friday night she will present “Lalo Guerrero, The Original Chicano,” a documentary she co-wrote and produced with the singer-songwriter’s son, Dan Guerrero. The film is airing on many PBS stations across the country.

Born in 1916, Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero is recognized as the father of Chicano music. Starting with his first recording in 1939, he wrote more than 700 songs and was declared a National Folk Treasure by the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1997 he became the first Mexican American to be awarded the National Medal of the Arts, the nation’s highest arts award. Guerrero died last year in Palm Springs, Calif., at age 88.

“His music reflects the history of Mexican Americans,” De Los Santos said. But it also touches the “common denominator in all of us.”