"Boulder's Chicano Community," 1979 film

This film (27 mins.) was made around 1979 as part of a project called “Boulder’s Chicano Community: Where Is It?” The organizers of the project were Jesse Velez Lehmann, Manuel Arcadia, and Regina Vigil, and it was funded by the Colorado Humanities Program. Assistance was provided by the Migrant Action Program and the Boulder Women’s Resource Center. The film consists of audio excerpts from interviews, still shots, music background, and long segments showing an unidentified Chicano gathering, with live music and dancing. The quality of the audio and video components is poor. Topics discussed or shown are: lack of knowledge about Boulder’s Chicano community; early arrivals in Boulder, including one family that came in a covered wagon; Quonset huts and OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] community center at 19th and Canyon; Mount St. Gertrude Academy; work in coal mines; the difficulty of field work; work in Wyoming in summer, then back to Boulder County for mining in the winter; Boulder in the 1930s offered the chance for children to get some education and different kinds of jobs; neighborhood around Water + Goss Streets; migrant farm work in San Luis Valley, then in Boulder area; difficulty of attending a city school; isolation of Chicano families from mainstream Boulder life. Sequence of scenes and people: 1. Introduction. Festival at an unidentified place. Voiceover: identity unclear, probably Jesse Velez Lehmann; 2. Quanset huts and OEO community center at 19th and Canyon, now Canyon Park, to be renamed Emma Martinez Park in Oct., 2013; 3. Speaker: identity unclear, probably Jesse Velez Lehmann. Speaks of support from Migrant Action Program and the Boulder Women’s Resource Center, both OEO programs; 4. Shot of Jesse Velez Lehmann at the festival; 5. Picture of Teresa Alvarez. Lived on Pine Street in Boulder, owned a beauty shop; 6. Shot of St. Gertrude’s Academy in Boulder; 7. Women dancing at the festival, including Jesse Velez Lehmann. Song is “Las Mañanitas”; 8. Man talking in Spanish: David Toledo, who was also a self-taught barber; 9. Shot of identity/employment? card for David Toledo; 10. Long shot of a photo of an unidentified man; 11. Woman talking: Virginia Maestas, interviewed at the school where she taught; 12. Shot of man with long beard holding the microphone in a park at the fiesta: Manuel (Arcadia?); 13. Shot of Abe Maestas with a hat and a beard.