September 30th | 2 Movies
Moctesuma Esparza was born in East Los Angeles on March 12, 1949. As a child in the Los Angeles school system, Esparza felt the sting of racism early. While some teachers were supportive, others didn't bother to hide their antipathy toward their Latino students. Despite ranking in the top percentile on his SATs, his guidance counselor told him that he’d have a better chance at going to a community college and getting a job as a blue-collar worker than trying to go to UCLA. Not only did Esparza graduate from UCLA cum laude, he also got an MFA from the film school.
An activist early in life, Esparza marched with Cesar Chavez while still in high school. In his first year of college, he was one of the organizers of the March 3, 1968, Chicano Blowouts, where 20,000 Latino high school students in the Los Angeles area walked out of class for a week, protesting the inferior education that set them up to become manual laborers, rather than prepared them for college. Only 18, Esparza was charged with 15 counts of conspiracy to disrupt public schools, which could have landed him in jail for life. This became the subject of Esparza’s 2006 HBO film, Walkout.
Acquitted after a two-year legal fight, he was again charged when the Brown Berets (a group he’d helped found but had already left) planned to peacefully disrupt a speech by then-Governor Ronald Reagan. Indicted on false charges, he had to go “underground” for a while. Eventually, he found life as a fugitive too stressful and turned himself in, resulting in yet another multi-year legal battle and another exoneration. Decades later, Esparza interviewed some of the prosecutors and FBI agents involved, who admitted that he had been unfairly targeted because law enforcement wanted to break up the protest movement.
After graduation from film school, Esparza became a producer, which would come easy to him given his ability for community organizing. Knowing that the producer was the one who controlled the money and the content of a film, he had the goal of transforming “an image Hollywood had created [of Latinos] which was stereotypical and demeaning, into an image of us as a people, as human beings of this land, who have something special to offer this country and the world, along with the rest of the native people of this continent.”
He was hired by PBS’ “Sesame Street” as a consultant on bilingual programming and then spent a decade producing independent documentaries. In the 1970s, Esparza acquired several film properties, including Américo Paredes’ With His Pistol in His Hand, which became The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1983), and John Nichols’ novel, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988).
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, directed and co-written by Robert M. Young, was a Western based on a true story of a Mexican-American farmer (Edward James Olmos) who kills a sheriff and becomes a folk hero. It was produced through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS’ “American Playhouse.” In 2022, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
The Milagro Beanfield War told the story of one man’s fight to stave off developers and special interests destroying his beanfield and his community. The film starred Rubén Blades, Sonia Braga, Christopher Walken and Melanie Griffith. Despite a lukewarm reception, it won an Academy Award for Best Music (Original Score) for Dave Grusin.
Since Esparza has dedicated his life to fighting against discrimination and racist depictions of Latinos, it is surprising that The Milagro Beanfield War was criticized for allegedly perpetuating Latino stereotypes. His producing partner, Robert Katz, said that Esparza was ready to give up making Latino films after this experience because “he’d been beaten up so badly.”
Not content to only create films, Esparza got into the cable TV business when he formed BuenaVision Telecommunications, which brought cable television to East Los Angeles until its acquisition by Adelphia Communications in 2001, and is the founder of the Maya Cinemas chain of multi-plex theaters geared toward the Latino community.
Moctesuma Esparza has continued to produce films, including Selena (1997), which made Jennifer Lopez a star. While focusing on positive representations of Latinos, he has made many non-Latino films, including the biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999) with Halle Berry and several military films, like Rough Riders (1997) and the Civil War-themed Gettysburg (1993) and Gods and Generals (2003). His latest film, planned for release in 2024, is Delfino’s Journey.
