BAM Is Bringing ‘Selena,’ ‘La Bamba,’ ‘Zoot Suit’ & Other Chicano Classics to the Big Screen

Almost twenty years after her death, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez is still a musical icon. Known as ‘la reina del tex-mex’ she was the first female artist to have a tejano hit. She sold more than 60 million albums making her one of the most successful Latina singers of all time. The movie memorializing her life, Selena, is iconic in its own right. Starring Jennifer Lopez as Selena, Edward James Olmos as her father, and the late Lupe Ontiveros as her fan club president, the film made millions of dollars at the box office. Directed by Gregory Nava, (El Norte, Mi Familia) it has its melodramatic, telenovela-esque moments and cheesy cutaways to a sparkly full moon and roses but the film is like a gift to her fans, their chance to see her perform one last time. The movie makes it clear that she was at a pivotal moment in her career, that she was about to crossover into the mainstream having just recorded an English-language album. And even though she wasn’t alive to witness it, her posthumous album, “Dreaming of You”, reached number one. Every time I watch it, it makes me tear up and incessantly repeat, “Anything for Suh-lee-nus.”

“The day the music died” and all the events leading up to that fateful day are portrayed through a beautiful narrative in Luis Valdez’s 1987 drama La Bamba. The film stars honorary Latino Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens (born Richard Valenzuela), an American singer/songwriter/guitarist who broke through the rock ‘n’ roll ranks to become one of the most exciting new recording artists in 1958 with hits songs such as “Come On, Let’s Go” and “La Bamba.” The writer/director Valdez tells the story of Valens and his breakout success along with his tumultuous relationship with his brother Bob (Esai Morales), who was both proud and a bit jealous of his younger brother’s accomplishments. As most people know, Valens, along with fellow rock ‘n’ rollers Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” Richardson, were killed when their chartered airplane crashed on February 3, 1959. Unless you have a heart of steel, the final scenes in La Bamba are some of the most heartbreaking you will ever see. When Ritchie’s mom hears the news of her son’s death and screams out, “Not my Ritchie,” be ready to grab the tissue box.

Director Gregory Nava made movie history when his 1983 film El Norte became the first American independent picture to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (Places in the Heart won that year). The film, which would be selected only 10 years later for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, told the three-part story of two Guatemalan immigrants, a brother and sister, who travel north through Mexico in hopes of reaching Los Angeles to start a new life. In the first part of the film, the siblings, Rosa and Enrique (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and Ernesto Gómez Cruz), escape Guatemala after their father is killed by government troops and their mother disappears. In the second part, Rosa and Enrique try to cross the Mexican border with the help of a coyote. In the final chapter, the duo makes it to the U.S but find that life is more difficult that what they had expected, especially since they are undocumented. One of most powerful quotes of the film comes when Rosa says, “In our own land, we have no home. They want to kill us. … In Mexico, there is only poverty. We can’t make a home there either. And here in the north, we aren’t accepted. When will we find a home, Enrique? Maybe when we die, we’ll find a home.”

With an all-star cast of Latino actors, director Gregory Nava’s independent film My Family, Mi Familia saw the likes of Edward James Olmos, Jennifer Lopez, Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales and the late Lupe Ontiveros coming together to tell the epic three-generation-long story of an immigrant Mexican family living in East Los Angeles from the 1920s to the 1980s. After patriarch José Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) makes his way to California from Mexico and starts a family, the drama unfolds between a host of resonating characters and themes, including personal tragedy, assimilation, and cultural identity. Both Smits and Lopez received Independent Spirit Award nominations for their performances and the film was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup (it lost to Braveheart). Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, My Family, Mi Familia opened the door for other films about the Mexican-American family experience to be told at the turn of the century, including Real Women Have Curves, Tortilla Soup and Quinceañera. In his review, late film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and said, “Rarely have I felt at the movies such a sense of time and history, of stories and lessons passing down the generations, of a family living in its memories.”

Trailblazing writer-director Luis Valdez’s stage musical was the first by a Mexican-American to bow on Broadway, and his film adaptation was the first to be produced by a major studio. It’s a brash, politically charged retelling of the 1940s Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots—in which a band of Chicano youths were wrongly accused of murder, setting off a wave of anti-Mexican violence—that illuminates a decisive moment in Chicano history with dazzling invention.

In this documentary murder mystery, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo investigates the mysterious death of her multimillionaire uncle Oscar, uncovering, in the process, a hidden history of family secrets, suspicions, and scandals. Portillo interweaves home movies, gumshoe noir style, and fragments of telenovelas to tell what’s both an engrossing true crime tale and an autobiographical X-ray of a Mexican-American family.

The very first Chicano feature ever made is an against-all-odds miracle of regional independent filmmaking and a vital record of Mexican-American life in 1970s America. Set in the barrio of San Antonio, Texas, it chronicles the experiences of a young Chicano (director Gutiérrez, who also produced and distributed the film) as he grapples with racism, poverty, and the effects of the Vietnam War on his community.

A companion to Morales’ own 1979 short film Chicana, A Crushing Love profiles five contemporary Latina activists, single mothers (Dolores Huerta, Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, Cherrie Moraga, Alicia Escalante and Martha Cotera) who balance family with their tireless work of advancing Chicano rights.

Director Jesús Salvador Treviño had long been active in the Chicano civil rights movement when he made this revolutionary cri de coeur. Set along the Texas-Mexico divide, it’s a hard-hitting, neorealist dramatization of the struggles faced by garment factory workers on both sides of the border as they fight to form an international union—a powerful portrayal of Mexican-Chicano solidarity.

Director Jesús Salvador Treviño offers a comprehensive view of Chicano history and identity, tracing the culture from its pre-Columbian origins to the political activism of the 1960s and 70s.

This probing documentary explores the legacy of Selena, the late Tejano music superstar, and her enduring centrality to Chicano culture through rare archival footage and interviews with her family and fans.