Selena Press Review

Awards present challenges
High emotions, both negative and positive, highlight Tejano music’s night of recognition
AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, March 25, 1996
by Cathy Ragland

…In spite of the obvious conflicts about the direction of Tejano music, this year’s awards presentation offered hope for the future of Tejano music in the success of Selena, the queen of Tejano music. A 61/2 minute tribute to the slain singing star was, without a doubt, the reason many people came to the awards this year. Produced by Austin documentary filmmaker Hector Galán, the video provided a sense of closure of the tragedy of Selena’s death and a commemoration of her legacy. She was celebrated for her beauty, modesty, pride in her ethnicity and contributions to the music and its growth. Viewers saw her as a young girl, whom her father Abraham described as having “perfect timing and natural talent,” and as a confident young woman, proudly embracing her roots while pushing open doors that once were closed to Mexican American musicians in both the English-language and Mexican markets.

In the end, the video seemed to offer up a challenge to the industry and Mexican Americans to carry on Selena’s dream.

Go Back to Mexico Press Review

‘Go Back’ examines illegal-immigration issue from both sides
This seamless, thoughtful documentary both elucidates and complicates the burning issue of undocumented workers.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, June 7, 1994
by Kinney Littlefield

For centuries people have been telling each other to go away. Mostly, racial and ethnic groups unwanted by others just keep on coming. Eventually, at least some of THEM become a part of US. But our biggest fear never dies: One day, they - whoever they are - will overwhelm us - whoever WE are - with their differences.

This never-ending cultural struggle is played out daily along the southern U.S. border, and nowhere more crucially than in Southern California.

That’s why it’s imperative that as many Southern Californians as possible - indeed as many Americans as possible - make time to watch “Go Back to Mexico!” the new “Frontline” documentary airing tonight on PBS.

As produced by Hector Galán and reported by correspondent William Langewiesche, “Go Back to Mexico!” is both a welcome gift and a provocative challenge.

What “Go Back” gives us, through Langewiesche’s astute narration and “Frontline’s” calmly flowing camerawork, is a comprehensive package of hard facts about illegal immigration, layered with deeply polarized opinions about its impact.

But there’s a price for this gift. What the documentary asks of us in return is empathy for those who come to California however they can. “Go Back to Mexico!” humanizes the plight of illegal immigrants by individualizing it.

“Go Back” follows pretty young Maria and her baby son, who flee impoverished Agua Verde, 1,000 miles south of San Diego to join her husband, Jesus, illegally in Los Angeles. Through Maria’s determined eyes, we see the relentless economic desperation that drives Mexicans across the border to a tough new life in immigrant-crowded L.A.

Like an increasing number of immigrants, Maria uses counterfeit documents to cross the border easily in broad daylight. Her son uses the birth certificate of a young cousin. They are poor, and illegal. Bu Jesus is already working and paying taxes.

“In the long run they are unlikely to take more from the nation than they give,” says Langewiesche, who used to fly the California-Mexico border as an air-taxi pilot.

But how can he really know?

“Go Back” also documents the new alliance of environmentalists, liberals such as Democratic California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and some Hispanics, who argue that immigration is a quality-of-life issue, that the tarnished Golden State has simply absorbed as many people as it can.

And the argument is as forceful as Maria’s personal story.

According to the documentary, every day about 1,200 illegals, or undocumented workers, flow into San Diego through Tijuana. Not even a 10-foot-high steel fence with $800,000 worth of glaring, prison-yard-lighting can stop them. Almost 600,000 arrests of illegal immigrants were made along this 14-mile stretch of border last year.

“Go Back” makes no pretense of finding a solution to this national and international problem. But Langewiesche finally comes down on the side of hospitality, of acceptance of the immigrant tide.

“We should not pretend that we can seal ourselves off without altering the essence of America,” he says.

Yet an increasing number of overcrowded, recession-weary Californians seem to disagree.

One thing is sure, however: Watch “Go Back to Mexico!” and your prejudices and preconceptions about others will be stirred. And as Langewiesche says in the documentary’s final moment, it takes real courage and wisdom not to indulge our fears.

Power, Politics, and Latinos Press Review

PBS Documentary Studies Latinos’ Clout
LOS ANGELES TIMESs, September 15, 1992
by Howard Rosenberg

There was a time when “Power, Politics and Latinos” would have been an oxymoron. As a PBS documentary bearing that title notes, however, the Latino electorate’s potential political clout is growing. The key word is potential.

The hour-long program (at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR-TV Channel 24) initially makes its case with statistics on the nation’s fast-growing Latino population: 22 million - 9 million of whom are registered voters, the bulk in such electoral-brawny states as California and Texas. Although implicit in these numbers is the assumption that Latinos will visit the ballot box in sufficient numbers to make a difference, there’s the mitigating factor, expressed tonight, that it’s hard to think about voting when you’re “poor and focused on basic survival.”

Anglo media have traditionally relegated Latinos to the shadows of U.S. society, with television in particular rendering Latinos virtually invisible, except when it comes to stories about violent crime and obligatory coverage of holidays.

“Power, Politics and Latinos” is an antidote, delivering a message of self-empowerment. “We don’t’ have a say in Los Angeles and we’re ignored by the media, and you expect us to take it lying down?” declares Xavier Hermosillo, chairman of the Latino group NEWS for America. “No way!”

Filmmaker Hector Galán flashes back to June’s fiercely contested Democratic primary for the 30th District congressional seat in Los Angeles, his camera following the campaigns of the favored Leticia Quezada and the eventual upset winner Xavier Becerra in their quest to succeed longtime Latino officeholder Edward Roybal. The result is an intimate look at grassroots politics and a refreshingly mainstream depiction of Latinos that contrasts with those TV pictures of Latino looters amid rioting in parts of Los Angeles following the Rodney G. King beating trial verdict (we’re told tonight that one-third of the businesses lost during the violence were Latino-owned).

The implication here is that this campaign, with several Latinos running, is self-empowerment in action and a metaphor for Latinos assuming control of their own destiny. However, the program omits a crucial statistic - the percentage of Latinos who voted in the primary. And it fails to explain why there would be a net gain for Latinos if the heavily favored Becerra wins in November, filling a seat that another Latino has held for three decades.

Who Cares About Children Press Review

Documentary examines child-welfare crisis in Arkansas
AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, April 18, 1992
by Diane Holloway

Is it investigative reporting, news analysis or Clinton-bashing?

Those are the questions viewers will have to ask themselves when they watch tonight’s edition of Frontline (at 9 on KLRU, Channel 18 Cable 9), which focuses on the child-welfare crisis in Arkansas, the home state of Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Bill Clinton.

Austin documentary filmmaker and frequent Frontline contributor Hector Galán was asked last year by the PBS program to look into the problems of foster care in America. He talked with experts across the country and learned that just about every state is either already in or fast approaching a crisis.

But several people, including a judge in El Paso, told Galán to look into the crisis and its accompanying legal and political battle in Arkansas, where the Center of Youth Law in San Francisco was planning to file a class-action suit, similar to one that had been successfully litigated in Maryland, to force child-welfare reform.

“When we first started working on this story, we looked at several states, ” Galán said from his Austin office. “As a matter of fact, we started here in Texas. But then I found out about the litigation in Arkansas. It was an unfolding, ongoing story since the entire state was being sued.”

Galán pointed out that he and his team were researching in Arkansas last summer, long before Clinton announced his candidacy in October.

“We weren’t really looking at Clinton but he has been governor there for 11 years and we were looking at what the state had done over the past 10 years,” Galán said, “We hadn’t intended to focus on Clinton’s record, but he grew into it because we were there for six months.”

In July, Bill Grimm, an attorney with the Center for Youth Law, filed a class-action suit against Clinton and the State of Arkansas, accusing both of failing to protect the state’s children.

Grimm’s documentation, repeated and illustrated in Galán’s program, points out cases of abuse and the state’s failure to investigate such abuse. The program also notes how children are moved from home to home and the many instances of terribly overworked and under-qualified case workers.

The documentary mentions almost in passing that child welfare and foster care problems are prevalent everywhere, but it does not make clear that Arkansas’s manner of dealing with them or ignoring them is the rule rather than the exception.

The difference in Arkansas, of course, is that the governor is running for president. And the irony is that child welfare is an issue Clinton and his wife Hillary have championed and campaigned on for years. In the 1970s, for example, Hillary Clinton founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and sued the state over its foster care policies.

Hinting at political motivations regarding Clinton’s presidential campaign, the documentary notes that Clinton called a special session of the Arkansas legislature a few days after the New Hampshire primary to consider a $57 million bill proposed by the governor to reform Arkansas’ child-welfare system. The proposal settled Grimm’s lawsuit and gave Clinton a new bill to crow about.

Galán probably could have made a similar case against any number of states and their governors. In fact, the Frontline episode probably would have been a stronger program and a more ringing indictment of America’s child-welfare system if it had not zeroed in so tightly on a presidential candidate.

Nevertheless, Galán’s work, as usual, is powerful.

Galán said he set out to look at some of the abuses he had heard about in foster homes but found out that such cases were “the exception and not the rule. A lot of foster parents get abused by the system. I was convinced of that after doing all this research.”

Galán said he sees Arkansas as a microcosm of a serious national problem and hopes viewers will see his program the same way.

“People need to look at this problem carefully,” he said. “The whole child-welfare system should be revamped. The government shouldn’t focus on keeping dysfunctional families together. Congress has passed laws to preserve families, which means a lot of these children are put back into families only to return to foster again.”

The Color of Your Skin Press Review

Coming to grips with racism
THE BOSTON GLOBE, June 9-15, 1991
by Bruce McCabe

It was called “Group 1.”

It was made up of six blacks, five whites and a Filipino. For 16 weeks, the group gathered in a circle in a small room behind a two-way mirror and confronted itself with its racial anger, pain and bewilderment.

The group, which met in a corner of Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Fla., was part of a program that since 1971 has helped more than 10,000 soldiers, sailors and air personnel to come to grips with their feelings on race.

“Frontline” tells the story of this unique program Tuesday night at 9 p.m. on Channels 2, 11 and 36. The episode is called “The Color of Your Skin.”

The program tells the story of the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI) which has been conducting these sessions since the Vietnam era when the military was being torn apart by racial confrontations and violence.

The 16-week course of “Group 1″ is told by showing the group’s progress through moments of despair, anger and confusion as individuals confronted their stereotypes, biases and gut feelings.

Viewers get to know Kelly Anderson, a liberal white navy petty officer from Utah, and Evelyn Johnson, a black sergeant from South Carolina, with whom Anderson identifies with midway through the course. Then he begins feeling defensive as a white male and she begins identifying more strongly with other blacks in the group.

A white sergeant, Glenn Smith, finds his attitudes transformed by the blacks in the group.

“It seems like I’m being held responsible for everything that’s been done by someone who was white,” complains soldier Bob Huselton.

“Even if you change a racist from one thought, one stereotype, it’s better than not changing at all,” says Army Sgt. 1st Class Eugene Bickley of the group dynamic. “It’s like a disease. You change him, he might go out and change somebody else.”

Austin filmmaker examines military race-relations class
AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, June 11, 1991
by Diane Holloway

For 16 weeks starting in January, a dozen military personnel confronted each other about their feelings on racism and race relations in a small room at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Fla.

Highlights and low lights of this unusual classroom activity were captured in an hour-long documentary, “The Color of Your Skin,” produced by Austin filmmaker Hector Galán and reported by Austin-based Washington Post reporter David Maraniss.

The film airs tonight on the PBS series Frontline (at 9 on KLRU-TV, Channel 18 Cable 9). It’s Galán’s ninth contribution to the award-winning documentary program.

The class was one of the hundreds that have met at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute since DEOMI was founded in 1971 to combat the racial tension and violence that erupted among American soldiers during the Vietnam War.

“The idea for this piece emerged out of a series of articles David wrote on integration for the Washington Post,” Galán said in the telephone interview last week.

Maraniss says in the documentary he set out “to see if blacks and whites were dealing with each other anywhere in America on an equal basis” and found DEOMI, which trains participants to handle racial problems in the military. Maraniss believes DEOMI is more successful than other race relations classes because the students are a captive audience. They are stuck with each other in one tiny room for the duration of the course.

But what emerges in 1991’s first class seems anything but positive. The feelings expressed are hardly new. Blacks talk about their past experiences and the continued problems of racism in their lives, while whites express their frustration and anger about constantly being labeled racists.

Many viewers probably will be struck by the naivete of two of the white non-commissioned officers, Sgt. Glenn Smith and Sgt. Bob Huselton, who say they don’t believe blatant racism and violence still exist. Where have these guys been? Don’t they read the newspapers? Haven’t they seen incidents at school, at work, and in public places?

In the end, viewers also will be struck by the apparent lack of progress the class made. At the graduation ceremony, the black participants sit together and the white participants sit together.

“There was really not a lot of intermingling outside of the school either,” Galán conceded. “It started to divide pretty early on and some internal feuds developed.”

In particular, a friendship that was forged early on between a white Navy officer named Kelley Anderson and a black officer named Evelyn Johnson completely disintegrated. During one stormy discussion, Anderson, a liberal whose Mormon ancestors were driven out of two states before settling in Utah, said to Johnson, “We made it. Why can’t you?”

All in all, the discussions seemed futile and depressing.

“But I think the fact they’re talking about it is important,” Galán said. “If we had done this in a bar, somebody probably would have gotten into a fight and left. At DEOMI, they were stuck in this fishbowl and had to face each other. Even though maybe it didn’t show a dramatic change, they started thinking about things.”

And so will viewers, albeit with considerable discomfort. Many of the discussions, such as Johnson and Anderson’s heated breakup, are painful to watch. And that, presumably, was the point.

“I think real thoughts and ideas emerged,” Galán said. “We carry on but a lot of the times we don’t let people know our real feelings about race. I think this is a real reflection of society. To me, it was a real peek-a-boo type of feeling, watching these people come unglued.”

The “peek-a-boo” was accomplished with one small video camera in the classroom, giving the documentary a concealed surveillance quality. The camera is unimposing and seems to be disregarded by the participants. The end result is an intriguing if depressing examination of one of society’s most difficult and enduring problems.

Los Mineros Press Review

The Copper Miners Who Sought Equality
LOS ANGELES TIMES, January 28, 1991
by Robert Koehler

Just as the xenophobic and racist responses have been triggered by the influx of undocumented workers from south of the border, full-fledged American citizens of Mexican descent have endured such hatred for more than a century. Hector Galán’s “Los Mineros,” a fascinating segment of “The American Experience” (at 9 tonight on Channel 38 and 15) invokes the battles of Mexican American copper miners in Arizona as symbolic of this history.

It’s an extraordinary piece of human theater, played out against the stark backdrop of the desert landscape broken by clusters of miner’s shacks facing down on the giant Phelps-Dodge mining operation. (Galán’s raft of archival photographs scream out to be filmically re-created by David Lean.)

On one side of the town called Clifton-Morenci were the white workers, and on the other were los miners, neither Mexican nor fully accepted as American. They suffered under a “dual-wage system,” in which white miners were paid at lease twice as much as their Spanish-speaking co-workers, who also were forced into the most dangerous jobs.

Here are all the conditions for a violent workers’ overthrow of the bosses, but even when the anarchist IWW helped organize los mineros for a strike during World War I, any efforts to stop Phelps-Dodge’s exploitative policies were met with harsh measures. After this strike, for example, the company rounded up strikers into boxcars and drove the boxcars into the remote desert with no food or water.

It was the next war that brought Mexican American men a new sense of identity - and a new will to demand their rights in a country they valiantly helped defend. Galán’s camera captures the passionate memories of living mineros veterans, such as Ed Montoya, whose Okinawa tale lends “Los Mineros” extraordinary moral power.

Strangely, this same passion is missing from the narration by stage and film director Luis Valdez, who knows a thing or two about dramatic effect but seems to have forgotten it this time.

New Harvest, Old Shame Press Review

‘New Harvest, Old Shame,’ About Farm Workers
NEW YORK TIMES, April 17, 1990
by Walter Goodman

In the 30 years since Edward R. Murrow’s powerful report “Harvest of Shame,” the safety and welfare of America’s migrant workers have bee improved by federal legislation and union bargaining. Nevertheless, as tonight’s strong documentary, “New Harvest, Old Shame,” shows, for the 800,000 farm workers who follow the crops north each spring, it’s still mighty hard travelling. The latest offering from “Frontline” can be see at 10 p.m. on Channel 13.

Dave Marash, tonight’s correspondent, joins a family in Indiana as it prepares for the September trip back to Florida. Pedro Silva, 40 years old and the family head, was already working in the fields when the Murrow documentary appeared. It has been a tough year for his 15-member family, ages 9 to 62. The tomato crop suffered from too much rain, and at 35 cents a bucket, the Silvas are ending their six-week picking season with only $1,400.

By the time they arrive at what serves as their home in the Everglades Migrant Camp, truck breakdowns and illness along the way have put them in debt. Their plans to stop off for some picking in South Carolina were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo, and the crops in Florida have been killed by a freeze.

In interviews with union organizers, farmers, officials and community workers, Mr. Marash finds that big growers are still enjoying an oversupply of labor. In Florida, he notes, there are three farm workers for every available job, and Americans like the Silvas are losing out to people from poor countries who are willing to work for less. A woman who has been hiring migrants for generations tells how the black Americans who did the picking 30 years ago were replaced first by Mexicans and Salvadorans and more recently by Guatemalans and Haitians, many of them illegal aliens.

In a particularly painful passage, Mr. Silva directs his anger not at the growers or at the authorities who set the minimum picking wage, but at the newcomers. “It’s killing us,” he says. “They’re running us out of there. Those Guatemalans, they say, ‘If you pay him $3.35 an hour, you can pay me $3 an hour.’” Marshall Barry, a professor of Florida International University who has made a study of the state’s agricultural economy, directs responsibility elsewhere: “Employers will lower the wages and then if you refuse to accept those wages, they’ll hire a man who’s hungry or someone who desperately needs work.”

The farmers, lobbyists and officials interviewed seem bland and evasive compared with the workers and union organizers. That may be a tribute to the editing skills of the program’s producers, but the evidence appears to support the case that despite the recent reform of the immigration law, illegal aliens continue to pour into the United States, where, with the cooperation of growers, they depress wages. Mr. Marash draws attention to the power of big farm interests in states like Florida as well as in Washington, D.C., to create loopholes in the law and discourage strict enforcement. As a rural organizer observes, “Farm workers are not anyone’s constituency in Congress.”

The income of Florida’s farm workers, Professor Barry reports, buys less than half the goods it did in 1967. Moreover, the great majority of workers have no health insurance, no sick days, no paid vacations, no pensions. Their children, constantly on the move, are unlikely to complete the schooling that might break the migrant cycle. “This ain’t no life really,” says Pedro Silva.

‘Harvest of Shame’ focuses on plight of migrant workers
ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sequel to Edward R. Murrow’s famous Harvest of Shame documentary showing the deplorable conditions of migrant farm workers in 1960 found little has changed in 30 years.

Three decades ago, CBS cameras panned over a long line of tired, hungry farm workers waiting for bags of food. They had just lost their jobs to a killing freeze.

Public Broadcasting Service shot the same scene, this time outside the National Guard Armory in Homestead, Fla., following a deadly Christmas freeze that dropped temperatures to 22 degrees in the Everglades.

The only notable difference is that one scene was filmed in black and white and the other taped in color.

Murrow’s report shocked the nation by showing that many Americans ate because of people who earned miserable wages and had no sick pay, vacations and unemployment benefits or disability pay. On top of that, the migrant workers for the most part lived in squalid housing.

In Houston, PBS’ Frontline series will air New Harvest, Old Shame at 9 p.m. tonight on Channel 8. It is the story of Pedro Silva’s family on the roads and in the fields of rural America as they move from an Indiana bunkhouse to a trailer at the Everglades Labor Camp.

“Even nature is against them,” said the producer Hector Galán. “This year they faced heavy rains in Indiana that cut crop yields in half, Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina which left them with no work and the freeze in Florida.”

Galán located Pedro Silva and his wife Reina in late November and followed him with an assistant and a photographer as the extended family’s six-vehicle convoy headed south, stopping at highway rest areas to eat, wash and sleep.

“What would have been a two-day trip turned into a six-day trip,” Galán said. “Pedro’s truck broke down twice. Finally he had to leave it behind because he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. Reina’s nephew became ill. It was one hardship after another.”

Reina Silva’s sister, María Martinez, said she wanted to be filmed to give farmers a hard look at the way their workers live.

“If all farm workers in this country stopped working, the farmers would have to let their fruits and vegetables rot in the fields,” she said. “They have to realize that when we make money, they make money. When we eat, they eat.”

The Dallas Drug War Press Review
‘Frontline’ examines ‘The Dallas Drug War’
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, April 4, 1989
by Daniel Ruth

In recent weeks, the mayhem and violence on the streets of Washington, DC have led to the city’s dubious distinction of being called the nation’s “murder capitol.”

Although Washington has been rocked by this bloody label, the city is hardly alone in trying to combat the epidemic of drug-related violence. That’s the focus of “The Dallas Drug War” a disquieting “Frontline” documentary, airing from 9 to 10 tonight on WTTW-Channel 11.

Last year, the Dallas police made more than 10,000 drug arrests. They barely scratched the surface of the problem.

Tonight’s “Frontline” on PBS examines the effect of virtually uncontrolled drug trafficking in what was once the proud neighborhood of South Dallas, a predominately black area of the city, where residents have struggled to combat the pushers, the users, and the nightly gunfire.

Dorothy and Theodore Davis, two schoolteachers, bought their house in South Dallas 15 years ago. They have reared two daughters who are now in college. It’s a lovely, warm home. But as “The Dallas Drug War” illustrates, once night falls, the neighborhood turns into a genuine war zone.

In the Davis living room, “Frontline” captures the nightly sound of gunfire. And using a night lens, the PBS crew photographs drug dealers openly conducting their business on the street outside the Davis home.

In the South Dallas area alone, police officials have staged more than 1,000 narcotics raids. But it is frustrating work. The dealers, most of them distributing crack, are known to operate out of more than 400 drug houses throughout the community. At least 70 drug-related murders have occurred in the past two years.

“Frontline” follows Mrs. Davis as she continues a frustrating battle to force the city to concentrate more resources on the drug crisis in South Dallas. It is a war that has been stymied on many fronts.

Like all major, urban police departments, the Dallas force has limited resources to fight an expanding problem. And like all major cities, Dallas finds itself embroiled in racial strife.

Over the years, the Dallas Police Department often has been the target of charges concerning excessive brutality toward blacks. During the past 15 years, more than 100 citizens have been shot and killed by Dallas police officers - a national record.

In 1988, meanwhile, five Dallas police officers were killed in the line of duty.

In trying to go after drug dealers in South Dallas, police officers frequently stop and question anyone on the streets who looks suspicious. The situation is tailor-made for conflict, especially since 80 percent of the cops patrolling South Dallas are white.

Consequently, some residents of South Dallas have attempted to deal directly with the drug problem in their neighborhood, led by the Muslim community in general and Fahim Minkah in particular.

Minkah has formed a community group called AA-Man (Afro-American Men Against Narcotics). The group frequently pickets outside known crack houses and often directly attempts to break up drug deals taking place on the street.

It’s a large and dangerous job. There are an estimated 4,000 crack addicts in South Dallas, “Frontline” reports. And there’s only one rehabilitation center.

“The Dallas Drug War” is a revealing, haunting look at a neighborhood fighting to save itself.

And tonight’s program once more underscores the fact that “Frontline” remains one of the finest sources of serious documentaries to be found anywhere in television.

Shakedown in Santa Fe Press Review

The Hellhole at Santa Fe
While reformers fight, the war goes on at New Mexico prison
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, February 23, 1988
by Michael Dougan

Television is most valuable and often most entertaining, when it takes viewers into places they cannot, or - being in their right minds - would not, choose to go. Places where violence is systemic, where death is as common as lunch. Places like the New Mexico penitentiary in Santa Fe.

This is no ordinary house of detention. The Santa Fe pen is a particularly unpleasant hellhole that erupted in 1980 into an orgy of horror and mayhem that still disturbs penal administrators nationwide. Twelve guards were beaten, stabbed and raped. Thirty-three inmates were tortured to death by their fellow cons. The prison was destroyed. Damage exceeded $80 million.

Now, as detailed on “Frontline” at 10 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 9, Santa Fe’s maximum security institution has become a battleground of a different sort, where prisoners, guards, the warden, federal courts, and the ACLU fight tooth-and-nail over the destiny of those incarcerated. As host Judy Woodruff notes, Santa Fe stands as a symbol of an ongoing “struggle for control of America’s prisons” between law and order proponents and civil libertarians.

And the beat goes on. Gangs behind bars maintain drug, gambling, extortion and prostitution rackets. Fear is the watchword. Suspected snitches continue to die.

“Shakedown in Santa Fe” is at once fascinating and repelling. This is not a show for the kiddies. Every scene vibrates with subsurface terror. Even the language seems violent. Guards and inmates don’t use Sunday school terminology; obscenities echo throughout the interviews.

On the other hand, if your young’un is contemplating a life of crime, this could prove instructive. Prison is no place for boys who want to have fun.

“Anybody who walks in here and says he’s not afraid is lying,” says correctional officer Ignacio Marujo in the opening seconds.

Marujo’s captain, Marcella Armijo, assumes a dejected look and adds: “We might as well give the keys to the inmates, they’re running it anyway.”

Armijo is a particularly fascinating character. One of the first female correctional officers to work in a maximum security facility, she is now the boss guard, employing a combination of patented toughness and feminine sensitivity to keep a lid on the joint. “I like a lot of the inmates here,” she says, “but I would never go as far as to say I trust them.”

Nor, clearly, do they have ample faith in each other. Much time in the program is spent with William Jack “Two-Pack” Stephens, a “professional convict” who was charged with two of the most brutal murders (one a beheading) during the 1980 riot. Two-Pack, and alert, articulate 38-year-old who authorities believe leads the “Aryan Brotherhood” gang, spells out his proud code of prison ethics: He doesn’t snitch and he doesn’t rape children.

What a guy. With a straight face, Two-Pack complains that it’s hard to find cons “who have a moral standard.”

Warden George Sullivan, who resigned in disgust during the filming of this documentary, speaks at length about “predatory behavior” on the cell block and how court decisions stemming from the riot make him powerless to protect his “reasonable inmates.” Local ACLU lawyers contrarily insist that the danger level at Santa Fe is a direct result of heavy-handed, inequitable treatment of the prisoners.

Both may be right. “Frontline” takes no point of view and offers no solutions. This intriguing documentary leaves viewers staring into a field of gray, a world so frightful and alien that standard concepts of right and wrong are relativistically rendered and, therefore, meaningless. It’s a bizarre, almost titillating, experience. “Shakedown in Santa Fe” will haunt you like a bad dream.

Does prison reform mean less control?
NEW MEXICAN, February 24, 1988
by Melissa Adams

The issue of who controls the Penitentiary of New Mexico - the inmates or the state corrections department - will be addressed tonight on Frontline, a national television series that airs at 9 p.m. on KNME - 5 in Alburquerque.

“Shakedown in Santa Fe” examines the state pen since the 1980 riot, which left 33 inmates dead and 12 guards beaten, stabbed and sodomized. Since that time, two guards and 12 inmates have been killed and four wardens have run the institution.

Hector Galán of Austin, Texas, produced and wrote the show, which includes interviews with former prison officials, correctional officers and inmates.

Galán’s show examines the effect of the reform movement following the riot, including the Duran Consent Decree, a federal court-sanctioned agreement between state officials and inmates that governs portions of prison life.

“The question the show raises is how much reform is too much reform?” Galán said in an interview from Washington, DC. “Have we gone too far in terms of inmate’s rights?”

Galán questions whether the warden and the guards or the inmates and their lawyers are in control. “While there is no question that the federal consent decree has made a difference, many of the changes seen have been superficial. It is still an extremely violent institution. Is the federal government really helping or hurting the prison?”

Galán said that 36 state prisons operate under consent decrees. His documentary, he said, raises the issue of what should be done. “It’s a real dilemma,” he said.

Galán spent 30 days last summer inside the penitentiary conducting interviews and observing life inside its walls. Former Warden George Sullivan granted his crew access. “We could really feel the pulse of the place. It was incredible,” Galán said.

Sullivan resigned while the crews were still working.

The documentary centers on William Jack “Two Pack” Stephens, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder and Capt. Marcella Armijo, who resigned while the crews were still working.

Much of the life at the pen is seen through Stephens’ eyes, Galán said. “Stephens is a convict and he abides by a convict’s code, which is more powerful than any laws or rules laid down by any administration,” Galán said.

He said that while many guards and officials agree with most of the Duran Consent Decree, they are concerned with the disciplinary portions that many think are not tough enough. Some correctional officers believe the reform means less control and more danger, he said.

Vaquero: The Forgotten Cowboy Press Review

The Vanishing Vaquero
Film pays tribute to a fading breed of traditional hero
SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, November 7, 1987
by John Rosales

No old West legend has so captured the American imagination as the cowboy.

Ten-gallon hats, chaps and six-shooters are woven into the fabric of the Old West as are herding cattle and taming wild horses.

In the video documentary, “Vaquero: The Forgotten Cowboy,” we learn that American-blooded cowboy heroes were successors to a tradition started by Spanish-blooded vaqueros.

Producer-director Hector Galán introduced us to the current - and maybe the final - generation of the vaquero.

“I did this documentary to pay homage not only to the vaqueros of today, but also to those of the past who never received their due recognition,” said Galán, a native of Lubbock who now lives in Austin. “If we don’t capture the vaquero now, we never will, except in books.”

Mexican-American cowboys began their trade almost 400 years ago, shortly after the conquistadores from Spain brought horses to North America.

“This is a piece of Americana few even know exists,” Galán said. “It is important that we realize the contribution Hispanics have made to United States history and culture.”

The 28-minute video, premiering Sunday at the Guadalupe Theater’s CineFestival, includes interviews with several vaqueros, archival footage, old photographs and other materials.

The initial images and commentary help the saga of its subject - the fading West.

As if from a romantic John Ford western, ranch hands on horseback herd cattle from the prairie to the corral for branding.

But the talk from ranch bosses is that pickups and helicopters do the job faster and cheaper. “Roundups that took days can be accomplished in a few hours,” says one boss.

“What they’re doing is outliving their time,” said Chris Hellen, a ranch manager. “Their purpose and place in the cattle industry is fading.”

High labor costs, less demand for beef and low cattle prices have accelerated the process.

The screen is filled with visual pleasures, particularly the faces of Samuel Torres, Chanate and Wanche Alarcon, which are as dramatically contoured and weather beaten as the land that has sustained their livelihood.

Galán’s intent in the story was to focus on more than just the bond between vaqueros and their ranching skills.

“The land has its own beauty,” he said. “I wanted to make a portrait of the people, the work they do and the land, and the interaction of the three.”

Today, only a handful of vaqueros continue the tradition of ranching as a way of life, says narrator Henry Darrow, the actor who played Manolito in “The High Chaparral” television series.

Most of the video is shot “In the heart of cattle country - Hebbronville,” south of San Antonio and 54 miles from the Mexico border. The city is 90 percent Mexican American.

“In its heyday, it was the largest cattle shipping center in the country,” Darrow explains.

We visit El Sordo, one of the last traditional working ranches in the country, where a ranch hand apprentice earns $425 a month.

Here, the day begins with eggs and tortillas served at 4 a.m.

We meet three generations of the Alarcon family, including Rene and his brother Kiko.

Rene studies ranching science at high school. Kiko has opted to work in law enforcement because “the vaquero doesn’t have a future.”

What they both share, however, is compassionate respect and admiration for the vaquero.

Galán’s documentary is a work of cultural anthropology that took two years to research.