Singing Our Way to Freedom

Twelve-year-old Mexican-American Marcos (Jose Alcala) recalls the hardships of the previous year, reflecting on the arduous trek his migrant-worker family made from Texas to the Midwest during harvest season. Along the way, Marcos learns plenty about the harsh realities of bigotry and the power of family in America of the 1950s. The coming-of-age Chicano drama is based on Tomas Rivera's semiautobiographical 1971 novella.

On Jan. 5, 1931, Mexican-American students were barred from attending their local elementary school. The parents took the school district to court.

Using rare historical footage, vintage musical recordings, and interviews with 88-year-old Pedro J. Gonzalez and his wife, this film chronicles Gonzalez’s long and colorful life, from his early days with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, to his career as a popular radio personality in Los Angeles in the 1930s, to the controversial court case that sent him to San Prison, a victim of the repressive forces operating against the Chicano/Mexicano community during that period.

Just before dawn on March 9, 1916, a band of Mexican revolutionaries loyal to General Francisco “Pancho” Villa crossed the border into the United States and attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Within a matter of hours, seventeen Americans and 67 Mexicans lay dead. The next day, President Woodrow Wilson announced the formation of the Punitive Expedition under the command of General John “Blackjack” Pershing. Within three months over 150,000 U.S. National guardsmen and Army regulars would be mobilized, in what was the largest troop deployment in the United States since the Civil War. “The Hunt for Pancho Villa” recounts the events that brought the U.S. and Mexico to the brink of war in the early part of this century.