Blood In Blood Out with Jimmy Santiago Baca and Jimmy Patiño
Sitting down with the screenwriter of a Mexican American epic
I promised you more and bigger things were coming and today is absolutely one of those days. For the very first time, we have a filmmaker on the Historians At The Movies Podcast and few films have more cultural importance than the one we’re talking about today: Blood In Blood Out with screenwriter and poet Jimmy Santiago Baca.
If you’re not familar with the film, it is the epic story of three Chicano relatives as they begin their adulthood in a Los Angeles gang in early 70s, and follows their diverging paths over the next decade. It is an epic film based on Baca’s own life that offers commentary on the roles of Chicano lives, extended family, women, gangs, policing, drugs, and the carceral system during the time. Released in 1993 first as Bound by Honor before being retitled, the movie fits in conversation with others of its time such as American Me, Boyz N The Hood, and Friday. But probably no other film captures the lives of Mexican Americans in this way. The film struggled to find an audience at first, but quickly found its way into homes across the US via video, DVD, and streaming. Shea Serrano, writer for The Ringer, often calls this film the best movie ever made. I’ve embedded a trailer for the film below:
One of the things I’ve tried to do with HATM over the past six years is reach far and wide to tell different kinds of stories. This film and podcast are the perfect example of that. I like learning different histories and lately I’ve become fascinated with immigration histories written by powerhouse scholars such as Natalia Molina, Julio Capó, Jr., Sarah McNamara, and Carly Goodman.1 Knowing the film’s importance to so many people, I reached out to Mr. Baca and was surprised when he reached back out and agreed to do the pod.
This is our first filmmaker on the pod (there are more coming—soon), and I really wanted to do this right. While I have an interest in immigration history, I am far from an expert. So I invited Jimmy Patiño on the pod to talk to Jimmy Santiago Baca with me. Jimmy is a phenomenal scholar and Professor of Chicano & Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. For me, it was a privilege just to be in the room as both me spoke about Mexican American history, the challenges each has confronted, and the film’s legacy over the past three decades.
I am so incredibly happy with this conversation and the direction that HATM is going. So I hope you enjoy it too. Links to the pod are right here:
About our guests
Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning American poet and writer of Chicano descent. While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, he learned to read and began to turn his life around, eventually emerging as a prolific artist of the spoken and written word. He is a winner of the prestigious International Award for his memoir, “A Place to Stand,” the story of which is now also a documentary by the same title. He is also the screenwriter of Blood In Blood Out.
Jimmy Patiño seeks to critically excavate alternative imaginings of democratic practice among aggrieved communities in the midst of global capitalism. Concentrating on Mexican-origin and broader Latino/a/x communities at the U.S. Mexico Border and in major U.S. urban settings, his work attempts to dialog about the ways that concepts of race, gender and nation create hegemonic class disparities AND formulate an array of identities that mobilize social movements and initiate class struggles on multiple fronts. His first book, Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego asserts that important contingents of Mexican-origin activists in the U.S. engaged, across generations, the crisis over the “illegal alien“ through attempts at organizing the Mexican-origin community across differences of national affiliation and citizenship status. Focusing on San Diego due to its vital positioning as both urban and border space where consistent migration and race-based border policing has occurred, the project illuminates a serious challenge to deportation-oriented immigration policies between 1968 and 1986 through the ideological prism of Chicano self-determination. He is now working on a number of other projects, including a study that investigates the conceptualization and historical practice of solidarity primarily through the lens of African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican sites of struggle in the twentieth century. Important to this investigation are the ways regional differences and geo-historical contexts facilitated articulations of Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic solidarities and how these articulations led to counter hegemonic activities and theories of revolution across local, national and transnational boundaries. Through a relational and comparative framework, the study will ground these analyses in historical activities in the Midwest, Texas, California and New York in the burgeoning Black and Brown Power movements at the mid to late 20th century. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies.
Alright so that’s it for now. This episode is our first foray into talking with filmmakers and we are hoping to continue to expand. If you want to help, please leave us reviews on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And when this hits social media tomorrow, retweet it share it, whatever, and help us get this community into new faces. Finally, paid subscriptions will help us buy advertising for the very first time as we push into the second half of 2024. (I’ll put another link below.) But regardless, thank you for being here and being part of all of this.
Jason
If you’re ordering through UNC Press for anything, use the code 01HATM30 for 30% off. I don’t get any compensation, but we set up a permanent discount for the HATM community.