I was in Fresno in California's great Central Valley this weekend to visit friends, talk to prospective sponsors and do a small screening of our Pablo and Virginia go to Luján movie. Fermin and I are discussing production options for a new Pan American Dreams project called Central Valley Stories because he produces fotonovellas and telenovellas for public education and political campaigns.
Ray (from our Board) and Claudia put me up in their lakeside home. We had a wonderful weekend that ended with a Sunday morning brunch screening of Pablo and Virginia, which my largely bi-lingual audience loved. They understood the movie in ways I wouldn't have anticipated, even reveling in the Argentine accents and jokingly imitating their pronunciation.
Friday night there was a going away party for a friend of Claudia's. At the end of the night, I found myself in a small group with Fermin, and he shared his own incredibly colorful Central Valley Story with me.
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His mother was a flamenco dancer with the famous Pilar Rioja dance company headquartered in Torreón, Mexico. Madame Rioja, who was born of Spanish parents in Torreon, was an international star, written up in the New York Times and other leading publications of the day for her innovative approach to what the Times called "the flamenco idiom," in which she mixed elements of Bolero, court dances and folklorica with intermittent readings of Baroque Spanish poetry. The Torreón dance troupe was a sensation, touring worldwide with some regularity and performing often in New York until quite recently.
Many of Fermin's earliest memories growing up in Torreón are of being the backstage center of attention at his mother's rehearsals and performances, where statuesque female dancers gently jostled him in the air and held him close to their luxuriant bosoms while cooing and fussing over him.
He delighted in the attention, but at a very early age he also began to realize that all was not well between his free spirited mother and his very traditional father. The father never came fully to terms with his wife's lifestyle as a professional dancer, with the insistently odd hours, the endless rehearsals, the colorful and sometimes flamboyant coterie of characters surrounding the dance troupe and the inevitable far flung tours that took his wife far from home for long periods.
These early experiences gave Fermin a finely tuned appreciation and unique insight into women. He reveled in their company, eventually wandering as a young man from Torreón to the colorful resorts and discos of the Mexican coast, where be worked for a summer as a poolside cocktail waiter by day and partied in the lively discos at night.
The next year he was off to Mexico City for university. He began working towards his degree in engineering, landing a job after graduation as an engineer with a prestigious design firm in the Capitol. Through a fluke incident that thrust him into the media spotlight as a last minute replacement for the company's public relations head at a press conference, he quickly became the lead corporate spokesperson and began studying communications. This led inexorably to work as a TV reporter. Within five years, he was a well known television news personality in Mexico City.
Just as his career in Mexico was beginning to blossom, his grandmother in south Florida contacted him to say that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was offering her grandchild US residency. All he had to do was live in the U.S. for a few years. It was an agonizing decision. His inclination was to stay in Mexico, but his grandmother, who had patiently toiled for years at work beneath her skills and education to become a U.S. resident, like many in her generation, insisted that he take the offer from the INS. It would open doors and bring opportunity on both sides of the border, she said, reminding him that he gave up nothing immediate in legal terms by accepting and exploring the offer.
He did accept, and via Florida and New York, he eventually landed in California's vast Central Valley, where he became a well known Latino TV anchor and commentator living in Fresno. Interestingly, he has never married, although he has a daughter with whom he is particularly close.
Everyone spent the night at Ray and Claudia's, waking Saturday morning to Claudia's buffet style spread of pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausages, steaming pots of coffee and nostalgic music of the '70's and '80's on a cable TV station playing throughout the house. An occassional kayak or canoe glided past on the sunlit lake outside. It is good to be here among friends.
