The Chicano Film Pioneer You've Likely Never Heard Of

In this week's newsletter, we’re going from the Queen of Tejano's dazzling biopic to the gritty borderlands of Texas with a little Chicano film history in between. You can find out where to catch “Selena” on the big screen, stream Jesús Salvador Treviño’s “Raíces de sangre,” and then meet the filmmaker behind the first Chicano fiction feature, “Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!” Fifty years after its release, Efraín Gutiérrez’s movie is finally getting the attention it deserves. I spoke with Gutiérrez about making the film, losing it, and the unlikely journey that brought it back.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

Directed by Gregory Nava, the classic film “Selena” traces the rise of Selena Quintanilla, from a young performer singing with her family in Texas to her emergence as the Queen of Tejano music. Jennifer Lopez stars as Selena, with Edward James Olmos as her father, Abraham Quintanilla, and Lupe Ontiveros as Yolanda Saldívar. The film captures Selena’s journey through vibrant concert performances, recording studios, colorful costumes, and intimate family moments. As her popularity grows, Selena navigates the demands of fame while staying connected to her roots, her family, and the music that made her a star.

Screening on Sept 4 in Tyler, TX; Sept 5 in San Rafael, CA; Sept 8 in Los Angeles, CA; Sept 12 in Tulare, CA; and Sept 17 in Morgan Hill & Gilroy, CA.

Conceived by Mexican American filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño, “Raíces de sangre” (“Roots of Blood”) is a bilingual border drama about Chicano and Mexican laborers fighting to bridge the U.S.-Mexico divide. In Socorro, Texas, a newly graduated lawyer joins friends at the Barrio Unido community center to organize a binational union. Across the border, mostly female workers toil in a dangerous maquiladora producing garments for a U.S.-owned company. As tensions rise over wages and working conditions, organizers on both sides struggle to unite the workers. Shot in 1976 and released in 1978, Treviño’s social-realist drama was produced by Mexico’s state-run CONACINE.

Streaming on YouTube.

Although cinema as a commercial art form is 120 years old, American Latino directors are relatively new to the game, with the earliest known feature-length fiction movie released only 50 years ago. Before that, in the sixties, Chicanos mostly produced civil rights-themed documentaries. That all changed when Efraín Gutiérrez, an eccentric San Antonio-born self-taught filmmaker, rented a theater in Texas to screen his first production, "Please, Don't Bury Me Alive!" in 1976. The movie's historic nature was emblazoned on the poster, proclaiming it as the "First Chicano Feature Film."

Gutiérrez, 30 years old at the time, played the lead — young and aimless Alejandro Hernandez (Alex for short). After his brother's funeral (a vet who died in Vietnam), Alex drifts through his days drinking at house parties, smoking grass, brawling with white dudes who hurl racial slurs at him, and cruising around town with his girlfriend while philosophizing on the daily struggles of Chicanos. Gutiérrez quite looks the part of an early seventies drop-out with his overgrown shaggy hair, scraggly goatee, requisite bell-bottom pants, and a cigarette dangling from his lips; you can almost see the weed and tobacco stench wafting off of him. The character Alex dabbles in petty crime, breaking into cars and occasionally mugging gabachos, but what starts as small-time trouble soon escalates when he tries his hand at drug trafficking. His new pursuits don't end well.

Mexican Americans, hungry to see themselves on screen, showed up in droves at the theater. Through a fully grassroots marketing and release campaign, Gutiérrez estimates the box office receipts totaled at least $300,000. Still, after signing a bad deal with a distributor and handing over all the prints, his movie went unseen for decades.

Enter UCLA film professor Chon Noriega. He read about Gutiérrez's movie in Gary D. Keller's 1985 book, "Chicano Cinema," but couldn't find a copy of "Please, Don't Bury Me Alive!" nor locate its director. Every year, he traveled to San Antonio's CineFestival and asked if anyone knew Gutiérrez's whereabouts. Nothing panned out until one day in 1996 when he got a fateful phone call. "I came home, and there was a message on my phone machine, my cassette recorder. 'You have one message,' and I play it. And he's going, 'Hey, Chon Noriega, this is Efraín Gutiérrez. I hear you're looking for me.' Chills run down my back. I thought, 'Oh my god, he's found me,'" Noriega shared in a recent phone interview.

When he called back to tell Gutiérrez he was searching for the film, he got a response that set off alarm bells. Gutiérrez told him, "I found a print of 'Please, Don't Bury Me Alive.'" And I've shown it three times, and the reel has only broken once, but we spliced it back together." Noriega, worried about the integrity of the decades-old film stock, picked up the phone. "I called the chair of my department, who was also the head of the UCLA Film & Television Archive at the time, and I told him about it. He said, 'Call him right back and tell him, 'Don't show that film again!' He'll destroy it. Bring it here, and we will preserve it.'" Gutiérrez agreed to hand over the reels but insisted on driving from Texas to California instead of trusting a shipping company with his precious cargo.

And so began the process of preserving the film, digitizing it, and advocating for its director's rightful place in cinematic history. Archivists with the federal government concurred with Noriega and, in 2014, inducted "Please, Don't Bury Me Alive!" into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the movie's theatrical release, I spoke to Efraín Gutiérrez. He recounted his life and childhood marked by discrimination, what drove him to make the first Chicano fiction film, and his choice to have the characters speak in both English and Spanish.