Last night my sister and I watched LaMission and it brought back memories of my youth and my father. La Mission stars Benjamin Bratt, Jeremy Ray Valdez and Erica Alexander. It takes place in the Mission District, my favorite San Francisco neighborhood. It is about a Mission District OG coming to terms with his violent tendencies and his son’s homosexuality.La Mission is rich in music, color, and flavor of the Bay. Even though the movie had a kind of serious tone I still giggled every time someone spoke. They said things like “What it do?”, “A’ight”, and “Know what I’m sayin’?”. To hear Benjamin Bratt say those things actually warmed my heart and put a smile on my face. This movie was to me so authentic to what I’ve seen and heard everyday growing up here in the Bay Area. When I watched the extras and found out that Benjamin and his brother Peter grew up in Glen Park which borders the Mission and that the character Che’ (Bratt) is based on a relative, I was like “Ahh soo!” it makes perfect sense now.
As I watched the movie I had memories of being with my father and his friend Uncle Juan. Though my Dad never owned a lowrider or wore bandanas, pendeltons or Ben Davis, he still introduced us to that culture unbeknownst to him I‘m sure. My Dad is an avid fan of Cheech and Chong. As children, those were the movies we bonded over. Cheech in a way (I think) was our introduction to the lowrider lifestyle. I can remember listening to the oldies in the front room of Uncle Juan’s victorian home in West Oakland with my Dad as they drank and smoked pot singing and telling each other stories of their youth and giving my sisters and I history lessons in music. Both oldies and jazz along with the latin music of our culture. Uncle Juan had an eclectic collection of music from Tito Puente and Celia Cruz to Vicente Fernandez and Thelonious Monk. So one minute your listening to Miles Davis then the next someone has made mention of someone else and a particular song and he’s up and flipping through the collection searching for that one piece by James Brown or War that you just HAVE to listen to. We also used to go to lots of festivals and concerts for Cinco de Mayo. There we got to experience Flaco Jimenez for the first time and Los Lobos and to see vatos, cholos and lowriders up close and personal.I guess the movie really reminded me of the beauty of my childhood. The closeness of my parents to their friends, the music, and the food that evokes such feeling of warmth and love just by the mere mention of it’s name or simply seeing it on the table in a movie.
Yes, there were bad times also. My Dad had that machismo that most men had back then. He wanted nothing to do with the homosexuals and he wasn’t too fond of asians either. He had to give up those ideas when he found that one of his closest friends was gay and when he found that one of my closest friends was asian. It was actually really confusing and hurtful at times to hear my father say the things he did back then because he and my mother never taught us to hate anyone.
So, for all the hurtful things my father ever said or did to my sisters and I, he also taught us to love everyone and all things. To be loyal and loving to family and friends and to treat them both as one and the same. I think I may be babbling a bit and may have lost track of what I was initially trying to say. Anyway, I just wanted to say that for me La Mission was a trip down memory lane full of rose colored memories of my father.
