Latino Americans Pittsburgh is a video documentary series aimed to represent the Latino community in the Pittsburgh region. The work consists of a monthly series of video portraits featuring Latino Americans living in Pittsburgh sharing their immigrant experience through their own voices, personalities, activities, hopes, and dreams of life and recognition. These portraits grow and develop as new members of the community participate and introduce, contextual, content. The portrayal of Latino Americans life through their own voices empowers, educates, promotes, and contributes to recognize a humanistic common sense that can help to promote social understanding and cultural knowledge towards a diverse and more inclusive society.
At this critical moment, we consider urgent to listen, understand, and provide constructive visibility to the Latino community and their families who, like any other minority group, is living with the threat of racism and social prejudice being promoted by their own government. We believe that their fair representation could educate and sustain true values and ideals from the Latino community in order to encourage hope and understanding about the relevance of their historical contribution to society; emphasize the relevance of social integration and multiculturalism in our culture and, at the same time, help to promote a positive sense of identity within the Latino community in the Pittsburgh region. The artistic consideration, honest visibility, and truthful awareness of the Pittsburgh Latino community is a valuable sign of evolving humanity in a more inclusive imagined future.
Latino Americans in Pittsburgh is produced by Casa San José, Andres Tapia-Urzua, and made possible thanks to a Just Arts Grant provided by The Heinz Endowment Foundation.
Casa San José is a community resource center that advocates for and empowers Latinos by promoting integration and self-sufficiency. Their vision is to model a strong culture of acceptance and integration in which immigrants and other newcomers are treated with dignity, respect, and kindness and can freely preserve and celebrate their unique cultures while adapting to their new lives in the Greater Pittsburgh area.
Andres Tapia-Urzua / ATU is a filmmaker and multimedia artist practicing in video, music, performance and installation. Fusing aesthetics, theory and political issues, his work frequently explores the liminality of an identity in constant intersection between culture and technology. Tapia-Urzua offers us a poignant and fascinating look at contemporary society where social alienation, high-tech environments and the poetics of globalization are represented in sharp and accessible ways. His art also considers the concept of cultural hybridity, recognizing the current exchange, bond and tension among different societies after complex relationships of colonial dependency in coexistence.
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