Hispanic Heritage Celebrated at SSU

In 1952, twenty-three year old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (later better known as Ernesto Che Guevara) just one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his last semester to accompany his twenty-nine year old biochemist friend Alberto Granado on his four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America starting from their home in Buenos Aires. Their quest is to see things they've only read about in books about the continent on which they live, and to finish that quest on Alberto's thirtieth birthday on the other side of the continent in the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. travels to Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico and Peru to discover the African influence on Latin America. He examines the shared legacy of colonialism and slavery in a region that imported ten times as many slaves as the United States, and kept them in bondage far longer. Gates finds that the people of African descent have had a massive influence on the history and culture of Latin America and the Caribbean, despite sometimes being forgotten or ignored.

A dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Eleven-year-old Ofelia comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather, a sadistic captain in General Franco's army, hunts down Republican guerrillas who refuse to give up the fight. The violent reality in which she lives merges seamlessly with a fantastical interior world when Ofelia meets a faun in a decaying labyrinth.

The central focus in Volver is a family of women: mother and grandmother Irene, her daughters Raimunda and Sole, and Raimunda's 14-year-old daughter Paula. Irene is dead: She died with the girls' father in a fire many years ago in their birth village in La Mancha. Raimunda lives in Madrid with Paula and her shiftless husband, who is malevolent, irrelevant, or absent. Separated Sole runs an unlicensed beauty parlor in her apartment. Their old aunt, Paula, still lives in the village and speaks about her sister Irene as if she were still alive. When the aunt dies, some things change, many things return, and Raimunda's troubles become extremely complicated. She bustles through them with passionate determination, a hard-working woman pulled in fifty directions, making a life for her family, reveling in every emotion but self-pity.

All he wants is to be a mariachi, like his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather before him. But the town he thinks will bring him luck brings only a curse of deadly mistaken identity. Forced to trade his guitar for a gun, the mariachi is playing for his life. A modern classic - check it out, yo.