‘BREAK OF DAWN’--A BILINGUAL EXPERIMENT : A Risk-Taking Film Mixes English and Spanish to Realistically Re-Tell a Story of Latinos

It is 1933 in a scene midway through “Break of Dawn,” but the moment is hauntingly contemporary.

Pedro J. Gonzalez, the hard-living hero, steps up to a microphone ringed with radio station KMPC-AM’s call letters. He nonchalantly buttons his shirt cuffs. At first pensive, then progressively passionate, Gonzalez, played by Mexican folk singer Carlos Chavez, begins to address his Latino audience in Spanish:

“Dicen que esta campana de deportaciones es para conseguir empleos. . . . (“They say that this deportation campaign is to secure jobs for North American citizens. It’s a trick. It isn’t true. It’s really nothing more than a racist attack against all Mexicans. We are neither illegals or undesirables,” Gonzalez says angrily. “They say that we came to this house and (that) it is not our home. It’s the complete opposite. Like it or not, this is our home and we have every right to stay here.”)

Gonzalez picks up his guitar, strums a first austere chord and, with his rich tenor voice, begins his recently composed “El Corrido del Deportado” (“The Deportee’s Ballad”):

Adios paisanos queridos,. . .

Beloved countryman farewell,

They are about to deport us.

But none of us are bandits,

But none of us are bandits

We only came here to work.

In about a minute, the movie gives a glimpse of the future: the birth of Spanish-language radio--and a painful episode from the past--the struggle of Gonzalez and others against his unjust imprisonment on a bogus rape charge and a government campaign in which as many as 600,000 Mexicans, some of them citizens, were deported.

Those themes put “Break of Dawn” in that small but growing number of films that tell the stories of historic Latino characters. A prime example is “La Bamba,” the story of Chicano rock ‘n’ roller Ritchie Valens’ budding success and early death. It’s scheduled for a major release July 24 by Columbia Pictures. Another is “The Milagro Beanfield War,” directed by Robert Redford and scheduled for fall release by Universal Pictures.

But “Break of Dawn’s” heavily bilingual script--about 40% of the dialogue is in Spanish--qualifies this film, which could be released in the fall, as a risk taker reaching for new levels of authenticity and the financial rewards of crossover audiences.

The film characters engage in a fluid linguistic dialect, switching from Spanish to English and combinations thereof, in an attempt to convey how Latinos actually speak and a sense of the subjective worlds they inhabit.

The thread linking all this cultural interaction together are the remarkable roles the 92-year-old Gonzalez has lived--from Gen. Francisco Villa’s telegraph operator to pioneering radio programmer to jailed folk hero.

This latest experiment in bilingual film making, says director Isaac Artenstein, goes literally and figuratively a step beyond Robert M. Young’s “Alambrista” (1977) and, most recently, Gregory Nava’s historically important “El Norte,” the 1984 film about a Mayan brother and sister’s harrowing journey from Guatemala to Los Angeles.

“What I tried to do was penetrate this bilingual reality,” said Artenstein, a Mexican of Jewish ancestry who spent his youth in Tijuana. “ ‘El Norte’ dealt with two refugees coming in conflict with the hostile Anglo world. That’s their story. In a sense, ‘Break of Dawn’ isn’t simply the story of an immigrant, it is the story of this metropolis and the cultural and historical reality this character unlocks after he gets here.”

The premise is ambitious. Artenstein argues that Los Angeles, and by extension Southwestern history, can’t be fully understood without a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the region’s Mexican and Latino influences, its dialogue of cultures and languages.

How far this stance will take the film is another matter. “El Norte,” one of the first U.S.-made movies with a large dose of Spanish dialogue to receive widespread recognition, was a moderate box-office success. Cinecom, the distributor, said that the movie was made for about $200,000 and brought about $4 million in gross revenues.

Artenstein answers that “El Norte,” as well as rapidly growing Latino audiences, had to be some of the factors that brought the Hollywood studios to their senses.

This fall Universal Pictures will release “The Milagro Beanfield War”--the Robert Redford and Moctezuma Esparza co-produced movie (with Redford directing) about a Latino farmer’s fight for land and water. Universal and Disney Studios have also made it a policy to simultaneously release significant numbers of films with Spanish dubbing in a bid to reach Latino audiences, such as Sylvester Stallone’s “Over the Top” and Steven Spielberg’s “An American Tail.”

Columbia Pictures is doing the same for “La Bamba” and looking closely at distributing “Break of Dawn,” said Jude Pauline Eberhard, the producer. Eberhard said Columbia will decide once the movie’s in subtitled form.

She wouldn’t disclose the cost of making the nearly five-year project financed by a joint partnership of several San Diego-area investors, except to say that is in the seven-figure range.

But she’s confident subtitles won’t relegate the film to the smaller art-house circuit. She gives two reasons: The film’s action attempts to explain the dialogue even when it’s in Spanish, a language that already is reality for many Southwesterners. But most importantly, there’s Gonzalez himself.

“We have a story about a man and his wife that is universal,” said Artenstein. “We didn’t start out to make a point about language and history, but a compelling story about adversity. The story is so dramatic that it carries these other elements in a natural way.”

Gonzalez is always eager to show the trace of a bullet wound on his pale chest.

Like the faded photos of stern-looking Mexican revolutionaries that cover the study of his run-down, two-bedroom home in San Ysidro just blocks away from the U.S.-Tijuana border, his scar is as good a pretext as any for an intriguing story.

Sipping a black, silty coffee served by his wife, Maria, the gray-haired Gonzalez explains how he was wounded by U.S. Army troops while escaping with Gen. Francisco (Pancho) Villa’s men to Mexican territory on horseback after a failed bank robbery in Columbus, N.M.

History made much of Villa’s desperate grab for cash to finance his waning revolutionary cause, but for Gonzalez it was the final chapter of an adventure that had started years earlier, when, as a boy growing up in his dusty Chihuahuan village, he had dreamed of becoming a telegraph operator. Eventually he did.

In 1910, at the start of the century’s first full-scale revolution, Villa gave Gonzalez no other choice: become his telegraph operator or face the firing squad.

After the fighting was over, Gonzalez, like thousands of other Mexicans displaced by years of civil war, migrated north, eventually settling here.

This is where “Break of Dawn” picks up Gonzalez’s story and his own ballad, “El Lavaplatos” (“The Dishwasher”):

Sonado en mi juventud . . .

Dreamed of in my youth

Was this Hollywood movie star,

And, so many days later

I came to visit Hollywood.

The film opens with Gonzalez and wife (played by Maria Rojo, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses) driving their jalopy through a U.S. border crossing under a drenching rain. It’s the late 1920s and the border guards aren’t interested in keeping immigrants out.

Years pass, and Gonzalez auditions for KMPC’s live radio variety hour in Los Angeles. But after the station manager sends him away because he sings in Spanish, Gonzalez returns with something he does respect--hard cash from the sale of Spanish-language commercials.

The station manager’s marketing instincts lead him to give Gonzalez his own show. It is a two-hour program starting at 4 a.m., featuring his own musical group, “Los Madrugadores” (“The Early Risers”). The show corners the Latino audience and an untapped source of revenue.

But Gonzalez’s sway with the Latino public, his reputation as a former revolutionary and his on-the-air opposition of the U.S. Department of Labor’s “Operation Deportation” get him in trouble with District Attorney Kyle Mitchell.

The corrupt prosecutor, played by John Henry Schroeder, who had been re-elected after buying political ads on Gonzalez’s program while stoking the anti-Mexican sentiments of Anglo voters, turns against Gonzalez because he fears him.

Mitchell asks at one point, “What if the crazy (deejay) told every crazy Mexican to make gasoline bombs to throw at American homes?” But after failing to cancel his broadcasting license, Mitchell--who is on the take from the gambling bosses--succeeds the following year in framing Gonzalez on phony rape charges.

Despite a recantation by teen-ager Elsa Baron, who is played by Maria Rubell, Gonzalez gets 25 years in prison. Baron, it turns out, decides to tell the truth after the appeal deadline has passed.

Gonzalez goes to San Quentin and assumes the status of folk hero.

It’s not hard to see the similarity between “Break of Dawn’s” characters with the actual historical personalities of the period, the young film makers say.

Baron’s character is based on Dora Versus, the alleged rape victim whose testimony sent Gonzalez to jail. Mitchell’s character appears to be drawn from Buron Fitts, the district attorney whose office indicted Gonzalez in 1934. A public perception of Fitts having ties to the city’s gambling interests was believed to have contributed to his being recalled in 1938.

Anna Zacsek, the attorney who represented Gonzalez, would later defend Henry Leyvas and the 21 other Chicanos arrested in 1942 in the infamous Sleepy Lagoon case--the heart of Luis Valdez’ musical and movie renditions of “Zoot Suit.”

And Gonzalez himself, who went to jail the same year Fitts lost his job, was paroled and deported six years later. Despite Zacsek’s advice to Maria that she forget her husband and begin a new life, she refused to lose hope, she said, by waging a grass-roots campaign in Los Angeles to free her husband.

Finally, in 1971, the couple was permitted to return to the United States and become citizens, ending years of separation from their four U.S.-born children.

Due to budget constraints, however, some potentially dramatic scenes weren’t filmed. For example, Gonzalez claims that he endured five days of seemingly Dantean punishment for slugging the captain of the guards.

Gonzalez doesn’t mind talking about such experiences: “On the contrary, the more I talk about it, the better I feel. Because I want to get things out, for people to know who did what and who didn’t.” He also is willing to accept a scene in “Break of Dawn” where he is portrayed as a womanizer. In the film, the only alibi Gonzalez has for not being at the scene of the crime was that he was with another woman.

“It (the film) satisfies me, even if it hurts,” he said. “We are all sinners. Sometimes we are confused, but we have the right to confess,” he adds, a remark he appears to direct to his wife, who stands close by in the kitchen.

For him, his citizenship, an earlier PBS documentary about him made by Artenstein and Eberhard and now a movie version of his life are enough vindication.

But not for Artenstein. Today, he claims, many undocumented immigrants again find themselves swept up in a panic because they realize they cannot qualify for the recently enacted amnesty law and are therefore condemned to a perpetual underground existence.

“It’s extremely important for a democratic society to acknowledge that a wrong was done: The vicious racism directed against Latinos during the Depression. Unless there is a recognition of this, it’s as if nothing wrong ever happened. And if it happens again, there is no precedent the people can use to defend themselves.”