Michael Sedano
In 1973, USC's El Centro Chicano hosted three days of raza artists performing their poetry and prose in El Festival de Flor y Canto. Several floricantos followed that year to put Chicano Literature on the U.S. literary map. The USC festival is the only one that was professionally videotaped. And then the tapes were lost until 2009.
That year, I tracked down the only two extant sets of videos from the first floricanto--outdated U-Matic ¾" videocassettes.
One set was in Kingsville, Texas, where librarians were uninterested in helping me physically locate cataloged tapes. Another set resided in a storeroom of the Tomás Rivera Memorial Library at UC Riverside. After numerous conversations with people at USC's Doheny Library, and ultimately the legal department, I got permission from a USC lawyer to digitize UCR's copies and make copies for distribution.
Juan Felipe Herrera was UCR faculty, a key conecta. Juan Felipe found the only U-Matic cassette player on campus. A few plugs and cables, two weeks in the storeroom, and the job was done (link). I returned the Festival de Flor y Canto 1973 to its USC home in 2010.
But the job was incomplete. Two performances had gone missing. I found exceedingly poor quality audiocassettes (link) of Roberto Vargas and José Montoya's readings, but the videotapes went out on interlibrary loan and got eaten by time.
I had such a beautiful goal of returning the floricanto to USC, but dissatisfaction burned in me at the absent videos. More important, I wondered what happened to the original source tapes?
Back in 1973, on my way to photograph a performance, I stuck my head into the production van and stared longingly at the 2" Ampex reel-to-reel video recorders I'd read about in my Annenberg coursework. The tape on those machines is what I wanted to get my hands on. Digitizing from 1st-generation tape would vastly improve the 3d-generation signals I'd worked. Plus, I would finally finish my goal of returning the floricanto--all the performers and all the stuff that landed on the cutting room floor--to USC. I was really interested in stuff seeming desultory then, that would have incredible value today.
The January 28, 2014 La Bloga-Tuesday announced my goal to find those original tapes. After all, I'd found almost all of the performances. If those originals existed, I would track them down. Three months ago, I got a phone call.
"Michael, this is Sy. I have the original tapes."
I always reasoned that the videotapes in Texas and UCR were produced by someone connected to El Centro, and marketed by them. The money wouldn't have been a lot, but it would have supported a lot of tardeadas at el centro, or personal fund-raising goals. I didn't ask, they wouldn't tell. UCR didn't have the invoices in their files--I checked.
That was all a ni modo under the bridge. Here is a lead to The Tapes!
I phone the man Sy got the tapes from. This fellow was always at the top of my list as the mysterious marketer. I was one step removed from being accurate. A fellow whose name I remembered, an insider I did not know back in 1973, had the tapes in his garage. He was dumping them and offered them to this other quondam insider.
Purportedly original tapes--the O.G.s of floricanto in the entire United States--were now in three locations. Sy had a reel. The middle fellow had a reel. The third fellow had two reels. Or so I heard.
Are they 2" tapes? Yes, 2" tapes. That's the only fact I thought I knew for sure.
Then the crucial question: Can you make copies?
Like the ¾" U-Matic media I worked with, I figured finding a machine to play 2" Ampex tape would be an expensive proposition. I'd have to go out glad-handing media people to ask for money to pay to digitize the originals. Or if I could collect the entire set, I'd see if Barbara Robinson at Doheny Library had a budget for the project?
Sy's son works in media. He'll do it. Problem casí solved, que no? Those tapes, that have been missing since 1973, have to make their way from a garage in wherever, to a garage in another town, to Sy's pad, to el hijo's studio.
I waited two months then called Sy last week to see if he'd collected all the tapes from both guys' garages. Yes. Not good news.
Sy reports these are not the original uncut material. Tom Reddin Productions, likely, ran off the original performances onto these tapes. Someone copies this second-generation material onto those U-Matics I digitized, then put the "original" tape into storage.
Roberto Vargas and José Montoya's performances? That's in Sy's hands now.
This is something good to understand: I'll never know. I'm as done with that project as I'll ever be, and I'm satisfied leaving it unfinished. It is what it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment