My America... or Honk If You Love Buddha
Renee Tajima-Peña takes to the road to investigate questions about Asian-American identity.
Renee Tajima-Pena
Renee Tajima-Pena
Casts & Crew
Renee Tajima-Pena
Victor Wong
Also Directed by Renee Tajima-Pena
America Undercover goes to the Madison Hotel in the skid-row section of downtown Los Angeles and talks to some of the desperate people living there. It talks to a prostitute and heroin addict named Becky, a drug dealer and traveler names John, and an heavy drinking alcoholic named Jack Woodrow Wilson.
When ARMANDO and CARLOS PENA set off to carry their mother's ashes back to South Texas and reunite with their brothers, the road reveals more than they bargained for. Calavera Highway (Skeleton Highway), traces the odyssey of two brothers as they decipher their family's story-why their mother ROSA was outcast by her own family, and what happened to their father PEDRO, who disappeared during the notorious 1954 U.S. government deportation program, "Operation Wetback," in which over a million Mexican and Mexican Americans were forced across the border. A sweeping story of a family of seven men grappling with the meaning of masculinity, fatherhood, and a legacy of rootless beginnings.
This film recounts the murder of Vincent Chin, an automotive engineer mistaken as Japanese who was slain by an assembly line worker who blamed him for the competition by the Japanese auto makers that were threatening his job. It then recounts how that murderer escaped justice in the court system.
They came to have their babies. They went home sterilized. No Mas Bebés is the story of Mexican immigrant mothers who were pushed into sterilizations while giving birth at Los Angeles county hospital during the 1960s and 70s. Alongside an intrepid, 26-year-old Chicana lawyer and whistle-blowing young doctor, the mothers mounted a civil rights lawsuit that is seminal to the alternative history of Roe v. Wade, and the movement for reproductive justice.
The New Americans follows a diverse group of immigrants and refugees as they leave their home and families behind and learn what it means to be new Americans in the 21st century.