You are invited to the screening of UN TRIP: RAÚLRSALINAS AND THE POETRY OF LIBERATION, in conversation with co-director/producer Laura Varela on Friday, April 19, 2024, 7:00pm at the EastSide Cultural Center in Oakland.
Presented by the EastSide Arts Alliance, “Un trip: raúlrsalinas and the poetry of liberation” is a 25-minute split-screen jazz and liberation documentary based on the poem “Un Trip through the Mind Jail” by the Xicanindio poet raúlrsalinas. Raúl R. Salinas wrote the poem in 1969 while incarcerated at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.
Directed and produced by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, the docu-film presents the story of raúlrsalinas, weaving his poem “Un trip through the mind-jail” with jazz and story to take us from the barrios of Austin and other points Southwest, to his incarceration and transformation into a Chicano movement poet and community organizer.
Film Flor y Canto
Laura Varela, one of the film-makers, will speak on their documentary, “Un Trip: raúlrsalinas and the poetry of liberation.”
Ms. Varela will be joined in dialogue with Alejandro Murguía, former San Francisco Poet Laureate and one of the early publishers of raúlrsalinas work.
Xicanx poets will perform poetry in lightning rounds of “Flor y Canto,” a traditional Xicanx gathering of spoken word, visions and struggles for liberation and justice.
The screening of UN TRIP with flor y canto will be held on
- Friday, April 19, 2024, 7:00 pm
- At the EastSide Cultural Center | 2277 International Blvd | Oakland, CA 94606
- Free admission.
- Doors open at 6:30; light refreshments will be available.
FREE event • film • poetry • discussion with the filmmaker • refreshments
FILM Laura Valera co-director/producer, in conversation with Alejandro Murguía (former S.F. Poet Laureate, early publisher of raúl r. salinas’ work) Moderated by arnoldo garcía
Presented by the EastSide Arts Alliance, Oakland.
Un trip: raúlrsalinas and the poetry of liberation
Released in 2023 to much acclaim, Un Trip: raülrsalinas and the Poetry of Liberation, is a story of transformation through political education in the community (initially a community of the incarcerated). The story is told by raúlrsalinas who spent most of his adolescent and young adult life inside prison as a petty criminal and drug dealer. He came out of Federal penitentiaries as a poet, a strong social advocate and community organizer in the Chicano movement. He never went back to prison.
The film weaves contemporary justice struggles with jazz in a poem that addresses and denounces imprisonment, community destruction, gentrification, and uplifts the profound impact of cultural memory on sanity and salvation. The film shows a poetry workshop led by raúl at the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center in Texas, where a young woman reads a poem that deals with her past.
The film has won several awards including the Audience Award at Cinelas Americas, Best Documentary at the Lost River Film Festival, and Best Documentary Short Texas Revolution Festival, and screened on Texas PBS’ Frame of Mind 2023. The film is funded by Humanities Texas, ITVS Diversity Development Fund and NALAC Fund for the Arts, funded in part by the Ford Foundation.
Please join us to celebrate and dialogue on the beauty and contradictions of liberation poetry and movements connecting the 1960s to the 2020s generations.
