Mis Queridos!  A new week here with your Tia Tenopia at Latinopia and boy do we have great new videos! Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb, one of our premier literary giants, tells us about his writing style and finding the “voice” of his characters. Then we visit with Alas Media, a new generation of Califas filmmakers who are blazing new inroads into cinema and the documentation of our community.

A word about Dagoberto Gilb. He is winner of the Whiting Writers Award as well as a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award and was a finalist fo the PEN/Faulkner award before winning the coveted PEN/Hemingway award. He is the author of short story collections like Woodcuts of Women, essay collections like Gritos, and novels like The Flowers and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna. He is a must read–your Tia recommends you start with The Magic of Blood, an excellent collection of shorts stories that reveal the wide range of Dagoberto’s characters and themes.

The Alas Media group is made of up Miguel Duran, Rosa Rubalcava, Elizabeth Rubalcava, Ibarionex Perello and Marco Torres. Their work spans the spectrum from documentaries to television video production, website design and production and shaping young minds with in-school video production. Somehow they also manage to do committed documentaries about Latinos in the San Fernando valley such as “A Mural with a Message” which is featured as a Latinopia Showcase film. Check it all out!