Paul Espinosa has produced over 30 documentary films aired on PBS.
Compiled By LA CUCARACHA STAFF
Chicano filmmaker Paul Espinosa, toured Southern Colorado the last week of February showing his award-winning film “Singing Our Way to Freedom” — first released in 2020.
The film is about the life and times of the late Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez, a renowned musician from San Diego, CA. Sanchez was a songwriter, educator and activist who gained national attention as a founding member of Los Alacranes Mojados (The Wetback Scorpions).
Espinosa showed the film at Colorado State University-Pueblo on Feb. 25 at a theater in the university library. As part of the tour, he made appearances at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Adams State University in Alamosa, and Otero College in La Junta.
His presentation in Pueblo was sponsored by the Chicano Studies program at CSUP and hosted by Chicano Studies Instructor April Bojoquez.
“Paul and I go way back,” Bojoquez said. “I was a graduate student at Arizona State University and he was a faculty member of the School of Transborder Studies when we met.”
While in Pueblo, Espinosa talked about his current project, a film about Padre Antonio José Martinez ( 1793-1867) a 19th-century New Mexican priest, educator, publisher and politician based in Taos.
Espinosa said he has produced more than 30 documentaries that have been aired on Public Broadcasting Service, including “The U.S.-Mexican War,” “The Border,” “…and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him,” and “The American Experience.”
In the film about Sanchez, Espinosa traces the musician’s roots from his birth in 1951 to Mexican immigrant parents in the desert town of Blythe, CA, to the Chicano Movement in the 1960s.
One of Sanchez’s and the San Diego community’s most ambitious projects was the founding of Chicano Park under the Coronado Bridge.
In the song he wrote about the experience, Sanchez talks about how the park was created following a 12-day protest in 1970 by local residents who seized the land to prevent the construction of a California Highway Patrol station, demanding a community park instead.
In addition to the beautiful murals adorning the pillars, the park includes a playground, picnic areas, a basketball court, and the newly opened Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center.
Photos of Chicano Park included in this report were taken by Anselmo Ortega, staff member of La Cucaracha in June 2025.