Josefina López, seated at center, and the cast/crew of Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme at Casa 0101.        by Stephanie Serrano I first heard about Casa 0101 in one of my Chicana Studies classes. My bad ass chingona professor Dr. Terri Gómez gave us—mostly young fiery women of color—glimpses into worlds and options beyond the neighborhoods we grew up in. Josefina López—like Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Rigoberta Menchu, Dolores Huerta, and Frida Kahlo—is a staple, a pillar in Chicano/Chicanx community. She, like each of those named, became a change-maker through diligence and hard work.  They all continue to spark fires in successive generations of revolutionary spirits, and they breathe life into Chicana Feminists when the world attempts to drown out our voices. Since hearing of it, I have wanted to visit Casa 0101, which had grown to include two spaces over the last few years, according to what I’d heard sometime after graduating fro...

  A scene from The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo . Photo by Michael Sedano     by Abel M. Salas Filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez still can’t take his eyes off the metropolis he calls home. If anything, his gaze has intensified, zeroing in on the untold paradigms of racial divide and the dynamics of difference that have long beleaguered Los Angeles, a city not yet completely comfortable with its Mexican soul. In the 14 years since the broadcast of Los Angeles Now —one of his earliest documentaries for PBS—an examination of the demographic shifts that signaled the “browning of America,” the now grey-bearded Angeleno has mined contemporary issues of race, identity and cultural diversity with increasing depth and intuitive foresight. This even as his lens, calibrated by an acute, erudite and humanist Latino perspective, has been artfully rotated toward the past. His recent focus on subjects culled from the period of social turmoil and political unrest that erupte...