INTERVIEW WITH ALEX RIVERA DIRECTOR, PAPAPAPÁ ‘REEL NEW YORK’ series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Alex Rivera in May, 1997. Kathy High: Well, what prompted you to make this tape, Alex? Alex Rivera: What prompted me originally was the pun, really; Papa (Potato) and Papá (Father). A friend of mine, Greg Berger, has done a lot of work researching the myths that surround food, and he had just done a theater project about the potato. I was thinking about a project that I wanted to do about my dad and about the process of assimilation. The idea came to me of this Spanish pun of papa (Potato), and papá (Father). And then the more I learned about the potato from Greg, I realized that these two stories, one of the mighty tuber, and one of my mighty dad, actually had a lot in common. They’re pretty parallel stories. Also, one of my interests is in making videos that are both really accessible and theoretically challenging. I think it’s possible to express concepts that are usually articulated through ‘high theory,’ but through a more accessable vocabulary. And using this metaphor and this kind of pun, I thought, was a really good way to do this. So that’s was where it came from. It started out as a joke; when I told my professor at school about it, it was almost a threat. I said to him "What if I made a tape comparing the journey of the potato- from the ancient mountains of Peru to contemporary America, to the journey of an immigrant, namely my dad. Pa-pa-pa-pá ..." It was a threat that became a legitimate idea. KH: That's great. Well, it's an incredibly dense piece. There is so much in there. It's really fun to watch. It's also really interesting to think about the kinds of work that went into it, because there's so many different levels of activity. Can you talk a little bit about the research you did, finding archival material and interviewing people at the potato chip factory and things like that around the potato? AR: Sure. It was a really fun process and I guess I need to start at the beginning. I’m well aware that there are people who don't like documentaries- I might have been one of those people- and so when I was making this film, I tried to develop a set of strategies that deviate from the documentary norm, and in my opinion make it more exciting. Papapapá is called a documentary, it screens as a documentary, but the way I built it was really different. Before doing any research I thought about the concepts I wanted to address. I wanted to talk about the relationship between technology and food and the way that technology's been transforming food. I wanted to make a parallel between that and the techno-cultural environment that people live in here -- make a parallel between food technology and how it transformed the potato, and television, the technology of culture, and how it transforms people. So ultimately the question is, with issues like these, How do you photograph them? How do you get them on video? How do you take a picture of them? And the answers were all over the place: I ended up creating this stream-of-conciousness list of people I’d have to talk to. Everyone would somehow address one part of the main argument of the film. We interviewed people at an advertising agency that tries to reach the Latino market; we interviewed a scientist at Cornell who's spent her whole life with the potato dissecting it; we interviewed workers in a factory that manufactures potato chips. They were all people I just called direct on the phone. I did a lot of research through trade journals and weird little places. Part of the process was unearthing the "Latino Couch Potato," and so I was researching Spanish language media and broadcasting as well as the potato. I got in touch with an advertising agency in New York and asked about the Latino market -- how they think of that population. And I called Jorge Ramos (The National news anchor for Univision). I called Univision in Miami and they said, "Okay, you can talk to this guy. He knows a lot about TV." And I had no idea that he was this reporter that millions of people watch every night. They said "We’ll put you on the phone with this guy. He's pretty smart." A lot of it was just luck and coincidence and being really relentless -- and probably irritating a lot of people in my path. But it was a really a fun process to do that kind of research because the roads that it led me down spread out all over the place. It would be really cool to have a reunion of all the people involved in the video. A lot of the people are interesting, and to get them all in one place to look at each other... You know, it would be this really weird crowd. KH: That's great. And then the other part of the tape deals with your own background, and also your father and his background. It's really interesting how you've handled the footage with your father -- the images of him sitting and watching TV. That's really poignant in relationship to the idea of "couch potato," etc. I remember the interview with him when he talked about first coming to Miami and encountering the "colored" and "white" bathroom stalls. Did you have a lot of footage of him and a lot of different stories? And how did you get him to talk to you? AR: My dad, through most of my life, was not a really vocal person about these issues, so it turned out to be hard. I feel like he obviously went through a lot, and he doesn't really like to talk about it. He grew up in this neighborhood called La Victoria, in Lima, which was a really tough neighborhood. He wasn't an upper-class Peruvian kid. He lived the typical American dream: coming from basically the ghetto of Lima into the United States, and working in factories, and really working his way up, and putting himself through school at night, and then graduating. Then he worked at better and better jobs, and eventually moved to New York City, and then to upstate New York, and now he lives in a split-level ranch with my mom and with "2.5 children" and with cable TV. When I was growing up, he was never really vocal about the experience of being an immigrant in any way in particular. It was a given. And so having the camera, at first, it was awkward really, but gradually he opened up. As an interviewer, what I would try to do is be as specific as possible, and not ask questions that were loaded. I tried to ask about specifics like, "What kind of dreams did you have when you were a kid?" and "When you went to the movies when you were a child in Lima, what did you see? " I wouldn't ask, "As a minority in America, what did you think . . . " You know what I mean. I did not speak in that kind of vocabulary, but I was more specific and I would try to get anecdotes. His analysis, his take on the world, floated out of that. There are a lot of films made that are about the personal life of the filmmaker. I think the purpose of making something that's autobiographical is ultimately that you're telling a story from a really intimate point of view, but that story is supposed to be valuable to large numbers of people in some way...right? Let's say, that by showing your very personal life, your audience is going to relate and take useful parts of that story into their lives. There is a lot of work that I've seen in this genre that crosses a line and becomes, in my opinion, too intimate. It then becomes more like staring through someone’s window with binoculars- I don’t like it. I was really nervous about making a piece like that, and so I edited my dad up pretty aggressively. I feel like he doesn't speak uninterrupted for probably more than 15 seconds. And as time has gone by, I kind of regret that, and I wish I'd have him speak a little more, because I think that he just came across as a really great character. But I was so concerned about burdening the audience with my dad. You know, I don't visit my dad more than three times a year. I figured, Why should the audience watch him for half an hour? Just get him in the tape, let him say his piece, and get him out. In retrospect, I wish I had let him hang in there a little more and have more of a presence because he's interesting. His face and his feature come across very well on the screen. KH: Yeah, I know, it's really interesting to watch his face. And speaking of faces, it's really interesting what you did with your grandmother's face. AR: What are you talking about? I know nothing. I didn't do that. [laughs] You must be talking about when I was telling the story of the first time that I met my grandmother in Lima, Peru. RETURN OF THE JEDI had been released in America, and so that was really on my mind. And then I went down to Peru and I thought this short, wrinkly character who's my abuela, I thought she looked a lot like Yoda. So I morphed her into Yoda in the film, and that's at minute six or minute seven into it. People are watching up until that moment; they're kind of hanging in there thinking, "What the hell is this film? Anthropology? Comedy? Documentary? Experimental?" And then when my grandmother morphs into Yoda, they're like, "Okay. This is weird." That's usually a turning point with an audience -- when they start to enjoy it more. KH: What did your dad say when he saw that? AR: I don't know what my dad thought when he saw his mom turn into Yoda. I'm sure he gasped. I don't know. He didn't blurt anything out. He wasn't like, "Ay, carajo!" Luckily, he didn't seem really mad. And he knew the story. I told him when I was right there standing with him in Lima, "Dad, she looks like Yoda." He knows my sensibility. KH: The other thing I wanted to ask you was as we get into the piece itself, it's really funny how you all of a sudden take us off for a ride -- suddenly we go to Inca Vision, your ‘pirate’ TV network for ‘immigrants of the human and vegetable persuasions’-- and I was just wondering how that came about. And did you perform it for a larger audience? AR: A video audience? KH: Yeah. Can we expect this on the air next week? AR: Right. Wow. I wish. That would be cool. But no, I was in development of it, just thinking about the ideas and what stories I could have, and what order they would go in, and what would be the stream of consciousness of it, you know, and how I would take the viewers through it all. I decided it would start with the history of the potato that would go into this contemporary history of the potato -- from the Inca's cultivating it through to suburban Peruvians eating it on the sofa. I wrote those kind of ruptures, right? And then you go from eating the potato chip on the couch into the television, which is in Spanish, and interview someone in Spanish. In any case, I wrote out the first ten scenes or whatever on paper saying, This is where I'm going to go, this is what the interview subjects are going to say. I wrote in quotes for people who I didn't even know. This is what they will say. And this isn't really good documentary practice. So, I wrote out the story like that. And then I started producing it. But then once I had gone through the first round of production, and shot what I'd written, and edited it, and it had come out mostly like I thought, I realized I hadn't written an ending -- there wasn't really a second half. I thought, "Uh, now what?" I had laid out so many different little strings that I wasn't really sure how to tie them all up. One answer was to say that the whole thing had been Inca Vision which was this new TV station. It's a very different way of looking at the world, retroactively saying you've been watching Inca Vision. Then at that moment, taking the viewers into another world where I had more license, I was able to get to the ending more quickly, able to intervene. So, in terms of management, watching Inca Vision allowed there to be this story and then this story, etc. It was a convenient way to manage all this stuff. I also have an interest in all of the rhetoric of cyberspace, the information age. It's so huge right now. I'm trying to think about the language, which is really rich. In those discourses around the Internet, people are reevaluating distance, reevaluating culture, property, geography, and I think, even ‘nations.’ All these things are up in the air. But then simultaneously, the whole access thing is also really exclusionary and aimed at the upper class, giving more access to culture and information to those people. So, thinking about that, I came up with this idea of Virtual Lima. It's distance, transnationalism and all these things that people are talking about for the corporate sphere, talking about for executives who want to telecommute from home. So creating Virtual Lima -- which is where the whole video ends -- and the cyberspaced version of La Victoria, the neighborhood where my dad grew up, was a way of talking about recent immigrants. Looking at my dad as a recent immigrant was like consciousness suspended. He doesn't feel connected to Peru anymore. He left there 40 years ago. He left there because he was discriminated against there, and to go from being poor, it wasn't a great situation. He never feels nostalgic for it. But then in the United States, he doesn't hear his language, his first language. And he is not surround by people who are even like him. He lives in a very isolated situation. And he compensates for that by watching Spanish language television five or six hours a night. And so, creating Virtual Lima, using the discourse of cyberspace, I thought that was a good way to talk about that state of being. It was like being between two places and not having a physical landscape that you feel part of, feeling rejected by all the options: aspiring to have some home, some place where you feel comfortable, but it's not anywhere on earth. You're neither here nor there, but somewhere else, somewhere suspended above. So, the use of this language of the Internet to talk about that sensation and to poke fun at the upper class's slant of a lot of that rhetoric says, "Well, where's the Third World in the this virtual neighborhood? And in the global village, where does the Third World fit in?" KH: Yeah, so your dad gets the control and then he just decides to blow it up, right? AR: Yeah. Exactly. People ask me, "What that's about?" And it's a different answer every time, but I guess generally, it was just sort of cathartic. And throughout you're seeing how this potato, which has been cast as this lost Inca, is a vegetable: it was sliced, and poured into hot grease, and dissected, and put under a microscope. This poor vegetable has been through so much. And then you get to know my dad. He was cast as this tragic figure in a world that doesn't accept him. He's traveled, and tried to escape it, and improve the situation, but never finds a place he's comfortable in. And he's also bombarded by people who want to turn him into a consumer, as well as people who want to discriminate against him. I really think that's an interesting situation that minorities in this country, who are still tremendously discriminated against, have simultaneously been realized as good markets, are being seduced into the economy. And it's like, "We won't give you jobs, but you'll have your own Huggies advertisement." And it's targeted right at you. KH: Right. And you can pay state tax, even though we can deport you. AR: Yeah. I mean there are really interesting dichotomies. And so when he blows up basically the whole video at the end, it's like this cathartic kind of release of frustration. But he's not blowing up anyone in particular. It's like he's in a dream, without escaping the dichotomies of these situations. It's impossible, of course. KH: Well, this has been great. Thanks. Do you have any odd production stories you want to add, or any moments of epiphany as you were cutting that came to you, or that you saw in a dream? AR: People we met through this process were just really wonderful characters. Everyone seemed to really open up and be thrilled to have someone make a movie about them. The guy at Inca Cola was such a character, and who's going to put him in a movie? And the scientist who specialized in the history of the potato. We put her in the movie. And so I think so many of them were really thrilled and over-anxious to speak to us, and would sometimes detain us for two and three hours to show us the slideshows and go on and on. We preserved them on tape. KH: Well, think of all the opportunities you've opened up with this one tape, Alex, for people to bare their souls to you. AR: It's wonderful. Well, thanks. This has been really great. KH: Thank you.