What started as a desperate attempt to track the pandemic’s physical and psychological ravages has grown into a groundbreaking arts initiative driven by some of the nation’s most vulnerable and essential workers.
The latest manifestation of “Somos Esenciales/We Are Essential,” a bilingual, multimedia performance and research project spearheaded by Mission-based theatermaker Paul S. Flores, takes place Saturday at KQED Commons Theater. It’s presented by the station and Acción Latina as part of “Paseo Artistico: The 1990’s Matter in the Mission,” an all-day series of performances at various venues centering on 24th Street/Calle 24 Latino Cultural District.
The KQED event is part panel discussion and part multimedia performance. The talk includes Dr. Lisa Fortuna, chief of psychiatry at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital; Joshua Arce, director of workforce development for the Office of Economic and Workforce Development; Roberto Hernandez, director of CANA and Mission Food Hub, and researcher and writer Adriana Camarena, Flores’s key Somos Esenciales collaborator.
The performance, an excerpt of a work-in-progress that will premiere next year, features dancer Andreina Maldonado, spoken-word artist David Calderon, cellist Claudia Portillo, percussionist Pedro Gomez, guitarist Manolo Davila, dancer and designer Jessica Recinos and the traditional Aztec dance troupe Danza Azteca Mixcoatl.
The project’s seeds were planted in early January 2021, when Flores started following 14 of the 300 or so volunteers staffing the Mission Food Hub, which began providing aid to people who’d lost their livelihoods in the spring of 2020. “The idea was to do a research project on how Covid-19 impacted Latino essential workers,” said Flores, who quickly lined up support from the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures.
“We were looking at how the Food Hub was filling a gap that the city should have been doing. The city caught up later, with free testing and funds for people who lost jobs and didn’t have papers. In the meantime, the Food Hub provided essential services.”
The 14 volunteers became researchers as well, interviewing fellow volunteers about the pandemic’s impact on their mental health and families, while soliciting their recommendations for support and services that could help. The volunteers, the majority of whom were undocumented and primarily Spanish-speaking, described wrestling with depression and despair as they struggled to navigate a world where Zoom replaced face-to-face interactions and household tensions spiked.
“We developed a research presentation, a PowerPoint with illustrations that we presented to all 300 volunteers,” Flores said. “It was amazing, and we invited Dr. Lisa Fortuna, who was chief of psychiatry at SF General then but is also in charge of behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She saw an opportunity to expand UCSF’s Spanish-language resources for mental health services and began working with Somos Esenciales to expand the program.”
The Somos Esenciales team became co-investigators on two research projects, working with UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and with SF General, studying the ongoing impact of covid and long covid on Latinx immigrants. Since then, the innovative project has continued to evolve and expand, encompassing a documentary film, a formal community-prepared report, and presentations at major institutions like the University of California, Berkeley and UCSF Medical School.
Somos Esenciales and another collaborative partner, Cultura y Arte Nativa de Las Americas (CANA), were just awarded a multimillion-dollar, multi-year grant from the National Institute of Health to research and develop a comprehensive community revitalization plan for the Mission District post-covid.
But the KQED Commons presentation isn’t about data or strategic interventions, at least not in any kind of PowerPoint format. Flores, a dynamic performance poet, has a long history of combining oral histories and first-person narratives in music-powered multimedia productions. As Somos Esenciales gained momentum, he started turning the stories they gathered into monologues, like the experience of a 17-year-old undocumented Lowell High senior with four younger sisters.
“She was living in a one-bedroom apartment with 12 people, four adults and eight children,” Flores said. “All four adults get covid, and she’s taking care of seven kids. For five weeks, she’s doing everything, and all the while the kids are worried their parents are going to die. As volunteers are sharing these stories, I’m turning the stories into theater.”
Working closely with Bayonics drummer and composer Pedro Gomez, Flores transformed the experiences into songs. “He portrays a lowrider who got through the pandemic by working on his car,” Flores says. Andreina Maldonado is performing a story of domestic workers. Jessica Recinos is playing Connie Rivera, who runs the Mexican culture store Mixcoatl at 24th Street and South Van Ness Avenue. The Food Hub is a character, too.”
Eager to explore new theatrical territory, Flores is taking a traditional turn with the release, next week, of his first book of poetry, “We Still Be.” Presented by Speaking Axolotl, the Bay Area’s long-running Latinx reading series, and hosted by Norman Zelaya at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery, Thursday Oct. 19, the book party features Flores performing spoken word with pianist/composer Jon Jang on piano, bassist Gary Brown and drummer Deszon Claiborne.
One of five volumes launching the new Los Angeles imprint El Martillo Press created by poet Matt Sedillo, “We Still Be” collects poems Flores has performed over the past two decades. “I decided a long time ago the best impact I had was to be in front of people’s faces,” he said. “I left the publishing world and moved into straight live performance. In the meantime I’m writing all these poems, but no one asked about publishing them until now.”
The book’s centerpiece is his collaboration with Jang, who’s releasing the five pieces they created together as an EP on Bandcamp. The title poem was inspired by a Galería de la Raza event held after Norman Zelaya was displaced by a fire.
“He lost his place, and to help him out, we threw an art fundraiser. The line ‘we still be’ comes from a poem about how, despite all the evictions and gentrification, people are defending their right to be there. Those people who fight for the place they live. They love San Francisco and the Mission.”
As part of the Green Film Festival, Spanish-born, Hawaii-based documentarian Gemma Cubero del Barrio’s “The Island In Me” screens Saturday afternoon. A former San Francisco resident who worked with legendary filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, Cubero is fascinated by female seekers. “Island” follows her previous award-winning documentary “Ella Es El Matador” (She Is the Matador), a portrait of two women determined to break into the theatrically masculine world of bullfighting.
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“The island in Me” is a very different meditation about two women living in Hawaii and plotting their return to their childhood home of Pukapuka, a remote area of the Cook Islands never before captured in film. The score is by bassist/composer Todd Sickafoose, who won a Tony Award for his work on “Hadestown.” An East Bay native who played a major role on the Bay Area music scene in the aughts, Sickafoose now lives in Eugene, Oregon, and doesn’t get back to the Bay Area often, but he’s playing one concert to celebrate the release of his gorgeous new album, “Bear Proof,” Oct. 21 at the Palo Alto Art Center Auditorium with a dream cast featuring violinist Jenny Scheinman, guitarist Adam Levy, pianist Carmen Staaf, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, accordionist Rob Reich and drummer Allison Miller (all of whom are also acclaimed composers and band leaders).