Getting to the Heart of One Family’s Life : Movies: Director Gregory Nava follows his ‘El Norte’ with a colorful epic exploring 60 years in the lives of a struggling Latino family.

Director Gregory Nava and a cast and crew of several dozen people are shoehorned into a small back yard in Highland Park, shooting a scene that comes midway through his new film, “My Family.”

It is a sweltering afternoon and the scene--a traditional Mexican wedding replete with hanging paper lanterns and a multitiered wedding cake--calls for formal dress and vigorous dancing. Everyone is hot, but remarkably cheerful.

Nava--whose low-budget debut film of 1984, “El Norte,” pleased the critics and did decent box office--is a tireless cheerleader for his movie, and the people working with him are convinced that his is a worthy vision.

“Most of the people on ‘My Family’ are working for less than they usually get paid because they feel it’s important that movies like this get made,” says Jimmy Smits, who stars in the film (opening May 3) along with Esai Morales and Edward James Olmos. “This is a film that presents Latinos in a positive light, and there aren’t too many of those around.”

The scene centers on Morales, whose character, Chucho, is the story’s resident brooding bad boy. Looking slick and dangerous in his tuxedo, Morales is required to slump down in his chair, listen to the music wafting through the air with a sour expression on his face, and mutter, “I hate that mariachi (expletive).”

It’s a small moment, but it encapsulates the film rather neatly. A chronicle of 60 years in the lives of a Latino family living in East Los Angeles, the film is a study of generational clash juxtaposed against the indomitable endurance of blood relationships. One generation after the next in the Sanchez family struggles against the social and psychological limits foisted on them by their elders and by the racism of the city where they live. But, even as they struggle, they never abandon the shelter provided by family.

Told from the point of view of an aspiring writer, Paco Sanchez, played by Olmos, the story commences in rural Mexico early in the century and tracks the parents as they immigrate to Southern California, where they carve out a life for themselves and their children in an environment that is less than hospitable.

“Because Latino culture in L.A. has traditionally been poor and oppressed, these people have always looked to their families for protection and strength,” Nava says of the central theme of the film, which he co-wrote with his creative partner and wife of 18 years, Anna Thomas.

“Following this family through three generations, you don’t see them getting less oppressed, either,” adds the 44-year-old director, who was born in San Diego of Mexican-Basque heritage.

“Yes, people do move up and you see change, but you also see the development of a permanent underclass. Early in the film we see Mexican workers of the ‘20s building the Pacific Electric Car, along with many other parts of the city. Latinos are still doing the jobs nobody else wants to do--they’re still washing dishes and digging ditches. This has become a permanent part of L.A. culture.”

Shot on locations in L.A. and Michoacan, Mexico, from May through July, 1994, “My Family” tempers its serious themes with a playful approach to art direction.

While Nava was lining up financing for the film and working on his script, he happened to see an exhibition of paintings by Chicana artist Patssi Valdez at L.A.’s Daniel Saxon Gallery. Uninhabited domestic scenes rendered in vivid, hallucinatory colors, Valdez’s paintings became a central reference point for the film in Nava’s mind. While in pre-production, Nava invited Valdez to collaborate with art director Barry Robison in shaping the look of the movie.

“The safe way to do this film would have been in warm sepia tones with everything muted, but Greg went in the opposite direction--this is a very bold film to look at,” Robison says of “My Family,” which attempts to achieve a quality of magical realism similar to that popularized by South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“For the ‘20s we used earthen colors and referred to the folk art of Michoacan,” Robison says. “The ‘50s were influenced by Patssi, as well as by the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and this segment of the film is dominated by pastel folk-art colors. The ‘80s are almost entirely Patssi. We all carried around color Xeroxes of her paintings because Greg wanted a literal interpretation of her work--he wanted her paintings to come to life in everything, from the sets to clothes and makeup.”

“I grew up in East L.A. in the ‘50s, so this is a world I know very well,” says Valdez, who now lives in Echo Park. “Greg told me the thing that struck him about my paintings was the way the light comes through the windows into the rooms--light is either warm or cold in my paintings, and it’s an intensely emotional interpretation of light,” adds Valdez, who conferred regularly with the film’s cinematographer, Ed Lachman, best known for his work on several films for German director Werner Herzog.

“Greg tried to duplicate that in the way he lit the sets--in the ‘50s, for instance, everything seemed to be a lot brighter and innocent. As the film unfolds and the plot gets more intense, the light and colors take on weight and become more muted and rich.”

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The wedding scene comes on the heels of a logistically ambitious dance-hall sequence shot at the historic Casa Camino Real building in Whittier, involving 200 extras, period dress and slick choreography.

“Big scenes like this are draining, but I love doing them because I love dance--dance is very important to Latino culture, too,” Nava says, racing through his lunch while the crew sets up the next shot. “Miguel Delgado is choreographing these scenes and they involve the corrido, polka, the waltz, slow dancing, rock ‘n’ roll and merengue,” he adds, beaming at the thought.

A boyish man who speaks with speed and enthusiasm about his subjects of expertise--film and Latino culture--Nava made his first movie, a short biographical portrait of Garcia Lorca, while studying film at UCLA.

His debut feature, “The Confessions of Aman,” released in 1977, was made in Spain for the unheard of sum of $20,000, using props and costumes left over from the filming of Samuel Bronston’s “El Cid.” A tale of a wandering medieval scholar, the film won several awards and helped prepare Nava for the making of “El Norte,” the story of a young Guatemalan brother and sister struggling to immigrate to the United States.

The difficulties that confront immigrants in this country is an abiding concern for Nava, and it’s a subject he feels hasn’t been addressed in appropriate depth in films like “La Bamba”--a commercially successful film about early rock ‘n’ roll hero Ritchie Valens and his Chicano roots. In Nava’s opinion, that movie worked well on a musical level, but was a less-than-accurate depiction of the reality of Latino life in L.A.

Actor Esai Morales, who played Valens’ older brother, Bob, in that film, agrees it was to a degree misunderstood.

“When ‘La Bamba’ came out people kept asking me, ‘Is that a Spanish or an English film?’ ” Morales says during a lunch break. “People ask the same thing about ‘Mi Familia,’ and what I say is: ‘Have you heard of Sierra Madre ? How about the Camino Real ? Where do you think you’re living? This was Mexico before some shifty land-grabbers came along and cooked up a little war, so Latinos in California have really been experiencing 140 years of occupation.’ Above all else, this is a story about family--a family that happens to be Latino. Latino families aren’t that different from Anglo families, but they are more expressive.

“This isn’t ‘Ordinary People’ we’re making here,” he says with a laugh.

“I didn’t grow up in a family like this because I’m from the East Coast and my roots are Puerto Rican. Most people don’t realize there are differences in Latino cultures, that Cuban is different from Puerto Rican . . . the California Chicano thing is more kicked back than Puerto Rican culture of New York. Chicanos are less hot-blooded than Puerto Ricans and Cubans--maybe it’s a result of the weather and the racial mixture here. East Coasters have more African blood, while Chicanos are more Indian and Spanish.”

Morales’ description of differences in temperament between cultures may be true, but it isn’t substantiated by the story line of “My Family,” which revolves in part around gang violence.

“When you can’t look to authority for protection you find other ways to protect yourself,” Nava says, “and this is one of the reasons gang activity has become so prevalent in L.A. Gangs are an old part of Chicano culture here, but unfortunately, they’re growing increasingly virulent. In the ‘50s the streets were safe for children and old people and there were boundaries the gangs respected.

“This isn’t a central theme of the film, but it’s certainly part of this world--this family lives in East L.A. so their lives are affected by gangs,” he says. “What makes this film different is that instead of putting gangs at the center of Latino culture, which the media are doing now, we put the family at the center. These other things--gangs, the Catholic Church, immigration problems, music--orbit around it.”

Regrouping two days later in the wilds of Agoura Hills on the main set of the film--the Sanchez family home--Nava’s cast and crew wait for the morning mist to burn off so the day’s shooting can begin. A ramshackle wooden dwelling that has the quality of a child’s playhouse, this set is a key metaphor for the family itself, and every inch of the interior has been meticulously designed--every knickknack, every stick of furniture has been carefully chosen and positioned. Valdez, in fact, created three altars, which she considers small works of installation art, for the set.

“Patssi’s colors are vivid, flat and hard and there’s a cartoonish quality to her work and we tried to give a bit of that to the house--every room in the house is painted a different color, for instance,” Robison says.

“This was a horse pasture when we got here and we had to have bulldozers grade it, then we built the house and grew a field of corn which we supplemented with artificial corn--we did all this in 3 1/2 weeks,” Robison adds. “The house is a living organism that expands, contracts and takes on different characters, and as the film progresses and the family grows, the house grows too--we added these funny carbuncle-like additions. By the time we get to the ‘80s the colors have become intense and dark, and the house has begun to sag because there’s been so much living in it.

“There are security bars on the windows now, which is a sad reflection on what’s happened to life in L.A. in the late 20th Century for Latinos--and for everybody else, for that matter,” he says.

“I guess this is something this city is beginning to learn about itself, that we all have more in common than we might have previously realized. The importance of family is one of those things, and that, in a nutshell, is what this film is about.”

* A screening of “My Family” on April 27 will benefit the National Latino Communications Center, 7:30 p.m. at the Cinerama Dome, followed by a reception at Mercedes-Benz Hollywood Inc. Tickets are $100. Information: (213) 663-8294 or (800) 316-2109.