A Family’s Long Trip From One L.A. to Another

While still in high school, Rudy Valadez set out to tell his mother’s life story. He made good on his pledge.

Valadez, 18, produced a film about his mother’s journey from the Mexican town of Los Angeles to the American metropolis of the same name--a perilous trek to a new life in a new land.

The 10-minute movie, “los angeles,” recently won top honors in the arts category at the national Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards in Washington.

Now Valadez, who graduated in June from Jefferson High in South Los Angeles, is embarking on a journey of his own. This one takes him from the poverty of his boyhood home on South Compton Avenue to the stately halls of UCLA.

Valadez is a freshman on the Westwood campus, where he is reading books about the Italian cinema and the art of classical Greece. Nothing could be further from the world of his youth, where Valadez slept on his bedroom floor at night because there weren’t enough beds for all six members of his family.

Why did Valadez wind up at a prestigious university when so many of his Jefferson High classmates failed even to graduate? The answer lies with his mother, Rosalva Rodriguez, and the film about the two places called Los Angeles.

“My mother never pictured a life like this, living in a completely different world where she can’t speak the language,” Valadez says in the film. “She works hard to take care of every one of us. And living in such a place just makes it harder for her.”

It was the family’s precarious financial situation, actually, that set Valadez on the right path. His mother and stepfather spent long hours working--she as a seamstress downtown, he as pizza deliveryman.

With the adults gone for long stretches, Valadez became a stand-in parent to three younger siblings.

“It made me realize what responsibility was,” Valadez said in an interview. “I would use the same responsibility at school as at home so I wouldn’t fail.”

Valadez earned respectable grades at Jefferson, finishing with a 3.3 grade point average. Friends and teachers alike say he was as hard-working and driven as he was quiet and soft-spoken.

Valadez has moved in a different direction than his good friend and collaborator on the film, Benito Cardenas. While Valadez has immersed himself in academia, Cardenas has gone to work as a sales clerk for a furniture store in Whittier. He is thinking about joining the Army, although he has no certain plans.

“I guess Rudy wants to become somebody quicker than I do,” said Cardenas, 19. “He’s a person who doesn’t like to stay behind.”

Valadez’s and Cardenas’ film teacher also noticed a difference between the two teenagers.

“Rudy believed more in school and the idea that it could open doors for him,” said Steve Bachrach, the former head of Jefferson High’s Academy of Film and Theater Arts. “Beno, like [many] Jefferson students, saw school as something to be endured before achieving a kind of freedom.”

Despite their divergent interests, Valadez and Cardenas--buddies since middle school--worked smoothly as filmmakers. Valadez narrated, Cardenas acted. Together, they re-created portions of the three-day trip from one Los Angeles to the other, showing how Valadez’s mother scurried up cold hillsides at night to avoid border patrols and how she feared being robbed by bandits.

Valadez was a toddler when his mother made the journey; he flew to Los Angeles with a relative and met her here. He eventually gained legal status and has applied to become a U.S. citizen. His mother is already a citizen.

In the film, Valadez and Cardenas explore life in the sometimes dangerous neighborhoods around Jefferson High, reenacting a gang stabbing in a deserted alley. Valadez’s 45-year-old mother, who appears in the film, tells how she fears for her children’s safety in Los Angeles and how she feels far more secure back home in the little Mexican town of Los Angeles, where life is slower and family is paramount.

“If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t come here,” she says in the film. “I wish I could go back to my country. But I shall stay here and continue working and educate my children so they can get ahead.”

The first fruits of that labor have been sweet. Mother and son flew to Washington in August to collect his prize plaque and a $5,000 check for college. The plaque sits on the bookshelf in Valadez’s dorm room, next to books with such titles as “Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism” and “Civilization and its Discontents.”

Valadez applied for the competition alone. Cardenas, his film partner, said he wasn’t interested.

The award money--which includes an additional $2,000 for winning at the regional level--is helping defray tuition costs. Valadez also is relying on financial aid and scholarships this year, but he isn’t sure how he’ll pay for all four years.

For now, he is soaking up everything that college has to offer--new people, new ideas, new food. And he is pondering a future in film.

His mother, meanwhile, is dreaming of her son one day becoming a famous filmmaker.

“I want to see his name in big letters on the screen,” she says after watching “los angeles” at home, a tremendous smile opening like a flower across her face.