Fillmore Leaders Shoot for Movies in Spanish

Eighteen years after Fillmore became the first city in the nation to declare English its official language, the tiny Ventura County farm community is moving toward showing Spanish-language films at its landmark movie theater.

In 1985, Fillmore made national headlines by formally embracing English in a City Council resolution generally seen as an insult by Latino residents.

But Tuesday night, without dissent, the City Council directed its staff to proceed with bringing Spanish-language films to the city-owned Towne Theatre in the heart of Fillmore’s picturesque downtown.

If times have changed, so has the Fillmore City Council. Since November, the majority of its five members have been Latino, reflecting for the first time the Latino ethnicity of the 14,000-person community. The city has been mostly Latino for two decades.

“The [full] council supports this -- it’s not just the three Latinos,” said Mayor Evaristo Barajas, who led a successful effort to strike the offending English-language resolution from city books in 1999.

“This theater showed Spanish films back in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Barajas said. “I started attending when I was 8. I liked sitting in the balcony for Sunday matinees. A lot of people attended those shows. Then they changed [theater] owners, and it just stopped.”

Barajas said he thought a revival of the Spanish-language Sunday matinee would draw a crowd to the historic 380-seat, single-screen theater, which showed silent movies nearly a century ago and played host to vaudevillian talents such as actress Mary Pickford.

“There’s a need for this,” the mayor said, vowing to take his 12-year-old daughter, Alani, to Spanish shows if he can get them back in town.

“She’s the only one of my children who’ll still go with me,” he said with a grin.

Once populated mostly by white Midwestern migrants, the agricultural Santa Clara Valley, which stretches about 15 miles east and west from Fillmore, is now at least two-thirds Latino. Many residents are farm workers from Mexico.

While locals say race relations are calm today, and Spanish-language interpreters are sometimes provided at City Council meetings, it wasn’t that long ago that tensions flared.

Older residents still remember when Latino students could not attend the same Fillmore school as white children, when they were prohibited from speaking Spanish in the schoolyard and when they were required to sit in the worst seats at the movie theater.

After World War II, things got better. But then in the 1980s, amid a nationwide backlash against bilingual education and illegal immigration, they got worse again. In April 1985, a divided Fillmore City Council passed a simple one-sentence resolution recognizing English as the city’s official language. Five states had already passed similar measures.

The move was made largely to appease white parents critical of the quality of their children’s educations in public schools, several city leaders said at the time. But it split the community down the middle.

Mexican immigrants said they feared deportation and a city ban on Spanish -- and they worried they would lose their jobs because they didn’t speak English.

“That was the biggest mistake I made on the council,” said former Councilman Roger Campbell. “Seven hundred people showed up at one meeting. It really just tore the town apart. It was a terrible, terrible mistake.”

A year later, California voters passed a constitutional amendment making English the official language statewide. But Fillmore’s reputation had been tarred.

Some residents still argue that judgments about the city were made unfairly -- that an endorsement of English should not have been seen as a slap against Spanish.

“I got calls from relatives in Texas, saying ‘What the heck are you guys doing?’ ” agricultural salesman Joe Voelker said Wednesday in a sidewalk interview across from the theater. “But that was misinterpreted. [The resolution] made sense to me, but when you put English-only in there, it was wrong.”

Voelker would welcome Spanish-language films at the city theater, he said, since “our Hispanic community is the better part of our population.”

City officials said they haven’t heard any objections to mixing Spanish-language films with the regular fare of first-run movies, such as “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Hulk” and “Finding Nemo.”

The only real problems, they said, were financial and tactical.

Officials are having trouble finding a distributor who will provide Spanish-language films for a reasonable price, said Tom Ristau, deputy city manager. No Ventura County city, even heavily Latino 180,000-resident Oxnard, has a theater that runs Spanish-language movies regularly, he said.

Nor do Fillmore officials want to disrupt a formula that is suddenly successful. After persistent losses, the city has made a little money during the last two years and has begun to chip away at the theater’s years-old operations deficit of $170,000.

That loss was on top of about $1 million in federal, state and city funds spent to resurrect the theater after the 1994 Northridge earthquake buckled its walls.

The key to success has been running movies the weekend that they are first released, Ristau said. And to get those movies, the city has to agree to run them daily. But the theater has no matinees, so a Sunday afternoon show would make sense if movies could be found and the city’s first-run distributor would allow the Spanish films to share the single screen.

“We want to try it one Sunday a month initially,” Ristau said. “The council wants to proceed cautiously, because we’ve finally turned the corner on profitability. But everyone, to a person, is pretty confident that if we can get these films, they’ll do well here.”

Fillmore handyman Luis Lomeli said he would eagerly go to Spanish-language movies, and take his three bilingual children with him.

“We could get movies from Spain and Latin America, not just Mexico,” he said. “I’m interested in the culture. I believe it’s smart to bring these movies in here.”