Screenwriter Victor Adame’s family life has been plagued with prison sentences, poverty, and substance abuse, as are the lives of the characters in his forthcoming film, “¡Raza!”
Looking through his grandmother’s photo album, screenwriter Victor Adame couldn’t help but notice the young and naive faces of the uncles, aunts, grandparents and parents who would one day become the guiding forces in his life. As he flipped through photos that spanned generations, he saw a 1980s-era photo of his grandmother visiting her brother in prison. It looked eerily similar to a photo of himself visiting his own brother in prison decades later.
The comparison between the two photos made Adame realize that their shared experience of family serving prison sentences on drug charges was nothing new, and digging deeper, had to be connected by a thread of intragenerational social struggles resulting from poverty, substance abuse and racial tension with the police.
That moment sparked the creation of Adame’s semi-autobiographical film, “¡Raza!,” loosely based on the lives of his family members. The film’s central conflict is rooted in the real-life events surrounding his Grandmother’s cousin, who, unlike her brother, was arrested for murder in the ’70s. He’s currently serving a life sentence, but Adame said that his grandmother’s cousin maintains his innocence. He’s tried to appeal his case several times on the basis that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime when the murder occurred, but his appeal attempts have continued to be denied.
Adame wanted to illuminate his own family’s experience in “¡Raza!” by crafting a story about a Chicano family living in Riverside (like Adame’s family) dealing with similar hardships when their eldest son of four, one of the film’s main characters, is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit.
“I became interested in telling the story that directly reflects my community and my family,” he said in a Zoom interview. “I find it interesting that certain ideas that my family has pitched to me are things that I had gone through on my own, like when my brother went to prison, and that’s something similar to what my mom felt when her relatives went to prison, and how my dad felt with his family, and what my grandma dealt with too.”
Adame and the production team will present a sneak peek of the film, with a short trailer, at the Casa Blanca Home of Neighborly Service in Riverside on Saturday, June 29. The event will feature live music, food vendors, local car clubs, a tattoo raffle and more.
“The whole point of this project is to get the community involved as much as possible and show people that others are working on reflecting and representing them. This space we’re hosting it at has a similar mission statement aimed at helping and representing the community,” he said.
Another source of inspiration for the film was Adame’s Latino heritage and how it intersected with his family’s ties to Riverside, a city where the population is over 50% Hispanic or Latino. Early members of his kin emigrated from Mexico as early as 1920 to work as fruit pickers and helped establish California’s standing as the leader of the citrus industry.
His grandparents came of age during the Civil Rights Movement in the ’60s and the Chicano Movement in the ’70s when it was commonplace to hear chants of slogans like “Viva La Raza!” by young Latino activists, which led to Adame adopting a portion of it for the film’s title. He said he understands the term has a complicated history, with some people viewing the term as outdated and unnecessary, while others say it preserves a legacy. For Adame, whose family lived through those movements in the Inland Empire, the term calls back to this specific time of Latino camaraderie.
“Raza was used to encapsulate this sense of community and togetherness that pushes our community forward and recognizes that even though we’re not all in Riverside or L.A., we’re all over the place, and we share the sense of identity and struggle,” he said. “I appreciate how this term has been used to unite us and push for more, and this film is directly about that.”
Adame grew up in Riverside most of his life, only leaving for a couple of years to pursue his undergraduate degree at UC Irvine and then to earn his MFA in screenwriting at Chapman University, where he graduated last year. He said that he always felt at home in Riverside and would describe the city to others as tight-knit, a city where everyone knew each other. As he reflected on his upbringing and was thinking of themes for the film, he also realized that the events his family went through were present in the Latino community that surrounded him.
“Every generation goes through their own struggles from immigration rights to the violence in the ’90s with police involvement,” he said. “I felt like I dealt with the repercussions of those things. I’ve had many loved ones who are incarcerated and whose lives ended. It’s been a challenge in the general scope of what we go through in this community. I’ve always felt that we as Latinos share many experiences that intertwine and affect us all similarly.”
As he’s progressed in his film career, working with industry gems including Sundance, The Black List and The Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 2022 Gold Rising Program, he has often been the only Latino in the writers’ room.
Although Latinos make up 19% of the U.S. population, they only make up 6.1% of leads in broadcast shows, 3.6% of leads in cable shows, and 4.3% of leads in digital shows, according to the “Hollywood Diversity Report 2023: Exclusivity in Progress,” released last year by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Entertainment & Media Research Initiative.
Feeling underrepresented was new to Adame, who never really felt like a minority in Riverside, given the sizable Latino population of the city. However, these were new waters, and he wanted to ensure that the stories he told were authentic and that they weren’t perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
Because “¡Raza!” is the culmination of stories loosely based on Adame’s life, it can sound like the focus of these hardships could be viewed as stereotypical, with Latino characters dealing with unjust prison sentences, unplanned pregnancies, troubled teens selling drugs and parental figures with substance abuse.
“The biggest issue here is that as people from underrepresented groups, we don’t often have the freedom to tell our own stories. Historically, it’s been other people trying to tell stories about us that they don’t understand, so they create these harmful stereotypes about us. On the one hand, I could see how people might find it stereotypical, but on the other hand, something that I’ve learned about storytelling is that every story is worth being told, no matter how challenging that may be, and for me, this is what I know.”
The hour-and-a-half film is set to wrap in spring 2025 and then submitted to festivals in September 2025. Adame can’t speak for the entire Latino diaspora but hopes to fill the project with Latino talent to maintain its authenticity.
“I hope to create something that represents people that look like them and with a message of optimism because we go through so much and, unfortunately, we will continue to face difficulties,” he said. “I hope it could be a beacon of unity and show that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
¡Raza!
Where: Casa Blanca Home of Neighborly Service, 7680 Casa Blanca St., Riverside.
When: 7-9:30 p.m. Saturday, June 29.
Admission: RSVP for free at eventbrite.com.
