Soon, you\u2019ll even be able to enjoy her tamales on Alaska Airlines flights, and possibly even American Airlines flights as well \u2013 that deal is still in the works.<\/p>\n
But while her business is booming now, that hasn\u2019t always been the case for Villanueva, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and started making 100 tamales in her home kitchen every night \u2013 after cleaning houses during the day and taking care of her three children \u2013 and then selling her tamales on the street, sometimes making as little as $20 for an evening of culinary effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an immigrant myself, I felt very drawn into the story of Alicia \u2013 she\u2019s a wonderful and charming person,\u201d says Oscar Guerra<\/a>, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and an Associate Professor of Film and Video in the Digital Media and Design (DMD) Department at UConn Stamford. \u201cI think that was very remarkable, to be able to meet people who are really hopeful about what it means to become American.\u201d<\/p>\n Guerra met Villanueva while producing and directing his latest documentary-style film, Grit & Grace<\/em><\/a>, a unique project that premiered on December 13 at the National Archives in Washington D.C., with a mission almost as compelling as the three stories of the American dream \u2013 including Villanueva\u2019s \u2013 that it shares.<\/p>\n Coffee with the Congressman<\/strong><\/p>\n Grit & Grace<\/em> tells the three very different stories of Villanueva; Joseph Graham, Jr. of North Carolina; and Jeremy and Wendy Cook of West Virginia. The film \u2013 narrated by the actress Sarah Jessica Parker \u2013 is a first-of-its-kind production on behalf of the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth<\/a>, chaired by Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes.<\/p>\n Guerra first met Himes at an event for Stamford Hospital in the late summer of 2021. They met again for coffee a month later.<\/p>\n “He started telling me about this idea,\u201d Guerra recalls. \u201cHe wanted, for the first time, for a U.S. Congressional committee to produce a film, not just a report. Because that\u2019s normally what all committees do at the end of their term, they produce a report. But he thought it would be more impactful if we were able to come up with something, that it could be more compelling than just writing a report. And I thought that was really interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n The Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth was convened by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to develop solutions to what it calls \u201cthe key economic issue of our time: the yawning prosperity gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n The committee was tasked with developing recommendations for addressing economic disparity in the country, but also intended to \u201cShow America to Itself,\u201d working in a nonpartisan manner to document the hopes, concerns, and aspirations of Americans regardless of differences or the issues that divide them.<\/p>\n \u201cHe told me that he wanted to tell stories about the American people, what it means to be American, what it means to achieve your American dream,\u201d says Guerra, \u201cand I said, \u2018I think that\u2019s wonderful.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After a lengthy process of interviewing people to potentially feature in the film, the committee staff settled on the three stories, and Guerra went to work bringing his signature style of personal connection with real stories to this new venture of docu-style filmmaking.<\/p>\n \u201cCreating media that unites, that\u2019s something that I really want to do with my films,\u201d Guerra says. \u201cI think that media can entertain. Media sometimes educates. Media informs. And lately we’ve seen a lot of media that divides. I think that we’re very polarized. So, I’m trying to get into this wagon of media that unites, and I’m trying to find stories where we can find commonalities among people and reclaim the humanity in each one of us, because that’s how we can actually connect at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n Stories of Resilience and Determination<\/strong><\/p>\n Guerra and his team traveled the country, conducting three-to-five-day shoots with each of the participants at their homes, businesses, and neighborhoods.<\/p>\n In California, they toured Villanueva\u2019s commercial kitchens, saw the nonprofit organizations that helped her turn her home-based tamale operation into a viable business plan, and saw the home that her family purchased as the business began to succeed.<\/p>\n In North Carolina, they learned from Graham about how the single father of four struggled with the impact of systemic racism in his early education, how family financial struggles initially derailed his dream of completing his college education, and how he eventually went back to school, ultimately earning his master\u2019s degree and starting his own business focused on equity.<\/p>\n In West Virginia, they met the Cooks, who take care of two sons with special needs while running a home-based antique shop. When pandemic restrictions forced them to close their physical location, they were forced to pivot their business to an online model \u2013 made all the more challenging by an unreliable internet connection in rural West Virginia.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s impossible, Guerra explains, to boil all Americans down into just three archetypes, the stories chosen for Grit & Grace<\/em> embody the resilience and determination of the American people.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you see the stories of Alicia, Joseph, and Jeremy and Wendy, they come from very different walks of life,\u201d Guerra says. \u201cBut the only thing that they all want from our government is for people work together and be there for us. So, at the end of the day, we’re actually not that different. We all go through the same struggles, and if we try to increase our compassion, if we try to raise our level of empathy, we can find that we all go through a lot and that there\u2019s dignity in the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Director and Professor \u2013 and on a Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Guerra \u2013 who won an Emmy award in 2021 for a PBS Frontline documentary<\/a> that followed an immigrant family from Guatemala living in Stamford, the mother\u2019s life-and-death battle against COVID-19 while pregnant with her second child, and the teacher who agreed to care for the newborn infant while the local community rallied to support the family \u2013 often spends months or years documenting the stories he features in his films.<\/p>\n For Grit & Grace<\/em>, he had only about six months.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was not until the summer of 2022 that we actually kickstarted this project, so it took a while to get going,\u201d he says. \u201cI wasn’t even sure if it was going to happen or not. It’s unusual to produce something valuable in this short amount of time, but we were working nonstop.\u201d<\/p>\n He was also working on the film at the same time as his newest Frontline documentary, After Zero Tolerance<\/em><\/a>, which also premiered in December.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving the right people on your team, it becomes crucial,\u201d Guerra says. \u201cIt\u2019s working with the right people at the right time and having the passion to make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n As with previous projects, Guerra worked as both a director and a professor, looking to UConn students and colleagues to help form that crucial team.<\/p>\n Samantha Olschan, an assistant professor in the DMD program at UConn Stamford, designed the logo for the film and worked with Michael Roca \u201925 (SFA), a DMD sophomore studying Motion Design & Animation at UConn Stamford, who joined the project in the fall as a title designer in the post-production phase of the film.<\/p>\n It was Roca\u2019s first time joining a project like this, and he says he learned a lot about working on a team through the process.<\/p>\n \u201cIn terms of the team itself, there was a lot of communication going on the whole time,\u201d says Roca, \u201cand that\u2019s pretty major. Every second counts in a project, especially when the deadline is near. Oscar did let me know that the deadline was near, I was like, ok, I\u2019m going to need to commit to this a lot, if I\u2019m going to get this done.\u201d<\/p>\n While DMD senior Christopher Orrico \u201923 (SFA), who is studying Film and Video Production at UConn Stamford, had worked on film productions before, he\u2019d never operated at the scale he says was required of him for Grit & Grace. <\/em>But he didn\u2019t hesitate when Guerra asked him to join the project.<\/p>\n “I jumped at it \u2013 I think I texted as soon as he asked me,\u201d Orrico says. \u201cI texted back not 30 seconds later, \u2018Yes, I’m down, let’s go. Don’t even care what it takes. What do we gotta do? What am I doing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Orrico worked as a camera operator for the project \u2013 invaluable experience, he says, that has jumpstarted his goals to eventually work as a director of photography and cinematographer on films, particularly documentary-style productions.<\/p>\n But it also pushed him outside his comfort zone \u2013 and literally out of Connecticut \u2013 as he traveled with Guerra to California, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Washington D.C., accompanying Guerra on his shoots with the film\u2019s participants.<\/p>\n And as he ate tamales with Villanueva \u2013 \u201cShe did nothing but feed us,\u201d he shares with gratitude \u2013 spent time with Graham and his oldest son, and experienced the day-to-day joys and struggles of the Cook family, Orrico\u2019s personal commitment to the project grew.<\/p>\n \u201cAt some point during this entire project, I wanted to be even more invested into it, not just from a career standpoint, but from an empathetic standpoint,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to do what I could, because this project is important, and I wanted to give everything that I had and more.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned so much throughout this entire thing, and obviously still being a student, I still made mistakes, and with each mistake that I made, I made it a point to make sure I didn’t make it the next time. That is something that I’m forever grateful for, for both Oscar and his projects.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Grit & Grace will be screened at UConn Stamford in an upcoming event this spring, sponsored by UConn DMD<\/a> and Dodd Human Rights Impact<\/a>. Additional screenings and events at Harvard University and New York University in Spring 2023 are currently in planning stages. To learn more about the project and the U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, follow <\/i>@GritandGrace<\/i><\/a> on Twitter or visit <\/i>fairgrowth.house.gov<\/i><\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ‘Creating media that unites, that\u2019s something that I really want to do with my films’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":193894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2318,2192,2312,1914,2235,174,2306,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2168],"class_list":["post-193765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dodd-impact","category-fairfield-county","category-hri","category-sfa","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-stamford","category-uconn-voices","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 14:55:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193765"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194032,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193765\/revisions\/194032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/193894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193765"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=193765"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=193765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Guerra](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/IMG_7409-2-225x300.jpg\")
![\"Guerra](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/095A4845-300x200.jpg\")
![\"Alicia](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/095A5451-300x200.jpg\")