Community Documentary on Homeless Immigrant Children

By Chon Noriega, Professor/Director of Chicano Studies

The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television has a unique opportunity to document the Los Angeles area, both as a contribution to the historical record and as part of an ongoing partnership with the city and its institutions. With this in mind I teamed up in 2005 with a talented student in our MFA production program, Roberto Oregel MA ’97, MFA ’07, to produce a documentary on Casa Libre/Freedom House, a longtime project of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL).

Freedom House is located in the Pico Union district of Los Angeles, not too far from where I live in Echo Park. The House occupies a 10,000-square-foot Gothic mansion that was built in 1901 and is now registered as a country, state and federal historic site. The mansion was designed by renowned architect John Parkinson, whose other buildings include the Los Angeles Coliseum, Los Angeles City Hall and Union Station.

Casa Libre is a licensed emergency and long-term 14-bed shelter for children, under 18 without homes, including unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children. Its programs offer a range of services, including case management, educational testing and placement, referrals to no-cost health care providers, drug and alcohol prevention programs, family reunification services, living skills and leadership workshops, free legal and immigration services, and cultural activities. There is simply no other program like this in Los Angeles, let alone the United States. In addition, the CHRCL has filed (and won) the only class-action cases on behalf of immigrant children, establishing the first uniform standards for the care and treatment of immigrant and refugee minors in INS custody.

Roberto Oregel has already produced a documentary about Noam Chomsky that aired on Showtime and another for the Carnegie Museum on the Chicano painter Gronk. Our project –funded in part by the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships –aims to tell the gripping story of these children and how they came to the United States in order to escape political and domestic violence, the impact of drugs and gangs, and other hardships that threatened their very survival. The documentary also examines the various administrative and judicial remedies that already exist but that rarely reach this population.

The documentary, “Casa Libre/Freedom House,” will be completed this spring and provided free of charge to anyone interested in the issue and especially those who have daily contact with homeless youth. The personal and first-hand knowledge offered by the interviewed youth and legal experts will offer an invaluable perspective that can affect those most in need of the information. The documentary will be disseminated in DVD form by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center through a series of community forums and public screenings and through a targeted mailing to local departments of children's services, shelters, schools, community-based service organizations, INS agencies, federal policymakers and the media. Above all, we feel that Casa Libre represents a model comprehensive program addressing the unique challenges and risks facing immigrant minors in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, immigrant non-citizens now account for one-third of the population. This population is predominantly Mexican and Latin American in origin and is a younger demographic. Our project is one effort to inform the broader public about this significant yet largely invisible population.

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