#687) Fuentes Family Home Movies Collection (c. 1928 – c. 1938)
OR “Deep in the Heart of Tex-Mex”
Filmed by Antonio & Josefina Fuentes
Class of 2017
My thanks to the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) for preserving these home movies. You can view them on the TAMI website.
The Plot: Filmed in the border town of Corpus Christi, Texas, the Fuentes family home movies are…well, home movies. As portable cameras were starting to become more accessible, Antonio and Josefina Fuentes spent the 1920s and 1930s documenting various holidays and trips, almost all of them with their adorable kids running around being cute. At face value these home movies are no different than many other families of the time, but historically they showcase a Mexican-American community forming and growing on the border of the Lone Star state.
Why It Matters: The NFR calls this collection “a priceless snapshot of time and place” that are “among the earliest visual records of the Mexican-American community in Texas”.
But Does It Really?: I was definitely on the fence about this one. We have plenty of home movies on this list already (heck, there’s another home movie filmed in Texas on the list), do we need another one? But as usual, my research led me to the Center for Home Movies, which features an essay by TAMI founder Dr. Caroline Frick that makes a compelling argument for this collection’s inclusion. As with so many movies on this list, the Fuentes family home movies are on the NFR not for what they are, but what they represent: in this case a documentation of a Mexican-American community in a Texas border town in its early stages, presented in a positive light, free from the harmful stereotypes of mainstream media. A very slight pass for “Fuentes Family” on the NFR, but I think I’ll take a break from home movies for a while.
Everybody Gets One: Once again, my thanks to the Frick essay which has the most thorough information about the Fuentes family I could find online. Born in Montemorelos, Nuevo León, Antonio Fuentes moved to Texas some time in the early 1900s, settling in Corpus Christi in the 1910s. While working as the town’s Mexican consulate, Antonio met Josefina Barrera, and the two married in 1918. They had five children: Ruben, Ophelia, Mercedes, Antonio Jr., and Carmen, all of whom show up in the home movies. At some point in the late 1920s, Antonio purchased a Pathe Baby 9.5mm camera, one of the first portable and affordable movie cameras, and started filming his family.
Other notes
- All told, the Fuentes family home movies are six reels totaling 16 minutes in runtime. The Frick essay mentions that there are 15 reels, but all my other research indicates that the Fuentes collection is just the six films available online. I’m grateful for how short this collection is (compared to the other home movies on this list) but who knows; This may turn out to be a placeholder post after all.
- Interestingly, almost every film ends with the Pathe logo. Was it imbedded into their film stock? Or was it added after the film got processed?
- Thanks to the Fuentes documentation of Christmas morning 1928, this movie qualifies for my “Die Hard Not Christmas List“. Always fun to give that an update.
- A good chunk of these home movies is devoted to the 1929 4th of July parade in downtown Corpus Christi. Among the local organizations represented with floats and/or marchers are two Mexican-American civil rights groups: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the Order of the Sons of America. The appearance of LULAC is especially interesting, considering that it had only been founded five months earlier (but I guess that early publicity worked: they’re still around). Antonio and Josefina were active with LULAC throughout their lives, as well as other local civic organizations, including Obreros y Obreros, which also shows up in one of these parades.
- No home movie collection would be complete without some vacation footage, in this case the Fuentes family’s 1938 trip to Antonio’s parent’s ranch in Montemorelos. While Corpus Christi wasn’t exactly a hustle-and-bustle metropolis at the time, the ranch visit is a nice change of scenery, with all sorts of chickens, horses, cows, and other livestock roaming around.
Legacy
- Antonio and Josefina Fuentes continued to be active members of the Corpus Christi Mexican-American community until their deaths in, respectively, 1988 and 1993. In 1992, their daughter Mercedes Fuentes Peck donated their papers to the Special Collections and Archives at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, with their home movies being donated in 1995.
- In 2002, the Texas Archive of the Moving Image was founded by University of Texas, Austin Associate Professor Caroline Frick to collect and preserve all film pertaining to Texas. Among these films is, of course, the “Fuentes Family Home Movie Collection”, which has been digitized thanks to TAMI’s collaboration with Texas A&M. Not-so-coincidentally, Dr. Frick was an “at-large” member of the National Film Preservation Board in 2017, and is no doubt the reason these home movies made it into the NFR.
The Horse's Head 
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