In 1985 the city council of Fillmore California passed a resolution making English the official language for city business. Located in Ventura County in Southern California and surrounded by citrus groves, Fillmore was a town that at the time was over 50% Latino. The resolution the council created was not a law or ordinance, but it created a lot of tension in Fillmore and made national news.
Drawn by the headlines, a University of Southern California graduate student in Visual Anthropology headed to Fillmore. The student and Artchange Director, Ellen Frankenstein set out to learn more, at first for an educational film company looking for new topics for projects. The film company went other directions, but the student ended up returning, countless times, focusing her master’s thesis work on the community. Ellen’s time in Fillmore led to making a film focused not on what divided the town or on the tensions around language, but on the immigrant process; a glimmer into what it means to cross borders, to try to adapt and make it in a new country, The fifteen-minute, award winning documentary called Miles from the Border focused on one family and the story of Ben and Manuela Aparicio.
While in Fillmore, not only was Ellen filming, but also taking black and white photos with a classic twin lens (TLR) Rolleflex camera. Over 800 images that include City Council meetings, picnics and protests, fairs, church services, a high school prom, a flower show, quinceañeras, 4th of July Celebrations and people at home and work, be it a café, laundromat, a rancho or citrus processing plant.
With the help of the The Fillmore Historical Museum the photos were shared with the community in 2022. It was powerful to finally bring the images back to where they came from, to share them with people in the photos and with family and friends so many years later. The hope was that the process would add to a conversation about what it was like to live in Fillmore in the 1980s, how much and how the community has changed and what’s ahead. Note: the English Only resolution was repealed in 1999.
There are many more of the images from the series to upload, so check back again and see if more are added.
