Young filmmakers explore America’scultural identity

Daniela Caride

STONEHAM — Foley Ibidapo and Xavier Garcia have many stories to tell.

One of Ibidapo’s teachers used to call him “troublemaker” because he was black. Garcia’s football coach called him “retarded rhesus monkey” when the Puerto Rican youngster missed the ball.

Ibidapo’s teammates used the n-word to insult blacks on the street. Garcia’s classmates joked that he was a Mexican who crossed the border on a raft.

At Stoneham High School, they were “the B&B Brothers” — short for “black and brown.”

A decade later, now 25, Ibidapo remembers that everyday he would hear some type of comment, “something to put down my culture.”

“You pause and think, ‘Well, they are my friends. They probably don’t mean it,’” adds Garcia, also 25. “We just accepted it as, ‘This is what a football team is like.’ But there was a lot of damaging going on.”

When they decided to film one another talking about their experiences, they took the first steps toward a much larger project that could rectify some of that damage — “Cultura Ijile,” or “Cultural Identity.” “Cultura” means “culture” in Spanish; “ijile” means “identity” in Yoruba, a west African dialect.

The interviews are part of a documentary, to be finished later this year, intended to look their hometown square in the eye and, in the process, find “a better tomorrow.”

The project

“Cultura Ijile” follows several current and former residents of Stoneham, a suburban town of about 22,000 people — 95 percent of whom are white, according to data from the 2000 U.S. Census — located 10 miles northwest of Boston. The film uses the personal stories of the residents, all of whom come from different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds, to explore the larger theme of cultural identity in America.

The filmmakers say the project examines the idea that everyone lives similar experiences, regardless of origin and roots — that even though we’re all different, we’re all the same.

“Stoneham is a unique place. But the suburban Americana can be seen as a great example of macro America,” says Ibidapo.

They have raised almost $10,000 for the project over the last two years, but still need another $20,000 to finish filming and properly edit the material.

“Through archival film, photographs, interviews and graphics, we show the audience the social complexities of American society through the town of Stoneham,” the filmmakers wrote in the sponsorship brochure they sent to prospective investors.

“We show the past ignorance of our society, its current progression and the hope for a better tomorrow,” they wrote.

The people

Garcia’s Stoneham story began in 1989, when he emigrated from Puerto Rico after his father Ismael was offered a housekeeping position at the newly opened New England Memorial Hospital. The facility, part of the soaring health care industry in a town traditionally known for agriculture and shoemaking, was recruiting people of various ethnicities, religions and cultures. At the time, Stoneham was even more homogeneous — over 97 percent white, according to the 1990 Census.

Garcia, his father, his brother Jonathan and his mother Delia lived together for a time in a one-room apartment on the hospital grounds with a small section for a toilet and a bath. They later moved to a more accommodating house a few blocks away — on the same street where Ibidapo lived when he moved from Florida to Stoneham in 1997 with his mother, Dorette Ellis, and his sister Toyin.

A single mother with two children, Ellis rented the apartment, the cheapest place she could find, while pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience.

Ibidapo’s family soon moved to a building cleaned by Ismael’s maintenance company. The two boys often saw one another while Garcia helped his father.
As seventh-graders at Stoneham Middle School, they became friends when they joined the track team. In ninth grade, they hooked up with three other good friends of different ethnicities who played football together. They called themselves “the League of Nations.”

“Sports is what brought us all together,” says Garcia.

“’Cause we were outsiders, we were more welcoming to everybody else than the other cliques,” adds Ibidapo, the school’s only black student.

The problem

But that spirit of togetherness didn’t necessarily empower the boys to stand up for their cultures.

“It was crazy how people would start making fun of their own culture or religion around some of the kids just to fit in,” remembers Ibidapo. “It was ridiculous.”

“Also, I didn’t understand a lot of things that people were saying that were subtly bad — I thought ‘B&B’ was like the Blues Brothers,” he adds. “I’m not blaming the kids.

“It’s just literally the culture of Stoneham. They were hearing these jokes from their parents.”

Garcia remembers becoming aware of the racist comments his peers would sling when he started working for his high school’s anti-defamation league in his junior and senior years. By the time the two went to college, both said they felt relieved at getting a break from that environment.

“I felt like I was dying slowly inside,” remembers Ibidapo.

Garcia headed north to Colby College in Maine, graduating in 2005 with a double major in Spanish history and Latin American literature and a minor in theater and dance. Ibidapo went to historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, also graduating in 2005 with a degree in English.

At Morehouse, Ibidapo learned black history that he’d never encountered in high school, an education that spurred pride in his culture. When he came back to Stoneham, he says, he felt different — and angry.

“There’s such a rich history that was censored to me and the rest of my classmates,” he says. “We’re in a society where people just don’t know about African American history, especially on how African Americans contributed to our society.”

The process

To make money after college, Ibidapo and Garcia started promoting and videotaping parties. Soon, they were filming music videos, designing Web sites and creating promotional material.

“People saw our videos and wanted to come to our parties,” remembers Ibidapo.

A 2006 TV contest calling for 5-minute documentaries on social concerns changed the course of their business. Garcia videotaped Ibidapo talking for two hours about his high school experiences with discrimination. They missed the deadline for the contest, but when they watched the edited cut of the talk, they said, they knew they had something.

They started interviewing Stoneham residents and experts in cultural and social issues related to race, like Leonard Steinhorn, associate professor at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C., and journalist Jeff Chang, author of the acclaimed book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.”

The documentary took shape in 2007 after an interview with Steinhorn provided their project’s unifying theme: It would be an effort to define America.

“One of the defining elements of America is written on our dollar bill: ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — ‘Out of many, one,’” says Steinhorn in the documentary. “America is an ideal that for centuries is trying to say that we welcome people of all backgrounds, all colors, all ethnicities, all ideas and ideologies, and we bring them together as one, as Americans, as people who believe in the fundamental principles of equality and freedom, and inclusion and tolerance.”

Garcia says he thinks relations in the U.S. still have a long way to go, due in large part to an overarching lack of empathy for people who are different — a lack frequently generated by ignorance.

Erica Frankenberg, a researcher for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, says she believes Garcia is right.

“White students now are only about 57 percent of the population,” and that number is dropping, says Frankenberg. “If students are not getting any information in either history textbooks or the literature they are reading about the [other] 43 percent, they will have a very slim view of the kind of things that are important in our society.”

The practice

One important element is a more nuanced understanding of how discrimination itself has evolved over the years, according to Ibidapo.

“Racism in America is so prevalent today,” he says. “It’s just hidden … in subtleties. [Sometimes] it’s not what you say, but what you don’t say.”

James Herron, Ph.D., a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who teaches a course on race in the Americas at Harvard University, explains that the “old racism” of the 1960s — generally defined as a notion of inferiority related to natural characteristics of a group — is being replaced by a new kind. This more disguised brand first highlights a person’s virtues or weaknesses, then links those attributes to certain racial groups.

“For example, they would say, ‘Good people are hardworking … and honest,’” illustrates Herron. “And then they would say, ‘By the way, black people are not like that.’”

Ibidapo says there were not enough minority students at his high school to cause a stir when faced with such veiled insensitivity — and those that were there “didn’t speak up about it because they just wanted to be like everybody else,” he adds.

The filmmakers say Stoneham High has more racial and cultural diversity now than it did in their day. But tensions haven’t disappeared.

In 2006, Garcia and Ibidapo met with some Stoneham students. Two black students in the room “really opened up,” according to the filmmakers.

“It was very similar, still, how they felt singled out and how they saw many of these things going on in their hallways,” says Garcia. “Now they are more aware than we were, which is great, but still they are not speaking back.”

The prescription

The student discussions broadened the filmmakers’ goals. They created a classroom guide to help stimulate dialogue in schools and community centers about cultural identity, a project that became part of Ibidapo’s master’s thesis in multicultural education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, which he expects to finish this fall.

Other ideas followed. Ibidapo and Garcia created an educational service for companies interested in discussing diversity with employees, and they train executives how to deal with culturally uncomfortable situations. The filmmakers are also developing a pilot for a reality TV series about cultural identity, and are considering starting a nonprofit organization to foster discussions about diversity and inclusion.

Standing in front of the former New England Memorial Hospital, later renamed Boston Regional Medical Center and long since closed, Garcia and Ibidapo reminisce. The skeleton of the hospital building now overlooks acres of grass where only a decade ago, the filmmakers’ homes once stood.

Even though Ibidapo and Garcia have mixed feelings about their past in Stoneham, they feel much better about the present and are confident about the town’s future.

“Our cultural roots are a direct result of Stoneham,” says Garcia, who makes it clear that he enjoys living here. “The main purpose [of ‘Cultura Ijile’ is] to uplift, inspire and change — to show that we’re all the same.”