Arlen Parsa, a local documentary maker and Columbia College graduate, never realized there was another artist in his family until his maternal grandmother died in 2013 and his mother, inspired to research the family’s history, learned that her grandfather, Eustasio Rosales, had been a composer of some renown. “She did a random Google search and discovered that his music is actually on the Internet,” Parsa explains. “This song of his had survived a hundred years and is still apparently being performed in South America. It’s called ‘Bolero,’ and it’s meant to be performed by five marimbas.”
In the process of getting Andina performed, Parsa learned about more than just opera—he discovered some shocking facts about the era in which his great-grandfather lived. After Rosales married an American woman in 1911, she was stripped of her U.S. citizenship under the Expatriation Act of 1907. (In 1922, Congress repealed the section that revoked the citizenship of American women who married immigrants, but it never issued a formal apology to the people affected until 2013.) “Can you imagine that happening? Losing your citizenship because of who you married and because you were a woman?” Parsa asks. “Because this didn’t happen to men who married immigrants.”
Directed by Arlen Parsa. 70 min. Screens on April 23 as part of the CIMMFest Spring Fling Thing and on April 29 and May 1 as part of the Chicago Latino Film Festival.
Sun 4/23, 2 PM Chop Shop & 1st Ward 2033 W. North cimmfest.org $10
Sat 4/29, 3:30 PM and Mon 5/1, 5:30 PM River East 21 322 E. Illinois chicagolatinofilmfestival.org $13
