Three Amigos at Rancho Bonilla

Had a great time on June 14 at the rodeo, concert and event at Rancho Bonilla. David Bonilla (left in photo) hosted and my friend Howard (right in photo) helped me promote and sell DVDs of Thinking Grande! Friend Valerie Martinez of Fresno also attended. The gentleman in the middle hosts a TV show in Santa Maria. Looking forward to the next event at Asi Es Mi Tierra.

San Diego TV Premiere for Thinking Grande!

Thinking Grande! will be telecast on San Diego's KPBS public television station at 9:30 pm today, Tuesday the 26th of May. And those of you in Fresno can see it on KVPT on June 22 at 7 pm. Tell your friends1

Rogelio Martinez at Rancho Bonilla June 14th!

Make plans to visit beautiful Rancho Bonilla for an afternoon of Mexican music, food, rodeo and fun on Sunday, June 14. David Bonilla is putting on another summer event at Asi Es Mi Tierra, the Mexican Wonderland his father Jose Luis Bonilla spent twenty years building.

Rogelio Martinez is a very popular singer who sings on horseback. Last summer's concert was a fantastic event and this one should be even better. Click here for video of last year's concert and more info about the upcoming event. See you there!

Visit Rancho Bonilla for more info about the event.

TG! TV Premiere on May 26

Thinking Grande! will have its broadcast television premier on San Diego's public television station KPBS on Tuesday, May 26th at 9:30 pm. Don't miss this television event!

Thinking Fallbrook!

TG! will show at the Fallbrook Film Festival on Sunday, April 26th. Fallbrook is a small town in north San Diego county and is the avocado capital of the world. We will show our new 27 minute version of the film.

Award for Thinking Grande!

I'm proud to say that TG! won the Central Coast Filmmaker Showcase Best Film award at the recent San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.

San Luis Obispo Film Festival and PBS

Thinking Grande! was shown at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival this week to a very enthusiastic audience. Great festival they've got going in SLOtown. I hooked up with my friends and advisors Gerry and Alice Gaxiola, both natives of SLO. They attended the screening and then fed me pulled pork sandwiches at Mo's and gave me a pick-up truck guided tour of their old stomping grounds.

I'm making plans for TG to be broadcast on public television stations KPBS in San Diego and KVPT in Fresno. Those showings should be in May and June and then again on both stations in September which is Hispanic Heritage Month.

Watch Thinking Grande! at Butaca, a new Video on Demand Service

Veranda Entertainment's Butaca, a new broadband video on demand service for Latino films, distributes Thinking Grande! You can see the entire film there. Click here and enjoy.

'Thinking Grande! DVD now available

You can now own Thinking Grande! It's available at Amazon and CreateSpace for $19.95.  So be the first one on your block to have the DVD and watch it over and over and over. 

A Spanish-subtitled version is also available on DVD. 

Get driving directions to Rancho Bonilla on Google Maps

Coordinates: 34° 55' 49.22''N, 119° 37' 48,40'' W

Santa Maria Sun article

Craig Shafer, Arts Editor, wrote a nice article in the Santa Maria Sun about Bonilla and the film.

Thinking Grande

Meet the Mexican migrant-turned-millionaire whose passionate twenty-year struggle to build a ‘Mexican Disneyland’ in California ultimately, painfully, and bitterly failed in a collision of bureaucracy, lawsuits and Mexican/American culture clashes.

He did, however, succeed in creating and leaving behind a monumental folk art masterpiece that stands tribute to his cultural heritage and audacious dream, and which embodies his Horatio Alger-esque belief: ‘In life, you have to think big!’

Now 65 and back in his hometown in Zacatecas, he still yearns to complete his dream village. He envisions Americans and Mexicans enjoying it together and learning more about Latino cultures. No matter its future, those who see his abandoned wonderland are amazed and inspired knowing ‘it was done by a Mexican who came to wash dishes.’

Jose Luis Bonilla, one of a million Zacatecan migrants to the United States, had a one-in-a-million dream that compelled him to work two decades trying to make it come true. He wanted to build his very own ’Mexican Disneyland’ right in the heart of California.

And he almost did it. Rising out of nowhere in the New Cuyama Valley between Santa Maria and Bakersfield, Bonilla’s idealized Mexican village has been compared to Hearst Castle and the Watts Towers. Así Es Mi Tierra (My Homeland is Like This) been called a ’folk art masterpiece’ and ’the most beautiful set of buildings in Santa Barbara County.’

His stunning, hand-made re-creation of a Mexican village features a 3,000-seat rodeo arena considered one of the finest in the world, a marketplace, artificial lake with fountain, gazebo, plaza, stage and bandstand. All built by Bonilla, his family, and teams of Mexican immigrants from local stones and scrap pipes from abandoned oil fields.

Intended as a bridge between Mexicans and Californians, a showcase for Mexican culture, and a home-away-from-home for local Mexicans, there is a problem. Así Es Mi Tierra now sadly lies unfinished and unused. Bonilla has given up.

But just a few years ago, events there drew thousands of attendees and the village throbbed with the excitement of charrerias and the live music of superstars Juan Gabriel and Chello. Now the main sounds are the wind through the Italian poplars and the lonely clip-clop of Andulusian horses on the village’s hand-laid cobblestones.

In 2001, embittered at what he feels were bureaucratic obstacles and legal disputes that forced him to abandon his vision, he stopped building. ‘Have to have permit for this, permit for that,’ Bonilla says. "There always was a problem.’

Bonilla, who first came to California in the 1950’s as a child, and later washed dishes at the Disneyland Hotel, has now returned to Mexico. ‘The worst thing is to stop,’ he says. ‘It's like cutting off your arms.’

Steve DeCamp, spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Building and Development Department, says the county is working on a conditional-use permit to allow the property's improvements. ’It kind of emerged out of the wilderness and it looked pretty fantastic when you looked at it,’ DeCamp says. ‘Now we're just trying to find a way to make the whole thing legitimate.’

Bonilla is frustrated. ‘In Santa Barbara, they demand Hispanic architecture,’ he says. ‘The most beautiful Hispanic place in Santa Barbara County is Así Es Mi Tierra, which sadly is half-finished.’ Bonilla has returned to his hometown in Mexico.

His California-born and raised children, however, still live at the ranch. Tending to the family’s local grocery stores, delicatessen and tortilla factory during the week, on weekends they dress in traditional Mexican outfits to ride, rope, sing and carry on their father’s beloved traditions.

They and their own children successfully straddle our country’s cultural divides. The younger Bonilla’s lifestyles and identities--a 21st century blend of Mexican heritage and California contemporary--pay tribute to and help realize their absent father’s vision of bi-cultural appreciation, understanding and acceptance.

Meanwhile, back at his ranch in Zacatecas where he raises fighting bulls, Bonilla seems restless and claims he'd return in a moment if the county invited him back. He's fit, 65, and can build more. ‘Just let them give me a hand and not so many obstacles,’ he says. ‘Let me finish the project, so that people can admire it and know that a Mexican who came to wash dishes was the one who did it.’

Postcard

Gerry Gaxiola, a valued member of our Advisory Council, has created this new postcard which we will use to promote our work in progress at the San Diego Latino Film Festival March 9-19 and at the national conference of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers March 9-12 in Long Beach. Producer Kevin Bender ( k.bender@corpcom.se ) will attend both events.

Gerry took the photos of the ranch when he visited last year.

Gerry's family originated in the Basque region of Spain, emigrated to Mexico in the 1600's and came up to California in the 1700's.

He's traced his family back to 1767 when Manuel Gaxiola, born in Real de Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico, and his son, Jose Antonio Gaxiola, born in 1786, moved to Monterey, California, and started the Gaxiola California line descending down to his grandson Justin Gaxiola Mead....that's over two hundred years in California!

Aso known as The Maestro, and the subject of Les Blank's documentary The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists, he explains the images he used:

'I tried to show four qualities of the project. This project is: Big, Solid, Strong, Individual.

Starting from the right top going clockwise; Big, this photo shows the size and scale of the project. It is very big compared to most folk art projects. Next, Solid, this photo shows how solid these buildings are made. This building reminds me of an ancient Roman or Greek building, planted firmly in the ground and ready to last for centuries. Next, Strong, the strength of the man, the tenacity to stay with the project. Bonilla the man is like a Mexican fighting bull, charging forward is all he knows how to do. Then the Individual, here is a photo of his brand. A man's brand is his mark, his logo if you will, showing him as an individual. What a man brands he loves and what he loves he brands. We see that brand all over the project.'

California Stories

This project is made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of the Council's statewide California Stories Initiative. www.californiastories.org

Our Advisory Council

Patrick Davis is the former Executive Director of the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission (1988-2006). A tireless and effective arts advocate in California since 1977, he has been called 'one of the most important public figures in the history of Santa Barbara.'

Raúl Ávila, Ph. D., is Professor of Linguistics and Spanish Literature at Colegio de México, has written more than 120 research publications on the use and abuse of the Spanish language. As General Coordinator of DIES-M, Diffusion of the Spanish Language in the Mass Media, he oversees research in the diversity of the Spanish language on radio and TV.

Ned Crouch is the author of Mexicans & Americans: Cracking the Cultural Code. A cultural analyst and lecturer, he graduated from the University of the Americas, and did graduate work in Mexican history at Michigan State University. He is a member of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, the World Trade Association and the World Affairs Council.

William Deverell, Ph. D., Professor of History at U.S.C. and a historian of the American West, has published eight books. His latest, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past, examines the ethnic history of Los Angeles. Deverell is the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Chair Emeritus of the California Council for the Humanities.

David G. Gutierrez, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He focuses on Chicano history, the history of the American Southwest, comparative immigration, and ethnicity. His publications include Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity and Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States.

Gerry Gaxiola is a Bay Area-based artist and expert on California folk artists such as Simon Rodia and Alex Madonna. A sixth-generation Californian with Spanish and Mexican roots, he is also the subject of an acclaimed documentary by Les Blank, The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists.

Sam Quinones is a journalist who wrote the definitive profile of Bonilla in the LA Times in February 2005. His stories from Mexico have been published in dozens of major American newspapers. His book, True Tales from Another Mexico, was published in 2001. In 1998, he was awarded the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships in U.S. print journalism.

Our Production Team

Executive Producer: Jorge Fons, one of Mexico's most internationally acclaimed film directors, Ariel award winner for best feature film, director of some of Mexico's most popular TV series, and the past president of the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences. His filmography includes: Director, La Cumbre, El Callejon de los Milagros (Midaq Alley), Rojo Amanecer, Diego Rivera: Vida y Obra, Caridad and many more. His film Midaq Alley has won the most domestic and international awards of any Mexican film.

Co-director: Julio Fons has been nominated as best director for an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of the Academy Award or Oscar. In television, he has produced for Mexico's TV Azteca. His filmography includes: Director, Benjamin; Producer, La Cumbre, El Señor L.B.; Editor, Espias en la Cuidad, Benjamin.

Co-producer, co-director: Kevin Bender has produced and directed a series of independent documentaries that have been hosted by TV personalities such as CNN's Larry King and cablecast nationally in the U.S. His videography includes: Producer/Director, Sports Greatest Rivalries, The Golden Decade of Baseball, Ball Talk: Baseball's Voices of Summer. Associate Producer, Les Blank'sThe Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists.

Rancho Bonilla Pics by Harry F. Thompson

Gazebo

Fountain & Arena Seats