Raquel Cepeda Joins One Book One Bronx
On Wednesday, 2/16, 7pm, Raquel Cepeda will join the conversation on her book Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, filmmaker, producer, and award-winning writer Raquel Cepeda is the author of Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (Atria, Simon & Schuster). Bird of Paradise is equal parts memoir about Cepeda’s coming of age in New York City and Santo Domingo, and detective story chronicling her year-long journey to discover the truth about her ancestry. The book also looks at what it means to be Latinx today. The companion curriculum is available for free download here.
Cepeda’s latest film, La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla, was set to premiere at Tribeca Film Festival until the global Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the festival’s cancellation earlier this year. The film had its virtual North American premiere at DOC NYC on November 11, 2020, and also won the festival’s Audience Award. Directed, written, and produced by Cepeda, the documentary follows a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former “First Lady” of the Savage Skulls gang as she struggles to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. With one foot firmly grounded in the outlaw life and the other as an activist and spiritual advisor, Lorine straddles the complexities of multiple worlds. Employing rich never-before-seen archives of the borough that gifted the world both salsa and hip-hop culture, we will go on a complicated and, at times, surreal journey through five decades of Bronx history and resilience in La Madrina's own words. Henry Chalfant and Sacha Jenkins are the film’s executive producers.
Cepeda’s documentary film, Some Girls, produced by Henry Chalfant and Sam Pollard, focuses on a group of troubled Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, the white supremacist narratives about American history they’ve been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. What does it really mean to be American? And, more importantly, what does that look like? The Some Girls companion curricula for 6-8th grade, High School, and Undergraduate students is available for free download here.
