Cascarón

A few years back when I made Grasshopper for Grandpa — the documentary on Jimmy’s Oriental Gardens — I met Chris Price, the co-director on this project. After he saw the film, he came to me with the idea of doing a film on finding “las hueveras” (the egg ladies) that actually make the cascarones for Fiesta and wanted to try and tell their story.

Everyone in Santa Barbara knows what cascarones are, the beauty of them, and the mark they leave... but no one really knew where they came from, how the tradition got started, and the significance behind them, especially their particular history in Santa Barbara. It seemed to be a good local story with some definite unknowns to try and reckon with.

I personally didn’t know any of the main characters in our film before heading out and trying to find them. I think Chris did some research and rode his bike around Milpas Street on the Eastside trying to find them, asking random people where he could find “the women who make the casacarones.”

One of those days, he got tipped off about Belen, the one who sells tamales around town who also makes cascarones. It turns out she lived within a couple-block radius of some of the other women, Rosalva and Carmen, who also make the eggs. So it was lucky.

Those are the three women who, along with their families, turned out to be the main sellers downtown during Fiesta, and the main characters in our film.

I had some more politically driven scene ideas I would have wanted to try and capture if I had initially gone into this story with a bigger and longer project in mind to begin with. Alas, my style tends to lean more toward the personal-portrait style or “human interest” story type, so our main focus was these people’s backgrounds — where they came from and how they got into making the cascarones in the first place. Questions like, who passed the tradition of making these eggs on to them?

It would have been fun to make a more political documentary, but it’s kind of nice not to beat certain controversial messages over the heads of your audience and let them infer certain things on their own.

For example, one of the women in our film, Rosalva Manzo, makes hand-painted Trump eggs. On the surface, that’s pretty political and also really funny, but it depends on how you spin it and what you do with the eggs. Do you collect them, break them, or scoff at them?

I think with all the stuff going on with DACA and immigration policy, women’s rights, etc., this film is definitely a conversation starter. People will walk away with questions and wanting to know more; at least that’s been my experience so far.

This is my first attempt making any type of film with a foreign language involved. The film is composed of mostly Spanish and broken English. Although both Chris and I speak some Spanish, this was still the most challenging part in completing the film.

Both my parents have taught ESL and lower-level English my entire life. My dad was chair of the ESL department at SBCC for years and first got into it because of his love for Mexican culture and the romanticism in the language and music.

So you can say this is a thank-you letter to my parents for providing me that experience growing up and surrounding me with their good-hearted, hardworking Mexican students. It’s also a personal love letter to this Hispanic culture of Santa Barbara and beyond. Why not give the marginalized a voice for once? (Director, Casey McGarry)

CHRIS PRICE (Writer, Director), I had been toying with the idea of a doing a film on cascarón makers on my own for several years. But being a full-time land-use consultant with no filmmaking experience, I knew it would prove difficult. After I saw Grasshopper, I knew Casey was the right person to help make it happen.

Finding the subjects was one of the biggest challenges early on. A number of people I approached refused to be interviewed. I think there was a fear that I was some kind of undercover ICE agent on a sting operation. Fortunately, I had known Belen and Florentino for several years because they would come by my house, selling tamales. Our relationship grew to the point that I would go their house anytime I wanted tamales.

After being shut down on the cold-call approach, I decided to stop by their house and ask if they knew of any hueveras. Little did I know they had been making them for 19 years. After that, using Belen and Florentino as a reference really helped opened doors.

My original vision for the film was not only to tell the story of who makes the cascarones, but also as a vehicle to underscore certain ironies of Fiesta and how undocumented immigrants are carrying on the tradition enjoyed by what is largely a white upper- and middle-class Santa Barbara.

For practical reasons (and the fact I have no filmmaking experience), I deferred to Casey’s idea to make this a short rather than a feature and focus on the personalities rather than the political controversy. Nevertheless, I think there is enough subtle reference in the film regarding immigration and race issues that the audience will be left with an impression of that message.

Time and money were both a constraint, but Casey worked his magic. We only started filming in July, and it was entirely self-funded. Hopefully on the next project I’m involved with, there will be more of both.