By EMILY RASMUSSEN, Press-Telegram – Dec. 18, 2018
Harvard University student Dario Guerrero Meneses was at a film festival in Maine when he got the call from his father. Doctors found his mother, who the family thought had an unusually lengthy cold, had terminal kidney cancer.
It was early in the fall 2013 semester for Meneses. So, the Long Beach film student tried to push the shock of the diagnosis to the back of his mind while he focused on studying.
“But one day, while I was working on a project really late at night, I decided if I didn’t do anything I would regret it forever,” Meneses said.
So he picked up his camera.
“When I went home, I borrowed a camera from the school and started filming little moments around the home,” said Meneses, now 25. “It’s like I became obsessed.”
In August 2014, hopes of specialized cancer treatments for his mother, Rocio, led to the family traveling back to Mexico, costing Meneses his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status. He was brought to the United States when he was 2.
When she died shortly after, surrounded by family in central Mexico, Meneses garnered national headlines during his struggle to come back to the United States.
“The only purpose I could see for myself was bringing my mother’s ashes home,” he said.
The moments that Meneses filmed while taking care of his mother in Mexico and his struggles to return to the United States were turned into the film “Rocio,” which Meneses describes as a love letter to his mother. The film will be screening for the first time in his hometown on Thursday, Dec. 20 at Cabrillo High School.
“This was a path that I think is finally ending with the release of this film,” Meneses said.
When Meneses joined his mother in hopes of better cancer treatment in Mexico, he was aware it would violate his DACA status, effectively deporting himself. But because time was limited for his mother, Meneses said he couldn’t wait for an approval to go to Mexico and back.
So when his mother, Rocio Meneses Diaz, died at 41 in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, Meneses stayed with family for two months as he fought to regain his DACA status.
Coincidentally, an essay that Meneses submitted to the Washington Post was published shortly after his mother’s death, which led to coverage by the Associated Press of his struggle to return home. Within minutes of that article’s publication, Meneses said, he was told he could come home.
“I realize that I was privileged in that way,” Meneses said, adding he feels for others who don’t get that kind of awareness.
After coming home to Long Beach, Meneses quickly thought about how to turn his footage into something bigger. In February 2015, he started looking through the clips of his mother, editing them slowly as he took in all of the different emotions.
“I was just lost in the sea of footage and my feelings, trying to make sense of everything,” Meneses said. “But I got it started as my thesis project with help from my professors.”
The film also includes home movie clips taken by his parents when he was a child. Using those preserved memories, Meneses uses an alternation between the old and the new to tell the story of his mother.
“The present and the past communicate with each other,” he said.
The hour-long film is one of Meneses’ first professional products, which he’s screened at a handful of locations in the nation. Although he graduated from the California Academy of Mathematics and Science in Carson in 2011, he hopes that students at Cabrillo – the area he grew up at – will be inspired by his story.
“I want to show that our dreams are really possible to enact,” said Meneses, who received enough financial aid at Harvard to cover tuition and housing. “Especially in these times where negative rhetoric is putting us down, it’s important to see how we can overcome.”
Meneses added that he has been making occasional trips to the Mexican border near San Diego to drop off supplies for asylum seekers, and that he encourages attendees on Thursday to bring supplies, such as food or clothing, that he can donate on their behalf when he makes his next trip. He will also be announcing a scholarship for high school students, but that the details will be a surprise for the screening, Meneses said.
Source: Press-Telegram
