Here’s what they are saying about My Bolivia:

“My Bolivia” speaks to all who are interested in Latin America, its present, its past, or both. Like Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rick Tejada-Flores relates a family story (in this case, his own) that opens out onto the history of Latin America itself. With consummate artistry, this prize-winning documentary film maker leads us from his childhood impressions about the ancestral country he did not know to his archivally-researched revelations about his family’s role in major events of twentieth-century Bolivian and Latin American history. Because, as William Faulkner more than once observed, the past is never really past, “My Bolivia” is an ideal primer for the uninitiated, an informative and revealing essay for the specialist, and a powerful and provocative meditation for all. Students especially will be quick to appreciate the telling of this epic tale through the eyes of someone who, like all of us at some point, want to know more about “who we are and we came from.”
Rolena Adorno
Sterling Professor of Spanish, Yale University
Winner Modern Language Association Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.

In My Bolivia, American-born Rick Tejada-Flores,  has made a powerful and uniquely personal and historical documentary about his Bolivian ancestors – from his grandfather, the country’s former president in the 1930s, before and after – a rich multi-generational, bi-cultural journey about the land-locked, mineral rich country most know precious little about. A rewarding addition to the history and culture of our hemisphere.
Ann Louise Bardach
PEN Award winning journalist, author of Without Fidel and Cuba Confidential

My Bolivia is a moving, beautifully filmed and well-researched story of personal redemption. It is a film that conveys a deep respect for the magic of the place and its people while exploring the complex issues of how we can take responsibility for the negative actions of our forebearers without having them define our futures.
Linda Farthing
author of Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change

My Bolivia’s take on the story of one family is fascinating as it reveals the complex layers of political history, migration, and the ongoing forces that shape the region. I found the segment that touches on Afro-Bolivian descendants highly relevant to the ongoing exploration of racial identities in Latin America, and appropriate as a teaching tool as it ties together the complicated issues of memory, history, activism and politics.
Cristina Venegas
Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies
UC Santa Barbara

A filmmaker and historian, Rick Tejada-Flores has made a nice career out of telling other people’s stories: Cesar Chavez (The Fight in the Fields), Diego Rivera (Rivera in America) and José Clemente Orozco (Orozco: Man of Fire), among others. Like the vast majority of documentary filmmakers, the veteran East Bay producer-director and all-around mensch was deeply allergic to stepping in front of the camera and making himself the subject. Ultimately, he realized he had no choice in order to recount his family’s saga in Bolivia.

The patiently probing and highly rewarding My Bolivia, Remembering What I Never Knew traces the strands of the Tejada clan from La Paz to Los Angeles (where the filmmaker was born) back to La Paz and on to the isolated rural countryside. Tejada-Flores’ personal journey expands into a mini-history of Bolivia in the 20th century, an edifying and gratifying development for viewers (like this correspondent) whose entire knowledge of the landlocked South American country was gleaned from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Tejada-Flores informs us at the beginning of My Bolivia of his ancestors’ prominence: He knew as a small boy that his grandfather had been president (José Luis Tejada Sorzano, from 1934 to 1936). But he was intentionally kept in the dark for decades about the ways in which the Tejadas gained—and lost—their wealth and influence. It’s a shocking legacy, and how Tejada-Flores decides to handle it gives the one-hour doc its transcendently bittersweet ending.
Michael Fox
KQED Arts

California-born filmmaker Rick Tejada-Flores unravels the myths and realities of his family history in Bolivia, the country where his father was born and his grandfather was President during the bloodiest war in Latin American history. This fascinating journey, rich in archival footage, family photos and his journalist mother’s letters, sets the stage for mysteries to be solved after the shocking discovery of many skeletons in the family closet. As landowners, his family was among the political elite, but during Marxist revolutionary times a land reform was enacted by a previously unknown relative that stripped the family of its estates. An award-winning producer and director, Tejada-Flores has made a career of preserving the stories of Latino icons including labor organizer Cesar Chavez (The Fight in the Fields, 1997) and artist Jose Clemente Orozco (Orozco: Man of Fire, MVFF 2006). With My Bolivia, he now turns his camera on himself.
Cinelandiausa.com

Following are a few of the comments from the United Methodist Bolivia Missionary Reunion on July 21, 2017 in Little Rock, AK.   Full disclosure — one of my brothers was born in a Methodist Hospital in Bolivia.

A multi-generational systemic burden was lifted by the combination of truth and reconciliation through an act of restitution. We are more free when others are also free.

We don’t always see the perpetrators at the top; we came in and worked with the people on the bottom. It was very interesting to see how the patrones felt.

I didn’t know anything about Afro-Bolivians and their history. I didn’t realize there was such a caste system.

I particularly appreciate that your position of non-violence comes through clearly, and that you do not sugarcoat war, but portray it realistically for what it is.

Interview on Chronicles of La Raza, starts at 19:50

For those who speak Spanish, Spanish interview with Samuel Orozco on Radio Bilingue’s Linea Abierta