Homegrown: Documentary Shorts Collection

(deep ominous music) [Jr] The volcano had her own gravitational pull, one that had driven us thousands of miles from our home in Jackson Hole.

She granted us passage through the mud and the clouds.

[Vanessa] We stood at the summit breathless.

With frozen fingers, we were rewriting the script of who belonged in the mountains (Vanessa yells) [Jr] As we celebrated the first descent down the volcano, the pinnacle of skiing, a video of us went viral on Instagram.

We were taken aback to see so many negative comments from the Latino community.

(mouse clicking) [Vanessa] After forming relationships and obtaining permission from the Indigenous territory, we thought we had done everything right.

We wanted to make our people proud of our culture and lands.

[Jr] Instead, we were left with hard questions.

Had we just become the very things we're trying to change about skiing and colonization?

(wind howling) (Vanessa speaking Spanish) (all three speaking Spanish) - Okay, yeah.

- You can see the "U"s are really prominent where all of it was created by the glacier, but it's receded quite a ways, obviously.

So now it's just hanging right there.

(Juliana speaking Spanish) (Jr speaking Spanish) (Juliana continues in Spanish) - Yeah.

- Safety first.

- Yeah, we've never been up there, so... - Here we go.

- We'll go check it out, see what we find.

(upbeat music) [Vanessa] It's just like Columbia.

- Just like Columbia.

- Nice and wet.

(Jr speaking Spanish) (Juliana laughing) - Uh-oh!

(in Spanish) - Oh, I go like... (snow crunching underfoot) (driving acoustic music) [Vanessa] You know, I moved here and I didn't even know what skiing was.

Kind of got into it not too long ago.

(snow roaring) I'm Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada.

I'm a Colombian immigrant whose heart is split between the mountains here and the mountains there.

I grew up in Michigan seeing families go on ski trips, but my family didn't have those traditions, so skiing was never something I saw for myself.

There in the quiet, snowy woods, I found a space for myself.

I met people like Jr who had already worked hard to infiltrate the space so that other people of color would feel welcome.

Hi, how are you?

My culture teaches me that when you love something you share it, so I quickly wanted to share it with everyone I knew and everyone who looked like me.

[Jr] I'd lived 27 happy years and didn't want to learn how to ski, but I wanted to climb huge mountains.

I'm Jr Rodriguez, mestizo filmmaker, pro skier, and climate advocate.

Movies ruled my life as a kid, and seeing films like "Vertical Limit" and "Touching The Void" made me think I could be an alpinist.

K2 and Everest were on my mind, so learning to ski was the first step towards getting used to the cold.

Once I saw that social circles revolved around glory laps and competing with your neighbor, I knew why the Latino population was missing in these spaces.

(somber music) The films and images that were continually exported from Jackson Hole were full of white hype and death-defying ski lines.

As a child of immigrants, I knew that breaking into a new space was not going to be fun, but I also knew that I wasn't doing it for myself.

I was doing it for others, so I kept skiing.

I thought to myself, "How hard could this be?"

The first few years of learning to ski were tough.

It was a lot of people looking at you, talking (beep), just like, "Who are you?"

Like, "What the (beep) are you doing in my neighborhood?

And that was the energy that I just kept running into here.

Now, as a pro skier, I still don't like skiing, and it's taken trips like going out with Juliana to Mexico, going with you in Ecuador to reframe all of those hard years at learning all of these skills.

A lot of these skills came out of like, spite that people thought that I shouldn't be in this sport 'cause I didn't look like them.

So can we learn a new language, a new way to ski, to shift the culture?

Now we have people of color, people that look like us, that are asking us questions.

Now we're just this resource where they're looking to us for answers on how to do certain things, and they don't have to learn from your classic ski bro and inherit those cultural interactions that turned me off from skiing.

[Vanessa] Being able to ski with you, it's ironic because you don't like skiing, but it's what made me love skiing.

It's just really cool that you did all this work for people like me to be able to enjoy it.

And it's a testament, how much I love skiing is a testament that all the hard work you put in was worth something.

And it's not just for me specifically, but for people like me who see you in this space.

Juli, this is like Columbia.

Wet, wet.

And then we met Juliana, the first female IFMGA guide in all of Latin America.

She didn't compromise who she was to reach the peak of the guiding world.

She juggles both worlds as effortlessly as she dances salsa, and she's been teaching us how to do the same.

(Juliana speaking Spanish) - You guys, my knee.

- Oh no.

- Ugh, that really hurt.

(somber music continues) Oh, that hurts a lot.

Ooh.

Oh, my knee.

I kind of messed up my knee not too long ago, and it's my first knee injury, my first sport injury.

I think it brought up a lot of fear and trauma because I didn't grow up with health insurance and didn't grow up with all of these resources.

It was just such a blatant reminder of how privileged this industry of skiing is.

Nobody talks about how pro skiers just have that security blanket to fall back on if you get injured.

Also, the pressure to continue, the pressure to keep skiing with my injury, not knowing, and having to take those risks made me feel really lonely, to be honest.

(somber music fades) Almost there.

(upbeat guitar music) (they instruct others in Spanish) It kind of feels like this is part of the reason why we're here.

We wanna create an alternative that feels less extractive and feels more like a community or family.

It was really cool to have the opportunity to teach back-country skiing to the Latino community in Jackson, through a local nonprofit organization called Camina Conmigo.

(upbeat guitar music continues) (Jr speaking Spanish) (upbeat guitar continues) [Jr] Being able to share our knowledge base of skiing and here's how we can learn good habits early.

The first times I went back-country skiing, there wasn't that nurturing or care.

Let's figure out how to bring the whole community up to speed and so that we can all enjoy the landscape together.

[Vanessa] Even being able to lead that whole ski day in Spanish is so significant to me because it feels like I'm talking to my own family.

(upbeat guitar continues) Being on the other end, being able to receive instruction in Spanish just takes another layer of discomfort away, 'cause it's like, "Okay, well this is a little familiar because it's in my own language."

(gentle guitar music) [Jr] We're trying to recalibrate the valley system in skiing in an outdoor culture for people of color.

- Keep going straight now.

We have these really incredible landscapes with glaciers that are important to different cultures, but they're not as equally as valued up here.

Pico de Orizaba, Ecuador, Columbia, they're all of these tropical glaciers that we can be proud of.

[Vanessa] I think we're just trying to instill a sense of pride and honor that is so often taken away from immigrants, because we're often seen as lesser than, or the fact that we had to leave our home countries somehow makes them inferior, when it's actually not like that at all.

Without erasing all of the hardship, we wanna also just shine light on all of the beauty and everything that's worth preserving, both in a metaphysical sense of a glacier and then also in culture.

And both of those things are kind of disappearing in some ways, and they need to be preserved and they need to be appreciated and celebrated.

[Jr] As we learned from our first ski descent in Columbia, all of our actions can bring unintended consequences.

(Vanessa speaking Spanish) [Vanessa] As Latino athletes, we are scrutinized in ways that traditional skiers are not.

[Jr] We're trying to highlight degrading ecosystems through skiing, but people are waiting for us to fail or make a mistake, to prove that we don't belong in these spaces.

[Vanessa] But the mountains belong to us too, and we want to create a legacy for others.

(gentle guitar continues) (Vanessa cheering) Oh my God!

(Jr laughing) (wind howling) (tense music) Wah!

Woo!

(snow roaring) (Juliana speaking Spanish) (tense upbeat music continues) (tense upbeat music fades)