The timing wasn’t planned, but the contrast between Keeper of the Fire, a documentary premiering on Friday, Jan. 24, at the Brava Theater, and the current administration is impossible to ignore.
As the Trump administration targets Latino immigrants and pushes a narrative of “one nation, one culture,” Keeper of the Fire offers something else entirely: a vision of the Mission’s poetic resistance and the communities it celebrates.
The 12-year labor of love is a documentary about poet and activist Alejandro Murguía — founding member and first director of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, two-time American Book Award winner, and San Francisco’s poet laureate emeritus (2013-2017).
But the film, directed by Louis F. Dematteis, is also a portrait of the Mission — and San Francisco. Poets like Juan Felipe Herrera, Roberto Vargas, the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ernesto Cardenal, share space with archival footage from the Mission, Nicaragua, and beyond.
Through Murguía’s story, Dematteis captures decades of culture in the Mission District, connecting local struggles to international movements.
‘We’ve Always Been Here’
Born in North Hollywood, raised in Mexico City, Murguía remembers arriving back to California as a child who spoke no English. “I came back as an immigrant,” he says. “I have both the power and confidence of being native born and I understand the experience of an immigrant who arrives not knowing any English.”
That dual perspective—insider and outsider, native and immigrant—runs through everything Murguía creates. His work spans poetry, short stories, and anthologies of Central American and Mayan verse.
Ask Murguía about the current administration’s “one nation” rhetoric, and he gets direct: “This nation has never been one,” he says. “It has always been multiracial from that moment the Europeans showed up.” He pauses. California has nothing to do with those other 13 colonies. We’ve always been here. We are, in fact, Natives.”
Visual poetry
Dematteis has known Murguía since the 1970s, when both were involved in Nicaragua solidarity work supporting the grassroots movement that removed the Somoza dictatorship from power in 1979. (Murguía fought on the southern front in Costa Rica in 1979.) In 2015, Dematteis released The Other Barrio, a feature film based on a short story by Murguía about the arsons that have plagued the Mission for decades.
Dematteis and co-producers David Brown and Raymond Telles began filming for Keeper of the Fire when Murguía was named San Francisco’s first Latino Poet Laureate in 2013. What started as a straightforward profile evolved into something else. “It wasn’t quite working,” Dematteis admits. “What we needed to do was to develop a visual poetry to go with Alejandro’s poetry.”
The result is a film that mirrors the rhythms and imagery of Murgia’s poetry, weaving footage from the Mission, Nicaragua, and Los Angeles into a visual language that complements his verse.
There were obstacles along the way. COVID delayed the project. So did funding challenges and the national reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, which redirected resources toward more immediately urgent stories. But Latino Public Broadcasting signed on to co-produce the film, and PBS is now in discussions about national distribution. The 26-minute, 46-second film has already won Best Documentary Short at the Denver Indie Film Festival and has screened at festivals internationally.
Speaking truth
Murguía is blunt about poetry’s importance in dangerous times. “Poetry uses language accurately to help clarify things — as opposed to what we’re seeing right now in the media where language is being used so that you get no clarity.”
“The fact that poetry feels so dangerous to the powers that be speaks naturally to the power that poets have,” Murguía says. “The good poet goes right to that crossroads and explains through poetry what it is that’s happening.”
Poetry also, he adds, is a tool to ridicule the powerful. “That’s what the powerful hate—to be ridiculed, to be made fun of, to have their emperor-has-no-clothes moment.”
A month and a half ago, Murguía got a reminder of that power. San Francisco Poet Laureate Genny Lim tried to hand Senator Adam Schiff a letter signed by poets across the city, requesting a cessation of military aid to Israel. Schiff’s office refused to send anyone to accept it.
So the poets came to Schiff. Outside his office, a hundred people gathered as former Poet Laureates Devorah Major, Murguía, Genny Lim, and Maxine Hong Kingston read their work into the air. “It was poets with their poetry that in fact shut down his office because they refused to meet with us,” Murguía recalls.
Days later, Murgia saw that someone had taken one of his poems from that reading and wheat-pasted it inside a Muni bus shelter at 24th and Folsom.
“Poetry in San Francisco is still alive,” Murguía says. “We are still making our voice heard.”
Estrenos bravos
At the January 24 premiere of Keeper of the Fire, Camilo and Greg Landau, who composed the film’s music, will perform live with vocalist Liliana Herrera. They’ll play “Suavecito,” the iconic Malo song, among others.
“It’s really a celebration of the Mission,” Dematteis says. “There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to see themselves on screen.”
“I think people will be happy to see the Mission and the struggles of the neighborhood documented,” Murguía says. “It will energize them and kind of reconfirm the commitment to keeping the Mission District what the Mission District has been the past 50, 60, 70 years.”
“It’s a very strong film, but it’s a celebratory film,” says Dematteis. It inspires people to be involved.”
That’s the fire Murguía keeps. That’s what Keeper of the Fire documents. And on January 24, the Mission gets to see it on the big screen.
Keeper of the Fire World Premiere is Friday, Jan. 24, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the Brava Theater, 2781 24th St. After the film, there will be a Q&A and book signing. Tickets are $20.