ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
In rural California, a small community of Black and Lantinx families strive for their own vision of what the town’s original founders sought to build over a century ago.

SYNOPSIS
The Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park sits about 40 miles north of Bakersfield, amidst vast tracts of industrial farmland that have come to characterize California’s San Joaquin Valley. It’s a site that celebrates its founder, Colonel Allen Allensworth, a former slave who joined the Union army as a young man and retired a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank of any African American at the time. In 1908, Allensworth and his colleagues purchased agricultural land around a railroad stop, and began to build a thriving, self-sufficient all-Black community.

Today, the park is characterized by stillness. Twenty-one buildings populate a sparse, dusty landscape, reconstructed to appear as they did between 1908 and 1918. Sporadic visitors drive from building to building, learning through a self-guided audio tour and interpretive signs. Four times a year, this calm is punctuated by large crowds attending “event days.” Visiting families listen to public speakers and dance to live music, as docents dressed in period attire tell stories of each building’s original inhabitants. The mood is celebratory, and it’s clear that many hold a deep personal connection to this place.

Outside the park’s boundaries, about 100 families continue to live in Allensworth. The town is now majority Latinx, and many work as farm laborers. As residents and visitors inspired by the aspirational founding of this place strive to realize their own dreams, their experiences will run parallel, intersect, and collide with the town’s historic past, offering a new lens through which to consider our collective, unfinished march towards racial justice and equity.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Tim Tsai
PRODUCER Kristin Lesko, Tim Tsai

ID: 399