Wearing a black beret, Alejandro Murguía, 76, sat inside filmmaker and photographer Louis Dematteis’s Potrero Hill studio, reflecting on his decades-long career as a writer, artist and activist. From the studio’s large bay windows three stories up, he gazed out at the industrial landscape as the San Francisco Bay sparkled in the distance.
“The role of a poet is to prophesize a better society,” Murguía said.
Born in North Hollywood, Murguía moved to Mexico City at age 6 and returned to the United States as a young adult. He settled in San Francisco, where he joined the Chicano movement and later became the city’s first Latino poet laureate. Through activism and literature, Murguía has borne witness to the Sandinista Revolution, solidarity movements in the Mission District and across Latin America.
Murguía’s life and work are the focus of Keeper of the Fire, a 33-minute documentary that will officially premiere Saturday, Jan. 24, at the Brava Theater in the Mission District, following more than a decade of crowdfunding and research. The film arrives during a renewed period of immigration enforcement and political repression across the United States.
Using archival footage and photographs, the film transports viewers to the Mission District between the 1970s and 1990s and to the front lines of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. Murguía joined international solidarity volunteers supporting efforts to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship, inspiring his collection of short stories, Southern Front.
“Similar to now, Somoza during that time was bombing its own cities,” Murguía said. “Kind of what is going on now [with Donald Trump] attacking our own cities. And the wholesale slaughter of the Nicaraguan people. The United States set up that dictatorship in 1933.”
For Murguía, solidarity with the Sandinistas was rooted in the growing Nicaraguan community that had blossomed in the Mission. The film features footage of anti-imperialist demonstrations in the neighborhood, drawing a direct connection between local struggles and movements across Central America.
“I’m a Chicano, but I’m also an internationalist,” Murguía said. “Like Che [Guevara], the struggles in other parts of the world also impact me.”
Throughout much of the film, Murguía narrates using excerpts from his poetry and short stories. Archival visual materials create a cinematic bridge between his literary work and political history, highlighting parallels between past Latino and Chicano struggles during that time. Keeper of the Fire also evokes today’s political climate, as immigration crackdowns continue across major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.
“If this film would’ve come out 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have the same relevance,” said Raymond Telles, a writer and producer of the film. “Right now, people are taking action, whether it’s protesting or being involved.”
Telles describes the film as “visually lyrical,” with music and imagery that transform Murguía’s writing into cinema.
The documentary also features Dematteis’s black-and-white photographs, from the Mission before gentrification took hold, as well as documentation of the U.S.-backed Contra War in Nicaragua. His archival images reinforce the notion of preserving historical moments for collective memory.
“Cultural preservation is important. Anti-gentrification is important,” Dematteis said. “People’s right to live in the neighborhood where they might’ve been born and grew up in. This takes a certain amount of struggle but it’s possible.”
As ICE crackdowns continue to spark resistance across the country and in the Bay Area, Murguía’s lifelong work as a poet and activist meets a moment of political reckoning. Still, for Murguía, poetry has always remained essential.
“You can’t silence poetry. Poetry is the voice of the people. It’s the voice of the community.”Keeper of the Fire, from film producers Raymond Telles, Louis F. Dematteis and David L. Brown, will premiere at the Brava Theater Center on Saturday, Jan. 24. Doors open at 6 p.m., with the screening scheduled for 7 p.m. Tickets are still available.