“Voces: Latino Vote 2024” reveals the complexities of a powerful voting bloc

The just-released documentary “Voces: Latino Vote 2024” — produced and directed by Bernardo Ruíz and produced by award-winning documentary filmmaker Andrés Cediel (’04) and Marcia Robiou — takes a deep dive into the powerful and complicated Latino voting bloc across multiple states. 

The hour-long film is a collaboration among CPB, PBS, PBS Socal, ITVS, and Latino Public Broadcasting and with the California Local News Fellowship and their newsrooms on a series of accompanying video shorts and stories. The film began streaming on PBS SoCal on Oct. 9 and will air on PBS nationally on Oct. 22. Berkeley Journalism will sponsor a screening on October 30.

“This is the year that Latinos are actually going to make a big difference,” said Cediel, a UC Berkeley Journalism professor, who said the film highlights how Latino voters could affect the presidential elections as well as state and local races. 

Cediel says the film explores how Latinos now have substantial enough numbers, with some 17.5 million voters nationally, to influence battleground states — not just states like California or Texas that already tend to vote blue and red. He says the documentary “unpacks” the rising trend of Latinos skewing more conservative and likely to vote Republican and reveals some surprising voting impulses along gender and age lines. 

The film builds on Ruíz’s 2020 ITVS film, Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground that documented how Latinos were then poised to be the largest voting bloc in the electorate. 

“I was excited to collaborate with a talented team of journalists and filmmakers on this follow-up to our 2020 PBS documentary, which I believe offers an in-depth and nuanced look at a politically diverse community at a time of significant challenges to journalism and independent documentary,” Ruíz said.

Organizer Audrey Peral and son Francisco in 2020. Photo Credit: Roberto (Bear) Guerra.

The new film looks at what’s driving these voters in key swing states, including Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and examines efforts of both political parties to reach the Latino electorate, particularly in California and Florida.

In addition to the documentary, the project will feature ten digital short videos, most of which focus on the experiences of young Latino voters in California. Three of the shorts are produced in collaboration with fellows from the UC Berkeley Journalism-based California Local News Fellowship Program and their newsrooms: Erik Galicia at The Fresno Bee, Victoria Ivie at The O.C. Register, Magaly Muñoz at the Oakland Post and Constanza Eliana Chinea with Caló News. A fifth short is produced in collaboration with the fellowship program’s newsroom partner El Tímpano. Reporters at each of the outlets will also publish related print pieces.

Nearly a dozen Berkeley Journalism alums contributed to the doc and shorts. Nisha Balaram (’20) was the associate producer. Other contributors include Daffodil Altan (’04), Brandon Yadegari (’20), Vanessa Flores (’23), MJ Johnson (’23), Jessica de la Torre (’23), Bria Suggs (’24), Nadia Lathan (’24), Mitzi Perez-Caro (‘24), Matthew Miranda (’22), Jen Wiley (’23) and Samuel Tanner (‘24). Current student Aisha Wallace-Palomares (’25) also contributed as an associate producer. One of the shorts is a profile of Berkeley grad Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño (M.C.P. ’24), and the Executive Producer of ITVS is Carrie Lozano (’05).

California Local News Fellow Erik Galicia, a reporter at the Fresno Bee, collaborated with Cediel on “First Time Voter,” a video short that features Jerry Reyes, a young conservative Mexican American voter in the Central Valley. 

Galicia, who is from Southern California and identifies as Chicano or Mexican American, said his own social media feed tipped him off to conservative shifts among Latino voters, specifically younger Mexican American men. 

“Jerry’s story is important to tell because it’s a reality,” said Galicia, who covers Madera County. “If you went back 10 years, there were fewer Mexican American conservatives — at least who were vocal. This is different now. It’s part of the story of the day.”

Cediel said the project involved a powerful collection of filmmakers, students and fellows. He said the state-funded California Local News Fellows and their newsrooms, in particular, added critical on-the-ground perspectives and a more nuanced view of Latino voters across locales and demographics. 

He said this type of collaboration makes stronger and more ambitious stories possible.  

“We’ve reached the point where there’s no longer a debate about whether we should be joining forces,” said Cediel about the effort across newsrooms and platforms. “The more people collaborating, the better. It increases our reach and our brand. The industry is changing so quickly, we have to be able to do everything at the same time. There is no one organization with the capacity to do it all.” 

“Voces: Latino Vote 2024” will be screened at the UC Berkeley Journalism School on Wednesday, October 30, 6 pm, followed by a talk with the filmmakers. Co-sponsored by the American Cultures Center.

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About the Filmmakers

Bernardo Ruiz (Director/Producer) is an award-winning documentary producer and director based in New York. Ruiz has directed and produced both documentary films and series for a wide variety of outlets including ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, numerous PBS series as well as Disney+. Highlights of past directing work include Roberto Clemente for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, which won the Alma award for outstanding made for television documentary. He also directed the feature documentaries Reportero, about Mexican reporters covering organized crime and political corruption in Tijuana and the Participant-financed Kingdom of Shadows, about the U.S.-Mexico drug war. Both films were nominated for News & Documentary Emmy’s. Ruiz also directed the James Beard-nominated Harvest Season, about the lives of the temporary laborers, permanent residents, and multigenerational Latinos intimately connected to the production of premium wines in the Napa and Sonoma regions of Northern California. In 2020, Ruiz created, directed and produced Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground, which was filmed during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Andrés Cediel is an Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker, and professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a frequent contributor the PBS program FRONTLINE, including serving as a writer, director and producer of “Covid’s Hidden Toll” (2020), “Trafficked in America” (2018), and the Emmy-award winning piece “Kids Caught in the Crackdown” (2019) which was produced in collaboration with the Associated Press. For FRONTLINE, he also produced “Rape in the Fields” (2013) and was a writer and producer of “Rape on the Night Shift”(2015), which investigated the rampant sexual assault of immigrant women at work, and sparked legislative reform in California. The two films, which aired in both English and Spanish, were produced at the Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with Univisión, the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED. He also produced The Real CSI (2012) in collaboration with ProPublica, which examined flaws in forensic science. Cediel is currently developing a film with the Jingle Dress Project, which promotes art as healing while raising awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Marcia Maritza Robiou is a documentary filmmaker and investigative reporter. She was FRONTLINE’s 2022 Hollyhock Filmmaker-in-Residence and worked on a documentary about the Minneapolis Police Department, Police on Trial. She worked on Whose Vote Counts , the recipient of the 2020 Peabody Award and 2020 NABJ Award , as a senior reporter and field producer. Marcia’s previous projects include Right to Fail, the winner of a Deadline Club Award , and Separated: Children at the Border , which garnered the 2018 Peabody Award and a 2018 Emmy-nomination for Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary . Marcia came to FRONTLINE as an Abrams Journalism Fellow in 2018. Before she became a filmmaker, she worked as a humanitarian for nearly a decade in Myanmar, South Sudan, Kenya and Iraq. During this time, Marcia worked on a number of shorts, including The Jungle Surgeon of Myanmar for Al Jazeera Witness. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Marcia was born in the U.S. to Dominican parents.