Nuestra Familia/Our Family is a documentary that investigates California’s prison gangs, their effects on Latino families, and law enforcement efforts to stop their spread. For the project, producer/director Oriana Zill de Granados of the Center for Investigative Reporting worked with The Monterey County Herald reporters Julia Reynolds and George Sanchez. Reynolds started this investigation into Latino gangs while she was covering crime issues for CIR; her initial reporting resulted in stories for the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, MotherJones.com and the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

Oriana Zill de Granados talked to the Blog about filming outside her comfort zone:

Filming requires numerous people, lot of equipment and a lot of technical knowledge, and it generally requires, basically, a lot of things to go right. And in a situation where, with gang members, where a lot of the situations we were filming were actually quite dangerous, for both us and them… we had to take a lot of precautions, and we had to change the way I normally work. And I couldn’t actually stay in town for very long because of fear that there would be some reprisal for what we were doing. So we had to kind of parachute in and parachute out a lot for the Nuestra Familia film, really different process. Many of the subjects interviewed eventually dropped out of the film for fear that there would be some kind of problem. . . [It] took a lot of time and energy to basically get people to trust us and to allow people to make their own decisions about whether they wanted to cooperate with the film, which many people eventually did, which is what makes it so good. And I really, in all my projects, I am in awe of my subjects, but in this project particularly, I was in awe of many of my subjects who I thought were very brave and honorable people.

>>Gangs know how recruit young Latinos, military style. Watch an excerpt from Nuestra Familia, Our Family.
>>Visit the Center for Investigative Reporting website for additional
reporting and to find out how to get a copy of the entire program.