Black & Gold: The Story of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation may have been undertaken by filmmakers Rick Rowley (Deserter)
and Jacqueline Soohen with the best of intentions, but it ended up a fictional tale divorced from the facts. The story that Rowley and Soohen hoped to document was that of a New York City gang leader, four-time convicted felon and former crack-addict, who had turned his life around and was at the forefront of a revolutionary street political organization akin to that of the 1960's Young Lords.
This would-be working class hero was Antonio Fernandez, a k a King Tone, who was anointed "Inca" of the New York chapter of the Latin Kings in 1996 when the prior Inca, Luis Felipe, a k a King Blood, was sentenced to life, plus forty-five years solitary confinement for ordering numerous murders from his prison cell. The Latin Kings had espoused revolutionary language under Felipe, but Fernandez took it to a new level.
Fernandez preached social and economic justice, gender equality, parental responsibility, Latino pride, and Roman Catholicism. He advocated for drug treatment, voter registration, legitimate employment, community development, racial and religious tolerance, and an end to street violence and police brutality. In 1997, Fernandez folded the Latin Kings as a criminal gang, and legally incorporated the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation as a nonprofit corporation.
A number of media outlets did generally favorable stories on Fernandez, including The New York Times. At least two documentaries followed the buzz. Rowley and Soohen's Black & Gold and the better resourced Latin Kings: A Street Gang Story by eleven-time Emmy award winning filmmaker Jon Alpert. Alpert shared Rowley and Soohen's initial hopes that Fernandez would prove to be as good as his word, but unlike Rowley and Soohen, Alpert retained his objectivity and in the face of overwhelming evidence Fernandez was continuing to deal drugs, Alpert allowed the story to change to fit the facts. The would-be inspiring story he hoped to make became a cautionary tale.
Rowley and Soohen, however, continued to make the story that increasing bore little resemblance to the facts. Though most of the interviews in Gold & Black were conducted when one could reasonably still argue that Fernandez was wrongly being targeted by the Police, the documentary was completed after he plead guilty to felony drug charges. Rowley and Soohen make no mention of the weight of the evidence against Fernandez or his admission of guilt, and they quickly gloss over the sentence itself at the conclusion of the documentary. The facts don't interest Rowley and Soohen nearly as much as the imagery of a Puerto Rican working class revolutionary from Queens atop a black and gold clad movement of thousands.
Rowley and Soohen have little time for the facts, but plenty of time for repetitive images of young men and women flashing the crown hand gestures in slow motion accompanied by a rap or deep base score. Similar scenes play repeatedly, along with archival footage of the Young Lords marching in 1960's New York for social justice.
There's plenty of footage of Fernandez espousing his rhetoric before crowds and directly to the camera too. Fernandez comes off as street smart and book dumb, but of above-average intelligence. Though about to turn thirty when this documentary was recorded, Fernandez still has the cocky bravado of a young turk. The sincerity of his positive message often seems suspect, but it's understandable when watching him why many liberal leaders inside and outside of the Latino community placed their hopes in him.
Rowley and Soohen recorded interviews with a number of community leaders who expressed support for Fernandez. The most interesting of these interviews is with Richie Perez (1944-2004), director of community development at the nonprofit Community Service Society and former member of the Young Lords. Recorded in 1998, Perez provides a thoughtful interview about social justice generally, and his hopes for Fernandez specifically. This interview, excerpted throughout the documentary, is presented in its entirety in the extras and is the best thing on this release.
Beyond cramming a square set of facts into a round storyline, Rowley and Soohen's documentary suffers from a telling lack of technical and monetary resources. A lack of consistency in footage quality and aspect ratio suggests that they were compelled to rely on outside sources for much of the video and audio material. Much of this material is clearly shot by amateurs on rudimentary home equipment. In addition to the technical limitations, the documentary suffers from having too little footage to put together. The editors slice and re-slice footage of a few limited interviews or events over and over.
The DVD
Black & Gold: The Story of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation is poorly made as a documentary and badly engineered as a DVD. Poor video and audio are compounded by misspellings in the subtitles, missing features, and dead feature buttons as detailed below.
The Video:
Black & Gold is presented in a ratio of 1.33:1, but incorporates a lot of letterboxed material. The image looks atrocious with aliasing, marcroblocking, and every other kind of visual noise imaginable. At times full frame material is stretched, and at other times widescreen footage is cropped. Outdoor scenes are often overexposed and out of focus.
The Audio:
The 2.0 stereo audio track suffers from heavy distortion and inconsistent audio levels that makes some dialogue barely understandable. The only optional subtitles provided are in Spanish. They and the the few in-film forced English subtitles contain spelling errors.
The Extras:
The extras consist of a lengthy interview with Richie Perez (44:38), excerpts of which appear in the feature documentary, and three trailers for other Big Noise Films releases, though not for this one. There is also suppose to be an extended interview with Antonio Fernandez, but that feature along with the command to exit the extras screen don't work.
Final Thoughts:
A lot of people saw a great deal of potential in Antonio Fernandez, and it's terribly unfortunate that he chose to throw away an opportunity to help himself and improve his community the way he did. Nevertheless, it did happen and can't be wished away.
Black & Gold: The Story of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation is a documentary in the loosest sense of the term. Rowley and Soohen do not allow the facts to interfere with the story they set out to tell. Black and Gold is a story of a working class hero, unjustly imprisoned for his politics, but that's all it is, just a story.
