Hotel Mocambo, Veracruz, MX
1968
In a crumbling, seaside mansion, young Camila Lomelín is sheltered from the sparks and fire of the civil rights movement, seemingly destined to follow the sedate bourgeois trajectory of her parents until tragedy strikes and the cries of Tlaleloco’s victim’s reach the port of Veracruz, threatening to tear her family apart.
In the aftermath, her brother’s revolutionary fiancée continues to resist while Camila’s parents barricade themselves within thick mansion walls. When a desperate boy shows up on the doorstep one day, Camila lets him in, and a bit of life returns to the Boulevard.
The boy becomes Camila’s playmate, until a betrayal sends him away. Lonely once more, she sets out to find work and falls in love with a forbidden suitor. Though disobedience goes against her upbringing, she refuses any path mapped out by others. She longs for familial harmony, for safety in her country, for the freedom to pursue the marriage of her choice, for the privilege of raising a family without being dragged into the underworld of rogue ranchers…But to have any power at all means bowing to convention, fighting a revolution or succumbing to the pervasive corruption around her, and she rejects it all. Subsequently, neither marriage, motherhood or vocation turn out the way she thought. When heartbreak returns, so too do unlikely allies, who encourage her to tell her story in a sanctuary of her own creation.
“Veracruzana is at once a portrait of the sparks and fire of the 1960’s Mexican civil rights movement to the globalization of the 1990’s and the emancipation story of one single woman caught between the institutions of the past and the possibilities of the future.”