San Diego Latino Film Festival faces backlash over edited image erasing migrant
After the artist asked for answers about a covered up migrant face in her work, festival organizers called it a mistake.
Written by Marco Guajardo, Edited by Kate Morrissey
The messages started coming in from Paola Villaseñor’s friends, telling her to check her artwork on the cover of the booklet for the 32nd San Diego Latino Film Festival.
Villaseñor, who’s known by her muralist name, Panca, examined the catalogue, which contains the festival schedule and other information about featured artists, and saw the face of the immigrant figure, a brown-skinned man mid-journey across the border, had been erased, his features covered under elongated strands of hair.
"It was very sneaky," Panca said. "They did it in a way where I wouldn't notice."
Despite four months of the festival promoting Panca’s original piece, the catalogue alteration sparked a backlash on social media starting March 20, the second day of the festival, which ran until March 23. Panca posted her frustration on Instagram, and commenters expressed support for her work and resentment for the perceived sanitizing and censorship of her art.
That same day, Ethan van Thillo, executive director of the Media Arts Center San Diego, which organizes the film festival, issued a public apology on Instagram, taking responsibility for the incident and saying that the edit was not intentional censorship.
According to the statement, the edit was a “terrible shock” to the festival organizers. It said the team had used and printed the wrong file.
The festival said it would rectify the mistake by making sure the digital catalogue featured the original version and that the festival would continue using only Panca’s rendition in its marketing of the event, as it had done since November 2024.
“We regret this immensely,” van Thillo said in the statement. “This was an honest and terrible mistake and we apologize to Panca and the frustration this has caused her and our community.”
Despite the apology, Panca and several in the community said they remained skeptical.
“It's hard for me to believe that an entire team of staff and people would have missed that. It just doesn't make sense,” Panca said in an interview with Daylight. “It's like, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry we didn't see this giant elephant in the room.’”
In an interview with Daylight San Diego, van Thillo pointed to a storefront display at the entrance of the festival’s Mission Valley art exhibition as an example of how the image had been previously modified to fit some of the needed marketing dimensions.
The two inward-facing, thinner windows of the entrance display Panca's design with digitally altered elements in the lower-left corner of the image to cover the immigrant completely and make the design narrower.
“Clearly, they used the wrong file instead of using the original version of the artwork,” van Thillo said. “They used a file that had all these layers in it that they were manipulating for different sizes, and that's where the terrible error was made."
The festival's freelance graphic designer in Colombia did not respond to multiple requests for comment via social media. When asked for comment, the Media Arts Center Artistic Director Maria Paula Lorgia deferred to the apology statement.
Some Instagram users’ responses pointed out the irony of a Latino-centered event seemingly shying away from a depiction of a person migrating, particularly given the current national policies aimed at stopping immigration and silencing equity-focused measures.
Panca said the edits feel like censorship.
“I'm not getting anything out of blasting them,” Panca said. “Right now, it's me with my little cartoon drawing, but later, it's going to be something else. And that's why it shook me up so much.”
Van Thillo also acknowledged that contradiction while emphasizing the festival's 32-year purpose of representing stories that combat negative portrayals of immigrants. That includes this year’s film lineup, which celebrated the 40-year anniversary of the migrant film “El Norte,” featured a Migrant Voices film competition and showcased a Frontera Filmmakers segment of the festival.
“If anything the real enemy here is our political situation that we're in,” van Thillo said, “and that we're dealing with an administration that wants to cut all arts funding, that wants to get rid of the Department of Education, that's deporting community members as we speak.”
