In the world of grant-writing and receiving, the MacArthur Grants are a dream come true: you cannot apply, you cannot be nominated, and the criteria are unknown…but the fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation reach out every year to endow a couple dozen extraordinary people with $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. Just because they’re amazing, and their work should continue.
This year, two Latinos are included in the grants: Natalia Almada, a 37-year-old filmmaker currently based in Mexico City, and Junot Diaz, a writer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“You usually have to apply for something, and it’s a lot of work,” said Ms. Almada in a recent article here in the New York Times. “It’s such freedom to think I can count on something. It’s huge. It’s validating.”
Almada, a citizen of the U.S. and Mexico, has had her films shown at festivals and museums around the world. One of her most recent works is El Velador, a “non-violent film on violence” about drug trafficking; it was broadcast in September as part of PBS’ POV series, and can still be seen here, through December. A powerful documentarian and founder of Altamura Films, the 37-year-old Mexican-born Almada addresses social issues that affect both Mexicans and Americans in non-linear films such as El General and All Water Has a Perfect memory, a winner at the Tribeca Film Festival a decade ago. Memory is an experimental short exploring the impact on her family of the drowning death of her sister at the age of 2½. Almada drew on her own life again in El General, the story of Plutarco Elías Calles, a former president of Mexico, and her great-grandfather.
Junot Diaz is the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and more recently a book of short stories called This Is How You Lose Her. The New York Times called him “one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully eclectic, capable of conjuring for the reader everything from the sorrows of Dominican history to the banalities of life in New Jersey.”
Other MacArthur Grant recipients this year include a mandolinist from New York, a Washington Post reporter, and a flutist and arts entrepreneur from Brooklyn.
