Taught to Hate - a film by James Garcia Sotomayor

The Long Island Latino Film Festival is this week -- Nov. 6,7,8 . Coincidently, it opens exactly a year and a short drive from the place and time of Marcelo Lucero's murder by a racist wolf pack. That senseless and evil murder shocked the immigrant communities across Long Island, the United States and even across the world.

It also exposed an ugly, deadly vein of hate typically veiled behind the leafyscapes of American suburbia, a vein mined by nativists politicians like Maricopa County's Joe Arpaio, Hazelton PA's Lou Barletta and Suffolk County's Steve Levy.

Now comes what may be the first of its type, "Taught to Hate,” a 27 fiction film based on the Lucero killing and the American sub-culture shaped by hate. The filmmaker is James Garcia Sotomayor, a local filmmaker and Latino immigrant who funnelled his life savings into making the film. He did so because, "I had to do something."

It's been noted that Marcelo's surname name means 'Shining Light'. The memory of Marcelo Lucero and the works of people like Garcia Sotomayor are our Luceros.