Three years ago, Cambridge resident Jose Barriga sat in a local coffee shop with a friend and first considered the idea of publicly screening Latino movies in his hometown.

This brainstorm became the Cambridge Latino Film Festival, which plays through this weekend and last year attracted an estimated 2,600 filmgoers.

Barriga and a group of dedicated volunteers have spent the last week ushering large crowds into packed screening rooms.

“We want to show non-Latinos how Latinos are,” Barriga says. “Demographically, Latinos are the largest minority in the U.S—there is a big interest to know about them.”

Barriga says he’s primarily interested in fighting stereotypes and presenting the “reality” of Latino experience in the United States and throughout Latin America.

When he moved to Boston from Los Angeles several years ago, Barriga says he became concerned with the absence of a local outlet for Latinos to educate others about their culture.

Film, Barriga says, seemed an especially accessible means of communication, and the idea for the festival was born.

The day after his coffee shop revelation, Barriga went to City Hall, but he was informed that he had missed the deadline to apply for a grant to fund the festival.

The delay gave him time to research the other major annual Latino film festivals in the U.S., which take place annually in New York and L.A. After visiting the New York and L.A. festivals, Barriga placed adds for volunteers in local newspapers and received and evaluated dozens of film submissions.

The Cambridge Latino Film Festival was inaugurated last year with 34 films shown at three small venues, and with little funding. But now, Barriga says, it is here to stay.

This year’s festival features a total of 56 films that will be shown at MIT, the Cambridge Public Library and the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). Barriga is especially pleased with the addition of the HFA, calling it “the best venue in New England for such a festival” because of its location on a major university campus.

Presenting short films, documentaries and feature films, the Cambridge Latino Film Festival is not lacking in variety.

“If a [Latin American] country is not represented it is because we did not receive any submissions,” says Barriga.

The films in the festival come from all over the Latin America and the U.S and are evaluated by a selection committee before making it onto the big screen.

To attract a large and diverse audience, Barriga says this year’s selection committee included members ranging “from MIT professors to a 68-year-old Salvadoran woman learning to write.”