BORDERLESS CULTURES

Relinking Past & Present

︎ WATCH
︎ SYLLABUS

Contemporary Pueblo Women
(Beverly Singer, 2021, 70 min)

The Blank Stare at Movie Indians
(Beverly Singer, 2010/2021, 13 min)

Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Rio Grande
(John Jota Leaños, 2014, 19 min)


Within popular media representations of Native Americans, stereotypes reign. One can argue this has been the case since the invention of  the European printing press—where mass imaging technologies allowed Western perspectives to position themselves as scientific and objective. Five hundred years later, imaging technologies have become more accessible than ever before, and peoples who were always represented by others now have the opportunity to represent themselves.

However, the violent legacies of imagining technologies have to be recontextualized, for we cannot undo harm by merely reversing the formula.

This screening explores the power of storytelling that imagines new indigenous representation in popular media, film and documentaries. Framed through Dr. Beverly Singer’s 2021 documentary feature film Journeys and Pathways: Oral Histories of Contemporary Pueblo Women, her 2015 short The Blank Stare at Movie Indians and John Jota Leaños’ 2014 short animated documentary Frontera!, this conversation interrogates the role of images in distorting realities and how moving images may be used to subvert and counteract colonial fantasies of “authenticity.”

Directors Dr. Beverly Singer and Professor John Jota Leaños joined us to delve into their films.

Refocusing Latinx Labor

︎ WATCH
︎ SYLLABUS

Salt of the Earth
(Herbert J. Biberman & Michael Wilson, USA, 1954, 92 min)

Why Cybraceros?
(Alex Rivera, USA, 1997, 5 min)

The production history of Salt of the Earth is a long and complicated one, but it always overshadows the revolutionary content of the film, effectively erasing Latinx labor. The film admirably tackles ideas of race, class, gender and national identity by rejecting the American dream in favor of basic human rights with an intersectional feminist challenge to white patriarchy and machismo. With such a potent legacy, this conversation begins by asking why many latinx representations in pop cultures during the subsequent 70 years have failed to uphold the messages of this film.

By pairing up the film with Alex Rivera’s short Why Cybraceros? we aim to refocus the conversation on the Latinx labor depicted in the film. In his films, Rivera constantly plays with the push and pull of the U.S. being comfortable with cheap and expendable immigrant labor, but constantly undermining the humanity of those whose bodies carry it out.

Director Alex Rivera and scholar Dr. Irene Mata joined us after the screenings to delve into the themes of the films, the nature of history and what it takes shift the narratives that have been told about Latinx peoples in the US.

Recentering Latinx History

︎ WATCH
︎ SYLLABUS

The Head of Joaquin Murrieta
(John J. Valadez, USA, 2016, 30 min)

For over a decade filmmaker John J. Valadez searched for the remains of Joaquin Murrieta, a legendary Mexican outlaw who blazed a trail of revenge across California until he was reportedly caught and decapitated in the summer of 1853. A hundred and sixty-two years later Valadez embarks on a quixotic, cross-country road trip through history, myth and memory to bury the fabled head of Joaquin Murrieta. Along the way he discovers chilling parallels with his own family story. Using ground breaking scholarship and working with a team of leading historians from across the United States, The Head of Joaquin Murrieta provides a view of U.S. history from a decidedly Chicano perspective. Deeply personal, irreverent and entertaining, the film tears open a painful and long ignored historical trauma.

Filmmaker John Valadez joined us after the screening to address the issues at the center of his documentary: land dispossession, racialized violence, and what it means to tell and retell the story of Joaquin Murrieta.