Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2019

The Latin Americanist, 2022

2012

The use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media in the Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street, and Mexico’s #YoSoy132 student movement have all generated excitement about the new uses of digital technology in organized social movements. This dissertation concerns itself with media and social transformation, but recognizes that even as media content can have a deep impact on society and culture, it is ultimately human beings who create and use technology off screen for our own purposes. This dissertation focuses ethnographically on one social movement, the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (The Peoples’ Front in Defense of Land) of San Salvador Atenco on the outskirts of Mexico City, and their relationships with a range of national and international filmmakers. Through examining the daily practices of producing and distributing social documentary films, I show how people used media as an ethical and political practice to purposefully shape and transform face-to-face human relationships. I argue that filmmaking and distributing was one set of practices through which people attempted to cultivate a collectivist disposition called compañerismo, and through which they could build partial autonomies from the state and corporate capitalism. I argue that the historical shift from ‘resistance’ political practices to ‘autonomy’ practices represents a significant departure for contemporary transnational social movements, and signifies a trend away from a Marxist tradition of organizing and toward greater articulation with anarchist thinking and organizing. The cultivation of compañerismo is part of this shift and is indicative of a partial relocation of objectives away from institutional, legal, and policy changes and toward personal and collective transformations of self. I argue that the intersection between cultural production and self production is a crucial locus for examining how social movements help to bring about elusive social and cultural changes that exist outside the grasp of legal and institutional frameworks. These arguments build from and contribute to three large bodies of anthropological research: a political anthropology interested in social movements, a visual anthropology interested in media production, and a broad theoretical anthropological interest in transformations of self, society, and culture through practice.

This chapter asks what the production and distribution of one exceptional Mexican social documentary, Romper el Cerco (Canalseisdejulio & Promedios 2006) can tell us about the changing relationship between professional filmmaking and the alternative economies of practice of collaborative and indigenous video. Romper el Cerco is largely a human rights documentary that argues Mexican police forces and commercial televised media conspired to justify horrific acts of police violence against a pueblo originario (San Salvador Atenco in the state of Mexico). According to the film, the national media, especially televised news, purposefully portrayed the local activists as dangerous criminals so that there would not be a public outcry when the police brutalized and arrested scores of people who were suspected of being part of a local social movement. This paper argues that Romper el Cerco represents a vector of influence that is a reversal of how indigenous media practices have converged with the conventions of professional filmmaking in the past. In this case, an independent professional production company (Canalseisdejulio) collaborated with a foreign professionally-trained filmmaker involved in an indigenous media association (Promedios) and utilized the open, collaborative production practices of community media to produce their film. Furthermore, an association that historically had reserved copyright restrictions on their work and distributed their products commercially (albeit independently without a corporate distributor), utilized an open, non-copyrighted, and non-capitalist distribution strategy generally associated with indigenous and collaborative media. Romper el Cerco demonstrates that the seemingly localized production practices innovated over the past thirty years of Mexico’s indigenous media centers have created a transnational diaspora of media-makers that have integrated alternative economies of practice into their repertoires of professional production practice. In short, I argue that the vector of influence between commercial/professional film and community/indigenous video production practices operates in both directions. Furthermore, rather than being a liability in the case of Romper el Cerco, the open, collaborative process through which the film was produced (inspired by indigenous filmmaking practices in Chiapas) deeply improved the language, content, distribution, and lasting influence of the film.

Visual Studies, 2019

Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 2018

Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas , 2021

Can filmmaking as a form of intercultural communication serve as an apparatus for self-identification and cultural opposition to established North/West knowledge pro- duction hubs? Based on extensive fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada and detailed anal- ysis of the Arhucao films and their production and distribution strategies, this article explores the possibility of utilising film and audio-visual communication as a way to decolonise local knowledge. Following decades of persecutions, hostility, ill-treatment and cultural violence, the work of Zhigoneshi (and, later, Yokosovi) communication col- lectives not only helped to nourish the cultural identity of the indigenous communities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, but it also turned them into proud ambassadors of indigenous values on the international level. Prolific in their internal and external com- munication practices, they regained agency as full participants of intercultural dialogue, which focuses on the importance of the inclusion, diversity and de-westernisation of local knowledge. While acknowledging its own limitations and the author’s inevitable positionality, this article also reflects on further steps that the European and Western collaborators and institutions need to take to accomplish the vision of decolonisation. It concludes with acknowledging the work of the Arhuaco filmmakers and their allies in providing an invaluable contribution to strengthen this discussion and enable the shift towards a more all-embracing pattern of knowledge production and dissemination based on quality and importance and less so on stereotypical preconceptions and geographical location.

2018

This thesis focusses on the contemporary politics of visual representations among the indigenous communities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. It discusses various methods used to represent the ‘Other’ and reflects on the processes of practicebased research. Centering on the figure of the Arhuaco filmmaker Amado Villafana and the Zhigoneshi and Yokosovi Collectives which he leads, the thesis argues that his initiatives push indigenous filmmaking towards a more widespread inclusion in mainstream cinema, transcending beyond the indigenous context. The Zhigoneshi’s work focusses on the potentiality of intercultural communication, including its challenges and practicalities. In addition, it provides an alternative to non-indigenous representations of the ‘Other’, fighting for the right of self-representation. This thesis is concerned with the wider context of representing the ‘Other’ in Colombia and beyond, forming part of a practice-based research project which includes a coll...

2019

This article explores mainstream ambitions of indigenous filmmakers from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. Using the example of Zhigoneshi, the Arhuaco filmmaking collective, I analyse the trend to transcend the boundaries of so-called “indigenous cinema.” The filmmaking in the region emerged as a response to political violence, and it developed into a tool of cultural self-discovery and opposition to past misinterpretations of the Arhuacos by Western filmmakers. Today, the Arhuacos reach for audiovisual media to communicate, create an archive of their history and culture, and to reflect on the implications of adopting a Western tool to protect the traditional values. The fruit of their work widely circulates at film festivals, academic events, and special presentations, reaching audiences all over the world. As such, the universal qualities of audiovisual media promise hope of successful intercultural communication.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2006