Thursday, May 15, 2014

Video short animation "Frontera!" by John Jota Leaños (Pueblo Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande)





Watch "Frontera!" 20 minutes (2014) animated history. "The Pueblo Revolt had to happen. Life was out of balance. Drought, hunger, colonial violence and religious persecution brought indigenous societies of New Mexico to the brink of collapse. The Pueblo people orchestrated the unthinkable: a pan-Indian uprising successfully expelling the Spanish occupiers from the entire Rio Grande region leading to an indigenous cultural and social renaissance. The documentary animation, Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande, traces the seminal events and colonial entradas that has shaped the deeply contested territories of the US-Mexico borderlands. Native and Chicana narrators recall this living history through memory, play, humor and song."

Director, John Jota Leaños is an Associate Professor and teaches in the Social Documentation program of UCSC’s Department of Film and Digital Media, and was a visual and installation artist before he turned filmmaker and an activist in both incarnations. He knows that the lines between nations or genres are rarely as clear on the ground as they are on a map.




Director's website: John Jota Leaños

“We began more than a year ago,” Leaños says “to think about ways to tell untold stories—or undertold stories—in American history.”

The “we” is a team of Xicano-identified collaborators Leaños has been working with for the past several years : San Francisco based writer Sean Levon Nash, New Mexican composer Cristóbal Martinez, animators including Texas artist Natalia Anciso and Reno artist Crystal Gonzalez, plus the Tucson mariachi ensemble Los Cuatro Vientos. Video: Team "Making of"

Their common area of concern is the US/ Mexico borderlands as constituted both in the past and in the present. Their interest lies not only in a geopolitical boundary, but in the territories of identification scattered across a common landscape. “Especially now, Leaños says, “with the emergence of new digital technology and new political and policing strategies, the border has become fluid. The elasticity of the border makes the issue a lot more complex.”
Full article click here