The Project
Long walks with Anzaldúa is a two-pronged fundraising campaign to produce the feature length documentary film Long walks with Anzaldúa and the segment and short film HORSE, about the influential scholar, poet, social critic, philosopher, Chicana dyke-feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) and draw from her seminal book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and other works.
Gloria Anzaldúa was a pioneer of gender and sexuality studies, Chicano and Latinx studies and intersectionality, and an incisive critic of cruel immigration policies. Her theories transcend the limitations of geography and landscape to include spirituality, diversity, and social justice. I borrow from experimental cinema, anthology films, music videos, interviews, performed readings, and adaptations to depict Gloria Anzaldúa's own experimental writing style and intersectional cultural philosophy into a kaleidoscopic hybrid documentary. This multi-layered narrative form conveys her continued relevance and presents Gloria Anzaldúa's expansive articulation of the borderlands, Latinx/Chicano experience and the creative process.
As a storytelling strategy, this mixed-genre documentary form allows me to render Anzaldúa's work continued relevance. I will present her expansive articulation of the borderlands, Latinx/Chicano experience, immigration, spiritual philosophy, the creative process, and theories about gender and sexuality in a multiplicity of voices, visual styles, and editing strategies. The style of the film mirrors her multilayered writing style, quest for self-discovery and political engagement.
With with this project, I seek to contribute to the Latinx cultural discourse on migration and displacement, memory and visibility and belonging, in addition to addressing the relative absence of Gloria Anzaldúa's influence on contemporary culture in the mainstream media.
Photo credit: *The Tree of Life, Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz, California, by Patricia Montoya, 2018.
*Gloria Anzaldúa’s routine walk ending point which she named The Tree of Life in some of her writings and a pilgrimage destination for her friends and admirers.
Long Walks with Anzaldúa
Long walks with Anzaldúa follows Anzaldúa's path in life and death across the United States. It begins with her childhood in South Texas, to the East Coast, where she edited, with author Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back (1981). Next, the film goes to California, where she was completing her PhD at UC Santa Cruz at the time of her death. Finally, the film travels back to her burial site at her family’s ancestral land in the Rio Grande Valley.
Fundraising and development for Long Walks with Anzaldúa is ongoing. The production is projected for 2023 and completed by 2025.
Photo credit: by Suzanne Goodwin. Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California, Mexico, 2021
HORSE
HORSE is a 20 minute stand-alone film, a segment, starting point, structural backbone, and a fundraising tool for the production of Long walks with Anzaldúa,
HORSE is based on a series of poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The poems portray incidents of white supremacist racist violence against a Chicano family, told from the perspective of a young girl.
Production for HORSE will begin in the winter of 2021 and is projected to end post-production in the fall of 2022.