Videos of Resistance

Chiapas Media Project puts video cameras—andpower—into the hands of Mexico's indigenous people.

When Alexandra Halkin went to Chiapas, Mexico, in 1995 to make adocumentary about the Zapatista movement, she found a plethora of videomakers and press swarming the rural communities. She also found theindigenous people of Chiapas were interested in the video cameras andtechnologies the foreign producers were using.

For more information on the Chiapas Media Project, visit www.promedios.org.

“It was a time when there was a lot of internationalpress,” she says of the period when the Zapatista NationalLiberation Army demanded that the Mexican government recognizeindigenous rights in the nation's constitution. “The indigenouscommunities were really aware of the video cameras. I saw a group ofpeople who were really organized and interested in talking to the worldoutside of Chiapas and felt they shouldn't have to depend on outsidemedia to tell their story.”

In 1998, Halkin used a grant from the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Cultureto bring inner-city Chicago youth with video skills and indigenousyouth from Mexico City and Oaxaca to a Zapatista community, where theycompleted a series of video production and postproduction workshops.The cultural exchange marked the beginning of the Chicago-based ChiapasMedia Project (CMP), which is also known as Promedios de ComunicacionComunitaria at the nonprofit's Mexican headquarters in San Cristobal delas Casas, Chiapas.

Those first video makers now lead CMP's introductory trainingworkshops and bring Sony MiniDV cameras, Apple Macintosh computers, andFinal Cut Pro editing systems to men and women of all ages in the ruralcommunities of Chiapas and Guerrero. The San Cristobal facility alsooffers a full video library and advanced classes in editing andgraphics. Halkin, the director of the organization, emphasizes that thetraining is serious and professional.

“We don't approach this as a hobby that they can do onweekends,” she says. “This is a professional skill they arelearning that can benefit their communities.”

That professionalism can be seen in the organization's productions.Reclaiming Justice, directed by Oaxaca video maker Carlos EfrainPerez, reveals how communities in the notoriously dangerous state ofGuerrero have successfully created their own police force and justicesystem, which emphasize education and rehabilitation.

Another recent video, Walking Towards the Dawn, directed byFrench video maker Nicolas De Fosse in collaboration with severalindigenous video makers, focuses on the struggles of Chiapas' displacednative people. It reveals its subjects' desires to reclaim the homesand lives they have lost as a result of a forced relocation by theMexican military and paramilitary groups.

“I think the military has looked at indigenous video makersand thought, ‘Who cares if they have a videocamera?’” Halkin says. “But now I think they arerealizing that if an indigenous person has a camera in his hand, itcould actually get somewhere.”

CMP's productions have indeed gone places. The organization hasapproximately 16 productions available with English subtitles andnumerous other videos available in Spanish. The productions have playedat many film festivals and venues, including the Amnesty InternationalFilm Festival and the Smithsonian National Museum of the AmericanIndian.

The U.S.-based MacArthur Foundation recently gave CMP a grant toestablish a media center in Guerrero that will document human rightsviolations, which Halkin says are often perpetuated by the Mexicanmilitary.

“The idea is to create an archive and get video evidence,which when used in courts in Mexico has actually resulted in theMexican military paying fines to communities and individuals,”she says.

Eventually, CMP will leave the productions and media centers in thehands of the indigenous video makers.

“This isn't about people from outside going to Mexico andadministering a project for the communities — they really take itover,” she notes. “Marginalized people in Mexico —and all over the world — need to have access to this technologyin order for there to be real democratic discourse.”

Kristinha M. Anding is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.E-mail her at k_mccort@hotmail.com.