USA Projects

Frontera! Animated Histories of the Southwest Borderlands animates the complex social history southwest borderlands of the United States along four major river systems - the Río Grande, the Colorado, the Mississippi and the Sacramento Rivers - through musical documentary animation. I am asking for your help to meet my fundraising goal of $6,000 which will be used to support storyboard development for the first three episodes of the animation.

The animated series consists of the following three chapters:

1. Frontera: The Making of the Southwest Borderlands, a quick-paced sung narrative remapping centuries of migration, settlement and conflict along major rivers in North America from “prehistoric” cultures of the Anasazi and Athabaskan people through the evolution and conflict of the of the Pueblo cultures, the Spanish, Mexican and American settlements to the establishment of the present border politics of the United States.

2. Black Legend: Rebellion on the Río Grande, tracing two Indigenous uprisings in New Mexico: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 led by Popé’s rebellion that expelled the Spanish from New Mexico, and the assassination of the first American governor of New Mexico, Charles Bent, in 1847 led by Tomasito’s revolt that foiled the Americans first attempt at settling the state.

3. Eureka! Gold on the Sacramento River, tells the story of Sutter’s Fort, a settlement that became the center of the discovery of gold, the Indian slave trade, the environmental transformation of the state and nation leading to a great influx of diverse populations into the west.

Laced together with a musical narrative approach sung by a chorus of contemporary Mariachi, the program is animated with hand-drawn characters, maps, graphic “assets” that reference Pre-Colombian art, Native American iconography, Spanish world maps, European engravings and more. The computer animation and motion graphics document critical, but marginalized moments in the long history of a contested border region offering new perspectives on issues of immigration, nationhood and the formation of the southwest borderlands of the United States, a region of vast cultural exchange, conviviality and cohabitation, but also one marred by violence and trauma spanning over 500 years.

Whether through expansion or elasticity of the southern border through immigration raids, forced sterilization, Minutemen patrols and/or laws like Arizona’s SB1070 targeting Mexican and Central Americans, the ideological understanding and misunderstanding of the U.S.-Mexico border region stands at the forefront of much of the border’s historical and contemporary tension. The proposed program, Frontera, offers historical context and nuance to the often-constrained conversations around US-Mexico border policy in the form of art, music, humor, documentary and Saturday-morning cartoons.