Trazando al indio audiovisual: representación, auto-representación y persistencia.

Abstract

This research project focuses on the cinematic depiction of the Indian during different periods of Mexican history. The Indian in Mexican cinema represents a space of ongoing struggle, upon which is discussed the idea of Nation that has been made by the many different actors who are imagining and constructing it. In this sense, one of the objectives of this project is to examine what social and political forces were behind each representation. For this reason I have shaped a genealogy of the cinematic representations of Indian in Mexico. In this genealogy I identify three key moments in the cinematic representation of the Indian: the Golden Age, the films of the sixties and seventies, and finally the so-called indigenous video. One specific objective of this work is to discuss how the productions made by indigenous mediamakers in Mexico create a space of confrontation and dialogue between the long history of representations about Indianess that were built by the national culture, and the constructions of indianess made from the perspective of Amerindian knowledge. At the same time there is a discussion about how the videos made by indigenous mediamakers disrupt the national cultural geography and the model of nationhood proposed by the states in the neoliberal and globalization age.