Long walks with Anzaldúa

This is a two-pronged fundraising campaign to produce the feature length documentary film Long walks with Anzaldúa and the short film 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, a feature-length documentary about the influential scholar, poet, social critic, philosopher, Chicana dyke-feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004). 

Both Long walks with Anzaldúa and HORSE draw from Gloria Anzaldúa's seminal book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and other works. 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 her expansive articulation of the borderlands, Latinx/Chicano experience and the creative process.

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.

HORSE  is based on a series of poems in Borderlands/La Frontera that portray incidents of white supremacist racist violence against a Chicano family told from the perspective of a young girl. 

Gloria Anzaldúa was a pioneer of gender and sexuality studies, Chicano and Latinx studies and intersectionality, her work speaks to me, as it has for academics, activists, LGBTQ + and BIPOC people around the world. With this project, I approach the challenges of belonging and identity through her radical imagination, spirituality and theories that transcend the limitations of geography to include diversity and social justice. Like Gloria Anzaldúa, I navigate many worlds. We share a story of survival and a struggle to belong to a world that renders our work inscrutable and our existence invisible.

With this project, I contribute to the Latinx cultural discourse and address the gap that Gloria Anzaldúa's influence has received from mainstream media.

HORSE donate here

Project website