Chapter 1 Toward a Decolonial Archive A Reflection on the Operationalization Process of Critical Transborder Documentary Production Practice

Framing the Border

In 2005, the US Congress began enacting legislation for the purpose of building a physical fence along its southern border with Mexico. The proposed “border wall” sought to fence a total of 700 out of the 1,954 miles of the international boundary between Mexico and the United States. Construction of the border fence had been deemed complete in January 2010 by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at least four years before we began working on the film. The result was a seemingly arbitrary barrier spanning some 651 miles along the US side of the US-Mexico border at a taxpayer cost of roughly $2.8 million per mile.2 The metrics for its success were vastly psychological and symbolic, with little data demonstrating it had met its intended purpose of slowing down illegal immigration, drug trafficking, or organized crime.

Largely omitted in the process of constructing the border wall were the coercive means through which the human rights and freedoms of local landowners and border inhabitants were forfeited for the purposes of a “secure border.” This became evident at the legislative level in 2005 when the US Congress passed the bipartisan REAL ID Act, which allowed the US government to erect the wall without consulting local affected communities. This entailed a discriminatory disregard of Indigenous peoples’ ancestral land claims, including Spanish land grant protection provisions provided by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. An array of state, federal, and international laws were violated for homeland security purposes emblematic of what Giorgio Agamben has termed “a state of exception.”3 These violations became “legal” in 2006 with the congressional passing of the Secure Fence Act, which allowed the DHS to waive any state and federal laws that might have interfered with the building of physical barriers along the border—thirty-six in total.4

Whereas the US-Mexico border has regained hypervisibility in contemporary mass media portrayals, at the time of the border wall’s completion in January 2010, it almost seemed as though US Americans had forgotten about its historically cyclical militaristic deployment. This changed in the summer of 2014, when news media outlets began reporting on a surge of asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors, leading to a recentring of the border as a key rhetorical point for the upcoming 2016 US presidential election.5 Henceforth the border would become a mobilization tool for nationalist right-wing amnesia, as has been evident since Donald Trump’s first press conference in which he called for the building of a border wall.6

Here, then, six months before Trump called for the building of a wall, our journey began toward the making of an archival documentary film that sought to foreground the “forgotten” and purposely “erased” histories of settler-colonial violence against the presence of Indigenous peoples in Texas and the US-Mexico borderlands. These processes of deliberate historic erasure are best summarized by what Brian Delay has termed the “Texas Creation Myth.”7 Following the Texas Revolution, this myth was reproduced across the United States, claiming that prior to Anglo colonization, Texas was a wasteland ravaged by wild Indians whom the Mexicans were unable to “tame.” Anglo settlers created a myth of heroism and triumph over nature, yet the real political reasons remained hidden. Delay’s concept informs some of the key theoretical and material stakes present in the context of the settler-colonial state of Texas and by extension the United States, both of which intrinsically depend on the constitutive redeployment of nationalistic rebordering practices.

El Muro | The Wall was produced for the purpose of disavowing settler-colonial imaginings of terra nullius (a no one’s land), of which the “Texas Creation Myth” is emblematic. The collaborative project envisioned the production of a decolonial didactic tool by foregrounding the history of south Texas / northern Mexico—prior to its annexation by the United States, before the Texas Revolution, before Mexico called the region Coahuila y Tejas, and before the Spanish came to call the region Nuevo Santander or even El Seno Mexicano (the Mexican womb).

The documentary demonstrates that contested space has been a social and historical fact. The shaping of this region has been imagined and reimagined by Aboriginal, colonial, and imperial agents. Doreen Massey notes that the identities of places are not static; they are dynamic and ever changing due to their nature, constructed from social relations. As such, Massey views places as processes with multiple, layered identities and numerous internal conflicts. bell hooks further argues that the meaning of home “has been very different for those who have been colonized, and that it can change with the experiences of decolonization and of radicalization.”8

Chicana feminists have led the way in contesting “the terms of capitalist spatial formation” and the narratives used “to naturalize violent racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies.”9 It is through narratives that spaces and subjectivity are produced. Narratives form and conceptualize traditions, myths, and definitions onto spaces, and it is through narratives that nation-states reproduce their claims to their borders. Mary Pat Brady points out that there has to be “border amnesia” in order to maintain the nation-state, strategically and violently “erasing cultures, identities, and differences, while simultaneously producing subjectivities.”10 It was our goal to show that contested space continues to play an important role in a postcolonial era in which an imperialist paradigm continues to impose—or attempts to impose—its will on the region.

Thus, El Muro | The Wall foregrounds the shaping of the landscape by the continued resistance of Indigenous inhabitants, such as the Lipan Apache, who have lived, and continue to live, on their traditional land, despite colonial, imperial, and postcolonial efforts to dispossess them of it. The focal point is the struggle of Eloisa G. Tamez against the DHS, which implemented eminent domain to seize a portion of her ancestral land in El Calaboz Rancheria. This portion of the San Pedro de Carricitos Land Grant of 1786 was granted by the Spanish Crown, which began with Jose de Escandon’s entrance into the area in 1745 with the settling of Nuevo Santander.11 The film foregrounds purposely forgotten aspects of history: colonial records explicitly acknowledge the Lipan Apache ownership of the land in Texas before the United States existed as an entity.

The film makes use of what Leela Gandhi has termed the “forgotten archive of the colonial encounter,” “[which] narrates multiple stories of contestation and its discomfiting other complicity” for the purposes of questioning the deployment of nationalistic postcolonial dichotomies.12 The unjust seizure of their land by the DHS impacts Lipan Apache cultural traditions and their way of life, since their lives are intrinsically tied to the land and river, to which they no longer have access—a breach of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Beginnings: Operación Ocelote

I first met Eloisa G. Tamez on January 3, 2015, after having read about her case in an article in the Texas Observer Magazine titled “Holes in the Wall,” by Melissa del Bosque, published on February 22, 2008. Del Bosque’s article was the first to critically look at the US border fence in south Texas, which was the last place to be seized by the DHS, as it had devoted its first efforts to fencing sectors along the US states of Arizona, California, and New Mexico. In the article, del Bosque notes the ongoing process of land seizures by the DHS, which started in the autumn of 2007, and she was the first journalist to seriously investigate what had determined the placement of the US border fence. She was also the first to report on the coercive methods employed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the DHS in acquiring land via eminent domain lawsuits and threats. One-third of the 320 condemnation suits filed against landowners in 2007 were still pending more than a decade later, mainly due to the lack of funding to pursue litigation on behalf of the federal government during Barack Obama’s second term.13 Del Bosque would later become one of the film’s participants at Margo Tamez’s suggestion, as she had been crucial in chronicling the building of the Border Wall and the broader social impacts created by its construction.

As of early 2017, the Trump administration began sending out condemnation letters to landowners whose property was in the planned construction site of the US border fence.14 This was followed by a thirty-five-day government shutdown starting on December 22, 2018, due to congressional gridlock between the then Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and Trump’s demand for $5.6 billion to build new sections of border fencing.15 In January 2020, US CBP announced it had identified $11 billion to add 576 new miles of fencing at an average taxpayer cost of $20 million per mile.16 And on February 13, 2020, the Trump administration informed Congress it planned to divert an additional $3.8 billion of Pentagon funding for the purposes of building the wall.17 On the ground, CBP intensified its aggressive eminent domain landgrab on private and Indigenous lands, including proposals to cut across historic cemeteries, wildlife refuges, and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a sacred burial ground to the Tohono O’odham Nation and a UNESCO biosphere reserve.18

At the time in 2015, I was searching for an environmental justice story on which to base a film that foregrounded histories of resistance against US-Anglo imperialism and racism that also incorporated the importance of the Rio Grande River not as a border/barrier or line of demarcation but as a generative nexus of the relationship between humans and the environment. I had grown up in Brownsville, Texas, visiting distant relatives in northern Mexico as well as the river and its ecotone at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. In every respect, the moment was personally ripe to engage in a political documentary that questioned the production and legitimacy of the border narratives and practices, especially given the fact that for generations, our families found themselves on various sides of these borders. The key juncture here was the legitimacy from which the modern nation-state has/had continued to draw its power—that is, law, memory, and the colonial archive.

My first meeting with Eloisa Tamez was at an IHOP in Brownsville, Texas, in 2015. In preparation for the project, I studied the history of dispossession and conflict that followed the takeover of the Southwest by the United States, from the Texas Revolution in 1835 to El Plan de San Diego in 1915, a plan for sedition that inspired the last uprising in south Texas and called for a union of Mexican mestizos, Indigenous peoples, Asians, and Black people.19 The uprising was led by Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa and resulted in failure and a reign of terror by the Texas Rangers, who indiscriminately slaughtered innocent ethnic Mexican mestizos and Indigenous peoples by labeling them bandits.20 This roughly eighty-year period had been rife with the armed persecution of “Mexicans,” land grant owners and heirs, and “Indians” by armed militias (including the Texas Rangers) for the purposes of stealing land and eradicating its people for Anglo occupation.21

I had emailed Eloisa two weeks before at the behest of my professors, Irene J. Klaver and Brian C. O’Connor, both of whom would be crucial to the overall creation of the film. The meeting itself was brief, under thirty minutes, and I was quite nervous. I was just a twenty-one-year-old master’s student speaking with the first “ordinary” citizen who sued the DHS when they attempted to seize her ancestral land and whose case had made it to a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held by the Organization for American States (OAS) and the United Nations Committee on Ending Racial Discrimination (UNCERD).

Eloisa was full of fire. She was a citizen and Tribal Elder of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas and served over twenty years in the US Army Medical Corps, retiring as a full colonel. She held a master of science in nursing from the UT Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, had graduated with her PhD in health education from the University of Texas at Austin, and was now a full professor and the director of the graduate nursing program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV).

I arrived a few minutes before she did and anxiously awaited her arrival over a cup of coffee. I don’t recall her attire, but I do remember recognizing her from some of her previous media appearances. I stood up and greeted and thanked her for her time and for meeting on such short notice. She had just returned from Canada, where she had visited her daughter, Margo Tamez, who had been pivotal in the organizing and mobilization efforts against the wall in the autumn of 2007, leading up to the federal court case in 2009, and taking her case to the OAS and the UNCERD. These two latter instances would involve the help of the UT–Austin School of Law Human Rights and Immigration Clinic and especially the work of Denise Gilman and Ariel Dulitzky, who are also featured in the film.

I pitched Eloisa my initial idea to produce an environmental justice film that foregrounded historical resistance movements against colonial erasures and problematized space, memory, and history. In essence, I sought to produce an intersectional, counterhegemonic, decolonial document/ary, which talked about the multiple times “Mexicans” and Indigenous peoples had fought back against genocidal persecution by the Texas Rangers.

We talked about the history of the area, and I shared that I had grown up in a colonia and that my aunt (Rosalva) was also a member of the faculty at UTRGV. She told me that she had spoken to many journalists over the years and that she would be willing to participate in the project, provided she was heard on her own terms. She advised that I speak with her daughter in the future as well. I think there was an air of uncertainty as to whether I was capable of producing a film of this type, and it was admittedly premature on my end to be talking about a film of this nature. I told her I would be in touch in the near future with a proposal. I tried to get the bill; she told me she would get it, and I awkwardly obliged. I thanked her for her time again and exited the restaurant, feeling unsure as to what making “a decolonial documentary” might entail and lacking an overall sense of confidence in my own abilities as a documentarian.

Following our initial meeting, I returned to Seattle for the winter and spring academic quarters and did not touch base with Eloisa again until my return to south Texas in June of the same year. This was a brief email exchange to determine whether she was still interested in participating in the film, which had started taking conceptual shape during the spring as part of my graduate coursework. Her response was brief but reaffirming; she replied that she was always willing to speak out about this injustice.

During this same period in the drafting of the original conceptual framework for the film proposal, I began to understand the complexity that such a topic truly entailed, and after consulting with my professors, I proceeded to ask my aunt, Rosalva “Rosy” Resendiz, to help me codirect and produce the film, given my relatively young age and lack of experience. Rosy graciously obliged; she would later be of critical importance in the execution of the negotiation and production process. This was also the week before Trump announced his bid for the US presidency, which neither one of us then imagined would be remotely within the realm of possibility.

Methodological Interventions: Toward a Decolonizing Production

In developing the theoretical and methodological framework that would direct the production of the film, most of the key provisions were derived from the theoretical interventions set forth by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Jay Ruby’s Picturing Culture (2000), Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye (1998), and Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), as well as some of the filmmaking conventions pioneered by John Marshall and Timothy Asch. Chief among these were the following:

1. 1. Operating on an ongoing procedural basis of constant free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) before, during, and after the production process, which contained an inherent provision by all participants involved in the project to withdraw participation at any point in the process. If exercised, this clause would entail deleting all footage gathered from our hard drives and backups.
2. 2. Ongoing editing consultations with all participants over their respective portrayals as well as with the key participants and tribal citizens. The participants were to receive a chance to review every edited cut of the film, provide feedback, and gather additional archival materials they thought pertinent to the integrity of the film.
3. 3. Only after consulting with all involved participants and after receiving their approval could the film be disseminated in public screenings.
4. 4. Free mass and public dissemination of the final film, as its political intent was and continues to be in circulation for didactic purposes, to raise awareness of the ongoing issues along the US-Mexico border and about Eloisa G. Tamez’s fight.
5. 5. Co-ownership of the final product between the filmmakers and the key participant, Eloisa G. Tamez, which would require the consent of all participants to sell the film in a for-profit capacity (though selling was never the intended goal).
6. 6. Inherent reciprocity, which included providing the Emilio Institute for Indigenous and Human Rights (operated by Eloisa G. Tamez and the Lipan Apache Band of Texas) with a hard drive including all of the unedited footage gathered throughout the production of the film to contribute to their ongoing efforts to create an archive of their own.
7. 7. Finally, and this was inspired by a larger epistemic and imaginative political perspective, to openly acknowledge the co-construction entailed by the project at all times. This spoke directly against the stereotypical legacy of the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as not contemporaneous in post/modernity.22

This last point specifically returns to the visual culture created by “salvage ethnography.” Ethnographers such as Robert Flaherty, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead perpetrated the myth of “the vanishing Indian.” Salvage ethnography was a movement to document the lives of Indigenous peoples because ethnographers believed “Indians” would vanish/disappear due to an inability to survive colonization and modernity.23 Fatimah Tobing Rony terms this an impulse of ethnographic taxidermy, in which “Indigenous peoples were assumed to be already dying if not dead, [in which] the ethnographic ‘taxidermist’ turned to artifice, seeking an image more true to the posited original.”24 Addressing and redressing this taxidermic process was of critical importance in the making of the documentary and informed the archival and aesthetic nature of the film in three key ways:

1. 1. To honour our agreement and do justice to Eloisa’s story and history of Indigenous resistance.
2. 2. To utilize the same colonial archive (maps, documents, architecture) to disavow the “Texas Creation Myth,” drawing attention to “the forgotten archive of the colonial encounter.”25
3. 3. To create a decolonizing document that would write back against the colonial erasures perpetrated by both ethnographic documentary and the misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in cinematic film (i.e., the western genre, in which Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest were portrayed as vanishing with the arrival of Anglo settlers devoid of the historic context of the violence exercised by settlers against these Indigenous communities).26

In addition to the aforementioned methodological procedures, the film’s participants were also to be vetted for participation in the project by the Tamez family and the Lipan Apache Band of Texas Tribal Board, given the fact that the film centred predominantly around her story, and we sought only to give a platform to those who had been deemed allies or had aided in the case against the continued US assault on Indigenous lands and human rights. In working toward this end, no agent aligned with or sympathetic to the colonial/imperial goals of CBP or the DHS was to receive any face time, especially since the political intent of the film was to redress asymmetric colonial injustices. To provide a space for the colonizer would have been a breach of trust on our end and would have also been counterintuitive to our decolonial goals.

Tribal Board Review of Operación Ocelote

In August 2015, I met with Eloisa again, this time in her office at UTRGV. It had been a few months since we had touched base. I had prepared a rough draft of the proposal for the film, which I handed to her. She looked at the first page and told me she would get back to me with comments. She asked if I had any questions at that time, and I expressed some apprehension in asking about whether it would be possible to employ the Rio Grande as one of the key storytellers of the film. She beamed and said that would be wonderful, because the river was the source of life. Later in the film, Margo would address the sacredness of the river.

The proposal in its then-current state contained an expansive theorization regarding the role of boundaries, borders, and the river, along with some of the environmental considerations inherent to discussions of the border and border habitats. The working title of the film was Operación Ocelote, a reference to the now critically endangered indigenous feline that once freely roamed the walled area. In addition to the key methodological procedures for the film, the proposal contained an expansive appendix with some of the major historical figures that the colonial archive has sought to forget and that have been villainously framed in the realm of the popular imagination. Many of our border heroes, such as Gregorio Cortez, were labeled outlaws but were remembered in our oral history as people who stood up against injustice.

Americo Paredes was the first folklorist/ethnographer to bring to light these counterstories of resistance.27 In With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), Paredes analyses the multiple narratives surrounding the legend and hero worship of Gregorio Cortez, who was wrongly accused of theft and, in an act of self-defence, killed a lawman, resulting in an unjust persecution by the Texas Rangers. Along the Texas-Mexico border, the Texas Rangers were the villains, yet they have been memorialized as righteous lawmen. The people recorded their abuses in corridos/ballads, leaving an oral history of remembered injustice and trauma. From Paredes’s work, heroes such as Cortez entered the decolonial discourse in print and film. (In 1982, Edward James Olmos starred in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez). Hero worship of “outlaws” is intrinsic to the contestation of border spaces and border narratives and demonstrates the tension between the nation-state and its subjects.

Our meeting ended on a positive note, and I asked Eloisa if at that point we could contact her daughter, Margo. Eloisa advised me to do so, as feedback from Margo would be of critical importance in being able to responsibly produce the film (especially since her doctoral dissertation had been about the border wall and the violent erasures it entailed to the lives of the Lipan Apache).28

I received a reply from Margo, who greeted me warmly but informed me that I was in violation of the proper protocols to engage in conversation with members of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas. We arranged for a Skype meeting the following week, and she provided me with a set of community guidelines to abide by: “Nde.’ Guidelines and Principles for Respectful Partnerships with Government, Law (Advocacy), Energy, Environment, Policy, Academia (Advocacy).”29

Fortunately, the working proposal was already largely in compliance with the stipulated guidelines. The key element that the guidelines helped us address in the proposal was to name the Emilio Institute for Indigenous and Human Rights as the entity to whom we would provide all of the raw materials gathered from the production process rather than just the individual participants.

The meeting with Margo proved fruitful and promising, and she mentioned that her mother held great hopes for the film. We went through the proposal together, and at the time there were no additional attached stipulations to the proposal in order for it to be submitted to the full tribal board for review. The only condition was that we conduct all inquiries and communication pertaining to the film and any/all potential Lipan Apache participants through her; she would act as our liaison until the tribal board’s Committee on the Protection of the Nde’ (Lipan Apache) Knowledge and Cultural Property finished their review of the proposed project.

Following our conversation, I returned to Seattle to complete my final quarter of coursework, and in November 2015, I received an email from Margo. She was in south Texas and wanted to meet with Rosy regarding the direction of the film. The three of them (Eloisa, Margo, and Rosy) met on a Friday morning in November and exchanged gifts. From that point forward, Rosy and Margo’s labour was pivotal for the completion of the project. Around this same time, I also received some funding for the film from the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington by Shirley Yee, who also provided some critical feedback and showed great confidence in the project. This was the only time we received any funds to make the film; everything else would be independently funded by us and our family.

The review itself lasted roughly over six and a half months, during which time I completed my coursework, went on leave from the university, and returned to Texas in January to hopefully make a thesis film. I emailed Margo because I would be in south Texas and wanted to know if I could receive permission to visit Eloisa for further consultation on the film. My request was approved, and I was granted a brief meeting with Eloisa, who expressed her approval of the film project. However, it would not be until March 16, 2016, that the full Committee on the Protection of the Nde’ (Lipan Apache) Knowledge and Cultural Property approved the project, ultimately with no stipulations other than that we continue to remain respectful.

Post/Production and El Muro | The Wall

Whereas the preproduction and review process entailed a substantial amount of time, the production process was rather streamlined in comparison. This was largely due to Margo’s aid following the review process, helping us identify pertinent participants from our initial potential list. In the end the film featured seven participants, three of whom were members of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, one from the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and three additional individuals who had critically helped raise awareness of the issues posed by the border wall. Four additional participants whom we interviewed would not make it to the final cut, but we remain eternally grateful for their time, and their interviews remain archived by the Emilio Institute for Indigenous and Human Rights.

During the production process, I acted as the singular technical crewmember, and Rosy was the main interviewer (up until her departure abroad, during which time other family members crewed for me while I conducted the interviews). After our first interview with Eloisa on May 20, 2016, the film remained in production through July 29, 2016, with the final interview taking place in front of the Alamo with Lipan Apache Tribal Chairman and Chief Daniel Castro Romero. The other participants in the film included Melissa del Bosque (journalist for the Texas Observer Magazine), Margo Tamez (tribal liaison and associate professor at UBC Okanagan), Denise Gilman (director of the UT–Austin School of Law Immigration Clinic), and Ariel Dulitzky (director of the UT–Austin School of Law Human Rights Clinic). An additional interview was conducted in the spring of 2017 with Ashley Leal (an anthropologist and member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas).

Following the production process, I relocated to North Texas to begin editing the film at the University of North Texas while I worked at Texas Woman’s University. During this time, I produced the first cut, which I defended as my master’s thesis on November 28, 2016, at the University of Washington. By then the political relevance and urgency of the film had become painfully obvious to all of the participants involved in the production, as Trump had won the 2016 US presidential election. However, it would be nearly a year before it would premiere in its final form on November 17, 2017.

During the time between the first and final cuts, additional consultations took place with the participants, and we allowed a six-month period for additional general comments after the first cut was done. Brian O’Connor and Irene Klaver, along with Margo, were of great importance in the conceptual and aesthetic archival editing of the footage.

Prior to its official premiere in November, Rosy also organized a public community screening at the UTRGV Edinburg, Texas, campus to present the film to the local community for comment and additional feedback. Eloisa and Margo, along with many other members of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, were in attendance, as well as members from our neighbouring country down south in Mexico.

We also procured the voluntary help of Adrian Flores and Brandon Odom from Finest Roar Productions, who composed and performed the musical score for the film free of charge, both of which we are very thankful for. The film was well received and would make its way back to the community in an official premiere capacity on Thursday, February 15, 2018, at the Historic Cine El Rey Theater in McAllen, Texas.

Thoughts and Discussion

In the end, the film led us to travel the majority of the Mexico-Texas border as well as to visit the unceded Okanagan Territory of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. This would itself become a small distance compared to the circulation of the film, which has been publicly screened on three continents, at various film festivals, and at many academic conferences. And as stipulated by our original proposed methodology, the film is also available for public viewing online, subtitled in English and Spanish.

In reflecting on the production of the film, we would like to revisit the key parts of the theoretical framework regarding the “production of a counterhegemonic didactic decolonial tool,” given that the film has taken on a different significance since the original proposal for the film was initially drafted. Since then we have seen a sharp rise in xenophobic ethno-nationalism in the United States, which right-wing politicians have seized upon and utilized through the rhetorical deployment of the US-Mexico border and the continuous call for the building of a border wall. To return to these central issues, we employ Kate Crehan’s observations in “Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: A Useful Concept for Anthropologists?” (2011) because it very well bridges some of the larger theoretical concepts embedded in El Muro | The Wall and that it attempted to theoretically address. Crehan problematizes dominant notions of cultures and their relation to the formation of the nation-state. She notes, “Actual nation-states may be quite recent creations in historical terms and their boundaries in reality far from fixed, but nations themselves—those imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson termed them, underpinning the concept of the nation-state—seem almost to inhabit a realm outside time. They both ‘loom out of an immemorial past” and “glide into a limitless future.’”30 In bringing attention to the modern creation of both nation-states and the boundaries entailed in their creation, as well as the role played by historicity, futurity, and memory, Crehan brings us back to the amnesiac processes intrinsic to the construction of the settler-colonial state and settler mythologies such as the “Texas Creation Myth.”

Though El Muro | The Wall only presents a singular instance of the coercive power of the nation-state and historic colonial erasures, it presents a case study in the creation of a historical document that talks back against the material and imaginative archive necessary for the stability of the colonial bordering processes of settler colonialism. We say this to bring to mind the fact that the film itself addresses the continued assault on Indigenous peoples, who are an unsettling reminder of Anglo settlers’ illegitimate occupation of the Americas and their continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples through coercive, legal, and extralegal means. The landscape continues to reflect these attempts as an archive of violence and resistance. Regarding the action of “writing back,” as expounded upon by Linda Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, it has been our hope that by producing a film of this kind to act as a decolonial document in itself for the purposes of telling stories back, we may begin to ameliorate the violence enacted by colonial mythologies. Margo says in the film, “As long as the people remain of a consciousness, the stories are going to stick,” and we hope that in its circulation, Eloisa’s story of resistance sticks.

Notes

1. 1. Ramón Resendiz and Rosalva Resendiz, El Muro | The Wall.

2. 2. Michelle Guzman and Zachary Hurwitz, Violations on the Part of the United States Government of Indigenous Rights Held by Members of the Lipan Apache, Kickapoo, and Ysleta del Sur Tigua Tribes of the Texas-Mexico Border, 2–4.

3. 3. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception.

4. 4. Nicole Miller, “How Property Rights Are Affected by the Texas-Mexico Border Fence: A Failure Due to Insufficient Procedure,” 631–32.

5. 5. Sural Shah, “The Crisis in Our Own Backyard: United States Response to Unaccompanied Minor Children from Central America.”

6. 6. Jose A. DelReal, “Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid.”

7. 7. Brian Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” 49–50.

8. 8. hooks quoted in Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 166.

9. 9. Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicano Literature and the Urgency of Space, 6.

10. 10. Brady, Extinct Lands, 60.

11. 11. Hubert J. Miller, Jose De Escandon: Colonizer of Nuevo Santander.

12. 12. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, 4–5.

13. 13. Melissa del Bosque, “Over the Wall.”

14. 14. Melissa del Bosque, “Texans Receive First Notices of Land Condemnation for Trump’s Border Wall.”

15. 15. Jessica Taylor, “Trump Signs Short-Term Bill to End Government Shutdown, but Border Fight Still Looms.”

16. 16. John Burnett, “$11 Billion and Counting: Trump’s Border Wall Would Be the World’s Most Costly.”

17. 17. Brakkton Booker, “Trump Administration Diverts $3.8 Billion in Pentagon Funding to Border Wall.”

18. 18. Eric Ortiz, “Ancient Native American Burial Site Blasted for Trump Border Wall Construction.”

19. 19. Americo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border.

20. 20. Paredes, Texas-Mexican Cancionero.

21. 21. Monica Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas.

22. 22. Philip Joseph Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places; Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

23. 23. Deloria, Indians.

24. 24. Rony, Third Eye, 102.

25. 25. Delay, “Independent Indians”; Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory.

26. 26. Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

27. 27. Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero; Paredes, Texas-Mexican Cancionero.

28. 28. Margo Tamez, “Returning Lipan Apache Women’s Laws, Lands, and Strength in El Calaboz Rancheria at the Texas-Mexico Border.”

29. 29. Margo Tamez et al., “Nde’ Guidelines and Principles for Respectful Partnerships with Government, Law (Advocacy), Energy, Environment, Policy, Academia (Advocacy).”

30. 30. Kate Crehan, “Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: A Useful Concept for Anthropologists?” 274.

Bibliography

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