Adjusting the Lens

Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico

Freya Schiwy, Byrt Wammack Weber, Freya Schiwy, Byrt Wammack Weber

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780822982425
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Adjusting the Lens offers a detailed analysis of contemporary, independent, indigenous-language audiovisual production in Mexico and in Mexican migrant communities in the United States. The contributors relate the styles and forms of collaborative and community media production to socially critical, transformative, resistant, and constitutive processes off-screen, thereby exploring the political within the context of the media. The chapters show how diasporic media makers map novel interpretations of image and sound into existing audiovisual discourses to communicate social and cultural changes within their communities that counter stereotypical representations in commercial television and cinema, and contribute to a newfound communal identity. The new media expose the conflict of social movements and/or indigenous and rural communities with the state, challenge Eurocentrism and globalization, and reveal the power of audiovisual production to affect political change.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Adjusting the Lens: An Introduction
• Chapter 1. (Re)Imagining Diaspora: Two Decades of Video with A Mayan Accent
• Chapter 2. Geographies, Diasporas, and Communities Revisited
• Chapter 3. Arroz Con Leche: Audiovisual Poetry and the Politics of Everyday Life
• Chapter 4. Shaping the Taraspanglish Diaspora
• Chapter 5. Patron Saint Fiesta Videos: Mediatization and Transnationalization Between the Sierra Mixe and California
• Chapter 6. Romper El Cerco: An Ethnography of Transnational Collaborative Film
• Chapter 7. The Open Invitation: Some Notes on Video Activism and the Politics of Affect
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Contributors
• Index