On Tuesday, Alex Halkin, director of the Chiapas Media Project, came to speak about her work with the indigenous Mayan communities of southeastern Mexico. The talk and presentation highlighted ways in which she and her group are attempting to give the newly formed Zapatista communities their own voice, as they have been the subject of many documentaries by cultural outsiders but have been unable to document themselves without the necessary technology . In 1995, Halkin was hired to do a documentary on a non-governmental organization caravan going to the Zapatista community to give them food and goods.
While she was filming this documentary, Halkin was approached by many Chiapas residents who were interested in producing their own films. This gave rise to Halkin’s foundation of the Chiapas Media Project in 1998. The project began as a youth cultural exchange, bringing urban youths with production experience from Chicago and Mexico City to Chiapas to teach workshops on digital video production. The program involve a high degree of participation and control by the outside staff. Its ultimate goal is to create an autonomous group capable of producing their own films. This is both an ideological and a practical decision as the four Mayan dialects make it difficult for outsiders to teach Mayans as easily as they can teach themselves.
Following Halkin’s brief introduction, she screened three films representative of the documentary work that the Chiapas Media Project has generated. The first, Zapata’s Garden¸ depicted changes that resulted from the Zappatista uprising in 1994, including Chiapas residents’ gaining control over their own land. As the film’s narrator stated, prior to 1994, “we did not have land to work, so we didn’t have anything at all.”
With the uprising, the aristocratic structure of land ownership was undermined and autonomous communities took control, collectivizing ownership and production. While the film presented this as a positive experience, there is a lot of work to be done before an idealic bucolic existence actually becomes reality for the Zapatistas. However, the film demonstrated ways the communal farm has dealt with the primary problems of malnutrition — demonstrating how the community members could cooperate to improve their quality of life.
The second film depicted the effort to preserve the tradition and culture of Chiapas through the maintenance of their traditional music. The film was based on a group of masked musicians, called the Grupo Tradicional de Yat Vitz, who strive to maintain the cultural tradition of music in the Mayan culture. This film was commissioned by Comandante David, a Zapatista who was concerned about the youth’s growing interest in popular Western culture. The film portrayed a cultural struggle to maintain interest in old traditions as they are replaced by new ones. It showed how the power structure could restrict individual freedoms in the desire to maintain cultural traditions.
The third film, Reclaiming Justice, is probably the most political. It demonstrated ways the corrupt Mexican government generates crime and consequently fails to respond to it. The Zapatista community in Gerrero decided to respond to this social problem through their own autonomous police force. The film documented the success of this organization despite the attempts of the Mexican government to prevent it from functioning through threats and violence against the organization. All the films presented the Zapatistas’ quests for freedom, identity and self-expression. The Chiapas Media Project demonstrated ways that middle-class leftists could help Zapatista communities gain their own voice through video technology.