Video America Indigena/Video Native America

I traveled to Mexico in August 1998 to take part in Video América Indígena/Video Native America (VAI), a traveling video festival cosponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, and the Indigenous National Institute in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Morelia. The program produced an important cultural exchange between indigenous video makers from Mexico and the United States that contributed to my profound experience of identification with many similarities between my Pueblo Indian upbringing and the Indian communities we visited during the VAI Festival.

Phone Calls

In May 1998 I received a call from Erica Wortham, a program assistant at the National Museum of the American Indian, Film and Video Center, in New York City. She informed me that I had been selected to participate in a video festival in Mexico and asked if I would be available to travel in August. The call came as I was packing my belongings to return to New York after a year of teaching at a state university in California. A month prior to Erica Wortham's call, I had received a spirit message that intimated Mexico was a place where I would find fulfillment as an artist.

I began driving to New York from California on August 1 in anticipation of my trip to Mexico two weeks later. I stayed with my family for a few days at Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, and I asked my niece to travel with me for the remainder of my trip. We left well before dawn on August 4, and as I hugged my mom I told her I loved her and to take care of herself. About twenty minutes outside of Santa Fe, it was still dark, and on the two-lane stretch of highway that rejoins with the interstate, I spotted a deer slightly off the road. I slowed the car, and as I drove by it watched me go past. I said a prayer for the deer, for my family, and for everything to be good.

Memories of my visit to Mexico begin with a telephone call that I placed from Cuernavaca, Mexico, to my mother. I knew my mom would enjoy hearing from me, and she did. I had been in Mexico for about eight days. I told her about my experiences thus far, including a visit we had made the previous day to Tzintzuntzan, a site where circular temples were built by the ancestors of Purépecha Indians. I told her of my strong feeling of familiarity about Mexico and mentioned the similarities of our cultures. Our conversation shifted to our annual feast at Santa Clara Pueblo on August 12. She said the feast was really nice, but she was tired from all the preparation. I said, "I'll be home next year to help you." My mother had been ill for some time. A month after I returned from Mexico, in October 1998, she passed to the Spirit World while I was en route from New York to be with her.

The passage of my mother so soon after my trip to Mexico effectively changed my perception of what I witnessed and learned about Mexico's indigenous peoples. I want to use this essay to document this unique exchange involving culture and media and offer some of my perspectives about our video making and theirs that were derived from my participation with the Video América Indígena Festival.

Arrival

Flying over Mexico City, I witnessed the vastness of the city, and as the plane descended, the multicolored buildings began to look like a box of old crayons. Smog hung over the city, and in the distance, volcanic mountains surrounded the city. I was arriving at a place so different, yet somehow familiar. Reality jarred me after I left one of my bags at customs and had to describe its contents to the airport police. Despite...