Central American and Mexican Video Archive

http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eclacs/

Indiana University
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
1125 East Atwater Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47401
(812) 855-9097

Principal Investigator:
Jeffrey L. Gould
gouldj@indiana.edu

Co-Principal Investigator:
Kristine R. Brancolini
brancoli@indiana.edu


Project Manager:
Sari M. Pascoe
sapascoe@indiana.edu


Dollar Allocation Year 1: $152,000

Project Overview:

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the award to the Indiana University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of a grant to create The Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA). The four-year $600,000 Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grant will allow Indiana University to create an archive that will make accessible hundreds of hours of raw footage, videos, and films that are currently preserved in a precarious state.

The archive will annotate, index and deliver the footage in such a way that it might be used in college and high school classrooms throughout the US, Mexico, and Central America. At Indiana University, The Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) is sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Center for the Study of History and Memory (CSHM), and the Digital Library Project/University Libraries (DLP).

Based at IU, Project CAMVA is a consortium of three leading research institutes in Central America and Mexico: The Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American History (IHNCA, Nicaragua), The Museum of Words and Images (MUPI, El Salvador), and The Center for Advanced Research and Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico).

Since 1960, millions of rural people in Central America and Mexico have undergone radical transformations in their livelihoods and their culture. The spectacular growth of agro-export economies caused a significant ecological, social and cultural transformation of rural communities. Land loss and internal migration directly conditioned the development of social movements that, following a period of repression, led to civil wars that ripped apart the fabric of Central American rural societies, accelerating the pace of ecological and cultural change.

Due to its unique political history, Mexico avoided the civil wars of the 1980s but nonetheless its rural inhabitants, in particular indigenous people, have experienced analogous forms of rapid and profound cultural change. Although many documents have been produced dealing with the conflicts in the 1980s, the more subtle yet crucially significant changes in peoples’ lives have left relatively little documentary trace. Similarly, the linguistic and cultural transformations of the indigenous peoples of Mexico have not been documented adequately.

Since millions of migrants from that region's countryside moved recently to the United States, Project CAMVA considers it vitally important to achieve a high level of understanding of their cultural history. The principal aim of this project is to address this profound need: to better understand the recent social-cultural histories of Central America and Mexico in order to gain a better appreciation of our new neighbors north of the border as well as those who remain in their respective countries.

Before the rapidly deteriorating film and video archives of this vital region are irreversibly destroyed, Indiana University (IU) will lead a collaborative project to create a digital record available to researchers, teachers, and students everywhere via the internet. This project purports to select audio-visual material that will otherwise likely perish. Those materials include large amounts of film and video that offer vital insights into the cultural history of the region’s rural peoples who, despite massive urban migration, still account for approximately 35 percent of the population.

It is highly important to recognize that the overwhelming majority of the rural people of Central America and Mexico have not left written records and, therefore, these audio-visual archives can play a crucial role in allowing scholars and policy makers to understand the cultural roots of the new immigrants, their present cultural universe, and their evolving worldviews and practices. Project CAMVA will take a major step toward meeting this need.

The main activity of Project CAMVA is to create a regional audio-visual archive where no other exists, even at the national level. The collected, processed, and distributed materials will allow students, scholars and policy makers to create cultural/historical benchmarks against which historical comparisons and contemporary studies can be measured.

Specifically, the project in Mexico will focus on videos and raw footage collected through years of anthropological studies at CIESAS dealing with the indigenous peoples, mainly of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas. In Nicaragua, Project CAMVA will also work with IHNCA in preserving and making accessible rapidly deteriorating videos, films, and raw video footage stored at the Universidad Centroamericana, the Centro de Historia Militar (Center of Military History), as well as footage from television companies. Most of the videos and television footage deal with rural conditions and conflict during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, in El Salvador, Project CAMVA will select and process materials from the vast MUPI collection, containing over sixty reels of film, dealing in large part with the rural-based guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and 1980s among the eastern Salvadoran peasantry of mestizo, indigenous, and hybrid identities. In fact, all collections, rich in cultural and historic al material, are imminently perishable, which forms the single, most compelling rationale for the project.

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