Media Pedagogy in Action: The Making of The Virgin Appears in La Maldita Vecindad

Abstract

This article focuses on the video documentary The Virgin Appears in La Maldita Vecindad as an example of critical, creative geographic media literacy and pedagogy. Conducting research through media production in the video documentary form can constitute a powerful pedagogical tool across three registers: making a video documentary allows the community or group documented to speak to, about, and for themselves as well as for others; it makes visible and illuminates a parallel yet hidden and unseen world for those outside the group; and, in recursive fashion, it places researcher-videomakers in the position of having to learn from their audiences.

Key Words:

• decolonialism
• NAFTA
• pedagogy
• video documentary

Notes

1. According to 2011 U.S. Census data, self-identified white persons make up 72.1 percent of North Carolina's population, African American persons 22 percent, and persons of Hispanic and Latino origin 8.6 percent. As a point of comparison, these figures for the U.S. as a whole are 78.1 percent, 13.1 percent, and 16.7 percent respectively (U.S. Census. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/37000.html).

2. We focus on the historic South, especially those states in the southeastern part of the United States that relied on slave labor and fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

3. These include the video examined in this article, The Virgin Appears in La Maldita Vecindad, produced by Elva E. Bishop, Altha J. Cravey, and Javier Garcia Mendez. (2008); People's Guelaguetza: Oaxacan's Take it to the Streets! produced by Elva E. Bishop and Altha J. Cravey (2006); and Seed Spirits: The Otomi of Carolina del Norte, produced by Elva E. Bishop, Altha J. Cravey, and Ciro Arroyo Vicente (2011). Videos are subtitled and in Spanish and English and can be obtained through the Web sites provided in the references.

4. The shrine attracts more visitors than any other Catholic shrine in the world, climbing to more than six million pilgrims over a forty-eight-hour period in 2009 (Norget 2006; Hayes 2013). Devotees to the Virgin petition assistance with specific problems and repay her with flowers, long pilgrimages that sometimes include walking a certain distance upon bloodied knees, and other public displays of devotion and endurance.

5. Both the video documentary and this essay are collaborative projects. In order to capture the immediacy of events in the making of the video, the authors of this essay, Cravey and Petit, use the point of view of videomakers Bishop and Cravey.

6. Matachine dancing is a cultural practice that spans the U.S.–Mexico border. Sylvia Rodriguez defines it as “a ritual drama performed by a variety of Indian and Hispanic communities throughout parts of Mexico and the southwestern United States” (Rodriguez cited in Cantu, 97).

7. Workers without documents or visas labor in dangerous and unhealthy conditions for low pay because they have few alternatives. Economic sectors such as meat processing, hospitality, and construction increase profits, while documented and undocumented workers alike struggle to provide for their families.

8. In additionto Mitchell, other key works on visual research include Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (2001); Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research (2007), and Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. (2012).

9. Que Pasa bills itself as, “The link to and the voice of the Hispanic community in North Carolina” (http://raleigh.quepasanoticias.com).

10. Whites compose 33.1 percent of the population; blacks 24.9 percent, Hispanics 8.4 percent, and Asians 0.9 percent, and 2.4 percent of the population reports two or more races.