Contributed by Anne Gebelein
El Instituto and the Human Rights Institute hosted filmmakers Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís February 12th for a showing of their new documentary “Borderland: The Line Within”.
Pamela Yates is the Founder and Creative Director, and Paco de Onís the Executive Director and Executive Producer of Skylight, a non-profit media organization that seeks to highlight the courage of activists defending human rights. Yates has a long history of working in Latin America, and her first film “When the Mountains Tremble” of 1983 is a classic. The film introduced many in the world to Rigoberta Menchú at a time in which news from the violence in Central America was being heavily censored by the Reagan administration. Yates created other films about Guatemala: “Witness to War”, “500 Years” and “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator” that contributed to Rios Montt’s conviction for genocide. She also made a film about Fujimori’s use of the fear of terrorism to weaken democracy in Peru in “State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism”.
“Borderland” profiles 2 activists: Gabriela Castañeda, a immigrant leadership trainer at the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, and Kaxh Mura’l, an environmental activist and defender of ancestral Maya-Ixil lands. Kaxh needed to flee Guatemala when he received death threats for trying to keep mining companies from extracting barite, and he fled to the U.S. border seeking asylum. Gabriela suffered her husband’s deportation, leaving her with 3 children, and the government revoking her DACA for her activism. A third thread of the film is a team of digital humanists who build a database exposing the border industrial complex and its web of private prison contracts across the U.S.
Borderlands is true to Skylight’s spirit of inspiring activists by highlighting the courage of people who risk their country, time with their family, and their very lives for causes they believe in. It reveals the need for persistence in fighting back against mining and prison corporations, as well as against unfair immigration policies of the United States, revealing the damage both inflict on families, communities and the environment.
BORDERLAND | The Line Within is the website for the movie, and viewers can find not only a study guide to accompany the film, but data on the amount of money each county in each state receives in contracts to support the border industrial complex.
The documentary is available streaming from Babbidge library. Because Skylight is a non-profit organization, the filmmakers invite human rights and activist groups to use their film for fundraising events as well. Yates and de Onís are quite busy given the renewed interest in the border with Trump’s declared emergency over immigration; they showed the film 30x between Sept 10 (Hartford Real Art Ways) and Nov 4, 2024 (Yale) and their inboxes are full of requests. Even though they had a showing the day after their Wednesday UConn presentation, Q & A and reception, they were generous enough to spend time in Anne Gebelein’s Human Rights on the U.S./Mexican Border class before they left town on Thursday to share their thoughts about the power of storytelling in the defense of human rights.
“Borderlands II” is currently in production, so hopefully we will be seeing Yates and de Onís again soon.