The Head of Joaquin Murrieta: A Conversation with John J. Valadez

UNSETTLING JOURNEYS has partnered with The BORDERLESS CULTURES FILM FESTIVAL () to bring you this conversation about the 2016 film The Head of Joaquin Murrieta. John J. Valadez directs this documentary that is both a personal journey and a crashcourse on the history of Mexicans and MexicanAmericans before, during and after the establishing of the monumental USMexico border. In this conversation, cocurators Annette Rodriguez (UNCChapel Hill) and Emmanuel RamosBarajas (Unsettling Journeys Producer) are joined by Valadez and discuss the themes of the film, the nature of history and what it takes shift the narratives that have been told about Latinx peoples in the US.

ABOUT THE FILM

For over a decade filmmaker John J. Valadez searched for the remains of Joaquin Murrieta, a legendary Mexican outlaw who blazed a trail of revenge across California until he was reportedly caught and decapitated in the summer of 1853. A hundred and sixty-two years later Valadez embarks on a quixotic, cross-country road trip through history, myth and memory to bury the fabled head of Joaquin Murrieta. Along the way he discovers chilling parallels with his own family story. Using ground breaking scholarship and working with a team of leading historians from across the United States, THE HEAD OF JOAQUIN MURRIETA provides a view of U.S. history from a decidedly Chicano perspective. Deeply personal, irreverent and entertaining, the film tears open a painful and long ignored historical trauma.

ABOUT BORDERLESS CULTURES

Knowing that popular culture constructs, informs, and reflects, Borderless Cultures brings together filmmakers and scholars to share films that are otherwise not in wide release to talk about about Latinx peoples and film. Thus, we selected films that tell us something about the U.S. racialization of Latinx peoples.

Conceived between collaborators and colleagues on opposite coasts, Borderless Cultures is our offering to gather across space, and share time and ideas. Bringing his talents as a content creator and art educator, Ramos- Barajas thinks through narrative and artistic vision, while Professor Rodríguez fixates on historical context and the value of scholarly analysis. Our goal is to reframe Latinx histories— and by extension, the interlaced histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Black & Anglo peoples— in what today is the South and West of the United States.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

JOHN J. VALADEZ is a Peabody Award winning filmmaker who has written, directed and produced many nationally broadcast documentary films. He grew up in Seattle, taught photography in India, and studied filmmaking at New York University. Valadez’s films have tackled such diverse subjects as the false imprisonment of a leader of the Black Panther Party, Latino poets in New York City, gang-involved children in Chicago, the history of affirmative action, segregation in U.S. schools, Latinos in World War II, the evolution of Chicano music, Latino civil rights, and the genocide of Native Americans in the Southwest.

His major works include: The Head of Joaquin Murrieta (2016), Prejudice and Pride (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), War and Peace (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), The Longoria Affair (2010 PBS/Independent Lens), The Chicano Wave (2009 Latin Music USA/PBS), The Last Conquistador (2008 PBS/POV), Arise (2006), High Stakes Testing (2005 CNN), Beyond Brown (2004 PBS), Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture (2004 PBS), The Divide (2003 Matters of Race/PBS), Soul Survivors (1997 Making Peace/PBS) and Passin’ It On (1994 PBS/POV). Valadez is a Rockefeller Fellow and a founding member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.