Confined Terrain is a multidisciplinary project that will encompass an experimental documentary, print work, and a series of related public programs. The core of the project is a film that takes a research-based, autoethnographic approach to examining the Texas prison system’s complex relationship with Mexican labor and the US agricultural industry through the lens of one individual: my late father, Richard Luna.

My father was the child of Mexican migrant laborers and grew up picking cotton and okra throughout Navarro County, Texas. Later, serving time in a Texas state prison, he returned to the fields, picking cotton but while in chains. Upon his release, he became a drug counselor and youth advocate, offering alternatives to juvenile detention and I spent many hours with him participating in the after-school programs. Taking up these subjects as the starting point, the film explores how the injustices of the Prison Industrial Complex and anti-immigrant policies--perpetuated by xenophobic and white supremacist ideologies that continue to inform U.S. national identity—impacted my father and ultimately defined the course of his life.

Weaving together oral history, site visits, archival material from the Texas Department of Corrections, and 3D simulations, the film is structured around an interview with my father. I’ve accumulated footage with his friends, long lost family members, and his extended community. In addition, the film includes documentation of an ongoing collaboration with my nine-year-old niece. Together, my niece and I look at images from the archives and describe them, echoing alternative text used for accessibility purposes. In effect, through this process, I am testing to see if research methodologies and image analysis can be used to decipher tangled visual histories for diverse future audiences and function as a liberatory praxis.

This project blends an autoethnographic style of documentary (inherently open) with archival material from the state (decidedly fixed), but it incorporates new media and collaborative investigation to bridge this gap in immersive and unexpected ways. I’m interested in decentering colonial models of knowledge production–as in the traditional ethnographic method, within which “objectivity” is a requirement. Instead, Confined Terrain foregrounds the practice of searching, and with that in mind the scenes flow from one to the other in a non-linear way. Much like the fracturing that the Prison Industrial Complex introduces to one’s life, the broken stories will be pieced together from various sources from state documents, archival sound recordings, and interviews.