Preview Screening & Fundraiser
DATE: DECEMBER 10, 7p.m.
LOCATION: Camaradas El Barrio, 2241 1st Ave /115 St./ Manhattan
Please join us in support of the documentary “Tell’em Who You Are.”
We will be screening exclusive clips from the film followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Michelle García.
The Wall is rising along the southern border. Even as the federal government reports construction delays and cost overruns, the Department of Homeland Security condemns hundreds of acres of privately owned land, Tejano owned land, the birthright of gU.S. citizens, whose roots in the region run centuries deep.
You are invited to preview a documentary film, a work in progress that strikes at the Border Wall by rescuing memory of a region and its people whose land and identity has come under siege for over 150 years and the story it tells about being an “American.”
Film Summary:
The U.S.-Mexico border occupies a mythical place in the U.S. psyche, a wasteland of lawlessness, dirty and wild. With that image firmly rooted in our minds,, the U.S. government sold the public on the idea of a multi-billion dollar Border Wall across hundreds of miles of the southern border.
Turns out, there’s some truth to those tales and legends. Blood once soaked the brush country and Tejano and Mexican rebels sacked towns and traded gunfire with Texas Rangers and Army soldiers. My heart pumps with the blood of those rebels, I am their heir and successor and the spirit of their cause summons me home.
Tell’em Who You Are is a return home, the embattled South Texas frontier, to recover memory, the historical memory of the Tejano-owned land that will be lost to the wall. Fighting on the front lines of Border Wall battle are the descendents of those largely known Tejano rebels and revolutionaries, continuing in a struggle for respect that began over a century ago. Our ancestors, the bandits and outlaws of Hollywood stories were actually Tejanos defending their protect land,identity and dignity from colonization. More than a century later, their fight is now ours.