CLLAS will provide funding for a research project led by Dr. Ramón Resendiz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, titled “A Chronicle for Cameron Park: An Intergenerational Documentary of Archival Resistance on the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
The project is a community-based oral history documentary that centers Cameron Park, Texas, the largest colonia in the United States. Through interviews with community elders, family photographs, and documentary footage, Dr. Resendiz will tell the story of how residents transformed raw, unincorporated land into a community with roads, electricity, clean water, and civic life.
The research will take place in Cameron Park and Brownsville, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Dr. Resendiz will work with retired community elders whose memories document six decades of Latinx life, grassroots organizing, and resistance to historical erasure.
The goal of the project is to preserve and share community histories that have often been left out of official archives. CLLAS support will help Dr. Resendiz complete final production, post-production, and outreach for the documentary, while also supporting a digital archive of oral histories and family photographs through the University of Oregon Libraries.
The finished project will contribute to Latinx Studies, Borderlands Studies, anthropology, and documentary media by showing how storytelling can return narrative authority to communities whose histories have too often been overlooked.