Filmmaker Alex Rivera Named MacArthur Fellow

October 1, 2021—Alex Rivera, the filmmaker who last October delivered the CLLAS Distinguished Lecture The Border as a Way of Seeing and also led a CLLAS teach-in, has been selected as a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. Known popularly as the MacArthur “genius grant,” the Fellowship is a $625,000 “no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” Twenty-five people from a variety of disciplines were selected this year to receive this prestigious award.

The MacArthur Foundation website lists three criterion for selection of Fellows: 1) exceptional creativity; 2) promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; 3) potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. 

Rivera has been telling ground-breaking Latinx stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, a cyberpunk thriller set in Tijuana, Mexico, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at Sundance and was screened around the world.  Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid set in an immigrant detention center, The Infiltrators, won both the Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.  Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Open Society Institute, among many other sources.

Tags: Alex Rivera, CLLAS Distinguished Lecturer, MacArthur Fellowship

“The Border as a Way of Seeing,” by Alex Rivera

Video

PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK to view the 2020 CLLAS Distinguished Lecture with Alex Rivera. Rivera is a filmmaker who’s been telling ground-breaking Latinx stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, a cyberpunk thriller set in Tijuana, Mexico, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at Sundance and was screened around the world.  Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid set in an immigrant detention center, The Infiltrators, won both the Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.  Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Open Society Institute, and many others.

For borders to be enforced as sites of social and material control, there must always be an accompanying system of visual production.  Today, that system includes drones, infrared cameras, biometrics, and more.  For over twenty-five years Alex Rivera has been using the language of moving images to contest those systems with visions of a different kind of border. 

CLLAS invites you to view Rivera’s latest film, The Infiltrators (2019), before attending the CLLAS Distinguished Lecture. Find the streaming information at https://theinfiltrators.vhx.tv/checkout/university-of-oregon-presents-the-infiltrators/purchase. The code for free access is: CLLASFILM. It can be entered by checking the promo code box below the credit card inputs. Please note that you will have 72 hours to watch the film after opening the link.

The Infiltrators (2019) is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who get arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center – on purpose. Marco and Viri are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical Dreamers who are on a mission to stop deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when Marco and Viri try to pull off their heist – a kind of ‘prison break’ in reverse – things don’t go according to plan.

These events are part of the CLLAS two-year theme (2019-2021), “The Politics of Language in the Americas: Power, Culture, History, and Resistance,” and are cosponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, and the new Latinx Studies minor.

Tags: Alex Rivera, film, LatinX Heritage Month