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Editor's Note:
Scholars have long explored the complex histories of slavery, race and class in individual countries in the New World. Yet recent years have witnessed a growing body of scholarship devoted to exploring patterns, commonalities, and connections among the peoples of the African Diaspora throughout the hemisphere. The African Diaspora in the Americas Collection aims to provide a visual counterpart to this growing field, uniting documentaries from Cuba to Argentina that capture the diverse experiences and underlying commonalities of the African Diaspora.
To order either of these videos, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-4804, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our website, www.latinamericanvideo.org, allows for secure purchases by credit card.
Pierre Fatumbi Verger-Messenger Between Two Worlds Get Details and Purchasing Info
Luiz Buarque de Hollanda
Documentary 90 minutes 1998
With English subtitles
Photographer, ethnographer, author, world traveler, Parisian playboy, friend to kings, initiate of secret religious societies, Pierre Verger was a Frenchman driven by his own personal demons and the power of the African deities to devote his life to the study of the reciprocal cultural influences between Brazil and the Yoruba and Fon regions of West Africa. But the story is not just Verger’s – his life is used as an entryway into an exploration of the complex religious traditions that were brought from Africa to Brazil with slavery and live on in the cultural resilience and deep spirituality of the African and Afrobrazilian people. This sumptuously-filmed documentary is narrated by renowned Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, who takes us from Brazil to France, Benin, and Nigeria, where priests and kings, friends and colleagues, comment on the significance of Verger’s life and the cultures he immersed himself in. The film shows us not only the dances and divination ceremonies of Africa and Brazil, but demonstrates the deep and pervasive ties of faith and family that exist between a people that even an ocean and the rupture of slavery cannot divide.
Purchase Price: $ 150.00
Promised Ship, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Luciano Capelli
Documentary 51 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
Limón, Costa Rica, is a settlement of Jamaican and other West Indian immigrants who came to work on the banana plantations at the turn of the 20th century. One of these laborers was Marcus Garvey, whose vision of black dignity and repatriation would later attract a following of more than 6 million black men and women across the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association was a massive black power movement in the early 20th century, which founded a steamship line intended to transport black people to back across the Atlantic to their ancestral homeland. Although Garvey’s dream never came to fruition, his return to Limón, and the arrival of ships from his Black Star line, had a tremendous emotional impact on the black townspeople of Limón. In this documentary, the old-timers of this forgotten fringe of the African Diaspora recall Garvey’s effect in giving the people of Limón a model of pride, dignity, and hope for the future that even Garvey’s arrest by the fearful FBI could not quash. Some of the old people of Limón have even held onto the tickets they bought on the Black Star line 80 years ago, just in case one day, that proud black ship sails into port to take them to the African promised land.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Forgotten Roots, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Rafael Rebollar
Documentary 50 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
Mexico has always imagined itself a nation forged from the encounter between Spaniards and indigenous people in the colonial past. But there are roots that have been forgotten, if not deliberately erased. This impressively researched documentary, the first of a three part series, acknowledges and explores the history and influential cultural heritage of Africans in Mexico. It tells how African people were brought as slaves and servants to the conquistadors, and came to occupy a variety of places in Mexican colonial society, from exploited mine and plantation workers to wealthy landowners. Their story in Mexico is one of both resistance and acculturation, as some slaves rebelled against their masters and others had children with them to advance themselves socially. This video uses both historical documentation and the example of Mexico’s dazzling hybrid traditions to illustrate the deep and pervasive footprints left by African culture in Mexican culture and society. The crowning example is the city of Veracruz, that bustling port of the “Afro-Andalusian Caribbean,” with its bubbling hodgepodge of faces, races, and musical expressions that was the point of entry for the majority of the slaves to enter Mexico. But the video emphasizes that Africans were present throughout the country, and works towards a reconciliation with those African roots of Mexican culture that have been forgotten for too long.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
From Florida to Coahuila (The History of the Black Seminoles) Get Details and Purchasing Info
Rafael Rebollar
Documentary 50 minutes 2002
With English subtitles
This documentary tells the remarkable story of a rebel people – the Mascogos, known in the United States as the Black Seminoles. This exceptional community, whose history crosses, borders, languages, and cultures, is descended from escaped slaves who made common cause with the Seminole Indians of Florida. The fierce battles of the Black and Indian Seminoles with the United States in the mid-1800s ended in truce rather than defeat, and they resettled along both sides of the Mexican border. These furious fighters – the only Native American group which never signed a peace treaty with the U.S. - were recruited by both the Mexican and U.S. governments to defend the border from bandits, and served as an elite battalion attached to the U.S. Army. They continue to live in towns like Nacimiento in Coahuila, Mexico, and Bracketteville, Texas. The exceptional Mascogo/Black Seminole culture combines African-American spirituals, Indian fry-bread, and Tex-Mex cowboy culture. Their old religion was based in dream divination, and their old language combined West African, Native American, English, and Spanish. But these old ways have been dying along with the elders who practiced them, and young Mascogo and Black Seminoles have lost touch with a heritage which is not taught in school and which risks total assimilation into mainstream Mexican and U.S. culture. Filmed on both sides of the border, this video documents the complex history of people of African descent caught between national boundaries, and the efforts of their descendants to maintain their culture and instill a sense of pride in future generations of this warrior people.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Candombe Get Details and Purchasing Info
Silvestre Jacobi
Documentary 58 minutes 2002
With English subtitles
In Carnival season, the black residents of Montevideo take to the streets to fill the Uruguayan capital with costumes, banners, and drums. The traditional black neighborhoods of Cuareim and Ansina fill with the insistent rhythm of drums as they have since the colonial times when the Spanish permitted the enslaved a short period of celebration to give them the strength to pass another year of hardship. CANDOMBE deals with this music and the men and women who make it. Almost completely unknown in the United States, candombe music is the living legacy of Africa in the Americas. Beautifully shot and poetically narrated, CANDOMBE depicts the ways the venerable tradition of the street parades is lived today by regular people of the Afro-Uruguayan community: the elderly artisans who make the drums, the men and boys who drum, the young women who march and dance, and singers like local diva Martha Gularte, who despite her advanced age, appears every year dancing like a teenager in a low-cut sequined dress. These men and women are pillars of the tradition. Their houses are veritable institutions of candombe, where the drums are made, the costumes are prepared, the songs are practiced, and most importantly, the tradition is renewed and passed on. The film shows us that candombe music is not just for the old; even children barely old enough to walk are shown marching, dancing and drumming in the parades. Filled with the color, rhythm, and poetry of black Uruguay, CANDOMBE is a tribute to this vital expression of community solidarity and cultural resilience.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Ritual Rhythms: Candombe Get Details and Purchasing Info
Mabel Maio
Documentary 48 minutes 1999
With English subtitles
This documentary gives a broad introduction to the history of Candombe and documents its pervasive influence in the Rio de la Plata. The film touches on the region’s history of slavery and the historical development of Candombe from a marginal form to a widely accepted and appreciated musical genre. It includes interviews with Candombe pioneers Lagrima Rios and Martha Gularte, as well as other historians, musicians, and experts in Candombe.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories Get Details and Purchasing Info
Pam Sporn
Documentary 56 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
This documentary traces the tangled paths and multifaceted identity of a black Cuban family in the Bronx. The subjects of this film experienced firsthand some of the great historical events of the 20th century – they saw Castro’s arrival in Havana and had their neighborhood bombed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; one son fought in Vietnam and a daughter marched against it. Both working-class and professional, black and Latino, foreign and native, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, the family is shown in the constant process of negotiating its identity. On their arrival in Miami, the family immediately encountered racial segregation, and as children in a mixed Puerto Rican/African-American neighborhood in the Bronx, they were forced by their playmates to choose their identity: “Are you black or Spanish?” Even the family’s roots in Cuba are complex - the grandfather was the son of Jamaican immigrants to Cuba – and their relation to the Cuban Revolution is complex and ambiguous. The film explores the various experiences that each family member had in dealing with the complex realities of life as black Cuban-Americans in the Bronx. One son, stuck between his family and the code of the streets, became a drug addict before he found religion. Another became a doctor, but his curiosity about his roots brings him back to a Havana very different from the one where he was born, and where he discovers he cannot fit in. The experiences of this one family speak to the larger issues of race, social class, and nation that help to shape the identities of everyday people.
Purchase Price: $ 225.00
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