The ground-breaking, award-winning, bi-national indigenous media organization Chiapas Media Project/Promedios is touring the U.S. in celebration of its 20th anniversary and is coming to Klein College. Join co-founders Alexandra Halkin and Francisco Vázquez for screenings of documentary films focused on indigenous rights and human rights as well as screenings of old and new Zapatista films. 

Alexandra is co-founder of the Chiapas Media Project that has trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in Chiapas and Guerrero, Mexico. Alexandra was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Latin American Indigenous Video Initiative and a Fulbright Scholarship for the Indigenous Audiovisual Archive. She produced five short documentaries in collaboration with Mexican human rights organizations. Alexandra’s chapter, Outside the Indigenous Lens: Zapatistas and Autonomous Videomaking was published in the book, Global Indigenous Media. Alexandra co-organized the New Cuban Shorts Program, part of the Documentary Fortnight Series at the MoMA and has co-written and collaborated on several articles about Cuban independent filmmaking published in the New York Times, The Nation, LASAForum, NACLA and Filmmaker Magazine.

Francisco Esau Vazquez Mota was born in the indigenous Nahua-Momoxca community of San Pablo Oztotepec. He studied photography at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and worked as a photographer and environmental activist, winning the National Youth Prize for environmental protection. He co-founded the Chiapas Media Project and has served as its executive director since 2003. Francisco has contributed to the democratization of media in Chiapas: training indigenous communities in media production, helping establishing Indymedia Chiapas and providing technical support for community media projects throughout the state. Currently, he is working on the Chulel Project, a server that enables the sharing of multimedia materials for human rights organizations, indigenous communities, journalists and social activists lacking digital security and Internet connectivity.