- Email:
- rresend@iu.edu
Ramón Resendiz is a Chicanx documentary filmmaker and media anthropologist from the south Texas U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Media School at Indiana University. He holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a Master of Communication from the Native Voices Program at University of Washington. His research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of national borders, memory, visual culture, systemic violence, and settler colonialism. His book project, Archival Resistance: Countervisual Documentary Media on the Margins of the U.S., investigates the historic violence, erasures, and undocumentation of critical Latinx Indigeneities in the national constructions of Texas, Mexico, and the U.S. He critically studies how settler colonial nation states are visualized by archival institutions across the south Texas/U.S. and northern Mexico border landscapes, and the ways visual documentary producers contest and render these erasures visible.
His filmography includes an array of collaborative community-based documentaries regarding immigration, social justice, human rights issues, Indigenous resistance, and the evidentiary. Chief of these is El Muro | The Wall (2017), a feature-length documentary film project co-produced with the Lipan Apache Band of Texas Tribal Board. The film documented the historic resistance exercised by Lipan Apache/Ndé peoples against colonial occupation and persecution in the south Texas borderlands. It follows Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez’s legal battle against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (USDHS) use of eminent domain to build the U.S. Border Wall of 2006 on her ancestral lands. His films have been screened across film festivals, community screenings, and both academic conferences, and in non-academic spaces.