Filmmaker Alex Rivera Discusses Engineering the Border

April 7, 2014

On Thursday, April 10, 2014, renowned film director Alex Rivera will visit the University of New Mexico (UNM) to discuss "Engineering the Border: Imagining America." The lecture will be held from 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. in the Anthropology Department's Hibben Center, Room 105. It is free and open to the public. For reference, see the event flyer.

Rivera visits UNM as part of a nationwide campus tour which first premiered at Harvard. His presentation details the ways in which science, technology, and the law have been used during the first one hundred years of American border enforcement to "grow" the border, transforming it from a line in the sand to a vast legal matrix that now covers the entire country. As a new techno-legal network of border enforcement has emerged, so have new forms of resistance to it.

This lecture includes clips from his films, including Sleep Dealer, Why Cybraceros?, The Sixth Section, and The Border Trilogy, and addresses themes of immigration, globalization, and technology.

Rivera has been widely recognized for using digital media to explore issues of immigration and Latino identity. He is a Rockefeller Fellow, a Sundance/Annenberg Fellow, a USA Artists Fellow, and the 2012 Rothschild Lecturer in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. He has presented at Harvard, Brown, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Rutgers University, Duke University, and many other universities and colleges across the United States.