Contacto y probando

The young girls led me through tall wet grass along a muddy footpath to a clearing behind their house. I had recently asked to film them as part of a year-long Sensory Ethnography production course at Harvard, and I had not expected such swift acceptance into their group. The July sun was soft, light hanging delicately in the thick fog, characteristic of mountain towns of Oaxaca. The girls buzzed with excitement about the prospect of a new playmate. I was entering the world of five sisters and two cousins, aged two to eleven, on their own terms and in their own time, through my camera and companionship.

I passed my camera down to one of the older girls, so I could carry younger Angeli, stalled by the fear of falling. I slipped with her in my arms, nonetheless, muddying my pants and throwing the girls into a fit of laughter. Spooked, Angeli refused my further assistance, speeding off to join her cousins in their ritual of presenting handfuls of grass to chivito—their grandmother’s goat. I retrieved my camera from Meyli, who held its weight carefully. I had shown her the magic of its headphones—which we compared to animal ears—the first time I had met her. Once my camera was recording, I felt that I seldom had to direct. The girls would convene in a swarm, negotiating who would assume the role of reina in the game La Reina Pide, and then disperse. For this round, reina Jeime would request yellow flowers, and the girls would diligently collect stems. My camera would dance at eye level with them, as they moved in and out of the frame. I would trail one, just to end up following another. In group shots, the collective moment of excitement, celebration or fear washes out as quickly as it came into being.

When the girls wanted to engage with me, and, by extension, my camera, they would. This engagement took many forms, from smearing fingers over the lens to holding eye contact with it, calling me to catch up or to follow their instruction. They would disregard or even forget me, too, as their imaginations tugged them along. I was initiated as a member of the group, elastic in my roles as playmate, older sister, caretaker (I don’t say filmmaker, because all the former roles just involved a camera in tow). I would rarely make “parental” interventions, since I was in the business of complicity. I did not know what each day would uncover, but I knew my method was to follow their lead, allowing me to peer into their embodied experience. Up close, because they let me be, I could begin to see both their conscious and subconscious mimicking of their environment and the people that defined it. How to translate these observations into the language of film would become clear only after months of combing through footage and experimenting with sequences in the dark of an editing room.

Through the girls, the film becomes about motherhood and networks of female care, necessitated and destabilized by the economic migration from Mexico. We see physical, maternal care of mother Adilene picking dandruff from tangled hair or bathing Fernanda as she cries. When Adilene and her mother-in-law, the matriarch and property owner of the home, are beyond the frame, we feel their presence in long braids, adorned with bows, surrounded by burdened clotheslines and hot caldos, omnipresent Mexican soups. More direct captures of parenting reveal its measured nature. Adilene puts up loose guardrails when she tells Meyli not to pick the neighbors‘ pears: he’s not sleeping, he’s borracho—drunk—, she tells Mey. However, Adilene knows, with limited energy to expend, her intervention cannot dissuade a mischief that becomes magic to a child (with a fine line of risk-reward). In another scene, Lia nags Ady to do her hair, eventually giving an empty threat to hit her mom, who is not paying attention. Ady looks across the neighbor’s fence to a group of men collecting for an afternoon beer. She acknowledges this episode in a quick comment to me: “Nobody but men, right, Thea?” Adilene and daughter Lia have long drifted into their separate reveries, both because of and in spite of the raw moments that play out before them.

Implicit in the film is the intermittent absence of male family members within the girls’ own lives; the theme is most directly addressed in the last shot, as the girls crowd around a phone to see their dad on FaceTime, calling from Washington state, where he harvests apples. The youngest two children (including the baby brother) closest to the phone, the girls flock to catch a glimpse; the awkwardness of the format yet excitement about the infrequent interaction compels their performance and shyness. Adilene is overwhelmed. From the phone, her husband instigates the child chaos yet is free of its management. He wrestles with his own responsibilities of financially supporting his family from afar (the girls tell me in private that they feel guilty about this dynamic—of asking him for more money).

This context is produced—and delivered to the audience—by the girls, who move as a group and in its various permutations. Together, they forge and replicate practices of care received from their mothers and grandmother. They bear the physical weight of each other, moving in teams through the streets of the town, looking for inspiration for their next game or quest. When Angeli falls and cuts her knee, Meyli cues Lia to show her matching wound, demonstrating Angeli will be fine. Then, Meyli urges them to leave the plaza, warning the others about the borrachos off-frame. The word borracho acquires new associations and meanings for girls as they notice its use by adults and apply it. Through these scenes, we bear witness to a revision of the girls’ values and an ongoing negotiation of their identities. They playfully swear, choose when to pay attention in Bible study, and sneak in a tragamoneda, or slot machine, game with spare change from a store errand. They share superstitions about teeth not growing back and ask if eating chile makes you Mexican.

In his essay “Children through the Looking Glass: Visual Anthropology,” David MacDougall writes about the often contradictory notions of children in visual culture as agential individuals yet unfinished adults; innocent and vulnerable but sinful. I work towards a complicated portrait of children that evades dichotomies, and in the process portray these girls as conducting distinct realities that run parallel to those of adults. Of course, the film is highly situated in its local context. Nonetheless, we observe tendencies and qualities of children that become unstuck from place.

According to filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, “when a filmmaker is fully and selflessly present, the audience becomes fully and selflessly present.” A shot, therefore, must fuse both “the seer and what is seen.” To be fully and selflessly present in a nonfiction work, in my opinion, involves an overt weaving of self into the footage. Since the reflexive turn in the anthropological discipline, we work to not only acknowledge but embrace the distinctly subjective nature of our research. No two anthropologists can go to the same location, speak to the same people, ask the same questions, and receive the same responses. I find this both beautiful and true to how we encounter and experience one another. The irreplaceability of ethnographic work is its merit. The relationship I built with the girls throughout my six weeks of shooting is the fabric of footage. My foreign qualities in this setting were not ignored, nor did they prevent my shifting positionality, as I strengthened my trust and companionship with the girls. And I believe I am felt everywhere throughout the film: the girls call my name, cast glances, string me along in their plots. As they opened themselves to me, my footage became more involved and participatory but without making my presence its content. I, of course, cannot dictate the experience of viewers but only hope that the girls reach the audience more honestly and wholly, as a result.