THE HEAD OF JOAQUIN MURRIETA

A Q&A with the Director will follow this screening.

Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020            3:00-4:15pm          MSU Library Green Rm

For directions, please click HERE.

Genre: Short,Docufiction

ABOUT THE FILM

John Valadez /USA/2016/30 min

 English

For over a decade filmmaker John J. Valadez searched for the remains of Joaquin Murrieta, a legendary Mexican outlaw who blazed a trail of revenge across California until he was caught and decapitated in the summer of 1853. A hundred and sixty-two years later Valadez believes he has the head. So he embarks on a quixotic, cross-country road trip through history, myth and memory to bury the fabled head of Joaquin Murrieta. Along the way he discovers chilling parallels with his own family story and eventually realizes that the head he will bury is only symbolic. And yet its power as a metaphor remains. Using new ground breaking scholarship and working with a team of leading historians from across the country, The Head of Joaquin Murrieta provides a dissenting view of American history from a decidedly Chicano perspective. Deeply personal, irreverent and entertaining, the film tears open a painful and long ignored historical trauma that has never been explored on American television: the lynching of Mexican Americans in the west.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

John J. Valadez is a Peabody Award winning filmmaker who has written, directed and produced many nationally broadcast documentary films. He grew up in Seattle, taught photography in India, and studied filmmaking at New York University. John’s films have tackled such diverse subjects as the false imprisonment of a leader of the Black Panther Party, Latino poets in New York City, gang kids in Chicago, the history of affirmative action, segregation in America’s schools, Latinos in World War II, the evolution of Chicano music, Latino civil rights, and the genocide of Native Americans in the Southwest.

His major works include: The Head of Joaquin Murrieta (2016), Prejudice and Pride (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), War and Peace (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), The Longoria Affair (2010 PBS/Independent Lens), The Chicano Wave (2009 Latin Music USA/PBS), The Last Conquistador (2008 PBS/POV), Arise (2006), High Stakes Testing (2005 CNN), Beyond Brown (2004 PBS), Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture (2004 PBS), The Divide (2003 Matters of Race/PBS), Soul Survivors (1997 Making Peace/PBS) and Passin’ It On (1994 PBS/POV).