Shaping the Taraspanglish diaspora

The purpose of my paper is to analyze the way in which diasporic experience builds and represents identities in the video project called Taraspanglish Shorts/Cortos Tarasplanglish. Tarasplanglish Shorts/Cortos Taraspanglish consists of a series of videos from one to four minutes that address the experience of migration and cultural continuity/discontinuity forged by the Purépecha community of Michoacan in Mexico, migrating to Madera, California in the United States. I propose that the audiovisual work of Indigenous videomakers may be understood as autoethnographic work that makes reference to identify formation derived from the process of migration. The purpose of this article is to analyze the strategies through which Indigenous videomakers represent/construct the identities of migrants using documentaries. Particularly, I explore how the Indigenous videomakers have adapted reflexive and performative modes of documentary to narrate the diaspora and to represent Indigenous communities participating in this experience. At the same time, I examine how these identities shaped by migratory subjectivity are inserted into the national and transnational contexts. The style of these shorts reveals how the videomakers conceive their subjects in the diaspora: mobile, performative and in constant construction. To demonstrate this, I have selected two productions. The first one is What is Taraspanglish? a short video that explains the purpose of the project and sets the general visual style of the project. The second short selected, Danza de la Identidad, in which a young Purépecha makes a re-interpretation of the traditional identity dance or Danza Celeste