Photographer and 2017 CatchLight Global Fellow Tomas van Houtryve confronts America’s collective amnesia and reveals the hidden legacy of the Far West. At a time when the US has reinforced a wall that isolates it from Latin America, the photographer retraces another border, the one that existed before 1848, when the US military invaded and occupied the northern Mexican territories that are known today as the states of Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. He meets and photographs the descendants of families that have lived in these lands since long before the American conquest: indigenous, black and mestizo families that never crossed the border – the border crossed them. Rendered strangers in their own land, they push back on the founding myths of the American Frontier and contribute their own overlooked stories to our common history. The film is co-directed by Mathilde Damoisel and Tomas van Houtryve and based on the book Lines and Lineage by Tomas van Houtryve.

by Irene Bryant and Stefanie Orrick
Curriculum Specialists: Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE)

Co-directed by Mathilde Damoisel and Tomas van Houtryve
Based on the book Lines and Lineage by Tomas van Houtryve.