“My connection to Santa Rita goes back generations. My great grandparents were there. My grandparents from both sides, my parents, and then me. And we moved out in 1966, because we had to, so it’s strange what a deep connection I have. ‘Cuz when I dream, I dream Santa Rita. Even if I just spent 16 years of my life there, I constantly dream Santa Rita.” —Esther Mendoza
– Esther Mendoza

The Into Space: Film-book, at its core, explores the collective memory of Santa Rita, New Mexico, as seen through the perspectives of those who lived there and were forced to evacuate when the mining company expanded its operations. This project tells the stories that have been preserved in the minds, rituals, and artifacts of the Santa Rita community. Between 1965-1970, all of the buildings in Santa Rita were either moved or demolished. Despite this loss, Santa Ritians have shown remarkable resilience. They have maintained a strong sense of community and have found ways to keep the memory of their town alive. Into Space: Film-book is an oral history case study that explores how groups of people maintain a sense of community despite the loss of a physical home. Through a series of short documentaries, I combine reenactments of archival materials with firsthand accounts from ten oral histories to explore the history of Santa Rita and the ways in which the town’s memory is preserved. I also present how Santa Ritians discuss their connection to the land, their connection with one another, and their complicated connection to the mining company. By weaving together these narratives, I hope to provide a nuanced understanding of how a shared sense of home persists and evolves within the community.

In this project, I’m analyzing both the oral history accounts of Santa Ritians as I’ve collected them and archival materials written and collected by Santa Ritians. These archival materials include stories documented in reunion brochures for a group called “The Society of Persons Born in Space.” Also featured in the short documentaries are a partial memoir written by a Santa Ritian, Robert Gardener, who has since passed away and a column series titled “Memories of Santa Rita” that was published weekly throughout the 80s in a local newspaper. I chose to code these artifacts side by side because I recognize that the Santa Rita community is growing smaller and the timing of this project limits the number of participants who are still around to discuss their experiences. I hope that by incorporating archival materials with oral history interviews, I can create a scope with which to provide a clearer picture of the Santa Ritian community and how it’s memorialized in this film-book. In this chapter, I will explain why I am incorporating documentary film into this memory studies project and why I think documentary film is an essential part of my methodology.

Documentary Film as a Methodology

Into Space: Film-book uses the methodology of documentary to direct and produce a multimedia project that investigates how locals enact collaborative rhetorical practices of memory. I believe film as a medium, and more specifically the genre of documentary, holds great potential for collective memory-making. My hope is that the films captures images of the things, stories, rituals, and contexts that collective memory binds itself to (Nora). This is particularly relevant in the Central Mining District where many of the locals have a strong reverence for the power of film (as explained in Chapter 1), and where the landscape is composed of finite resources that are constantly changing.

My interest in documentary films stems from the collaborative, creative process for producing narratives by combining oral history interviews, archival materials, and reenactment. Such intertextuality is rich for examining and constructing sites of collective memory, places where memory is concentrated and where it can be revised, accessed, and preserved. Through filming interviews, a researcher can begin to analyze what memories of a particular place or moment in history are alluring to a group and what secures the adherence to a particular memory or group of memories (Dickinson et al. 14). In this section, I will explain why I am using documentaries for this rhetorical memory study. I will begin with a brief overview of the scholarship on using video in the field of rhetoric and composition. Next, I will define documentary as a genre of film. Finally, I will discuss how this project is a hybrid genre that draws on the conventions of both documentary and academic writing.

Brief Review of Literature

Many scholars have already noted how film as a medium can enhance research processes in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. In particular, the use of film to collect data allows a researcher to analyze embodied, spatial information about our participants and their contexts. As one example, Emma Rose and Alison Cardinal argue that participatory video (a method developed out of documentary film-making) can be a powerful tool for ethically researching literacy, power, and embodiment. They define participatory video as “putting the camera in the hands of participants” to allow them to create their own narratives (35). Rose and Cardinal argue that participatory video has a number of ethical advantages over traditional research methods including empowering participants by giving them a voice and a platform to share their stories and building relationships between researchers and participants, which can lead to more trust and cooperation. Furthermore, In “3D Interviewing with Researcher POV Video: Bodies and Knowledge in the Making,” Ann Shivers McNair describes similar advantages to using video in research by enacting what she calls a 3D interviewing approach. This approach involves “observing and interacting with people and machines as they engage in acts of material-discursive making” (n.p.). This method not only records information about the participant and their experiences, but also the relationships between the researcher, the participants, and the space in which they are interacting. Laura Gonzales writes about how video data can account for “verbal, embodied, and material interactions among people and technologies” (n.p.), including how participants use rhetorical strategies like gestures and storytelling to convey information. Each of these scholars conclude how the medium of film is integral to the researchers’ methodologies and can help account for the ways people interact with each other and their environment.

One such scholar in particular, Alexandra Hidalgo, a documentary film-maker and rhetorician, has advocated for the use of documentary film in the field of rhetoric. As Hidalgo notes in A Call for Documentary Filmmaking in Cultural Rhetorics, documentaries bring different modalities to cultural rhetorics, such as the way documentaries let us see and hear people. Hidalgo says, “explorations of how our skin color and features affect our experience are important aspects of cultural scholarship” (5:58) and this is particularly true for this project, as I am documenting the erasure of a town which is remembered differently by the people of color who once lived there than those who are white or held positions of power. As a hyper-regional case study, it is also useful to hear the local vernacular of the participants. Additionally, their tone and demeanor help tell the story. Indeed, using film as a medium can enhance rhetorical arguments. It can also elevate the voices of our participants, if a filmmaker is careful and considerate of their methodology.

Other scholars have noted how video can increase the circulation and access of compositions. As one example, Janine Butler discusses the use of sign language in music videos and how it can be used to make music more accessible to deaf audiences. They argue that ASL music videos are multimodal compositions that synchronize multiple modes, such as visual, digital, gestural, spatial, aural, and linguistic, to create a more inclusive and engaging experience for deaf audiences. Further, in “Reculturalizations: “Small Screen” Culture, Pedagogy, & YouTube,” Hodgson describes the sharable nature of video creations. He notes how videos, especially on the internet, can be appropriated, leveraged, and repurposed. In creating the Into Space Film-book, I purposely wanted to create a product for “small screen” culture. In my consent forms, I give participants the right to share their interviews with friends and family online and to use their interviews as they see fit.

Modeled after the works of Hidalgo, Into Space: Film-book is specifically interested in documentary film-making. Moving beyond discussion of media, it takes the form of what I am calling a film-book, a hybrid genre. Hidalgo calls her compositions video books, a term that stems from her intentions to expand the media used in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Like Hidalgo, I aim to create films that draw on scholarly frameworks and research practices. She says:

I use a video book to define the genre you are currently experiencing. I use video because it is the medium through which this work comes to viewers. I struggled with the term book, especially in a piece of scholarship that argues for the value of digital media. Books are, after all, the epitome of print culture. They also, though, denote a long, substantial work, the equivalent of a feature film. Unlike a feature film, however, this work draws from scholarly sources to craft its arguments through narration, images, and music. (Cámara Retórica, Chapter 1)

Hidalgo uses her work to “argue for the value of digital media” in Rhetoric and Composition, and she uses the term video book to emphasize her points about video as a medium (Cámara Rhetorica). In addition to focusing on the media of video, I am interested in the collaborative processes of producing documentary films—working with participants, archivists, and historians to develop a film’s narrative. I choose to hyphenate film-book to draw attention to the distinction between documentary films and academic books as genres, as both genres lend themselves to particular processes and engagements with the audience.

What are Documentaries?

In his 2017 book, Introduction to Documentary, American film critic Bill Nichol explains how there is no single definition for documentary film. The term is often used to describe films that document real events or people, but there is a great deal of variation within the genre. He explains that there are common-sense notions about what a documentary is, though they are both helpful and misleading. He says:

Were documentary a reproduction of reality, these problems would be far less acute. We would then simply have a replica or copy of something that already existed. But documentary is not a reproduction; it is a representation. Therefore, they are not documents as much as expressive representations of what documents may contain (9).

This is to say that while this project is grounded in truth, it’s important to recognize how documentaries are not simply recordings of reality; they are also subject to the artistic vision of a filmmaker and the participants who are interviewed. Just as my own experiences and agendas shape the narratives of the film, the participants are also conscientious of the camera and make decisions about the answers to their questions according to how they want to portray themselves. Nichols goes on to explain that various modes of documentary help to distinguish the different categories of documentary that emerge.

Hidalgo’s work demonstrates an expository mode of documentary. This is a form of documentary that “addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that tell a story, propose a perspective, or advance an argument” (Nichols 121). Given such modes, Into Space: Film-book is also quite different from Hidalgo’s documentaries. Her work distinctly uses voice-over—her voice—and brings in video footage and animation to support the points in her argument. To reiterate, her style uses video footage to support her scholarly argument. Much like an academic essay, her authorial voice dominates the composition. Such an approach is effective in demonstrating her points about how digital media can enhance Rhetoric and Composition. However, my research aims to explore the ways in which documentary as a genre brings the participants, filmmaker, and audience into the act of constructing memory. Therefore, my film-book will take on a different look and feel. I am explicitly interested in the participatory mode of documentary and how it lends itself to a rhetorical feminist research approach.

Why Choose Documentary?

As I explain in Chapter 1, I am making a film in hopes of learning how documentary can expand our understanding of feminist rhetorical methodologies. Participatory mode is marked by the relationship and interaction between the filmmakers and their subjects—it’s collaborative in nature, requiring the help of many people to create one film, from the participants, to archivists, to those who help carry the equipment. As Royster and Kirsch note in Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, “Feminist scholars have made that case for designing research that enriches the lives of those they study” (34). Indeed, as I create this film with the help of my participants, my hope is that the chapters in the film-book will create a memorial space for them to share with others. I also hope to make something that equally benefits the people of Grant County. Nichols explains how the participatory mode of documentary “has come to embrace the spectator as participant as well” (121). Nichols’ notion of participatory mode is defined by the way it is presented by the filmmaker and perceived by the audience. My methodologies take the participation a step further, where my perceived audience are the participants and their families. This film invites participants and viewers to share the “seemingly irrelevant documents, artifacts, and encounters” that Santa Ritians have saved to memorialize the town (Royster & Kirsch 79). The audience are the same individuals providing feedback on what images and information ultimately makes it into the final films.

As a multimedia project, the film-book invites viewers to act as participants. It is important to note that the film-book is not just a series of documentaries, but it includes a digital interface where viewers can watch the complete interviews, explore images of the participant’s saved artifacts, or read introductory chapters which provide my motives for creating the films. Traditionally, documentary filmmakers have been seen as observers, recording the world around them without interfering. However, as noted by Nichols, since the 60s there has been a growing trend towards filmmakers interacting with their subjects, a relationship which shapes the outcome of the film. This trend has also been extended to the spectator, who is now able to participate in the film by exploring different possibilities and paths. This observation is similar to those made by social justice documentary filmmaker and archivist, Jaimie Lee. As noted in Lee’s scholarship, filming interviews creates an opportunity to invite audiences into the intimate moment with the researcher and participant. Lee argues that digital video, which can elicit perception through visual, aural, and haptic modes of human experience, is particularly effective at creating this sense of connection:

Each interview offers intimacies experienced between interviewer and interviewee while the camera and recording technologies hold the space for public engagement. Through the archives and archival productions, the stories are tethered to history as a collective body but constituted by multiple histories and truths. Therefore, multimodal storytelling on and through digital video, which elicits perception through visual (seeing), aural (hearing), and haptic (combinations of ‘tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive, the way people experience though both on the surface of and inside our bodies’ [citing Marks 2002, 2] modes of human experience, creates a sense of culture and community that effectively moves and connects interviewees, interviewers, as well as those who access the records through the archives. (82)

This is to say that the act of filming oral histories and reenacting archival materials implicate the interviewer, the actors, and the audience as participants in making memory. As I am producing and editing these films, I explore how creating a hybrid text is an act of making memory.

How is it a Hybrid Text?

Into Space: Film-book is a multimedia project that combines documentary films, raw interviews, and academic writing into a single website. It is a hybrid text because it is meant to be consumed by several distinct audiences. The primary audience is the Santa Ritians, including those who were displaced and also their friends and families who were not directly impacted by the evacuation of the town. I will be sharing this project at local events in New Mexico where I can present the documentary films. However, this project also serves as the culminating product of my academic research. For this reason, the project takes on the features of both documentary films and academic research books.

While the films I am proposing are meant to be seen and heard, they will follow the genre conventions of an academic text including a methods section, literature review, research findings, and an appendix. As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (10). Academic writing is better suited to textual modalities because it is “easier to verify or refute” (Postman 10), and citing sources is a textual practice. Likewise, textual modalities are easier to review, provide feedback on, and edit. As such, I recognize that film is likely not the best media for conveying my methods, the data, nor the conclusions I encounter. For practical purposes, I must create text-based chapters that contextualize my research and justify the methods. For these reasons, the appendix includes the uncut oral history interviews and an index of footnotes to denote editing decisions.

For my findings, I choose documentary film as the genre for chronicling people, objects, and their surroundings. I find documentary film to be particularly well-suited for the participants to tell their stories, and for the memory of Santa Rita to be preserved with their words, faces, and recollections. As Kimberlé Crenshaw, American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of Critical Race Theory, notes in her TedTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” confronting intersectional violence, and celebrating intersectional coalition building requires us “to be willing to bear witness, to bear witness to the often painful realities that we would rather not confront—the everyday violence of humiliation many black women have had to face…black women [and other women of color] across color, age, gender expression, sexuality, and ability” (14:30). Textual modalities are limited in their capacity to represent bodies and embodied experience. On the other hand, film allows the viewer to read embodied and emotional affective language. I add that we must also bear witness to the resilience, innovation, and care with which marginalized people have preserved collective memory and created community in the face of devastation.

Film is a medium that allows audiences to bear witness. In “Vanishing Fronteras: A Call for Documentary Filmmaking in Cultural Rhetorics (Con la Ayuda de Anzaldúa)” Hidalgo explains how documentary film can let us experience female and intercultural relationships as they unfold in ways that the written word cannot. As an example, Hidalgo shows us how film can capture people “from different cultures and races—conversing, inhabiting a space together, and relating to each other.” Acknowledging my role as a filmmaker, Into Space: Film-book will also capture my own interactions with the participants and the ways we inhabit a space together across racial and cultural differences. Capturing my interactions with them is important because I want to portray this process as a collective and collaborative act of making meaning. Through my training as a rhetorician, I have come to appreciate how academics—especially in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies—seek to follow the most ethical guidelines as possible while working with participants, interviewees, and other collaborators. In Chapter 4, I touch on my ethical practices in producing the film-book. I believe the films are a means by which to honor the people who share their stories, to capture their faces, gestures, tones, language, and even their space. This is not to say that documentaries are better than written text. Rather, each modality highlights different benefits.

Aside from a difference in content and genre features, the process of producing and editing a film also varies from that of an academic book. As noted above, Nichols defines documentaries as “representations of reality.” He argues that we should judge documentaries not by their fidelity to the truth, but by the pleasure they offer, the insights they provide, and the perspectives they convey. They are not usually thesis-driven, and the author’s voice is often hidden. Instead, documentaries rely on tension, drama, and character development to create a compelling narrative. In How Documentaries Work, documentary editor, producer, and director Jacob Bricca describes the process of creating a narrative in documentary as “building causality and attaching meaning to heretofore inert facts—highlighting certain material, excluding other material, and rearranging it in order to produce a story” (56). Thus it is important to acknowledge that in creating documentaries I am curating the way a viewer experiences the memory of Santa Rita. Though I receive the memories of Santa Rita as discrete narratives, I usher them into familiar structures by utilizing common narrative techniques such as exposition, rising action, conflicts, and resolution—thus shaping the story in a way that does not resemble the objective findings of a qualitative research project. I mark this distinction between academic writing and documentary production to acknowledge how my biases and film-making decisions influence the narrative, even though the participants’ voices are not my own.

As a documentary editor, I have to acknowledge that it is sometimes in my best interest to withhold information from viewers. Documentary relies heavily on narrative to carry the genre forward. This can be done to create suspense, to build drama, or to simply keep the audience guessing. Bricca states, “[by] focusing meaning—highlighting certain material, excluding other material and rearranging it in order to produce a story—documentary launches into the realm of the semifictional because the logic of stories is not necessarily the logic of real life” (56). As a scholar, I am deeply mindful of both the narrative arc of a documentary and the ethical implications of withholding and rearranging information. I personally do not want to mislead or deceive my audience which is why I am documenting my editing decisions in an index. My goal as a documentary filmmaker is to create films that are both informative and engaging. I want viewers to experience the story of Santa Rita and its community in a way that is both educational and entertaining. The following lists denote how the dual genres of academic writing and documentary production influence the process for writing Into Space: Film-book.

Conventions of the Film-book which are Influenced by Academic Writing

Comprehensive methodology section that includes a methodological framework and key decisions about how the data was coded
Explanation of the research questions and findings
Appendix of the full interviews
Appendix of the editing decisions made in the interest of transparency
Reflection on my experiences as a researcher throughout this process
Sourced material (interview, archival footage, photos, archival written material) cited in the credits roll

Conventions of the Film-book which are Influenced by Documentary Production

Refined narrative with a dramatic arc in each film chapter
Characters are drafted from the footage of the real participants in order to serve a story
Delayed gratification “in order to deliver a continually satisfying narrative experience” (Bricca How Documentaries Work 56)
Actors enlisted to re-enact written archival work
Integration of a musical score

Methodological Process Derived from Academic Writing

Research questions lead decisions on how to collect and analyze data
Interview questions refined with each of the participants
Coding process determined by interview questions and refined after each participant

Methodological Process that will be derived from Documentary Production

Media—interview footage, archival stills, etc.—must be organized into digital folders in a nonlinear editing platform
Editing process begins with reels that lack structure (antithetical) at first and are refined into “rough cuts” through drafting and feedback.

I want to end this section with a disclaimer that I am not a filmmaker by profession. Before working with Into Space: Film-book, I had never produced films of any length or repertoire. I had taken courses on documentary film and made efforts to research the overlaps between filmmaking and Rhetoric & Composition. I am inspired by what I have learned. I am eager to bring some of that knowledge to my home discipline of Rhetoric and Writing. I am indebted to the scholars whose work helped to shape this project, and to Professor Jacob Bricca who bellows this interest with his feedback and recommendations. In writing this, I do not wish to step on the toes of any scholars who have come before me nor claim that I have more knowledge about editing and producing films than I actually have. Rather, I want to pick up the metaphorical torch that Alexandria Hidalgo is handing off to other scholars in the field. She says, “We want to show the richness that can occur when those who are different come together, and documentary filmmaking is an ideal medium for doing just that.” (Camera Rhetorica 18:28). I see this video essay as my call to action to pick up the camera, especially as my research acknowledges race, age, gender, and class, capturing images and voices is important to my work.

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