Documentaries
2016
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Juggling Currencies
This 40-minute video takes an anthropological look on how people in two border contexts (Mexico/US) manipulate, manage and exchange money and social currencies. The film concludes that people simultaneously manage multiple currencies, normative frameworks and legal contexts and that getting by implies "juggling" currencies.
This project, funded by the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, took researchers to the border communities of Mexicali-Calexico and the central Mexico ranch community of Sabinilla, in the mountains of Jalisco. This project was led by CIESAS-Occidente researcher Dr. Magdalena Villarreal. Lead investigators Dr. Lya Niño and Joshua Greene carried out the field work. The video was produced by Joshua Greene, Ana Torres, and Pablo de la Peña
2011
Fuentes de Oportunidad
This video was produced for the World Bank and SEDESOL and looks at the social welfare program Oportunidades and the difference in the normative values of indigenous participants. The work was part of an investigation carried out by CIESAS-Occidente and was a collaboration between artists Ana Torres Villarreal, Pablo de la Peña, researcher Joshua Greene,  and journalist Glynis Board.
2009
The California Porject
The California Project is an ethnographic video: findings of a bi-national multi-year research project between the University of California in Santa Barbara and CIESAS-Occidente in Mexico, about the formation of community in the San Joaquin Valley in California. For 150 years migrants from Mexico have been central in supplementing the region’s labor force at key harvest times. Unlike other regions of the U.S. in California the growing farms are reliant on lots of cheap labor. Up to a million workers a year are needed in prime harvest times. The grapes, the nuts, the carrots and onions, the oranges and strawberries all need harvested on time.
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The Mexican migration pattern has no doubt changed in recent years. Tightening of the border increased the danger and made it more likely migrants would stay multiple seasons, move up the ladder of opportunity, fall in love, settle down, they are given the chance to borrow into the American Dream. Engaging in contracts and loans they tie themselves to a future in the United States. How does discrimination fit into the bigger economy? This video looks at how issues related to identity, citizenship, currencies and multiple normative and legal requirements come in to play as part of the economic landscape of the creation of wealth in the $34 Billion per year California ag-industry.
Now that water has become a major issue for urban residents in California, can it really afford to dedicate up to 90 percent of it’s water resources to Industrial Agriculture. What happens to these individuals and workers who have built communities and raised their children and grandchildren?