cine nepantla
excavating nepantlera/x strategies of rēsistance from the 1950s to the present
Our Spring 2026 season took place at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center, becoming the inaugural cineteca at the Wachale Wednesdays Mico-cinema.
program
The theme for the first Wachale Wednesdays, which took place the Spring 2026 semster, was Cine Nepantla. Our curator dug through the archives to bring together images—whether moving, still, or disappeared—that rēveal strategies of rēsistance put forth by feminist and queer theorists (or to borrow an Anzaldúan term: Nepantleras). In this program, we focused on images between the 1950s and the 2020s, from the once-banned film SALT OF THE EARTH (1954), to a video published on YouTube titled DREAMING OF BILLY DREAMING OF GABRIEL (2024), and feminist and queer Latinx texts by the philosophers, theorists, and writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Mariana Ortega, PJ DiPietro, José Esteban Muñoz, Clarissa Pinkola-Estés, Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and Deborah Cullen-Morales. Go to the Cine Nepantla archive ➞
format
We alternated between “brown bag” screenings from 12:00p.m. to 2:15p.m. where you are encouraged to bring and enjoy your own lunch while you watch, and moonrise screenings thagt started at 5:00p.m. and later in the season at 6:00p.m. The program was designed to allow folks to drop-in and dip out, although staying for the full presentation gave the viewer the ability to see how all the films reveal a greater story.
you might be wondering, “what is a cineteca?”
A cineteca, also called a cinematheque, “is a specialized institution, archive, or library dedicated to the preservation, restoration, study, and exhibition of film heritage. These institutions often house extensive collections of films, documentaries, and related artifacts, offering public screenings, research, and cultural promotion of cinematic art.” Some famous examples are Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City, or the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Ours is an educational cineteca housed in a new micro cinema space at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center. On one hand, our focus is to study film and other images of U.S. Latinx and hemispheric communities, and on the other, our mission is to present the often-difficult-to-find films and our research to the greater UC Berkeley community.
trailer
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