Juan Carlos Rodríguez (Ph.D., Program in Literature, Duke University, 2007) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Georgia Tech, co-director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, and co-editor of the collections of essays New Documentaries in Latin America (Palgrave, 2014) and Digital Humanities in Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2020). He is also co-editing a book series, Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, for the University of Florida Press. His research focuses on Latin American documentaries from perspectives informed by sustainability, critical theory, urban and environmental studies, and digital humanities. As an educator and scholar, Rodríguez has a strong record of community engagement. He is the founding director of Georgia Tech’s Global Media Festival: Sustainability Across Languages and Cultures. His public digital humanities project Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive, is a collection of video interviews that tells the story of demilitarization in the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Using materials from the Vieques Struggle project, he just completed his first long feature documentary, Vieques: A Living Archive, which covers the history of Vieques before and after the departure of the US Navy from the island in 2003.
Juan Carlos says about this work: “Vieques: A Living Archive is a listening journey that weaves together the testimonies from the community and my own reflections as witness and filmmaker. I have accompanied the people of Vieques for many years, lending an ear to their sufferings and frustrations, to their plans, dreams and doubts. In this documentary, the voices of Viequenses, as well as my own voice, emerge and evolve from this listening practice. Witnessing the process of demilitarization while accompanying the Vieques community allowed me to establish a strong bond of trust. I am the best person to tell this story because this is the story of my relationship with the Vieques community. Therefore, I do not claim to represent the people and their history, but instead the evolution of my ongoing dialogue with them, and all the lessons I have learned in that process.
The soundtrack has been designed as an ongoing dialogue between the voices of the Vieques people to that of the filmmaker. The images display gestures, offer poetic commentary, and evoke atmospheres that swing from the uneventful to the surreal. Emulating the metadata collected over the years, the graphic design will underscore the importance of the archive.
Like other films about collective memories, this film focuses on historical changes taking place over a long period of time. The film develops a longitudinal approach to examine these changes. The visual consistency of this approach is accomplished by juxtaposing old and new images of the same places and the same people, including the filmmaker, filmed at different times and with different technologies (Super VHS, MiniDV, iPhone, 4K, drones), to make visible the changes taking place in Vieques life, as well as the changes of the documentary process. As we see the aging process transforming the look of our protagonists, we also witness the vulnerability or disappearance of some places. Some places of memory that I filmed in 2004 no longer exist and others are in ruins. One key image symbolizing the broken promises of demilitarization is the image of the Vieques Hospital: it was closed in 1998, when the Navy was still in Vieques; it was open and operating in 2004, a year after the Navy’s departure; it was damaged in 2018, after the passing of Hurricane María in 2017; and it was demolished in 2022.
My longitudinal visual approach is inspired by Patricio Guzmán’s autobiographical documentary practice. In this film, I examine a personal archive of collected images, but this personal archive is also a community archive that comes to life in the gestures and voices of Viequenses. The film is therefore an autoethnography in a twofold sense: it is a reflection on the life of the filmmaker and on the struggles of the Vieques people. As I explore the emotional journeys of Viequenses, I also explore my own emotional journey through the history of Vieques.”
In its style, the documentary partakes of the autobiographical filmmaking pioneered by works like Sherman’s March, La television y yo, or The Blonds by the interplay of on-screen/off-screen presence of the filmmaker and the use of first-person voiceovers. The poetic register of my VO reflections brings into the film a tone consistent with the poetry of the Vieques people. In Vieques: A Living Archive I put my own body on the line, an approach that differs from other films that rely entirely on the disembodied voice of an absent filmmaker, who does not appear in the screen.