ENGLISH
Synopsis: In a gripping and unpredictable 20-year quest, Juan Carlos Rodríguez showcases the poignant story of Vieques. Through intimate recollections, community voices, and archival footage, the film exposes the profound hardships endured by Viequenses before and after the US Navy’s departure in 2003. It unveils Vieques’ dire health situation throughout the years.
Long synopsis:
For more than 60 years, the military facilities in the island of Vieques were part of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility (1941-2003), on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. The US Navy and the Marine Corps trained their military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, naval gunfire, and air-to-ground bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. The US Navy occupied 79% of Vieques’s territory, condemning Viequenses to live between two military bases in a mid-island civilian zone. Hunger, unemployment, military abuses, environmental degradation, and lack of health services came to characterize the life of Viequenses for decades.
Vieques: A Living Archive explores the memory of the Vieques’s social movements against the presence of the US Navy. The Vieques Fishermen (1978-1983) organized a movement against the US Navy for their right to fish. The Vieques land rescue movements (Villa Borinquen in 1976 and Monte Carmelo in 1989) claimed land and housing while challenging the territorial control of the US Navy. In 1999, the death of a local security guard, David Sanes, killed by a US Navy bomb dropped near the Camp Garcia observation point, ignited a new cycle of civil disobedience in Vieques. Through acts of defiance inside the US Navy target range, the civil disobedience camps (1999-2003), supported by a coalition of social movements, demanded demilitarization, decontamination, healthcare, development, and return of federal lands.
As a result of this struggle, on December 3, 1999, President Clinton “ordered a halt to live-fire military training on the Puerto Rican Island of Vieques and an end to all exercises there.” Although bombing ended, demilitarization has not resulted in a process of just recovery. While the US Navy finally ended training exercises on the island the land was not transferred to the islanders but to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2003.
This documentary examines how a demilitarized community confronts social, economic, and environmental challenges. The film focuses on the environmental and health costs of the US military presence while looking at the dilemmas of post-Navy Vieques. Tensions with the FWS underscore the colonial dilemmas created by federal lands in Vieques. Tourism and gentrification present a threat to the prospects of a community-driven path to sustainable development. The toxic waste of the US Navy has compromised the future, leaving Viequenses with all the uncertainties of an irreversible ecological crisis. Limited access to health services poses a risk for Viequenses, a population with a higher cancer rate than the rest of Puerto Rico.
This ecological and public health crisis has been aggravated by the loss of the only hospital after Hurricane Maria, transforming Vieques’ situation into a prolonged disaster. A case-study of military training as slow-violence, the story highlights the problems created by using Vieques as a bombing site, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste. It is an intimate meditation on the paradoxes of war, memory, historical change, and social justice in the 21st Century.
The filmmaker and the community develop a closer relationship over the course of the film. The film has three main characters:
- The Vieques community: a choral narrative, the collective protagonist of the demilitarization process.
- The filmmaker: the main narrator of the film, a traveling activist turned educator, a witness of the demilitarization process who builds a long-lasting relationship with the Vieques community.
- The archive: the guardian of memories, an ongoing and evolving process, a repository of pending and unexpected questions.
The film is a travel documentary divided in three parts, each covering the history of Vieques in three different periods: 1998, 2004, and 2018-2022. Each period portrays the situation of the Vieques people in a very specific context and the overall film represents the evolution of this collective protagonist. The film highlights the traumatic experiences, solidarity networks, and resistance strategies of the islanders, as well as the ambiguities, conflicts, and challenges among themselves.
The film itself is also conceived as the making of a multilayered archive (personal memories, community dreams, collective action, and internal conflicts), underscoring the role of an audiovisual collection built over two-decades as a living archive of testimonies of the past, present, and future. Despite their vulnerable situation, Viequenses are a resilient people: they build their own archives and memories of their struggle.
Director Biography:
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.
Director Statement:
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.
Goals of the project:
The Vieques struggle for a just recovery after multiple disasters is an unfinished task. I hope that this film will inspire people from around the world to collaborate with Viequenses in their quest for a better future.
Vieques: A Living Archive serves the interest of the people of Vieques in various ways. As a historical document, it offers a chronicle of the Vieques struggle over the past twenty years through community testimonies that articulate an impressive collection of wisdom and knowledge about the impact of militarization and demilitarization on underserved Latino communities. The film will serve as a brainstorming tool for communities in Vieques, in Puerto Rico, in the United States, and around de world seeking innovative solutions to overcome the social (access to health services and healthy food), economic (unemployment, gentrification, and the negative impact of tourism) and environmental (high levels of chemical pollutants) challenges faced by demilitarized small islands. Through screenings and other events, Vieques community organizations would have the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with new audiences, among them, other community organizers, college and K-12 educators and students, government officers, industry partners, STEM professionals (in health services and environmental policy).
Screenings will be complemented by a film webpage (whose link will be included at the end of the film) with more information about the Vieques movement, its protagonists, and links to educational resources. As a multi-platform set of activities, Vieques: A Living Archive will serve to generate public discussions and educational projects (discussion guides, course modules, syllabi, public talks with Vieques’s leaders at schools and universities) about sustainable development in small islands facing the challenges of climate change: what sustainability means in the context of Vieques, how to implement it, and how it could be achieved through partnerships.
We hope that the film will generate new opportunities for partnerships that would mutually benefit the people of Vieques and their collaborators in different sectors, and, in turn, will contribute as a public platform to explore solutions to some of the most pressing problems affecting Viequenses today, such as lack of efficient maritime transportation, limited access to health services and affordable housing, and high risk of cancer due to environmental degradation.
This film will attract audiences interested in human rights and social justice, and in representations of history and memory, or war and demilitarization. My goal is that it will motivate discussions on health inequalities and environmental challenges and will serve as a tool to organize communities facing similar issues.
