BULLS AND SAINTS

For the past two decades, working beyond the headlines, I’ve been documenting the growing Latino immigrant population in North Carolina both as an artist and an activist. My work has taken me across the Nuevo South in search of stories of loss and hope, love and redemption. As an immigrant who has experienced the pains of exile, the separation of families by the border is a theme of great concern. One of the ways I dealt with it was creating “videograms” for migrant families divided by the Border. Before the age of smart phones and FB live, there were very few options for working class immigrants to visually communicate with the families they had left behind. Bulls and Saints is one them. A “videogram” created from the dust and guts of the Mexican/US rodeo circuit. It’s an experiment that deals with love lost, with hope, with machismo and frailty. To me, this is as close as I can get to express the multitude of emotions that come with family separation, with exile, with the loss of your country. It’s a hybrid film because the immigrant experience is a hybrid condition, never quite here, never quite there, caught between fading memories and the sometimes-brutal immediacy of the now. Bulls and Saints is an attempt to deconstruct the linear constraints of a traditional documentary and offer a simultaneous juxtaposition of the different perspectives and points of view that make up the immigrant experience. There is no film like Bulls and Saints, it is a unique creation, in collaboration with his Nuevo South Media producing partner Peter Eversoll, in a moment when humanizing immigrants from the ground up is necessary and essential.

The exhibit consisted of three giant screens: one with the life of Cheyo, the bull rider in the USA, the other with his wife Oralia back in Mexico and the third one featured Cheyo’s love letter.