Biography

Juan Mejia Botero was born on July 11, 1977 in Bogotá, Colombia.  He came to the United States in 1994 to attend the United World College of the American West where he got his International Baccalaureate diploma.  In 2000 he received a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology & Sociology from Swarthmore College.  As part of his thesis work he co-directed and co-edited the documentary film: Merging Voices: The Youth of El Salvador Speak. During the following year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship recipient he traveled, lived and worked as a grassroots video facilitator in several countries in Latin America (Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Chile).  In August 2004 he culminated the University of Texas’ masters program in Latin American Studies with an emphasis on race, development and communications. His thesis work included a written piece: Critical Grassroots Media: Towards a Visual Anthropology of Liberation, and a documentary film: A Taves de Estos Ojos (Through These Eyes). After spending the following year continuing his work with the Asociación de Afrocolombianos Desplazados (AFRODES) in Colombia, he entered the masters program in Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005. He is currently working on his thesis project: a one-hour documentary video: Uprooted, about the processes involved in the mass displacement of Afrocolombian communities from the Pacific Coast to the interior of the country.

Project Summary

Uprooted: Stories of Black Displacement in the Colombian Pacific

For more information about Uprooted, please visit the film's website at:

http://web.mac.com/juan_mejia/Uprooted

Since the late 1980s the Colombian Pacific has become a new frontier for development, including macro-development projects and new forms of capital accumulation.  Concurrently, as the civil war has escalated, armed actors are disputing the territory and valuable resources of the region.  Violence and mass displacement have become all too common as struggles for land and resources intensify.  Afrocolombians make up a disproportionate number of the over 2.5 million internally displaced Colombians since 1990. Colombia’s internal displacement crisis is second only to Sudan.

The proposed project—a 60 min. video-documentary—has developed in collaboration with the Asociación de Afrocolombianos Desplazados (AFRODES) and our common interest in the production of a documentary that explores the situation of Afro-Colombian forced displacement.  Specifically, the project seeks to complicate the official discourse on displacement, which portrays it simply as an inevitable consequence of the violence in Colombia.  Through a character driven, personal approach, the proposed video seeks to explore the intricate processes involved in the uprooting of the Afrocolombian population and their resettlement in cities far from their communities.  The project seeks to expose flows and connections that involve complex processes of economic expansion into the Pacific, cultural uprooting and fragmentation, and Black communities’ resistance and ethnic/political affirmation.
This project has and will continue to stress collaboration in all aspects of the documentary process:  pre-production, production, postproduction and dissemination.  Production will focus specifically on the growing community of displaced Afrocolombians from the Pacific littoral who have settled in two cities: Quibdó and Bogotá. The film’s narrative will be rooted in the life of Noris Mosquera a displaced Afrocolombian single mother and a community activist.  Production for the project will take place during a ten-week period from July to September of 2006.  Post-production will subsequently be carried out from September 2006 until May 2007.

The project’s objectives are to explore important research questions of value to the community and to me as a researcher (outlined above); to bring much needed visibility to the specificities of Afrocolombian displacement; to continue to involve members of the Afrocolombian community in multi-media production; and to provide AFRODES with valuable visual material that can be used in policy campaigns.