Produced under the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, the Tipografía Nacional films were instruments of state propaganda, designed to project a unified national identity rooted in modernization, order, and progress. But the images exceeded this intention. Alongside portraits of infrastructure and political ceremony, the films document K’iche’ communities in Quetzaltenango celebrating syncretic festivals, carrying out agricultural remedies during locust plagues, and building roads — moving image records of communities whose labor and presence shaped the nation, and who would play a central role in the democratic revolution that overthrew Ubico in 1944.
Guatemala’s contemporary politics remain defined by demands for a plurinational state with genuine representation across Indigenous, Maya, Xinka, and Garifuna communities. These deteriorating reels, housed in a Cinemateca facing climate risk, underfunding, and institutional precarity, carry within them histories that have never been fully named. Alex’s presentation will explore how the work of archival digitization — carried out collaboratively with historians, artists, educators, and students — creates the conditions for these films to be re-storied: for unseen and unidentified elements to surface, and for new materials to emerge that can reshape Guatemala’s national narratives from the ground up.
About the Presenter
Alex Feliciano Mejía is an Assistant Professor of Critical & Digital Literacy at San Francisco State University, where he works at the intersection of experimental cinema, archival research, and audiovisual pedagogy. He is currently collaborating with the Cinemateca Universitaria of Guatemala’s Universidad de San Carlos on the assessment, cataloguing, and digitization of a collection of approximately 800 films produced by the Tipografía Nacional between 1920 and 1950. Alex will present on this collection of the oldest surviving moving images in Guatemalan history, and pose questions they open up about what archives can do.
This event is free and open to everyone. Simply register below to attend.
