Introduction

My name is Danielle Cosmes Aguilar and I am a Zapotec filmmaker, visual artist and researcher. This portfolio is a multidisciplinary and multilingual compilation of my creative and research practice. It is a collection of questions, memories and experiments rooted in self-representational practices that have emerged from Indigenous and migrant communities. 

I was born in Los Angeles, California, and I come from a family of migrant women who forcibly returned to our community of origin, Ixtlán de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mx, when I was a child. I was a migrant youth, and it is from those embodied experiences that my creative concerns, world-building beyond nation-states, and visions of self-determination arise–all of which find a home in the works of this portfolio.

I received my B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis on the affective experiences of return migrant Zapotec and Chinantec communities. Currently, I am independently producing and directing my first feature-length documentary film based on said research and my own stories of return titled, Me Espera un Pueblo.