In 2019 the Chicanx civil rights, student activist organization M.E.Ch.A. (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), of which I was a member, changed its 55-year organization’s name removing the cultural terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán” (the mythical homelands of the Méxica/Aztec peoples). To be more inclusive of Afro-Latinx and indigenous identities within their 200+ chapters on colleges and high school campuses across the US, this renaming however prompted heated debate around the meanings and importance of these terms.

Through a hybrid, experimental documentary practice, “The Fall of Aztlán” unpacks the problematic term “Aztlán” and its varied interpretations and manifestations across indigenous epistemologies, cosmologies, spiritualities, and our solar system. Aztlán is investigated through a personal archive of Chicanx paraphernalia, investigations of the Nahuatl language, Méxica dance rituals, Hopi beliefs and traditions, Mississippian and Late Woodland archeological sites, and found N.A.S.A. footage, juxtaposed with interviews conducted through the Covid-19 pandemic.

This film project unearths the errs of “indigenismo”, or the position of "indigineities" within Mexican and Chicanx nationalist ideology informed by dangerous notions of “Mestizaje” ethnic “whitening” while addressing contemporary erasures of North American indigenous peoples living and resisting settler colonialism in the Southwest today. Through a lens of Critical Latinx Indigeneities, we might expose Aztlán’s geographical untruths, and archeological and anthropological fallacies, instead positing new indigenous futures brought forth from oral history and, oddly, alternate potentialities found beyond Earthly identity politics, without falling into space-travel, sci-fi colonial tropes.