The Magic Yali
The Magic Yali will be an animated short based on a young girl and her home is the Rio Grande Delta in South, Texas. On one of her adventures, she witnesses history repeat itself, threatening her home and channels a part of herself to protect the place she loves.
Background: “The Magic Valley” was an early twentieth century marketing campaign created by wealthy investors and anglo settlers in order to profit off the land and Mexican labor. More anglo settlers moved south, anti-Mexican narratives and violence grew, and racial scripts justified the stealing of land from Mexican ranchers supported by the state and the Texas Rangers. The Rio Grande Valley is going through another wave of extraction and environmental exploitation with the building of a SpaceX testing site and the proposed building of Natural Gas piplines (LNG) right next to the Rio Grande Delta, endangering animal species, biodiversity, and interdependent ecosystems.
