Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos
Do you remember your ABCs? We think you do! Sing along with this group of animated Mariachi social documentarians who will guide you through imperial history that will make you laugh, cry, and wonder why.
Director’s Statement:
Los ABCs: ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos! is a five-minute animated documentary that draws from the narrative and musical traditions of the Mexican and Chicanx corrido, reimagined through a Day of the Dead lens. Structured as an abecedario, this piece journeys from A to Z, each letter bearing witness to the lives and deaths of individuals and communities lost to the violences of war—understood here not solely as conventional combat, but as a condition that includes symbolic, structural, and economic warfare. These range from the so-called “War on Terror” and “War on Drugs” to the persistent assaults of racialized state violence, femicide, poverty, and xenophobia.
This is an animated documentary—a hybrid form that documents not “real life” in the traditional vérité sense, but real death. Each vignette visualizes a specific act of erasure or injustice: “I” stands for Isabel cruzando y perdida, referencing the deaths of migrants who perish crossing the U.S.-Mexico border; “J” evokes the femicides of Juárez y sus desaparecidas; “S” recalls the post-9/11 murder of a Sikh man in Arizona, killed in a wave of misdirected nationalist violence. These are not abstract metaphors. They are rooted in historical specificity and loss.
Los ABCs also functions as a Day of the Dead offering—playful, irreverent, and political. In keeping with this tradition, the dead return not to haunt, but to mock the living with song, satire, and a scathing critique of empire. The animation uses children's rhymes, mariachi music, and visual comedy as counterpoints to the gravity of the subject matter, expanding its accessibility without diluting its urgency.
All characters—from the singing mariachis to the 26 “protagonistas”—are already dead. Free from physical suffering, they re-stage their own deaths not as victims, but as participants in a theatrical memorial. Their reenactments serve a dual purpose: to honor those forgotten by official histories, and to confront the living with their own complicity, indifference, or ignorance. In this sense, Los ABCs becomes both a cultural primer and a subversive civics lesson—a biting satire of imperial amnesia, or as we put it, Empire for Pendejos.
We invite viewers to “remember their ABCs” as a means of unlearning the sanitized narratives of power, and re-engaging with the ghosts of histories too often buried. This piece is dedicated to the unnamed and unclaimed, to those whose lives were taken and whose stories deserve to be sung.
¡Qué vivan los muertos! Long live the dead—not just in memory, but in the rhythms of our resistance.
—John Jota Leaños
Written and Directed by
John Jota Leaños
Art Direction
Sean Levon Nash
Animation and Technical Direction
Ivan Wachter
Musical Composition
Cristóbal Martinez
Musical Arrangement
Juan G. Aguilar
J. Javier Enriquez
John Jota Leaños
Cristóbal Martinez
Vocals
Juan G. Aguilar
M. Yesenia Cervantes
Javier Enriquez
Cristóbal Martinez
Sound Effects
Ryan McFadden
Audio Production Consultation
J.C. Golding
A Project of Creative Capital & Burning Wagon Productions 2005
Selected Screenings:
Audience Choice Award Reel Rasquache Festival of Latino Film
Best Short, Xicanindio Film Festival, DenverSundance Film Festival 2010, Comedy Classics
Sundance Film Festival 06
Morelia Film Festival 08, Morelia, Mexico
Mill Valley Film Festival 07
De Young Museum, San Francisco
Cine Sin Fin Chicano Film Festival, Los Angeles 07
Reel Rasquache Festival of Latino Film and Art, Los Angeles
Sin Fronteras Film Festival, New Mexico
Xicanindio Film Festival, Denver
Silverlake Film Festival
Jacksonville Film Festival
Brooklyn Underground Film Festival
Arizona International Film Festival
‘Toon Town Troublemakers, Museum of Contemporary Art, SD
Southside Film Festival, PA
Artivist Film Festival, Los Angeles
Xicanindie Film Festival, Denver
Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos!
A is for Abu who gazed at his reflection
B is for Bethlehem who escaped inspection
C is for Coyolxauhqui who fell from the sky
D is for Dow caught in a toxic lie
E is for Emilio thrown into the sea
F is for Frederick hung from a tree
G is for Guillermo asphyxiated by gas
H is for our Homey capped in the ass
CHORUS
¡Qué vivan, qué vivan los muertos de la guerra!
Qué lastima, qué pena, qué gracia me dan
La I es para Isabel cruzando y perdida
La J es para Juarez y sus desaparacidas
K is for Kenny who failed to pass the term
L is for Lequoia diseased the Man’s germ
M is for Manuel olvidado sin Purple Heart
N is for Natalia lost in a Wal-Mart
O is for the Other who tripped a wire
P is for the Pacifist consumed by fire
CHORUS
¡Qué vivan, qué vivan los muertos de la guerra!
Qué lastima, qué pena, qué gracia me dan
Q is for Quantos fallen to friendly fratricide
R is for Rwanda afflicted by ghastly genocide
S is for the Sikh gunned down at the station
T is for the Territory of Western Civilization
U is for Umito reduced to an apparition
V is for Violence of a slave expedition
W is for Walid tortured by a chain of command
X is for Xochiquetzal uprooted from her land
Y is for Yucca who irradiated away
CHORUS
¡Qué vivan, qué vivan los muertos de la guerra!
Qué lastima, qué pena, qué gracia me dan
Z is for Zuzela quien canta night and day…
¡Qué vivan, qué vivan los muertos de la guerra!
Qué pena, qué pena, qué lástima ma dan