Convivencia

Convivencia

Short Film / 7:19 / 2025

Film Description

"Convivencia" is a dance film that brings to light the lives and stories of female essential laborers along the US/Mexico borderlands through Tap dance, Son Jarocho, and Afro-Carribean rhythms. The film highlights interviews with migrant domestic laborers from "La Colectiva de Mujeres,” a female-led collective of domestic workers in California. The film addresses the struggles, resistance, and resilience of these women to showcase their significant contributions to our communities and celebrates their spirit of community, joy, and resilience. “Convivencia” is a unique fusion of oral histories, percussive dance, footwork, and folkloric dance from choreographer/director Vanessa Sanchez and La Mezcla in collaboration with filmmaker John Jota Leaños. 

Director Statement

Convivencia is our second dance film collaboration, following the award-winning Ghostly Labor, which explored the lives of farmworkers along California’s Central Coast. This latest dance documentary, Convivencia, interweaves oral histories, percussive dance, and folkloric traditions to illuminate the lives of female domestic workers in California. Co-directed by John Jota Leaños and choreographed by Vanessa Sanchez, the film was created in collaboration with La Colectiva de Mujeres, a female-led domestic worker advocacy collective, to honor the resilience, labor, and untold stories of migrant women whose work remains largely invisible.

At its core, Convivencia is both an artistic intervention and a political statement. The film examines the realities of domestic work—often undervalued and overlooked—through movement, rhythm, and testimony. Dance is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is a language of resistance and resilience, a living archive of labor and survival. The percussive rhythms of Tap, the grounded footwork of Son Jarocho, and the Afro-Caribbean influences in Convivencia are deeply tied to histories of struggle and resilience, amplifying the voices of those who sustain our society yet remain unseen.

Collaboration with La Colectiva de Mujeres was central to the creative process, ensuring that the film remains rooted in lived experience and collective advocacy. Their testimonies and activism shaped Convivencia into more than a film—it is a cultural document, a call to awareness, and a platform for justice. By merging oral histories with embodied movement, we seek to honor the spirit of these workers and contextualize their contributions within the broader histories of labor and migration.

Through an immersive and interdisciplinary approach, Convivencia offers a politically urgent and artistically rigorous experience. It is an invitation to witness, listen, and engage with the lives of those whose labor maintains our daily existence.

John Jota Leaños & Vanessa Sanchez