Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film

A Film by John Jota Leaños & Vanessa Sanchez
Performed by La Mezcla | In Collaboration with ALAS

Project Description
Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film is a multidisciplinary, community-based performance work that honors the invisible labor sustaining the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Created through a deep collaboration between filmmaker John Jota Leaños and dancer/choreographer Vanessa Sanchez, the project emerged from a year-long partnership with Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS), a Latina-led farmworker advocacy organization based in Half Moon Bay, California. The film weaves together oral histories, movement traditions, and sound practices to reveal the long arc of agricultural labor, systemic exploitation, and the enduring joy of collective resistance.

Filmed at Avila-Garcia Farms—one of the only Mexican-owned, self-managed producers in the Half Moon Bay region—Ghostly Labor moves with and through the land. Grounded in interviews with farmworkers and community members, the project centers the lives, hands, and stories of those too often erased in national narratives of productivity and citizenship.

Cultural and Aesthetic Framework
Drawing on Indigenous and Afro-diasporic rhythms, the film fuses Tap Dance, Mexican Zapateado, Son Jarocho, and Afro-Caribbean movement traditions (Afro-Cuban, Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Haitian) into a polyrhythmic performance of memory and survivance. Each gesture becomes testimony; each rhythm becomes resistance.

Choreographer Vanessa Sanchez developed original sequences in collaboration with her company La Mezcla, composing movement that responds directly to the testimonios of farmworkers. She worked with Son Jarocho Maestra Laura Rebolloso (Veracruz, MX) to develop original versos for the piece “El Camotal: Manos Que Nos Dan.” The musical score—performed live on set—features Conga and Chekere in Afro-Cuban Bembe rhythm, Zapateado in Café con Pan, and Quijada percussion. The sound was recorded using isolated channels for each performer and was later mixed by Emmy Award-winning sound engineer Greg Landau.

This documentary dance film adopts a five-beat Indigenous storytelling framework:

• Beat One: Rooting the story in land and culture, the film opens in the fields of Half Moon Bay, invoking the sacred relationship between land and labor.

• Beat Two: The main character emerges—not a singular hero, but a collective protagonist: the farmworker community.

• Beat Three: Through interviews and movement, the film reveals the historical crisis—generations of displacement, underpaid toil, and systemic marginalization.

• Beat Four: The resistance unfolds: dancing on the fields, reclaiming space, making visible the rhythms of survival.

• Beat Five: Land and community are re-aligned; a vision of dignity and joy reclaims what exploitation tried to erase.

The story cannot be removed from place—it is inscribed in the soil of Half Moon Bay, in the rhythms of the workers, in the breath and beat of the farm.

Production
The film was produced in collaboration with ALAS, recognized as California Nonprofit of the Year in 2023, under the leadership of Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga. Vanessa Sanchez and La Mezcla began by volunteering and performing for farmworkers during weekly “Farmworker Friday” lunch programs—bringing art to the fields. This relationship deepened into formal interviews and participatory filmmaking. The work was fiscally sponsored by Brava! for Women in the Arts and supported by a range of cultural institutions and foundations.