Paper short abstract:

She is slightly older than I am. We know each other since years. She worked, did pottery, raised her children, migrated, worked and looked after her family again. I worked, did research, filmed, and taught. I filmed her family; she grasped that my filmic records turned into being her family history.

Paper long abstract:

Mexico 1980: I wanted to write a dissertation on pottery in the context of developmental anthropology. I arrived at a village, at a potter family house, and stayed. They kindly accepted me, we shared our time, and I managed to stay in contact with them till today. 1989: We (my cameraman and I) started an ethnographic film project portraying the potter family. I wanted to show the manifold activities of the women, the daily life, and the economic implications. Later I asked the main protagonist to comment the film. She did it, but she was not feeling very comfortable with it. She was a modest person and she was not sure of the usefulness of the film - till her grandchildren from the US visited her. Suddenly the film became a piece of family history. 2000: She moved to Florida to look after her grandchildren. 2001: We visited her, and she started to use our video camera to record her life there and her reflections on living in the US. I visited her once in a while and the people in the sending village, recording changes here and there. We used the little time we had together to discuss the difficulties she was encountering - very often off camera. Through her I got deep insights in a migrant family life, the worries and hopes. I gathered a lot of visual material, but I still search for a way to make sense out of it without compromising the protagonist's family.

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