Between Fences Program Information
The following speaker presentations, book titles, and film discussions have been designated for Between Fences programming. If your organization would like to participate in this conversation, call 602/257-335 x23.
For a roster of Between Fences speaker presentations, click here.
For a list of Between Fences book discussion titles, click here.
For information on applying for a Between Fences film discussion, click here.
Between Fences Speakers Bureau Presentations
- Native Borders: Arizona’s American Indian Reservations
- Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Walls, Boundaries, Lines in the Sand, and a Yankee Poet
- Four Hundred Years of Immigration: America 1607 to 2007
- The Changing Nature of Resources on Arizona’s Native American Lands
- Japanese-American Internment in Arizona
- The Opening of the Frontier and the Closing of the West
- The Repatriation of Mexican and Mexican-American Citizens in the 1930s
- Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West
- Fences and Walls: Which Side Are You On? Perspectives from the Smithsonian, Arizona and Beyond
- A Third Country? Cultural and Economic Melding on the Arizona/Sonora Border
Between Fences Book Titles
Fiction Titles
- Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Urrea
- The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
- The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter
- The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
Non-Fiction Titles
- Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John Neihardt
- The Devil’s Highway by Luis Urrea
- Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey To Reunite with His Mother by Sonia Nazario
- Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
- Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border by Ken Ellingwood
- Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day
- Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border by Miriam Davidson and Jeffrey Scott
Between Fences Film Discussions
Film scholar Fred Linch will screen films and lead discussions on themes from the Between Fences exhibition. For more information on participating in a Between Fences film discussion, contact 602/257-0335 x26 or e-mail amjohnson@azhumanities.org.
Fred Linch - Between Fences Film Discussion Facilitator
Fred Linch is first and foremost a lover of the art of film. This love has allowed him to lead major film festivals and to lecture on film in Arizona and around the world. He has conducted Movie Tuesdays at the Burton Barr Library for over ten years, Salon Cinema for seventeen years, and Cinematheque de Langlois for eight years. He has taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at ASU-West for over five years, created new film festival ideas, and attended international festivals as a jurist. Fred Linch loves and shares the art of cinema.
Between Fences Films
Most of these films are suitable only for mature audiences. Descriptions adapted from Fred Linch, production company sites, and the Internet Movie Database.
Babel (2006)
A tragic incident involving an American couple in Morocco sparks a chain of events for four families living in four different countries around the world. In this mesmerizing, emotional film that traverses both the deeply personal and the explosively political, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu explores the nature of the barriers that seem to separate humankind. In doing so, he evokes the ancient concept of Babel and questions the mistaken identities, misunderstandings, and missed chances for communication that, though often unseen, drive our contemporary lives. An international ensemble of actors enrich Babel's take on cultural diversity and enhance its powerful examination of the links and frontiers between and within us.
Barbarosa (1982)
Barbarosa is a well-reviewed, classic western that deals with the ease of crossing the border in the 19th century and the concept of blood feuds. A young cowboy (Gary Busey) hooks up with a legendary outlaw (Willie Nelson), and before long both are on the run from the law.
The Border (1982)
An underrated Jack Nicholson film that deals with an incident on the U.S.-Mexico border. As a border guard involved in drug smuggling along the Rio Grande, Charlie Smith has crossed the line many times. But when he decides to clean up his act and help unite an "illegal" woman with her baby, he runs afoul of his corrupt department, his greedy wife (Valerie Perrine), and a ruthless neighbor (Harvey Keitel) in this action-packed suspense-thriller.
Shane (1953)
Acclaimed director George Stevens’ legendary rendition of the quintessential Western myth earned six Academy Award nominations, and made Shane one of the most popular Western films of the 1950s and classics of American cinema. The story brings Alan Ladd, a drifter and retired gunfighter, to the assistance of a homestead family terrorized by a wealthy cattleman and his hired gun (Jack Palance). In fighting the last decisive battle, Shane sees the end of his own way of life. Mysterious, moody and atmospheric, the film is enhanced by the intense performances of its splendid cast.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones directs and stars in one of the best films of 2006, a poetic and striking modern-day Western about loyalty. Peter Perkins (Jones) is a veteran cowboy who embodies the values of the old west, living in a small Texas town bordering the U.S. and Mexico. He hires Melquiades Estrada as a ranch hand and quickly befriends the man. But when Estrada is gunned down under mysterious circumstances, Perkins takes justice into his own hands and kidnaps a trigger-happy border patrolman (Barry Pepper), forcing him to unearth Estrada's body and accompany Perkins on horseback on the long and treacherous journey through the frontier mountains and back roads of Mexico to bring his friend’s body home.
Tom Horn (1980)
Steve McQueen produced and starred in this gritty, exciting recreation of Horn’s latter-day career in the turn-of-the-century West, where gentler ways supplanted the law of the gun, and Horn would be an unwitting victim of that change. A renowned former army scout hired by ranchers to hunt down rustlers, Horn finds himself on trial for the murder of a boy when he carries out his job too well. Horn finds that the simple skills he knows are of no help in dealing with the ambitions of ranchers and corrupt officials, as progress marches over him and the old West. Shot on serenely beautiful Arizona locations, Tom Horn indelibly brings to life one of the West's truly unsung heroes.
Touch of Evil (1958)
This classic film noir, directed by and starring Orson Welles, dramatizes the criminalization of race, cultural stereotypes, and border paranoia in the American imagination in this tale of murder and police corruption in a Mexican border town. Charlton Heston plays an honorable Mexican narcotics investigator who clashes with the bigoted Welles as Hank Quinlan, a crooked police chief who frames a Mexican youth as part of an intricate criminal plot.
