Graphic Novel Honors Palenque
Ten years of a documentary on Tom Bradley and forthcoming project on Guatemala
Marta Valier and Sara Scalia are launching the second round of fundraising for the hybrid graphic novel of San Basilio de Palenque to finish the remaining 39 boards and prepare it for presentation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January 2026.
The Center begins a partnership with Dr. Giovanni Batz, UC Santa Barbara’s assistant professor and principal investigator of the Central American Studies Lab at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research Center at UCSB, to further disseminate Richard Cross’ photos to multiple audiences, particularly to Guatemala Maya peoples in Guatemala, the US, and elsewhere.
The filmmakers behind the documentary Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race came to the University Library’s Special Collections & Archives. June 14 marks the tenth anniversary of the premiere of the documentary at the LA Film Festival.
Help Us Finish Les yeux de la terre, a Graphic Novel Honoring Afro-Colombian History
By Marta Valier
This month, illustrator Sara Scalia and I are launching the second round of fundraising for Les yeux de la terre (The eyes of the Earth). This hybrid graphic novel brings to life the powerful story of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free Black community in the Americas.
Combining Scalia’s illustrations with Richard Cross’s photographs archived at the Bradley Center, the novel is inspired by a key moment in 1975, when Cross and Colombian anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann worked together to document this Afro-Colombian community. Founded in the 17th century by rebel leader Benkos Biohó, San Basilio de Palenque remains a living symbol of Black resistance, cultural survival, and community resilience.
Cross and Friedemann didn’t just document the community, they connected with the people. They developed relationships with residents, from boxers to turtle hunters, whose stories are mixed with both legendary and historical figures and events. The result is a portrait of a Black community that, nearly five hundred years after its founding, continues to rely on its resilience and adaptability to survive. Les yeux de la terre is our way of honoring that story.
Thanks to your generous support during our first fundraiser, we raised $6,500, which allowed us to conduct research, shape the script and visuals, and create the first 25 boards of the graphic novel. Now, we’re asking for your help again to raise another $6,500 to complete the remaining 39 boards and prepare the project for presentation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January 2026, one of Europe’s premier graphic novel events.
We’ve chosen the French-language market because it has a long tradition of graphic novels exploring social, cultural, and historical themes, the perfect fit for the story we are telling. It’s also a personal choice: Cross’s mother was French, and having grown up in France, I’m comfortable writing in French.
We are excited to take this next step. We are a small but fierce team of two, and we hope you'll join us in our effort to finish our book. To donate to Les Yeux de la terre’s GoFundMe page, click here.
You can explore Richard Cross’s work, including his photos from San Basilio de Palenque, via the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center collection here.
Thank you for being part of this journey!
With gratitude,
Sara Scalia and Marta Valier
New Collaboration to Disseminate Richard Cross’s Photos of Guatemala Maya People
By José Luis Benavides
Before heading to Florida and later to Guatemala to present his recently released book The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Extractivism, and Maya Resistance in Guatemala, Dr. Giovanni Batz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Santa Barbara, came to visit us at the Bradley Center. Dr. Batz is PI of the Central American Studies Lab at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research Center at UCSB. In 2023, he curated the photo exhibition entitled Chajul: Fotografías de Richard Cross durante el Conflicto Armado (Chajul: Photographs during the armed conflict by Richard Cross) at the Maya Ixil Museum in Chajul, Guatemala.
This time, the Center and Dr. Batz are establishing a collaboration that seeks to further disseminate Cross’s photos to multiple audiences, particularly to Guatemala Maya peoples in Guatemala, the US, and elsewhere. We plan to work on a book and digital project on Richard Cross’s photographic work, promoting exhibitions of his work more broadly. We hope to involve photographer James Rodríguez and Professor Marta Valier on this project.
In the early 1980s, Richard Cross thought of his photographs of the Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, as the beginning of a visual anthropological project that he couldn't finish because he was killed on June 21, 1983, in Honduras. But in his papers, there is information about the visual themes he used for documenting life in the eight refugee camps he photographed. These themes include, for example, portraits of refugee families in front of their homes, their problems/illness, and signs of violence and prosecution, as shown in these three photographs.
Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the release at the LA Film Festival of the award-winning documentary film Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, directed by Lyn Goldfarb and produced by Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor. Last month, both filmmakers visited the Bradley Center and the Special Collections team at the University Library.
When this incredible duo started this project in 2008, there was no biography of Tom Bradley, so they decided to conduct more than 130 interviews, narrowed this large group to 50 two-hour interviews for this film, and conducted extensive original research on Bradley to chronicle his life and the life of Los Angeles throughout most of the 20th century. You can watch the film here.