"Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande" is an unconventional tale that utilizes colorful comic book-style animation, humor, diverse voices, aesthetic complexities and hip-hop to create an enthralling account of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

John Jota Leaños, creator of "Frontera!" and a Mexican-Italian American filmmaker born in the Inland Empire of Los Angeles who identifies as a Xicano-Güero-Mestizo-Coyote, effectively tells the tale of deeply contested territories and Pueblo people expelling Spanish occupiers from the entire Rio Grande region.

A practitioner of social art, Leaños was inspired by Chicana artists and thinkers such as Yolanda Lopez, Ester Hernandez, Amalia Mesa-Bains and Gloria Anzaldúa. Through their creativity, bravery, generosity and brilliance they showed Leaños that social and personal transformation "isn't only possible through art, but absolutely necessary."

"These and other artists showed me that beauty, politics, humor and laughter function as healing and medicine for our communities," Leaños told Latin Post. "As a borderlands artist, I use all and any media necessary to tell stories and highlight social issues for Latino, Chicano and Native audiences. I came to animation as a tactical approach to inserting political content in a palatable and friendly form."

"Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande" is the sixth animated film that Leaños has created, and it is his most challenging project to date. The animation tells the story of the first American revolution, which is living history that's "continuously evoked and remembered today in Native, Pueblo and Chicana/o communities as a seminal moment defining contemporary Pueblo autonomy, mestizo cohabitation and indigenous cultural sustainability," explained Leaños.

Native, Mestizo and Chicano/a artists and scholars worked together to fuse the genres of animation and documentary in order to tell a story that's been largely untold and ignored during the making of "America's Master Narrative." It's important for Native, Chicana/o, Latina/o and other colonized communities to see stories of triumph, resistance and struggle in fresh and creative ways. It's also important to learn alternative perspectives in history and see how change has been made possible with negotiation, communication and collective action.

Latino, Black, Native and Asian independent artists, born and raised in the U.S., were resources when creating the animation, rather than endorsing or replicating the exploitative model of using poor communities in Latin America and Asia to draw, color, sequence, or lip synch for Western consumption. The result of using 12 artists that Leaños has a personal relationship with was a "homespun aesthetic that leans into a diversity of styles and talents of local artists in the San Francisco Bay Area and in New Mexico."

"'Frontera!' was designed to tell the story of the important moments in the makings of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Pueblo Revolt outlines the first colonial wave in the borderlands and centers on a mestizo revolution in the face of extinction. The next animation will touch on the second colonial wave -- the American colonial project which includes the assassination of the first American Governor of New Mexico, Charles Bent, as well as the Gold Rush," said Leaños. "We are telling these stories from Native and Latino points of view which means they are not 'textbook' histories and rely on new indigenous-led archaeologies, oral histories, stories and 'myth.' We are constantly 'reading between the lines of accepted histories as we view history as emergent and not fixed."

The musical score was created by Cristóbal Martínez, who is a member of the acclaimed Native artist collective, Post-Commodity. An original rap song was also produced with Greg Landau and Deuce Eclipse for the animation, entitled, "Ojo por Ojo." The centerpiece song depicts the rebellion and crisis that brought the Pueblos to the brink of collapse. The rap captures the multivocality of this history.

Conroy Chino, Warren Montoya, Lee Moquino and Dr. Aimee Villarreal were instrumental in making the film. Also, Dr. Robert Purcell, the late Dr. Linda Cordell, and Matthew Liebmann (Harvard University), author of "Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico," are prominent scholars who served as consultants and script advisors on the project. Joseph "Woody" Aguilar, Latino Public Broadcasting and its staff, as well as Luis Ortiz, Diana Ballesteros, Jennifer Ortiz and many others offer continued support to the project.

The animation has been supported by a Latino Public Broadcasting Public Media Grant, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video, a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, a National Association for Latino Arts and Culture Grant, UCSC Arts Research Institute Grant, a COR Faculty Research Grant and a UCSC Art Dean's Excellence Award.

Check out the Guggenheim Fellowship winner, John Jota Leaños, on Vimeo and his website.