For Anevay Ybáñez, storytelling is not just an art; it is a commitment. Her senior thesis project, "With Love This Time: An Ode to the Borderlands" is a powerful documentary that delves into the lived realities of the United States Mexico border, the place she calls home.
Raised in the Rio Grande Valley, Ybáñez grew up amid national narratives that often reduced her community to stereotypes or left it out entirely. “I grew up surrounded by a lot of harmful media that characterized us in the region as harmful. … I grew up feeling like we were constantly in the shadows,” Ybáñez said. Her film pushes back against those portrayals. “This is an homage and a love letter to the border region I grew up in.”
The Rio Grande Valley is boxed between the United States Mexico border wall and an internal checkpoint located about 100 miles north. People who are undocumented are unable to pass through either of these, Ybáñez said. “We exist in the in-between … there’s a distinct culture there that keeps the community so strong.”
That strength became a guiding force in her filmmaking process. While Ybáñez often worked solo with her camera, she emphasized the collective spirit behind the project.
“Although this is something that has my name on it, it’s not something that I made alone,” she said. “It’s informed by everyone I know and people I don't know who are from there, by the poetry and the sociology that I study, by the professors who taught me how to make this type of media [and] how to be conscious while making it and the friends and family I talked to about this before and during the process,” Ybáñez said. “Although it was just me with the camera, a lot of the times I felt like I had a village behind me.”
Still, the project wasn’t without its challenges. The weight of representation, both personal and communal, weighed heavily throughout. “My identity is very different here and at home, so I had a hard time navigating that,” Ybáñez said. Initially, she resisted including elements of the political institutions that dominate border discourse, like the wall and border patrol presence. “I wanted it to just be a love letter,” she said.
However, the project shifted after she created a 3-minute short for another class using the same footage. That short film, she explained, “essentially handled all the topics I didn’t want to in my thesis.” The process of making it came easily, pushing her to reconsider the limitations she had originally placed on her thesis. A conversation with her Film and Media Studies advisor, Natalie Minik, further shaped her perspective. Minik reminded her “that love is complicated and it’s nuanced.”
“And so, I did a second pass with my footage, and I realized that although I was coming from a lens of love, all of that came in. The border patrol presence was there; the wall was there; it was all visible. So I’ve been able to work with that and construct this narrative surrounding: yes, we love it here; yes, there’s stuff that’s happening, and both of those can be true at the same time.” The result is a film that tells a layered story.
For Ybáñez, the audience is twofold. “I have home, and then I have everyone else,” she said. “I want people from home to watch it and feel the amount of pride that I felt while making it, and the amount of pride that went into conceptualizing the project, and then I want others to see a place that is remarkable that they otherwise wouldn’t have heard of.”
When it came to submitting her film to festivals, Ybáñez was cautious, especially in the U.S., voicing fears about safety and censorship. “I always hoped to have a career in documentary, but I anticipate that there would be censorship,” she said.
Nonetheless, her commitment to truth-telling through film hasn’t wavered. “I will not stop making documentaries,” Ybáñez stated, “I have hope that honest media is still going to get made, and I’m still going to do it.”
Despite all challenges, she sees her project as both a reflection of who she is and a promise to the place that raised her. “I feel this overwhelming sense of pride every time I watch what is my almost completed thesis. … I feel like I did it in the best way I could right now, and I’m very proud of that, and I’m proud of staying so strict with my process and ethics surrounding the project.”
With that pride comes clarity. “Once I left, I realized how lucky it was to be from there, and every day I just realized it’s that luck and that feeling of love and pride that just grows, grows and grows,” she said. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder.”
In the end, Ybáñez’s thesis is exactly what she hoped it would be: a love letter, not in spite of the region’s complexities, but because of them. It’s a tribute not only to where she’s from but to the deep, complicated love that her home inspires one frame, one cut, one story at a time.
Correction: This article originally stated that non-citizens could not pass through the United States Mexico border wall or an internal checkpoint. The article has been updated to reflect that this is true of undocumented people. The Daily regrets this error.
