Inside InterNeta, the Audiovisual Archive Preserving Mexico’s Underground History

Some archives are created to preserve works, while others, before becoming archives, had to accompany the very things they sought to document. InterNeta’s archive belongs to the latter category. For decades, its cameras documented punk scenes, outlying neighborhoods, Indigenous communities, migrations, grassroots urban movements, alternative forms of communication, artistic practices, and social conflicts. These subjects rarely found a permanent place within institutional audiovisual circuits.

This journey now enters a new phase with *InterNeta: Memory—Catalog of the Invisible, 1990–2026*, a publication by Guadalupe Ochoa Aranda and Pablo Gaytán Santiago. The book, provided by Gaytán to Yaconic, further clarifies the scope of the catalog. It contains a selection of 44 video entries out of a total of 236 pieces from the InterNeta Audiovisual Archive: Memory of the Invisible. The entries make up the fourth section of the publication. The publication also includes texts on the project’s videographic archive, the Video Proceso Comunitario, an essay dedicated to *La década podrida*, and a documentary gallery.

The catalog will be presented three times in September 2026 in Toluca and Mexico City. Pablo Gaytán confirmed the dates and venues to Yaconic during their conversation. In that conversation, he also explained the process of creating the book and reviewing the archive. These events offer an opportunity to revisit a little-told history of Mexican documentary and independent video.

It is not merely a matter of organizing titles, dates, and credits. The volume reconstructs a journey through audiovisual production carried out outside the mainstream circuits of Mexican cinema. Furthermore, it proposes examining that history through a medium that long remained in the background: electromagnetic video. Gaytán believes that one of the project’s main values is precisely to reconstruct a history of the documentary through video and not solely through the cinematic tradition.

InterNeta Before the Catalog: When Video Set Out to Find Its Own Stories

To understand the catalog, we must go back to the moment when video began to transform the possibilities for documenting everyday life, urban cultures, and social movements. Industrial cinema, independent cinema, and professional film schools occupy a central place in Mexican audiovisual history. However, beginning in the 1980s, video equipment opened up new possibilities for producing and circulating images.

A study published in *Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas* reconstructs part of that process. In 1986, the First Videofilme Exhibition took place. In 1990, the First Video Biennial was held. Over the following years, groups, exhibitions, and venues dedicated to the medium emerged. In 1992, Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha founded Productores Independientes de Video (PIVAC). In addition, other initiatives expanded production and exhibition networks. The study also identifies InterNeta as one of the active collectives within this late-20th-century video scene.

This development was not solely institutional. Some of the video produced in Mexico drew on the interests of the independent, militant, and collective cinema of the 1970s. It found in the new medium a way to document migration, inequality, political conflicts, and social transformations. Video allowed creators to work with resources and dynamics different from those of conventional cinema. Thus, it fostered the emergence of individual and collective producers interested in documenting immediate events.

Pablo Gaytán has situated his own work within that genealogy. At the symposium “Thawing the Revolution: Visual Culture, Cinema, and Politics in Mexico 50 Years After the Halconazo,” the UNAM Institute for Aesthetic Research featured his research, *La Generación Transparente*. The Influence of Independent Film on the First Generation of Independent Videographers (1971–1993).

In conversation with Yaconic, Gaytán explained that this first generation was not composed exclusively of film or communications students. Among those who began using video were photographers, musicians, visual artists, and activists. They found in portable cameras a tool for producing their own records. The catalog-memoir explores this genealogy in its first section, dedicated to the period 1977–1992.

Guadalupe Ochoa’s career is equally indispensable to telling this story. The proceedings of the Fifth CENIDIAP Conference on Visual Arts Research and Documentation identify her as a sociologist, psychoanalyst, and video artist. Furthermore, they present her as a producer, screenwriter, and co-director of works alongside Gaytán. It also documents her participation in Video Popular y Cultural A.C., Videar, and the video magazine InterNeta.

Video Proceso Comunitario: Working for Years, Not Just Filming

One of the contributions highlighted in the book is the “Community Video Process.” In the introduction to the memoir-catalog, Ochoa and Gaytán trace their formation to experiences in community production and video workshops conducted with indigenous communities, collectives, and urban-popular organizations during the 1990s.

Gaytán elaborated on the concept in greater detail during his conversation with Yaconic. He explained that some pieces did not arise from a brief visit or a project completed in a few months, but rather from processes of engagement that could last five, six, seven, or eight years. “It’s neither a commission from an institution nor a thesis,” he explained when discussing experiences built with various indigenous groups and urban collectives. It is this prolonged involvement that InterNeta refers to as “Community Video Process.”

The significance of the term, therefore, lies in the duration and the relationship established with the people involved. It does not merely describe a production technique. In some cases, several hours of shared experiences, workshops, and recordings were condensed into pieces lasting three, seven, ten, or fifteen minutes. Gaytán defines these videos as syntheses of much longer processes, the complete documentation of which remains in the archive.

The book organizes these experiences under the section “Community Video Process, 1993–2007,” which features works related to indigenous communities, urban grassroots video, rock music, and the changes that accompanied the transition from analog to digital media.

La década podrida: A Camera Inside Mexican Punk

One of the best-known entry points to the archive is *La década podrida 1985–1995*. The Alberto Beltrán Information and Documentation Center of the Ministry of Culture preserves it within the InterNeta Collection; the 1995 date identifies Video Popular y Cultural and InterNeta as the creators and records its original format as VHS. The catalog entry describes a video dedicated to rock and punk bands whose lyrics addressed the issues faced by young people in the Valley of Mexico.

In an interview published in 2018 by 1 Minuto de Gloria Zine, Gaytán explained that *Submetropolitanos*—material later incorporated into *La década podrida*—compiled recordings made between 1984 and 1989 at gigs in outlying neighborhoods. In that conversation, he described the project as work carried out from within the punk collectives.

In a conversation with Yaconic, Gaytán provided further details about the scope of the archive. He spoke of recordings of the punk movement made between 1985 and 1992 and highlighted scenes from concerts, daily life, and fanzine production that, from his perspective as an author and custodian, are rarely found in other collections. He also recalled materials that could not be recovered during the digitization processes and others that disappeared before they could be properly preserved.

The fact that *La década podrida* can now be found in an institutional repository also illustrates the journey of these images. Material created and distributed through independent channels can, decades later, become a source for researching youth cultures, music, and metropolitan transformations.

But the archive is not limited to punk. The catalog-as-memory organizes its 236 pieces into seven categories: public art, Generación Transparente, memory and the urban-popular movement, countercultural movements, movements in defense of territory, social and political movements, and indigenous and native peoples.

In his conversation with Yaconic, Gaytán mentioned projects carried out in Querétaro, Oaxaca, Baja California, Chihuahua, the State of Mexico, and Veracruz, as well as Mexico City. He spoke, among other examples, of projects with Hñähñu women in Querétaro, community workshops, documentation of rockabilly culture, and records of urban-popular organizations. This variety helps explain why “the invisible ones” does not refer to a single scene or a single social group.

From VHS to the Challenge of Preserving Audiovisual Memory

Storing a cassette for thirty years is not the same as preserving its contents. Magnetic media age, tapes can deteriorate, and the equipment needed to play certain formats becomes unavailable. In the case of InterNeta, the problem is not abstract: Gaytán told Yaconic that some materials could no longer be digitized due to physical damage to the tapes.

This risk helps explain why organizing the collection became another phase of the project. The introduction to the catalog explains that during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was time to begin organizing the materials and making progress on their systematization. That work later led to the exhibition *Rebelar la memoria* (*Revealing Memory*), held in 2023 at the Querétaro Museum of Contemporary Art, and continued with the cataloging now presented in the book.

The process also has institutional roots. In 2022, the Mexican Institute of Cinematography included *Acervo Audiovisual InterNeta. Memoria de las y los Invisibles*, presented by Pablo Gaytán Santiago, among the ongoing projects authorized as part of its support for the creation and preservation of film archives.

That same year, a Campus article about the project mentioned more than 1,200 hours of video footage and 220 documentaries, preserved in formats such as Betacam, VHS, Video 8, Hi8, and DVD.

The 2026 catalog-report lists a collection of 236 works, of which 44 were selected for the video entries in the book. Gaytán provided Yaconic with the same figure and explained that the works range in length from approximately one to 80 minutes. The 2022 report uses the term “documentaries,” while the 2026 publication refers to “works.” By using different categories, both figures describe the collection in distinct ways and should not automatically be interpreted as a direct contradiction.

Cataloging adds a different layer to the physical preservation of a tape. It allows us to identify what exists, establish relationships between pieces, recover dates and authorship, and reconstruct processes whose material may be scattered across different formats and copies.

InterNeta’s archival dimension also reached a specialized academic forum in 2026. The 5th International Seminar on Research in Archival Science, Memory, and Society included the presentation “InterNeta Audiovisual Collection: Memory of the Invisible,” by Pablo Gaytán, as part of its track dedicated to society and archival communities.

What does *Memoria: Catalog of the Invisible* propose?

The publication allows readers to explore several decades of images without reducing them to a chronology. Its structure begins with “Videographic Memory, 1977–1992”; continues with “Community Video Process, 1993–2007”; devotes a third section to “40 Years of the Rotten Decade”; it then includes the collection catalog and concludes with a gallery of materials from InterNeta.

The 44 selected video entries include cataloging information, synopses, technical details, and images of the works. Gaytán himself showed Yaconic this organizational structure during their conversation and explained that the selection is part of a collection of 236 works produced and preserved by the project.

The book also prompts a discussion of what we mean by “documentary.” In contrast to a history organized primarily around finished films, directors, and film institutions, InterNeta’s journey compels us to examine the conditions under which these images were produced: who they worked with, how long the process took, what events were recorded, and what happened to the films afterward.

This perspective is especially important as the media age. In conversation with Yaconic, Gaytán emphasized that behind the finished works lie many more hours of documentary footage. In some cases, the value of the collection lies precisely in these extensive records, which allow us to recover aspects of an experience that were left out of the final cut.

In this sense, the catalog does not serve as a final point. It transforms part of the archive into a reference tool and highlights the work required to ensure that these images can continue to be identified, preserved, and viewed.

When and where will the InterNeta catalog be presented?

In a conversation with Yaconic, Pablo Gaytán confirmed three presentations scheduled for September 2026. The tour begins in Toluca and continues at two venues in Mexico City:

• Thursday, September 17, 2026: School of Political and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEMéx), Toluca.

• Thursday, September 24, 2026: Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), San Lorenzo Tezonco Campus, Iztapalapa.

• Thursday, September 24, 2026: Macondo Bookstore, on Baja California Street, Roma neighborhood, Mexico City.

The book will be available during the presentations.

Beyond these practical details, the presentations offer the opportunity to revisit a collection of images captured over decades as the documented scenes and processes were unfolding. InterNeta. Memory: Catalog of the Invisible 1990–2026 transforms part of that journey into a tool for accessing the archive and understanding that preserving images is not merely about preventing the loss of a tape—it also involves preserving the information, names, and contexts that allow us to understand them anew.