In this article, the author provides some background of Efrain Gutierrez's "story" and its relationship to film historiography. Gutierrez is a self-taught filmmaker from San Antonio, Texas, who wrote, directed, starred in, and distributed the first three U.S. feature films produced by a Chicano: "Please, Don't Bury Me Alive!/Por favor, no me enterrien vivo!" (1976), "Amor chicano es para siempre/Chicano Love Is Forever" (1978), and "Run, Tecato, Run" (1979, "Run, Junkie, Run"). These films had been presumed lost or destroyed since 1980, when the filmmaker himself mysteriously disappeared. However, these films were recovered by the author when Gutierrez met and worked with him years later. The films were eventually brought to the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Among moving image archivists, titles produced outside national film industries and the corporate protection of studios and networks are now identified as "orphan" films, and since the 1990s there has been a call for moving image archives to adopt this work. The author wants to make two points about these "orphan" films entering the archive. First, while he is critical of this process, he thinks that it is necessary and will be productive in ways that everyone cannot predict, and may not even desire. Second, there is also a need to make room for contexts other than the one that informs the academy. In the remainder of this article, the author considers Gutierrez's method, offers a preliminary reading of his first film, "Please, Don't Bury Me Alive!" and ends with some thoughts about the significance of his achievement for Chicano cinema as well as for broader national and transnational film histories. (Contains 1 figure and 8 notes.)