Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2021

In this article, I argue in favour of using political and social theory as a framework for reading Central American and Mexican migration films, using Sin nombre (Fukunaga 2009) and La jaula de oro/The Golden Dream (Quemada-Díez 2013) as case studies. Key ideas of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman and Judith Butler can yield important insights when applied to the readings of migration films. My particular interest here is their conceptualizations of the scale of value applied to human life, and the resulting right to rights, or failure to be granted rights, as this is particularly apposite to the condition of migrants and refugees and to the role of film in creating value. A central argument is that film has a specific role in challenging or endorsing the negative values placed on the lives of migrant/refugees in hegemonic political and media discourses. I claim that cinema has the ability to create Arendtian personae, particularly important as in the political and media discourses around refugees and migrants the embodied experiences of refugee–migrants themselves are frequently absent. La jaula de oro presents a textual and extra-textual call for the right to rights for its non-citizen migrant characters. Yet, film also has the potential to support prevailing fears and stereotypes, and work against Arendt’s concept of the right to rights, and I argue that Sin nombre runs the risk of endorsing this position.

In recent years, several audio-visual productions have portrayed the gender system of Juchitán (Oaxaca, Mexico), focusing in particular on muxes, a third-gender community. Many of these productions use exoticization to expose specific muxe characteristics that are founded on a centuries-long legacy within the Zapotec civilization. Based on queer theory and a close reading of specific scenes, this article examines three documentaries: Muxes:Auténticas, Intrépidas buscadoras de peligro/Muxes: Authentic, Intrepid Seekers of Danger (Islas 2005), Muxes (Olita 2016) and Muxes (Schwarz 2017). This analysis shows how these films represent the process of gendered identity construction of the muxe community, as well as their connections with indigeneity and problematic family interactions.

Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga 2010) is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral and aesthetic complexity that resists the politics of consensus and avoids essentialist views on queer identity, the Catalan resistance to the Francoist state and the treatment of the past as a mere ideological commodity in the contemporary politics of memory in Spain.

Teo Hernández (Ciudad Hidalgo 1939–Paris 1992) began a prolific career as an experimental filmmaker after entering a self-imposed exile in Paris in 1966. With no formal training, he completed dozens of films on the amateur format of Super 8 before his untimely death at the height of the AIDS epidemic in France. Hernández’s cinema cannot be separated from his postcolonial experience as an undocumented immigrant in Europe. Based on his audio-visual and written work, this article examines how the filmmaker elaborated a unique film theory grounded in an auto-ethnographic appropriation of primitivist tropes. Through this queer exilic cinema, Hernández crafted an authorial persona around the figure of a shamanic filmmaker. I take the films Nuestra senõra de París/Our Lady of Paris (Hernández 1981–82) and Pas de ciel/No Sky (Hernández 1987) as a point of departure to examine the construction of a cinematic ritual capable of inducing trance in the body of the spectator and the filmmaker.

This article examines three films by Mexican filmmaker Alfredo Joskowicz (1937–2012) in the context of the emergence of independent Mexican cinema. As a direct product of the 1968 Student Movement, this filmic corpus stood in direct opposition to the industrial, state-subsidized cinema that was perceived as an emissary of national discursive hegemony. My analysis foregrounds the representation of corporeal abjection as one of the main tropes through which these films enacted countercultural insurrection. I also aim to demonstrate how these three films represent shifts in Joskowicz’s ideological perspective, and how they correspond to the State’s intensifying repression and the concomitant radicalization of leftist opposition. I argue that Jokowicz’s initial representation of bodily abjection first stood as the emblem of an authentic dissidence predicated on biopolitical insurrection, and later acquired a negative, necropolitical valence that effectively delimited a great part of independent cinema’s political-ideological horizon.

A number of contemporary Mexican films have moved away from the direct portrayal of graphic violence on-screen, instead engaging with invisible, hard-to-represent aspects of systemic violence. This article brings together Deleuzian affect theory with cinematographic formalism to offer a new methodological approach to violence in cinema that draws from the critic’s own body and gut feelings. Through a case study of Tatiana Huezo’s 2016 non-fiction film Tempestad/Tempest, it suggests that the affective work of the film occurs not in the first moment of viewership, but rather after-the-fact by laying the groundwork for future resonances.

What if thinking about Mexican cinema in concert with the environment had implications beyond representation? This article brings ecocritical methodologies into conversation with industry studies to propose that reading Mexican cinema in tandem with energy has sweeping repercussions for the study of Mexican cinema. It highlights several potential avenues of inquiry that consider Mexican cinema as petrocinema. These include the film industry’s funding, infrastructure, material footprint and inextricability from the ideology of energy surplus as the driver of modernity. This capacious approach to energy and environment as an ontological question and not just a question of cinematic representation argues that cultural production should be historicized within the infrastructure of fossil-fuelled capitalist modernity.