The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema

Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319972497
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319972503
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin America proposes a cinematic cartography of contemporary Latin American horror films that take up the idea of the American continent as a space of radical otherness, or monstrosity, and use it for political purposes. The book explores how Latin American film directors migrate foreign horror tropes to create cinematographic horror hybrids that reclaim and transform monstrosity as a form of historical rewriting. By emphasizing the specificities of the Latin American experience, this book contributes to broad scholarship on horror cinema, at the same time connecting the horror tradition with contemporary discussions on violence, migration, fear of immigrants, and the rewriting of colonial discourses.

© The Author(s) 2018

Gabriel Eljaiek-RodríguezThe Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97250-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Antipodean Horrors—The Return of Latin American Monsters

Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez¹

(1)

The New School of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, USA

End Abstract

Since its colonial beginnings , the American continent as such was constructed as a place of horror. Starting with Christopher Columbus’s journal entries and letters written to his benefactors, the American continent has been described as the place of the wondrous as well as the monstrous, the diametric opposite (antipodean ) of Europe and everything that originated there. In his entry for 4 November 1492, Columbus affirms that, after a discussion with natives, he “understood that, far away, there were men with one eye and others with dogs’ noses who were cannibals, and that when they captured an enemy , they beheaded him and drank his blood, and cut off his private parts” (138). The description of these horrific creatures and their actions is as important as Columbus’s assertion that he “can understand” what the natives are explaining to him (after less than a month of interaction). This certainty in his interpretative abilities demonstrates the position of power that he constructs for himself, as well as the imaginary that he uses to approach his experiences in the American continent. He considers himself equipped with the necessary skills to understand the “newly discovered” lands, in part because of his beliefs in his own European superiority, in part because of his knowledge. In regard to the latter, Columbus’s readings of Marco Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World and John Mandeville’s The Travels of Sir John Mandeville inform his interactions with the natives he is encountering as well as with the American environment.¹

For Peter Hulme , Columbus’s influences can also be traced to Greco-Roman narratives that, because of the Renaissance, were present in the mentality of the time:

More circumspectly, there is what might be called a discourse of Oriental civilization and a discourse of savagery, both archives of topics and motifs that can be traced back to the classical period […] The locations moved but the descriptions of Amazons, Anthropophagi and Cynocephali remained constant throughout Ctesias, Pliny, Solinus and many others. This discourse was hegemonic in the sense that it provided a popular vocabulary for constituting ‘otherness’ and was not dependent on textual reproduction. (21)

A vocabulary of Otherness is precisely what Columbus is reviving in his writings: everything that he sees or hears necessarily passes through the filter of (t)his medieval mindset and becomes what he thinks it is, as opposed to the reality he has in front of him. In this sense, the Admiral’s incredible powers of communication are nothing more than a set of preconceptions that he took with him when crossing the seas. As asserted by Paolo Vignolo , “the incomprehensible Arawak words return Columbus to the old phantasmagoria of cyclops and men dogs that for centuries have populated the uncertain borders of the world” (155). In this sense, the enemies that the natives describe cannot be other than cyclops and cynocephaly since those are the barbaric races that the classical authorities describe, and that the medieval travelers depicted in their voyages.

Columbus makes his claim of American monstrosity official in the letter he sends to King Ferdinand of Spain in 1493, in which he narrates the results of the first voyage.

Thus I have found no monsters, nor had a report of any, except in an island “Carib ,” which is the second at the coming into the Indies, and which is inhabited by people who are regarded in all the islands as very fierce and who eat human flesh. They have many canoes with which they range through all the islands of India and pillage and take whatever they can. They are no more malformed than are the others, except that they have the custom of wearing their hair long like women, and they use bows and arrows of the same cane stems, with a small piece of wood at end, owing to their lack of iron which they do not possess. (32)

The lack of the specific monsters Columbus and his crew were looking for does not mean that the Spanish were not able to find (create) monsters in the American territories. These indigenous inhabitants of the Carib island, equally or less “malformed” than the rest, have a particularity that makes them different in the eyes of the Europeans: they eat human flesh. In the Caribs the Admiral seems to have found the monsters that are going to define the imaginaries of the continent. The word (and idea) of the cannibal is first named in the journal and later in the letter, marking one of the most salient ways the continent is going to be approached and understood.

From this moment on, the American continent is enunciated as the space of the monstrous, the habitat of the cannibal as stated by scholar Carlos Jáuregui : “Since the first encounters, Europeans reported cannibals all over the place, creating a sort of semantic affinity between cannibalism and America. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the New World was culturally, religiously, and geographically constructed as some sort of Canibalia ” (14, my translation). This Canibalia was “a vast geographic and cultural space marked by the image of the American man-eating monster ” (18, my translation). In a comparable manner, for Mimi Sheller the image of the cannibal is haunting the history of the continent, and specifically of the Caribbean : “Cannibalism, the literal ingestion of one human by another, haunts the foundational moment of European presence in the Caribbean islands, as seen in early visual portrayals of this liminal zone of encounter as a site of human dismemberment and cooking” (143). A foundational fiction of the discourses that Europeans used to describe America (Hulme calls Columbus’s journal “the first fable of European beginnings in America”) as well as of the narratives the continent has used to depict itself, the cannibal informs the ways in which the continent is represented (p. 18).²

As described by Jáuregui , this image takes a very specific form in the European iconography of the continent:

The American cannibal was, strictly speaking, a canibalesa [a female cannibal]: the metonymic corporeity of the New World described by Amerigo Vespucci corresponds to the appetizing and avid, desirable and feared female body that offers itself sexually and which castrates […] These bodies of cannibal women and naked Amazons who by the end of the sixteenth century already represented the continent, were also resistances of the object of colonial desire. (25–26, My translation)

The American canibalesa was widely represented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in engravings and illustrative drawings. In the majority, she appears as a naked indigenous woman, armed with spear, bow, and arrow, and accompanied by animals distinctive of the American fauna (parrots, crocodiles, anteaters). According to Jáuregui , one of the first places where the continent appears represented in this way is in Abraham Ortelius’s The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)—the first modern atlas and one of the most famous of the sixteenth century—in which America is placed in the lowest part of the allegorical portal” (107). In the Prosopographia’s engraving America by Philip Galle (1585–1590) she also bears in her hand the severed head of a man, and in the engraving America published in the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1611), the severed head is at her feet, pierced by an arrow. On the other hand, in the famous drawing America by Jan van der Straet (1600), America itself, nude and cannibalistic, gets up from a hammock to receive a Columbus who, astrolabe and flag in hand, approaches her. Although in this case there are no human fragments around her, the marks of cannibalism become apparent via a group of natives at the back of the drawing, roasting a pair of legs.

The image of the man-eating, naked barbarian permeated the representation of the whole continent and created a set of colonial practices applied to the real, non-cannibalistic inhabitants of the Americas. Their monstrosity was uncontested thanks to the repetition of stories that travelers and conquerors (that were echoing medieval imaginaries) kept narrating, even if it was difficult to render the natives as monstrous. They were still described as “malformed” or “ugly,” but with the increased contact between Europeans and indigenous populations, and the geographical expansion of the empires, it was increasingly difficult to sustain the existence of cynocephali or cyclops. However, the colonizers maintained a discourse of difference and superiority concerning the populations found, even though the “monstrous” tribes were now reduced to peripheral cannibals and indigenous populations were increasingly considered somehow similar to the Europeans—or with the potential to be like them.

Referring to the ferocious cannibal and noble savage dualism, Hulme asserts that it “has such obvious continuities with the classical Mediterranean paradigm that it is tempting to see the whole intricate web of colonial discourse as weaving itself in its own separate space entirely unaffected by any observation of or interchange with native Caribbean cultures” (47). As difficult as it may seem to have sustained such a dramatic fantasy, most of the European explorers, conquerors, scientists, and military who colonized the New World emphatically confronted it with mentalities immigrated from Europe. In these mindsets, the Other is inherently monstrous, not necessarily because of its actions or appearance, but because it does not belong to the same traditions shared by the inhabitants of Europe, including not belonging to the same religion. Following that artificial logic, Europeans were destined to control American lives and resources, deciding who was a friendly monster and who was a monstrous monster , a rendering that frequently resulted in death and enslavement.

After conquest and colonization, the image of a monstrous continent and the cannibal as the tutelary monster of Latin America persisted and has continued to permeate forms of approaching and understanding the continent.³ After multiple transformations, it was the avant-garde movements that finally reworked the image and its uses more radically. As stated by Jáuregui , “a fundamental chapter in the Latin American context is the modernist appropriation of the cannibal around the project that Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) crystallizes in Brazil with his ‘Manifesto antropófago’ (1928) and the Revista de Antropofagia (1928–1929)” (393, my translation). For Brazilian poet Oswaldo de Andrade Antropofagia is not an imposed term to ostracize and exclude the American Other, but a shared tradition, a heritage that unites the continent. As he s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Antipodean Horrors—The Return of Latin American Monsters
• 2. Caribbean Monsters: Gothic Migrants in the “Hot-Lands”
• 3. The Mexican Supernatural: Migration in Historical Reverse
• 4. Yūrei in the Andes: National Vengeance Through Hybridized Ghosts
• 5. Argentina “Rojo Sangre”: Dictatorships Through the Lens of a Gore Film Director
• 6. Contact Zones and Their New Monstrosities
• Back Matter