Forty minutes into Walter Salles’s Diarios de motocicleta (2004), the bikers Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and Alberto Granados (Rodrigo de la Serna) bump into a herd of cows while traveling an unpaved Chilean road and wreck their already unreliable motorcycle, which they have ironically named La Poderosa (the mighty one). An editing cut takes viewers to the back of a truck that transports the protagonists and their broken motorcycle to Los Angeles, the nearest town with a repair shop. They share the space with a cow and two indigenous men, a Mapuche father (Juan Maliqueo) and his son (Samuel Cifuentes), who are conversing in Mapudungun. The camera pans to show us Ernesto’s fascination with the pair of indigenous men, the first of a number of indigenous peoples they will encounter during their journey. A cut to a close-up of the cow’s face from Ernesto’s point of view is followed by Ernesto’s attempt to reciprocate the generosity of the locals who are giving them a ride by offering his expert medical opinion: “That cow’s going blind.” The son replies with indifference to Ernesto’s diagnosis and surprises both Ernesto and the viewers by making a nonchalant observation that is nonetheless replete with social critique: “All she’s going to see is shit.” Although seemingly inconsequential in the broader context of the film, this brief scene encapsulates several distinctive features that make Latin American road movies unique: the tense relationship of Latin American countries with modernity as epitomized by the precarious infrastructures and the uneven access to motorized vehicles and other modern technological advances; and the use of nonprofessional actors, shooting on location, and natural lighting as neorealist techniques to showcase such tough realities of the region as persistent poverty, class differences, and marginalization of indigenous populations.
The purpose of this volume is precisely to delve into this uniqueness of Latin American road movies in relation to the configuration of the genre in other latitudes. Our object of study are films made by Latin American directors and produced or coproduced by Latin American countries, whose narrative focuses on a journey across, out of, or into Latin America. The key element is that we consider a road movie not just a film about people driving a vehicle, but one that focuses on a journey—irrespective of the means of transportation used—and, in particular, on the impact that journey has on the travelers. The twelve essays by specialists on Latin American cinema traverse diverse cinematic routes and cover extensive geographical landscapes from a common point of departure: The traveling narrative of the road movie and its focus on crossing borders—physical, metaphorical, theoretical—make the genre ideal for re-examining the ideological grounds of national and regional discourses. Road movies have become a huge phenomenon in Latin America, especially since the 1990s. With a corpus of more than 200 films across the region, Latin American road movies have achieved a high profile in the last two decades at major film festivals, and profitable results at the box office, as exemplified by international blockbusters such as Central do Brasil (Walter Salles, 1998), Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), and Diarios de motocicleta, among many others.
The Latin American Road Movie: Readings and Genealogies
Despite the proliferation of road movies in Latin America, there are no interpretations of this cultural phenomenon from a comprehensive, regional perspective. Most scholarly articles engage in specific readings of one or two films, especially blockbusters such as the above-mentioned Y tu mamá también and Diarios de motocicleta. 1 Those few books dedicated to the road movie genre are either limited to examining the phenomenon within one country or to comparing two similar national contexts. In “On the road” en Argentina, Agata Drabek analyzes Carlos Sorín’s trilogy—Historias mínimas (2002), Bombón, el perro (2004), El camino de San Diego (2006)—to conclude that in that particular country the genre manifests its own distinctive features. The use of nonprofessional actors and the representation of a multicultural yet isolated and melancholic Patagonia allow for a unique variation that is specific to the Argentine tradition. Although several of the articles included in Sara Brandellero’s The Brazilian Road Movie identify the emergence of a new, postnational cinema that goes beyond the need to discuss local identity and to stage the nation in an authentic fashion, the volume—as its title announces—is still restricted to a national corpus. In the same vein, Natália Pinazza’s Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema argues for a perspective that takes into account the “situatedness” of Brazilian and Argentine road movies within a transnational context but relies on a comparative view of the two nations’ local histories. According to Pinazza, the succession of populism, militarism, and neoliberalism in the two countries made possible the advent of road films embracing a global aesthetics (1–7). Although these three books have opened the path for an exploration of the genre in Latin America, they do not provide an overarching, regional view. Indeed, as we will see later, such a regional view challenges some of their basic assumptions, such as the use of nonprofessional actors and the representation of a multicultural landscape as an Argentine exception or the negotiation of a global aesthetics as a unique Brazilian feature.
Furthermore, the construction of a Latin American perspective has been hindered by the prompt association between the road movie and the USA—an almost inevitable association ever since David Laderman claimed that the genre was “a dynamic manifestation of [US] American society” (2). Relying on pioneering critics of the US cinematic tradition such as Laderman, Timothy Corrigan, Steven Cohan, and Ina Rae Hark, Latin Americanists have taken for granted that Latin American road films have adapted US formats. The Mexican Sin dejar huella (María Novaro, 2000) and the Ecuadorian Qué tan lejos (Tania Hermida, 2006) are seen as variations of such iconic US films as Easy Rider (Denis Hopper, 1969), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) (García Sánchez 1–13; Lindsay 86–89). The two rebellious women in Scott’s film are also considered the main source for the configuration of queer and female subjectivities in the Argentine Tan de repente (Diego Lerman, 2002), Cleopatra (Eduardo Mignona, 2003), and El niño pez (Lucía Puenzo, 2009)—a view that, one could further argue, has led to the problematic inclusion of Puenzo’s film within the genre (Blanco and Petrus 325–329; Schiffauer 93–122). 2 Alicia’s desperate journey to San Pedro de Atacama in search of a job in the Chilean Alicia en el país (Esteban Larraín, 2008) and Ignacio’s long quest for the musician who passed on to him a cursed accordion in the Colombian Los viajes del viento (Ciro Guerra, 2009) are perceived as successors to the extravagant journeys of David Lynch’s classics like Lost Highway (1997) (Valenzuela 2). In other words, Latin Americanists seem to endorse Cohan and Hark’s assertion that “the road movie is, like the musical or the western, a Hollywood genre that catches peculiarly [US] American dreams, tensions, and anxieties, even when imported by the motion picture industries of other nations” (2).
Needless to say, a comparison with the US context can certainly help to unveil cinematic techniques, as seen in some of the close readings included in this volume, such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s interpretation of the ideological connotations entailed by Mexican citations of Easy Rider or Carolina Rueda’s examination of the links and differences between Qué tan lejos and US road movies that feature women behind the wheel such as Leaving Normal (Edward Zwick, 1992) and Boys on the Side (Herbert Ross, 1995). However, the widespread assumption that Latin American films are derivative of an original US format fails to notice that the road movie is a hybrid genre whose roots can be traced to other filmic genres and narrative forms. Leslie Dick proposes in Sight and Sound: A-Z of Cinema that, rather than a genre in its own terms, the road movie should be seen as a mixture of the film noir and the western. The traveler’s search for experiences that are unavailable in his or her daily life points to the social critique that is typical of the former and to the sense of adventure that characterizes the latter (22–24).
We can indeed trace back a long history of fictional and nonfictional journeys in Western literature. From Homer’s Odyssey to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Western civilization abounds in narratives of mobility and displacement. Whether those stories are related to exile, pilgrimage, migration, or nomadism, they demonstrate that the voyage is a transhistorical, transnational figure driving the act of narration from its very beginnings. In Latin America, travel narratives have been an integral component of regional culture since precolonial times. Displacement and migration made possible the creation of humans, the emergence of distinct languages, and the establishment of cities in the K’iche’ foundational narrative Popol Vuh. A detailed description of the trajectory from Buenos Aires to Lima guided the literary mapping of Alonso Carrió de la Vandera’s 1773 masterpiece El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. Especially between the mid-1700 and the end of the nineteenth century, travel writing was the main source for the production of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “Eurocentered form of global or planetary consciousness” (4). European scientists and artists like Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Johann Moritz Rugendas affirmed white supremacy while traversing and describing Latin American territories. Moreover, several years before cinema came into existence the narration of journeys across, out of, or into Latin America played a crucial role in the nation-building process. They shaped gender, social, and racial stereotypes, and they were useful in framing national imaginaries as Latin American countries were tracing their physical and geopolitical borders—as seen in canonical narratives still required as school textbooks like Rubén Darío’s Peregrinaciones (1901), José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872–1879), and José Martí’s travel chronicles.
As this long history suggests, the road genre draws from a rich tradition of travel narratives that goes beyond the importation of cultural codes from the USA. Non-filmic narrative manifestations are also part of the “genre memory” (Pérez 12) available to road movie filmmakers. Some of the essays included in this volume further demonstrate that this is the case. In “Recorriendo las Américas,” Gilberto Blasini claims that Latin American road movies incorporate elements of action, comedy, adventure, melodrama, and documentary to provide “a cinematic rendering of Latin America as a pan-national entity.” Going back to traditions, genres, and forms that had been disregarded or demonized in the preceding decades, road films redefine the notion of popularity in such a way that they both question and ...