Reconfiguring Precarious Landscapes: the Road Movie in Latin America

• In Event: Marginality, Precariousness, and Exclusion: the Latin American Road Movie

Abstract

Latin American road movies have achieved in the last two decades a high profile at major film festivals, international visibility, and profitable results at the box office. This has generated significant academic attention in the form of essays and conference papers focusing mainly on high profile road movies such as Central do Brasil, Y tu mamá también, and Diarios de motocicleta, to name but a few. The recent volume The Brazilian Road Movie (Brandellero) has provided a most welcome contribution on the rich tradition of road movies in Brazil. Yet, a more comprehensive view from a regional perspective is still lacking. Our presentation fills this gap by exploring the Latin American road movie as a regional phenomenon. We claim that, as Latin Americans were deeply questioning their roots in the midst of the 1990s neoliberal crisis, these travel narratives became useful vehicles for reexamining the ideological grounds of national and regional discourses. If travel writing was crucial for mapping national boundaries during the nineteenth-century nation-building process, the road movie helped to undo and re-chart those boundaries during the neoliberal crisis and into the new millennium. Focusing on three recent films (the Argentine Tan de repente, the Peruvian Máncora, and the Chilean De jueves a domingo), our paper explores how post-1990s road trips have reconfigured racial, class, gender, and sexuality-based representations and have opened the path for a reconsideration of foundational binaries in the region (urban/rural, modern/traditional, citizen/migrant).

Authors

• Jorge Pérez, University of Kansas

• Verónica I Garibotto, University of Kansas