Affective Archives and Ethics of Care in La Pecera (2023): Healing, Interdependence, and Collective Memory in Contemporary Puerto Rican Cinema

• In Event: Film production in three continents

Abstract

This presentation analyses the 2023 Puerto Rican film La Pecera (dir. Glorimar Marerro) through the dual frameworks of “ethics of care” and Beatriz Llenín-Figueroa’s concept of the “affective archive.” Situating the narrative within the political and ecological trauma of Vieques, the film offers a nuanced portrayal of care not as a private or feminized sentiment, but as a radical, communal praxis essential for survival and resistance. Drawing on care ethics—which privileges relationality, interdependence, and the moral imperative to sustain communal wellbeing—La Pecera foregrounds the ways in which support networks and affective ties counteract systemic neglect and environmental violence. The protagonist’s return to a contaminated homeland becomes a site of trauma-informed care, where personal deterioration is met not with isolation but with shared memory and affective solidarity.
Llenín-Figueroa’s notion of the affective archive enriches this reading by illuminating how the film constructs and recovers intangible, affect-laden histories that lie outside official narratives. Through gesture, silence, and memory, La Pecera curates a counter-archive rooted in the lived experience of colonial and ecological harm. By elevating care work and affective labour—long devalued under patriarchal and colonial epistemologies—the film challenges dominant frameworks of knowledge production and reclaims care as a mode of historical and political agency. This reading thus positions La Pecera as a powerful cinematic intervention that intertwines care and memory, individual and collective grief, making visible what dominant structures have sought to erase.

Author

• Consuelo Martínez-Reyes, Macquarie University