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The road to nowhere: deconstructing the bildungsroman in El camino

Wed, May 27, 6:00 to 7:45pm, TBA

Abstract

The arrival of more than 57,000 unaccompanied minors to the United States from Central America over the last year has fueled much debate in contemporary political and cultural circles. However, child migration in Central America is nothing new. In fact, during the last ten years, films depicting the plight of child migrants, as well as more general coming-of-age stories, have been used by filmmakers in the region to critique the larger inequalities at play in global exchange. In the film El camino, by Costa Rican-Chilean director Ishtar Yasin, the journey of the child protagonist—Saslaya—from poverty-stricken Nicaragua to Costa Rica, does not end in a better life, but rather in a renewed cycle of exploitation and marginality. In this way, the film deconstructs the bildungsroman genre—and its Western, bourgeoisie, roots—to critique the neoliberal promise of “free circulation”, as well as its implicit promise of success through individual struggle. The film serves as a potent reminder of the unequal relations of power inherent in migration, but also interrogates the North-South directionality of circulation by positing that for many Nicaraguans, as the writer Sergio Ramírez has stated, the “North” is really south of the border.

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