Re-thinking Wayuu Identity in the Colombian documentary: Girlhood, ‘Self-made’ Subjectivities and Social Recognition

• In Event: Adolescents, Youth and Emerging Practices in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

Colombian director Priscila Padilla’s documentary La eterna noche de las doce lunas (2013) records the traditional period of confinement undertaken by a girl named Pili from a Wayuu community in the Guajira Peninsula upon the start of her menstrual cycle. This
analysis of Eterna noche as a ‘performative’ documentary, both in terms of production style and subject matter, will shed light on the ways that this pre-modern practice can be seen to grant Pili a socio-cultural ‘agency’. First of all, Pili is given the opportunity to mold the potential meanings of the rites to serve her more ‘modern’ goals. The nature of these altered acts are suggestive of the film’s reliance on ‘individualist’ notions of feminism, which have seized upon the figure of the girl as the ideal subject to perform the new flexible, or ‘self-made’, subjectivity that the ‘dislocation, flux and globalization’ of late modern times demands (Harris 2004: 2). Secondly, a close analysis of the inherent tensions in the film’s disparate feminist discourses demonstrates that Pili’s success in re-inserting herself into her community as a ‘woman’ and social ‘agent’ is contingent on her
explicit ‘social recognition’ by other members of her community, despite having been screened off from them. Pili’s participation in these modified rituals represents a ‘knot’ in which Wayuu notions and ‘modern’ Westernised notions of feminism are, not unproblematically, intertwined and yet this becomes a productive site from which to champion Wayuu culture, whilst acknowledging that it is irrevocably modified by the impact of late modernity

Author

• Rachel J Randall