Bordering Adolescence: Latin American Youth in Road Films "La misma luna" and "Sin nombre"

• In Event: Renegotiating Gendered and Racialized (Excluded) Subjectivities in Times of Neoliberal Crises

Abstract

In La misma luna and Sin nombre, two road films concerning illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border, Patricia Riggen and Cary Fukunaga re-appropriate the established characteristics of the Hollywood genre and in doing so revitalize the road film’s objective and reach. The characteristics of escapism and narcissism exhibited in traditional road movies are challenged in these two films by the vulnerability and optimism of their child protagonists forced to navigate the border as necessitated by globalized neoliberal economies. These protagonists are not middle-class youth that cross from the safe space that defines childhood into the unknown, whereby childhood can be seen as a self-enclosed world immune to the outside pressures of neoliberalism and as a holdout to the dynamic development of a youth exposed to vertiginous modernity. Instead, these films present children from Latin American societies whose difficult circumstances compel them to set out on perilous journeys. There couldn’t be more relevant films today than those that delve into the cultural anxieties surrounding large-scale immigration and touch on the contentious issues regarding immigration reform and policies for undocumented minors currently taking place within Hollywood’s home country. As director Walter Salles has commented: “In different parts of the world, people now increasingly travel because they need to and not because they want to. A road movie captures this urgent social-political reality better than many other film genres. It’s more proof that road movies are as necessary as ever to tell us who we are, where we come from and where we’re heading.”

Author

• Laura M Senio Blair, Southwestern University