Migration, Affects and Knowledge in Juan de Recacoechea’s American Visa and Paolo Agazzi’s Mi socio

• In Event: Affective Strategies and Mediatized Markets in Contemporary Latin American Narrative

Abstract

In Latin America, the migrant is often associated with images of crisis, chaos, illegality, and disease that neither favor his/her appreciation as a valuable individual, nor foster social understanding among the different actors involved in such phenomenon. Contemporary Bolivian cinema, however, invests migrants with knowledge instead of representing them as subjects of crisis. Paolo Agazzi’s Mi Socio (1982) and Carlos Valdivia’s American Visa (2005), for instance, not only represent two different moments in Bolivian cinema, but also represent migration as a means to a sudden realization of the self and its social context. In these films, the aesthetization of affects and melodramatic tones leads to and frames the characters’ positive understanding of their own social circumstance in the face of displacement. Hence, I contend that a number of Bolivian films depicting migration can be defined as narratives of anagnorisis in the sense that they represent a critical discovery, the acquisition of a particular knowledge empowering the migrant. Such sudden (re)discovery, then, produces an episteme that expands individual and collective knowledge in regard to internal and external displacements. This investment of knowledge is a representational practice that generates a pluricultural dialogue as a decolonizing option and produces what Walter Mignolo calls ‘epistemic disobedience.’

Author

• Lorena Cuya Gavilano, Lycoming College