Refusing maternity and marginality in Julián Pastor’s "Los pequeños privilegios" (1978)

• In Event: ¿Un cine interrogante?: Film, hegemonic cultural discourse and visions of (making and remaking of) indigeneity

Abstract

Indigenous urban and rurally located characters have long been treated in Mexican film as secondary or tertiary characters or as symbols for nationalistic metaphors, rarely emphasizing gendered voices within those often collective characters. Despite this, a certain number of narrative voices in Mexican film of the 20th century have been imbued with a more specific, indigenous and female subjectivities. One notabe example is Los pequeños privilegios (Julián Pastor, 1978). This paper will expand on previous, preliminary analyses of the film (Ramírez Berg, 1997) and will examine the ways in which women belonging to first nations are portrayed in this full-length fiction film. The context for Los pequeños privilegios will be carefully considered as the late 1970s in Mexico marked the advent of neoliberal democracy as well as during the tail end of indigenismo participativo and a full decade since the students protests and government orchestrated massacre at Tlatelolco. Taking this context into account, we may interrogate what maternity, citizenship and identity look like for indigenous women in this film, thinking about how this film might correspond to the political and historical moment of its production. Furthermore, this paper will examine how Mexican cultural norms (and discourses of mestizaje) relate to indigenous women in these constructed narratives, and to what extent these narratives escape a stereotypical malinchista—and often fatalistic—framing. Likewise, this film shed light on how the protagonists are granted a space in non-indigenous, Mexican society and at what price.

Author

• Julia Brown, University of California - Santa Barbara