Eva Karene Romero (Auth.) - Film and Democracy in Paraguay-Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
Eva Karene Romero (Auth.) - Film and Democracy in Paraguay-Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
DEMOCRACY IN
PARAGUAY
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Introduction 1
2
Hamaca paraguaya (2006): The Campesino and
Circular Time 27
3
Frankfurt (2008): Documentary, Fútbol and
the Campesino Icon in Paraguay 55
Bibliography 157
Index 165
xi
List of Figures
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Statement of Aims
This long historical isolation (geographical, cultural and political) has meant
that Paraguay has been largely neglected by historians, journalists and travel
writers, leading to a dearth of serious writing on its history, politics, society
INTRODUCTION 5
Transition
Transition structures Film and Democracy in Paraguay. Paraguay’s transi-
tion of power from dictatorship to democracy occurs in tandem with a cul-
tural turn from the written language of the elites toward visual language
6 E.K. ROMERO
initiated a wave of reports that were to become the raw material with
which to fight for a more equal distribution of wealth and power.
One of the ways in which the young visual artists of Paraguay have been
seen as contributing to this “good fight” in the service of the universal
ideals of freedom and equality involves transitioning the language of the
Paraguayan patrimony from the written word to the visual symbol. It has
been thought that literary dominance over the patrimony contributed to
the exclusion of “the people”—or the popular/subaltern sectors of soci-
ety—by the elites, especially in populations like Paraguay’s, with high rates
of illiteracy. The turn to the visual promised to open access to memory
and national identity beyond the symbolic use of the few.11 The priority
of new directors became the substitution of the visual signs the elite had
traditionally put into circulation with symbols that were recognizable to
the subaltern classes—specifically, campesinos and later, the urban poor.
Guaraní (and to a lesser extent, Jopará)12 came to replace Spanish as the
language of Paraguayan film in an effort to invert the traditional order of
linguistic power, despite the difficulty that this posited to most directors;
members themselves of the urban elite with limited fluency in the Guaraní
language.13
All this said, bringing the rural and urban poor into their sphere of
influence is a priority, not only for the sake of such lofty goals as equality,
but also for the sake of the counter-elite’s own chances at a piece of the
new pie. One of the primary characteristics of being a campesino in twenty-
first century Paraguay is that while campesino poverty and victimization
are part of the justification for democratic reforms, campesinos are simulta-
neously considered a threat to the transparency project. As Hetherington
so succinctly puts it, “transparency and democracy are supposed to cure
rural poverty, but what most stands in the way of this cure are the rural
poor themselves, whose ways of being and thinking are seen by many
reformers as inherently undemocratic.”14 If Paraguay were to back-slip
into another authoritarian regime, the new democrats could once again
find themselves excluded from power. The films I analyze in this book
reveal profound anxieties around the position of the underclasses as vot-
ing masses whose illiteracy, irrationality, and weakness for authoritarian,
populist leaders (such as Alfredo Stroessner or Lino Oviedo) make them
a threat to democracy. The events of Marzo paraguayo, for example, are
seen as evidence of how certain segments can be manipulated into sup-
porting authoritarian hopefuls.15
8 E.K. ROMERO
authentic than the cinema of its larger neighbors. I always encourage some
exploration beyond this thesis; I see it as impossible for an approach that
privileges national authenticity to be operationalized in favor of equity and
redistribution. It is worthwhile to recall Vitali and Willemen’s argument
that
Guarani is an oral language (even today very few people write in Guarani)
and this fact, combined with low levels of literacy and education, has resulted
in a lack of written historical testimonies and memoirs “from below” in
comparison with many other Latin American countries.21
12 E.K. ROMERO
Nearly isolated from contacts with the outside world, the landlocked nation
changed and developed under the leadership of Dr. Francia to emerge as the
most egalitarian society yet known in the Western Hemisphere … Paraguay
offered a better life to more of its citizens than any of the other American
Nations.27
no se podía decir nada pero se comía biens,” referring to the Stronato (the
Stroessner dictatorship). His statement could be considered part of the
“éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse, a popular attitude of nostalgia for
the Stronato. The sentiment is clear: democracy may have brought new free-
doms to Paraguay, but at a cost that was not agreed upon democratically:
a worse economic situation, an increase in crime and arguably, an overall
lower standard of living for working class Paraguayans. There is not unani-
mous agreement in Paraguay that dictatorship is a bad thing, as evidenced
by the celebration of “mi general” Alfredo Stroessner visible on social media
every third of November, Stroessner’s birthday (aka fecha feliz.)
Returning to the nineteenth century, Francia was immediately followed
by populist caudillos Antonio Carlos López and Francisco Solano López
(1863–70), father and son whose dynasty was only ended by the Triple
Alliance War; a war financed in part by British loans, in which Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay joined forces against Paraguay.29 The period after
the Triple Alliance War and before the Stroessner regime, 1870–1954,
is seen as a time of devastation and chaos in which Paraguay was ruled
by 44 different men, 24 of whom were forced from office. The violence
and instability related to the struggle between political parties—specifi-
cally, the colorados and the liberales—are the outstanding qualifiers of
the period: a period seen as a limbo, a chaos, an in-between moment; a
moment that could only be ended by the beginning of a new dictatorship.
The histories of the foundational Francia dictatorship and the Stroessner
regime are written similarly. From a working class perspective, dictatorship
is synonymous with censorship and control, but also with stability and
greater egalitarianism. From an elite perspective, dictatorship is synony-
mous with terror, suppression, and obstacles to the free accumulation of
wealth, particularly through international trade—unless, of course, one
was a personal friend of Stroessner’s.
The 35-year Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989) concluded with
Andrés Rodriguez’s coup d’état of 1989; however, the process of apertura
social (socio-cultural and artistic change in public discourse) was slow to
take hold. From teachers to bricklayers, many speculate that this change is
related to the fact that every president elected after the coup had close ties
to the Stronato until Nicanor Duarte’s election in 2003. Unfortunately,
most concur that Duarte’s presidency was a monumental disappointment:
more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past. When left-leaning
Fernando Lugo was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for
the first time since 1948, (61 years), a non-member of the Colorado party
INTRODUCTION 15
had risen to power. Lugo initially represented a possibility for change and
a radical departure from the profile of past presidential figures.30 He iden-
tified with the working class not as a native of Asunción, but rather, as a
native of rural Encarnación. As an ex-Catholic priest, he had a record of
supporting the liberation theology movement and his professed politics
were decidedly socialist. His popularity, however, started to plummet after
various paternity scandals. In June 2012, a violent land dispute took place
in Curuguaty, resulting in his impeachment. Seventeen people were killed
in gun battles between the police and landless farmers (or hired guns. At
the time of this writing, four years later, the case is still unresolved).31 The
police had been sent to evict about 150 farmers from the land, a forest
reserve owned by Blas Riquelme, a politician opposed to Lugo. Advocates
for the campesinos sin tierra argued that the land was wrongfully acquired
from the state by Riquelme during the Stroessner dictatorship and should
have been part of a land reform program. Lugo won the presidential elec-
tion in 2008 in part on a promise of agrarian reform that would benefit
87,000 Paraguayan farm families, although this was never delivered.32 In
the media coverage that immediately followed the gun battle and ensuing
impeachment, the campesino figure was depicted in ways that ran the gam-
bit from the most disenfranchised victim of the state to the most violent
and lawless of criminals.
The history of dictatorship in Paraguay has been followed by a period
that can be qualified as precarious for democracy, at least. Lugo was demo-
cratically elected and his impeachment was constitutional, but certainly
one must consider how strong a democracy can be when a democrati-
cally elected president can be legally impeached in less than 48 hours.
Dictatorship and its anti-democratic legacy have created a counterproduc-
tive environment for certain types of cultural production. As producer/
director Augusto Netto Sisa explains about the Stronato:
ficult given the scarcity and expense of the technology that was needed to
produce film. The few cine-clubs established during the sixties and seven-
ties were squelched in the late 1970s and 1980s as “subversive.” The only
completely Paraguayan large-scale production (with a $600,000 USD
budget) to come out of the period was Cerro Corá (1978), a film financed
by the state and widely regarded as political propaganda created to extend
a fascist version of Paraguay’s history as promoted by the Strossner regime.
As director Pablo Lamar explains, the Stronato’s control of cultural pro-
duction produced a general attitude of irrelevancy toward artists in gen-
eral: “El artista no está visto como una persona importante para la sociedad
… Es una sociedad muy práctica y funcional la nuestra. El artista sirve para
decorar la casa solamente.”34 The boomcito of Paraguayan cinema and its
transnational visibility parallels the political movement away from the old
regime. Consider, for example, that Nicanor Duarte was the first president
(2003–2008) to be elected since the coup d’état who did not have close
ties to the Stroessner regime. In 2006, the feature-length fiction Hamaca
paraguaya was screened at the Cannes film festival among others, win-
ning multiple awards and becoming a pivotal antes y después point for
Paraguayan film. Ramiro Gómez’s pioneering documentaries, Tierra roja
(2006) and Frankfurt (2008) won awards at various international film
festivals during the Duarte presidency. Marcelo Martinessi’s documen-
tary Los paraguayos, produced for Brazilian oil company Petrobras as part
of their Os Latino-Americanos series, was also released in 2006. During
Lugo’s presidency the first (and to date, only) Paraguayan film to take on
the Strossner regime in any manner made its debut. The documentary
108/Cuchillo de palo, directed by Renate Costa, tells the story of Renate’s
uncle’s mysterious death and describes the state’s organized persecution
of homosexuals best exemplified by the “Lista de los 108:” the regime’s
gay “blacklist.” Cuchillo competed at the Berlinale Film Festival of Berlin
among other festivals, and was screened in a mainstream Paraguayan the-
ater, Cine del Sol, for a record four weeks in 2010: the longest time a
national film had screened continuously at this Cineplex.35
Chapters
Thus far I have described the general character of this study; including
its disciplinary rationale, theoretical implications, political claims, and
major assumptions. The primary aim of this book is to explore cinema
in Paraguay and its focus on the representation of subaltern classes, fur-
INTRODUCTION 17
Guaraní. Frankfurt follows several rural families during the 2006 FIFA
World Cup. These campesinos go about their days as they prepare and
eat meals, harvest crops, watch and/or listen to World Cup games on
television, and play fútbol on their own community teams. The difference
between Frankfurt and many other narrative, documentary, and short
films produced in Paraguay from the same period is that the paraguayidad,
which seems to pre-date capitalism in other films, is visually linked to neo-
liberal economics in Frankfurt. Instead of representing an almost timeless
way of being and living, Frankfurt represents subjects through whom the
interwoven discursive threads of rural life, nacionalismo futbolero, religi-
osity, Paraguay’s location in the global neoliberal world market and the
division of Paraguayan classes are explored. Neoliberalism is congruent
with an ideological heritage that sees rural poverty and brownness as not
only its own problem, but as the country’s burden. Ultimately, Frankfurt
provides the viewer with an ambiguous reading of the politically-charged
campesino figure. By producing visual contrasts between the urban, rural,
wealthy and poor, Frankfurt draws attention to a transnational and
national uneven distribution of wealth. Through images of daily rural life
and sport, Frankfurt suggests ways in which the campesino makes his/her
precarious existence more livable. At the same time, Frankfurt intertwines
the market, the church, and the state in a way that demands reflection on
their roles in a larger production of systemic violence. Through relational
temporalities, the nineteenth-century history of war between Paraguay and
its neighbors haunts the world order in Frankfurt, signaling the potential
interchangeability of historic and contemporary binds. By the end of the
documentary, the spectator may understand nacionalismo futbolero and
countryside religiosity as the ultimate expressions of passionate detach-
ment from failed politics; as distraction where political action should be; or
at worst, as fragmentary, vestigial obstacles stubbornly blocking national
modernization.
Chapter 4, “Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009) and Noche adentro
(2010),” analyzes two powerful short films, produced at nearly the same
time, that both feature rape narratives: Karai norte (2009) directed by
Marcelo Martinessi and Noche adentro (2010) directed by Pablo Lamar.
I analyze these short films as particular allegories about the Paraguayan
nation while theorizing the rape narrative’s relationship to the nation
within the specific context of (1) filmic representation and (2) some of
Paraguay’s main historical narratives involving rape and more broadly,
female sexuality. Situated within a long tradition of usage of the rape trope
INTRODUCTION 19
to comment on political power (in art and political rhetoric), these films
deploy the rape trope framed in conjunction with other crimes—specifi-
cally, murder and theft—and the ambiguous position of the spectator as
witness. In terms of the usage of the rape trope in Paraguayan national
history, I explore the accounts of two specific events: the moment of la
conquista (and its ensuing mestizaje myth) and the Triple Alliance War
(1864–1870), concluding that within their filmic and national contexts,
Karai and Noche both present urgent challenges to the political status quo
while recalling historical feminist struggles whose legacy is still active in
Paraguay’s contemporary legal and social environment. Both films present
these challenges while walking the line between representing sexual vio-
lence without “showing too much,” and using the rape trope as a violent
spectacle that seduces and excites.
Telling the story of a bride who is raped and murdered by her groom
on their wedding night, Noche uses a rape allegory to explore the rela-
tion of the Paraguayan state to the Paraguayan people, making invisible,
systemic political violence graphically visible and eliciting a powerful, vis-
ceral response. In Noche’s “State-on-pueblo” heterosexual violation and
homicide, Paraguay’s pueblo is the bride and the State is the groom (and
perhaps the complicit best men.) In evoking the wedding night and the
assumption of consent, the allegorical reading of Noche echoes the neo-
liberal discourse of personal responsibility and true economic liberalism
which requires consent that is given voluntarily. Noche demonstrates that
because of this relationship of legal consent, the Paraguayan State has been
able to exploit, oppress or “rape” the Paraguayan people without facing
consequences, in a violation that has been as normalized as heterosexual
sex on a wedding night. Karai similarly features a female protagonist (but
in this case, an elderly woman) who is the victim of a grave injustice.
Specifically, theft and an unlikely (and therefore all the more distasteful)
rape takes place. In Karai, however, who exactly perpetrated the rape is
unclear, complicating allegorical readings. The hero of the story is also an
ambiguous character with a shadowy background who becomes the hero
through homicidal revenge on the rapist/thief. When likened to the State,
the man from the north is most representative of the mano dura politics of
past dictatorships: an authoritarian figure to whom the law does not apply,
yet who dispenses rigid, subjective, violent “justice” upon the people who
threaten the order.
Chapter 5, “Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de palo (2010)
and Semana capital (2010)” analyzes 108/Cuchillo de palo, a Spanish doc-
20 E.K. ROMERO
problems. While the hope that this shift represents a move toward greater
civic engagement, participation, and organization for the Paraguayan pub-
lic, lobbying for the child can also easily placate the neoliberal right, as the
child figure is completely congruous with the heteronormative life narra-
tive to which conservative regimes rigidly cling. Calle Última and 7 cajas
back away from the left in this manner, but more troublesome is how, in
certain instances, these films circumvent critiques of the state by repre-
senting street kids less as a symptom of structural inequality, and more as
a problem in and of themselves. When street kids are presented as having
a choice between school and crime, they run dangerously close to being
emplotted as the only ones to blame for having “chosen poorly.”
Notes
1. See Damián Cabrera, “Guarani in Film” for a more in-depth study
of Guaraní language politics and their relationship to Paraguayan
film.
2. Perhaps the most interesting filmic moment acknowledging the
divide between filmmakers in Paraguay and the groups they domi-
nantly represent is present in La Chiperita (Hugo Cataldo 2015).
The film’s characters are Guaraní speakers who work at and around
highway toll booths in the countryside. Anonymous travelers from
the city passing through are played via a stream of cameos that
constitutes a veritable little who’s who of the film industry. The
divide between the travelers and the film’s main characters is
marked linguistically (Spanish vs. Guaraní), by those serving vs.
those served, by those in cars vs. those on foot and to a lesser
degree, by differences in skin color and apparel. A moment that is
pivotal to the film involves an interaction between these two
groups, when La Chiperita (Virgilia) is vending to a passenger who
hands her his garbage to throw away as the driver pulls away quickly
after making a rude, underhanded comment about her weight.
The greasy food garbage is spilled on Virgilia’s uniform, which
becomes important to the storyline as replacing the shirt repre-
sents a point of contention due to the cost.
3. See Tamara Falicov and Jeffrey Middents, “Small cinemas.”
4. In Magical Reels, John King dedicates two pages to Paraguayan
cinema, starting the section off with “…Paraguay has not, until
now, been able to sustain a national film culture” (100). In 2003,
INTRODUCTION 23
and his puppeteer, Lino César Oviedo, were responsible for this
assassination. (Oviedo had previously been incarcerated for
attempting a failed coup d’état and was freed by Cubas Grau once
the latter won the presidency.) Crowds protested in the streets over
the course of several days, demanding the end of the Cubas Grau/
Oviedo government immediately. Protesters were fired at by snip-
ers located on downtown rooftops, causing deaths and injuries.
The end result, however, was the creation of enough pressure to
result in Cubas Grau’s resignation. It is important to note that the
violence of this event was not limited to exchanges between pro-
testers and sharpshooters. At the same time, Federación Nacional
Campesina del Paraguay had organized a manifestation with the
purpose of lobbying for their own interests not related to the polit-
ical assassination. This group of campesinos was purportedly mobi-
lized by Cubas Grau and Oviedo, and instructed to attack the
protesters.
In light of the events of Marzo paraguayo, many ask if Federación
Nacional Campesina del Paraguay was manipulated as much as
some accounts would have us believe, or whether their actions
were completely congruous with the defense of a political model
(authoritarian military dictatorship) under which the rural and
working-class standard of living was better. One must also ask how
a democratic Paraguayan national project can go on if the chasm
between the urban elite and the campesino poor is not bridged
somehow, at least rhetorically.
16. Acosta, Thresholds, 6.
17. Vitali and Willemen, Theorising, 2.
18. Ibid., 15.
19. See for example Tamara Falicov, “Migrating from south to north:
The role of film festivals in funding and shaping Global South film
and video,” in Greg Elmer et. al. (eds), Locating Migrating Media,
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. pp. 3–21. Patricia White,
Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary
Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Natasa
Ď urovičová, and Kathleen E. Newman. World Cinemas,
Transnational Perspectives. (New York: Routledge, 2010); Miriam
Ross, “The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and
Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund,” Screen 52, no. 2 (2011):
261–267; Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,
INTRODUCTION 25
31. More up-to-date information and continued advocacy for the vic-
tims of the Curuguaty shooting can be found at www.quepasoen-
curuguaty.org.py, a website maintained by an alliance that calls
itself cojointly Plataforma de Organizaciones Sociales por la
Democracia.
32. bigstory.ap.org/article/paraguay-17-killed-violent-land-dispute.
33. Personal interview with Eva Karene Romero, July 2010.
34. Personal interview with Eva Karene Romero, August 2010.
35. A very detailed, in-depth history of the struggle of emergence of
the Paraguayan film industry can be found in Catherine Leen,
“The Silenced Screen.”
36. UNICEF, Paraguay, 11.
CHAPTER 2
June 2012, Curuguaty, Paraguay: a violent land dispute takes place result-
ing in the impeachment of President Fernando Lugo. Seventeen people
are killed in gun battles between the police and landless farmers (or hired
guns. At the time of this writing there is insufficient evidence to deter-
mine who, exactly, started the shooting). The police had been sent to
evict about 150 farmers from the land, a forest reserve owned by Blas
Riquelme, a politician opposed to then President Lugo. Advocates for
the campesinos sin tierra argued that the land was wrongfully acquired
from the state by Riquelme during the Stroessner dictatorship and should
have been part of a land reform program. Lugo won the presidential elec-
tion in 2008 in part on a promise of agrarian reform that would benefit
87,000 Paraguayan farm families, although this was never delivered.1 In
the media coverage that followed the gun battle and ensuing impeach-
ment, the campesino figure was depicted in ways that ran the gambit from
the most disenfranchised victim of the state to the most violent and lawless
of criminals. Since then, more Paraguayan peasant leaders have been assas-
sinated: Sixto Pérez was killed on September 1, 2012; Vega Vidal on Dec.
2, 2012 and Benjamín “Toto” Lezcano on February 19, 2013.
These events are examples of how politically charged the campesino fig-
ure has been and is in Paraguay today. Paraguayan film emerging in the last
fight “external and internal colonialism” when it rejects “the same gen-
eral characteristics of the superstructure.”4 In “For an Imperfect Cinema”
Julio García Espinosa describes imperfect cinema as a “cinema of denun-
ciation” and a potential weapon in the struggle against imperialism.5 He
states that “the only thing imperfect cinema is interested in is how an
artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to
overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’ elite audience which up to now has
conditioned the form of your work?”6
In light of the aforementioned manifestos, Hamaca’s long takes and
slower tempo can be read as an attempt at harnessing the potential of
slowness to disrupt a narrative economy that is congruent with capital-
ism. Hamaca begins with a dark space that is slowly lit to reveal a thick
forest and a small clearing covered by leaves. It is dawn. The sounds of
birds chirping, a rooster crowing, and a dog barking can be heard in the
distance. Thunder rolls more faintly in the distance, also. The elderly cou-
ple—Cándida and Ramón—are barely perceptible at first. They enter the
frame as if coming onto a stage.7 They seem to be about twenty to thirty
feet from the camera in a long shot (Fig. 2.1). It is impossible to make
out their faces with the distance and the dark. At first the couple bickers
about where to hang the hammock, whether it will rain, whether or not
to give water to the barking dog, etc., but conversation promptly turns to
the topic of their son, and how he might be, how they miss him and want
him to come home from the war.8 Ramón complains that the war is good
for nothing. They drink tereré.9 They talk about how their crops will not
last much longer in the drought. It is dark and cloudy, it seems it might
rain, but it does not. In fact, it is completely still. The audience may imag-
ine that these types of conversations have been going on for a long time
when Ramón says “¿Cómo estará nuestro hijo? Yo le extraño. Quiero que
venga,” and Cándida replies saying, “Todos los días hablás de la guerra.
No querés hablar de otra cosa.” Indeed, for most of the film there is little
other action besides these circular conversations about the war, their son,
the rain that never comes, where to hang the hammock, and what to do,
if anything, about their son’s barking dog.
The fact that the elderly couple is filmed doing relatively little, coupled
with audiovisual repetition (in their conversations and in their visual rep-
resentation), produces a slow tempo overall, yet it also has the effect of
representing the possibility of two uneven temporalities simultaneously
in a way that resonates with the Paraguayan experience.10 On one hand,
as a medium, film is by definition a forward thrust—a march of frames
imitating the arrow of time, progressing, one frame upon the other. On
the other hand, the repeated shots coupled with the repetitive, circular
conversation that continually returns to the same topics and words cre-
ate a sense of time that stands still. While in the couple’s world they do
relatively little, there is evidence that in another, larger world, impor-
tant things are happening. This evidence, however, comes to them like a
haunting, an abstraction, a de-materialized communication, clairvoyance,
or a premonition.
Within the first scene it is possible that the spectator may have noticed
that during the couple’s “conversations” neither character’s mouth is
moving. The spectator may be unsure if the protagonists are in fact com-
municating non-verbally, if these are interior dialogues, or if these are the
conversations they have had or would be having. In her book Experimental
Latin American Cinema, Cynthia Thompkins also dedicates a chapter to
exploring this and other formal subversions of a single version of events:
“Life is and is not: Paz Encina’s Hamaca paraguaya.” Whatever the view-
er’s speculations, it is clear that this is not a traditional formal choice. The
entire rest of the film continues this way: the audience never sees a mouth
pronounce a word. Similarly, when the couple’s son, Máximo, “comes to”
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 31
Ramón and then Cándida to say goodbye as he goes off to war, his voice
is audible but his body remains invisible. Likewise, when a soldier comes
to Cándida to inform her of Máximo’s death at war, this messenger is
never visibilized. The spectator only sees Cándida sitting, nearly motion-
less, while her voice and the messenger’s voice go back and forth in a dia-
logue (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). Similarly, when Ramón takes Máximo’s dog to
the veterinarian, who informs Ramón that the war has ended, we never see
this veterinarian nor do see Ramón interact with him. The negativities of
Hamaca are what make the film truly disruptive; the lack of action result-
ing in a slowness (a slowness which is also expressed in the rare instance
that Cándida’s or Ramón’s body is filmed in motion11), the “unspoken”
quality of all the dialogue and the invisibility of certain characters create
a series of reversals of what constitutes mainstream cinematic language.
For many viewers, Hamaca is a painstakingly slow film. However, when
I sat down to write a description of the film for my own use, I had difficulty
deciding which details to include and which to leave out, which made me
conscious of the fact that Hamaca is not necessarily a film in which little
happens, as I had initially thought. Rather, it is a film that focuses on what
Karl Schoonover refers to as “quotidian microevents.” The very question
of what events and details to include in a film is challenged by Hamaca,
challenging, in this sense, how value is assigned though our senses of scale,
what we do and what happens in our lives.
The time of capitalism is produced, measured, and controlled by and
through productivity and labor. As Karl Schoonover explains in his arti-
cle on slow film “Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the
Political Spectator, and the Queer,” a film’s lack of action has the poten-
tial to create a space for ambiguity by producing an actor/spectator labor
reversal. Schoonover refers to André Bazin’s conceptualization regard-
ing the slowness and the “living duration” (durée) of the shot. Bazin
postulates that the longer the shot, the greater the effort the spectator
must exert, resulting in a more active spectatorship. Whereas capital-
driven film production creates action/labor for the audience to consume
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 33
without struggle, the slow film does less of the labor for the audience,
requiring the viewer to actively focus and make sense of the non-action
(or as in the case of Hamaca, the unspoken speech and the micro-action).
This makes watching into work.12 The slow film is resistant to capitalist
production of action, and in this sense one could call it “unproductive.”
Schoonover refers to Lee Edelman to argue that this slowing/diminish-
ing of film action could point us toward a queer materialism of slowness.
Edelman describes dominant conceptualizations of linear temporality,
including reproductive futurism, as heteronormative political rhetorical
devices to which queerness presents a threat in that it names an outside to
these “discourses of the common good” that present themselves as self-
evident. For example, Edelman describes the Child who is summoned in
political rhetoric as the hope for the future. Any argument that under-
mines this Child is unthinkable, being that under the logic of reproduc-
tive futurism, any such alternative equals a movement against hope and
the future. Edelman describes reproductive futurism as that which would
“…impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving
in the process the absolute privilege of heternormativity by rendering
unthinkable, by casting outside the public domain, the possibility of a
queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations.”13
Edelman presents queerness as a refusal of this temporal order and inves-
tigates its potential to make visible the tyranny of time and reproduction
as social structures. Just as time represents the inescapable march of one
moment progressing upon the next, the heteronormative life narrative
represents one acceptable series of events, including heterosexual cou-
pling, marriage under the law and procreation. Presented with Edelman’s
framing, I believe that in the case of Hamaca, Schoonover’s metaphor
regarding the “unproductive” nature of slow film could be extended to
encompass a resistant, “non-reproductive” element as well, given that
Hamaca’s couple’s only offspring, Máximo, is killed and is furthermore
never visibilized. The fact that the couple is too elderly to be considered
of reproductive age also queers the story in the way it forces a rethink-
ing of the values of capitalist notions of temporality and productivity/
reproduction.
Returning to the formal element of Hamaca’s unspoken speech, what
are the implications of the fact that no speaker ever moves their mouth in
this film? This question recalls Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic work
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that the Other as Subject is
34 E.K. ROMERO
As a particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that takes
both the value and the burden of failure upon itself, queer theory, as I con-
strue it, marks the “other” side of politics: the “side” where narrative realiza-
tion and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 35
turn against themselves; the “side” outside all political sides, committed as
they are, on every side, to futurism’s unquestioned good.14
Spivak and Edelman both seek to point out the limitations of the regis-
ter of the speaking subject, always bound by the order of the law. When
Hamaca makes the point of never allowing its characters to speak in the
way spectators would expect, it is queering a traditional form insomuch as
it draws attention to the innate failure of storytelling: it creates a way of
telling a story that also tells the story of storytelling’s failure.
The topic of speech/non-speech is connected to the issue of pres-
ence/absence around which Hamaca is formally constructed. Máximo
is perhaps the most subaltern of the three protagonists, being the one
who is ultimately violently sacrificed for the nation (shot at war). He is
also the main character whose body is never present. By making Máximo
invisible, Hamaca responds to violence against his body with a symbolic
language of anti-corporeal gestures. As Megan Lorraine Debin argues
in reference to Mexican performance artists who respond to violence
in their work, “The trace of the absent body is where the trauma of
physical violence is rendered most visible”15 (2). Working with Peggy
Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Debin builds upon
Phelan’s assertion that “visibility is a trap” because it “summons sur-
veillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, and the colo-
nialist/imperialist appetite for possession”16 (65). By keeping Máximo
invisible, through the power of the trace, Hamaca is able to highlight
the violence to which he (and by allegorical extension, the Paraguayan
people) has been subject in a less corruptible way. Also, if we consider
Schoonover’s conception of the distribution of labor between offscreen
and onscreen bodies, making Máximo invisible exacts the most labor
from the spectator. If “the art film … exposes that genre’s insistent dis-
articulation of the body onscreen from the body offscreen: a belabored
spectator mirrors in reverse the nonbelabored body of the character
onscreen.”17 Schoonover also explores how in Italian Neorealism, the
neorealist body does not require a performance; its body is its per-
formance (i.e. scars, gauntness from famine).18 It follows, then, that
Hamaca’s actors do less acting and more being: Ramón’s wrinkles and
Cándida’s white hair mark their bodies with the passage of time while
their stories highlight a state of being caught in a temporal whirlpool
(Figs. 2.4 and 2.5).
36 E.K. ROMERO
[P]eople who waste too easily and those vagabonds who society treats as
waste, and who, like refuse, are thrown to the side of the road. The art film’s
40 E.K. ROMERO
Indeed, it is people like Máximo whom the Paraguayan state have deemed
of low enough value to classify as sacrificeable. Ironically, perhaps, in
emphasizing his invisibility, Hamaca is able to make his discarded life vis-
ible. Máximo is such a mutant, such a wastrel, that the state eclipses him
completely. Hamaca shows us that.
Returning to Edelman’s conceptualization of the Child and its rela-
tion to the concepts of “future” and “hope,” could we consider the fact
that Hamaca kills the Child (Máximo) and hope for a future as some-
thing more than deterministic or pessimistic? If as Edelman suggests, “[t]
he Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics,
the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,”25 then kill-
ing the Child functions in much the same way that Phelan would have
us understand invibilizing the Child: it removes the locus that otherwise
makes the film’s discourse more vulnerable to co-optations of surveillance,
the law, fetishism, and the colonialist/imperialist appetite for possession.
Without the figure of the Child and without the future, no politics can
emerge in defense of the social order that exists to preserve such a univer-
salized subject as the fantasmatic Child, and therefore a notional freedom
cannot be elevated over the actuality of freedom itself. By refusing the
insistence of hope, Hamaca rejects “fidelity to a futurism that’s always
purchased at our expense” and “might rather, figuratively, cast [a] vote
for ‘none of the above,’ for the primacy of a constant no in response to
the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law’s foundational act,
its self-constituting negation.”26 By featuring a murdered Child, Hamaca
engages in a denouncement that can be easily read, yet by commenting on
the fantasmatic nature of the Child through invisibility and absence/loss,
Hamaca creates enough ambiguity and disruption to withhold the Child
from a facile entrenchment within the law of the Symbolic.
competition, are English and French. What does it mean that Guaraní is
the dominant language for Paraguayan film, but it can only be properly
employed through translation? What does it mean that Paraguayan film
exalts the Guaraní language, but Guaraní monolinguals are some of the
most at-risk individuals in Paraguay today?
Although Renato Rosaldo describes the project of Hybrid Cultures as
one that is oppositional to a doctrine of evolutionism that would imply that
“social formations at any single point in time can be ordered chronologi-
cally from ancient to modern in a way that corresponds to a parallel moral
ordering from inferior to superior,”31 Joshua Lund makes a solid argu-
ment for how Canclini succumbs to exactly this narrative. In The Impure
Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity, Lund essentially argues that
hybridity, as Canclini defines it, represents a failure in logic as it celebrates
“genre mixing,” which can only make sense under the presumption that
genres (including races) were somehow “pure” to begin with. Lund
describes this pitfall as a haunting by a “Eurocentrically determined logic
of race.”32 Lund also problematizes Canclini’s concept of “multitemporal
heterogeneity” by pointing out the ways in which temporal marks and
race are interrelated.33 Although Canclini presents hybridity as a possibil-
ity for interrogating binarism, Lund sees Canclini’s move as a reification:
“[T]he binaristic choice between hybrid (mixed) or binary (pure/impure)
presents itself as if it were, in fact, a real choice. In doing so, it conceals
the fact that hybridity and binarism are functions of each other”34 (33). It
is not possible to simply celebrate mestizo inclusion for hybridity’s sake:
hybridity itself is a complicit conceptualization. While Lund points out
a question of a binarism operating even while such categories are rhe-
torically rejected altogether, the slippage is one that illustrates how one
category (or perhaps, all categories) can be subsumed within or occluded
by another. In celebrating contemporary hybridity, Canclini disavows his
dependence on the concept of original purity. Similarly, discourses in circu-
lation in Paraguay disavow race, only to be haunted by language function-
ing as the semiotic trace of race. It is difficult to find resonant race-related
denunciations in Paraguayan public discourse, yet everyone understands
that Guaraní monolinguals are at-risk. Likewise, while Hamaca provides
no commentary on race (besides a quiet privileging of mestizo characters),
its multitemporal heterogeneity is directly related to historic determin-
istic conceptualizations of race and progress; race and racism haunt the
structure of this narrative. Returning to the epigraph at the beginning
of this chapter, as Ruskola states, “Periodization is inevitable but never
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 43
Europeans will tell you straightforwardly ‘We want to see certain topics
from you and we are not interested in seeing other topics from you. If you
try to make a film like one that the Americans or we do better, we are not
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 45
The Indian (or in the case of Hamaca, the campesino) is seen as static,
rooted in the past and passively subjected to the forces of modernity. The
past as something that naturally must be lost is prescribed as the tem-
porality of the Indian, who sadly—but inevitably—must fade away, also.
Through this temporal association, dominant white culture does not bare
any responsibility for the marginalization and genocide of indigenous peo-
ples, because it was “no one’s fault” that they could not adapt to moder-
nity. Fanon describes colonial violence, stating that “… I begin to suffer
from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes
discrimination on me … tells me that … I must bring myself as quickly as
possible into step with the white world …”42 If the term “white world”
is replaced by the term “modern world,” white dominance is figured as
blameless. Rather, the dominant class can state that there is a “cultural
clash” with progress itself, and progress, being ascribed to the domain
of the impartial and inevitable, cannot bear any moral burden. Edmundo
46 E.K. ROMERO
A uniform way of life does not exist in América. The ways of life of the
Indian and the well-off city dweller are impermeable to each other. On the
one hand, the Indian retains the structure of an ancient form of thinking,
a thousand years old, and on the other, the city dweller renews his way of
thinking every ten years.44
Time becomes a fetishistic stand-in for the othering of peoples who the
dominant class seeks to repress—including women. A European historicist
scheme functions to universalize a European version of historical experi-
ence and inculcate beliefs about progress, superiority, inferiority, and the
proper place of racialized and gendered peoples. “Women were seen not as
inhibiting history proper but as existing, like colonized peoples, in a per-
manently anterior time within the modern nation,” McClintock states.46
Anne Cheng helps in the exploration of how these beliefs about race,
gender and the alignment of linear time with progress constitute a mel-
ancholic ideological discourse. Through Freudian psychoanalysis, Cheng
presents us with the concept of the melancholia of race. First, she defines
melancholia as follows:
an implacable portrait of this ‘land without men and men without land.’
”53 (101). The cultural influence of books written by Roa Bastos and King
makes the inclusion of this phrase in the only three pages dedicated to
Paraguayan film all the more striking. Both authors describe Paraguay as
a place of “land without men and men without land,” (in)directly linking
the feminization (“without men”) of Paraguay to its situation of poverty
and uneven distribution of wealth (“without land”).
Paraguay’s history of dictatorship has also been read by “first world”
political scientists as an indicator of inferiority. As Thomas E. Skidmore
and Peter H. Smith have written about the history of development dis-
course in the United States:
Conclusion
In conclusion, the form, text and context of Hamaca paraguaya represent
a valuable opportunity for understanding how certain themes in narrative
and documentary film of Paraguay became dominant through national and
transnational processes of production and consumption. While these pro-
cesses cannot go uninfluenced by the uneven distribution of wealth under
which they are produced and even help to maintain, Hamaca paraguaya
is an example of a film that plays the field while drawing attention to some
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 51
of the very problems of that field. While formal choices related to tem-
porality produce an inversion of the order of capitalism by redistributing
labor and controlling the gaze, Hamaca’s points of connection between
temporality, race, nationality, gender and class can function as articulations
on which coloniality, postcoloniality and development discourse logics are
constructed. Hamaca represents a careful treatment of the campesino
icon—potentially the most politically co-opted identitarian positional-
ity in discourse and narrative in Paraguay today. Through specific formal
choices, Hamaca attempts to produce negativities that denounce and sub-
vert a filmic and social order. However, the film also illustrates a discursive
linkage between Otherness, brownness, lack, poverty, the past, the (super)
natural world, passivity, fixity, tradition, feminization, determinism and
pessimism that it cannot escape. Simultaneously, Hamaca’s formal choices
create a space for certain theoretical interventions that may clarify this
film’s potential for visibilizing the temporalization of desire and its trans-
lation into narrative film, showing the demands of the logic of meaning
production.
Notes
1. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/paraguay-17-killed-violent-land-
dispute
2. In Martin, New Latin American Cinema, 41. The insistence on
the colonizing essence to be found in the very materiality of cul-
tural imperialism produced in relation to the cinema is also a topic
of discussion in feminist cinema studies. See, for example, Claire
Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1975) in:
Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women’s Cinema, London: Society
for Education in Film and Television, reprinted in: Sue Thornham
(ed.), Feminist Film Theory. A Reader, Edinburgh University Press
1999, pp. 31–40.
3. In Martin, New Latin American Cinema, 42.
4. Ibid., 93.
5. García Espinoza, “For an imperfect cinema,” 80.
6. Ibid., 82.
7. At the time of Hamaca’s production, most actors in Paraguay had
more experience in theater than in film, and this is certainly the
52 E.K. ROMERO
case for Ramón del Río (who plays Ramón) and Georgina Genes
(who plays Cándida).
8. Although the name of the war is never mentioned and it is difficult
to deduce the time period in which the film is set, the description
of the film states that the story takes place during the Chaco War,
a border dispute with Bolivia that Paraguay won in 1935.
9. Tereré is a traditionally cold Paraguayan yerba mate tea. The
toasted leaves are placed in a hollowed bull horn or gourd with a
metallic straw. Cold water is then added.
10. Temporalities may be experienced differently as a matter of iden-
tity. See, for example, Cornell University’s “What is a
U.S. American?” <http://www.isso.cornell.edu/ithacalife/us1.
php#Time_Orientation>. Designed to help foreign students
understand U.S. culture, this webpage includes a section on
American “Time Orientation:” “Americans place considerable
value on punctuality. Because they tend to organize their activities
by means of schedules, they may seem harried, always running
from one thing to the next and unable to relax and enjoy them-
selves.” The fact that this section is immediately followed by a sec-
tion entitled “Doing Rather Than Being” (i.e. Products over
People) reinforces the connection between identity, nationality,
capitalism and how a particular temporality can be experienced. I
thank Laura Briggs for bringing this link to my attention.
11. In one scene, Ramón cuts sugar cane. To keep comparisons to the
cinematic realm, we could compare Ramón cutting cane to scenes
in which people cut cane in Frankfurt, a Paraguayan documentary
from the same year. In Frankfurt people are shown cutting the
cane at least twice as fast as in Hamaca, making Hamaca’s clear
emphasis on slowness even more evident.
12. For an article on how for some, slow film is the no-fun equivalent
of “eating your cultural vegetables,” see http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.
html?_r=1
13. Edelman, No Future, 2.
14. Edelman, No Future, 7.
15. Debin, “Cleansing with Blood,” 2.
16. Ibid., 65.
17. Schoonover, “Wastrels,” 71.
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 53
television is on, but it glows without showing any discernable image. One
of the brothers tries to fix it, but nothing seems to work. There is a rather
long shot of the brothers trying different channels with no improvement.
The screen is blank; it produces not much more than a bluish light. A
woman looks on as one of the young men tries to solve the television
issue. The spectator may feel some of this family’s frustration as the specta-
tor herself is forced to watch the blank screen for a period of time which
seems to go on interminably. The family finally gives up and settles on just
listening to the game. The camera focuses on the television screen as the
shot fades to black. What is worse than not being able to attend the game
in person? Not being able to watch it on television at all.
These opening scenes not only call attention to the division between
Paraguayan classes, but also to the division between Paraguay and Europe,
specifically. While football itself is a sport that has come to represent
Paraguayan national pride and fervor, its origins are British. In fact, it is
England who plays against Paraguay in this first game. When the television
in the documentary broadcasts from Asunción, a commentator interviews
a BBC correspondent, greeting him in English saying: “Good morning,
you are stupid!” The correspondent gracefully ignores the comment and
responds “I’m in the very best country in South America.” In one of the
few scenes that feature a woman, a cheerleader named Tania crowns the
BBC correspondent with a Paraguayan hat.
This far in the documentary the spectator has only seen two women: a
mother and a sexy cheerleader. If they had appeared in a Hollywood film,
Charles Ramírez Berg might have categorized them as the stereotypical
abuelita and the female clown. In the context of the Third/First world
dialectic that is so vital to Frankfurt, Anne McClintock’s work on gen-
dered discourses of the domestication of national time may be helpful.
McClintock sees the resolution of the nationalist conflict “between nostal-
gia and the impatient, progressive sloughing off of the past” as resolved by
a differentiation between different representations of time: one in which
“women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national
tradition (inert, backward-looking, and natural), embodying national-
ism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the
progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent, and
historic).”14 A gendered scheme functions to reconcile a version of his-
torical experience that includes both progress and tradition while inculcat-
ing beliefs about progress, superiority, inferiority, and the proper place of
racialized and gendered peoples.
60 E.K. ROMERO
super-players, eliminating the channel which connects local football with its
sources of renewal.15
Frankfurt’s rural football fans may not have bought tickets to the game,
but they are most definitely consumers. Sandvoss’s analysis of football fan-
dom leads him to the conclusion that “…fans … all explain their fandom
in terms of a series of acts of consumption, often media consumption. In
other words, fans are consumers.”22 Who does this textual consumption
benefit if campesinos do not consume enough football tickets and mer-
chandise to sustain this industry? Perhaps what is being sold most essen-
tially through World Cup football is nationalism itself, and by extension,
citizenship. With citizenship marketed as a form of consumerism, campesi-
nos are meant to feel that they are getting something, at least the feeling of
inclusion, for their participation in the nation-state, while simultaneously,
an avenue for potential future product consumption is affectively carved
into place through the spectacular, through a football event that allows
one to experience citizenship emotionally. Writing about the Argentine
peso devaluation crisis of 2001–2002, Pablo Alabarces also draws atten-
tion to the link between consumption, desire, shared history, and mystical
attachments: “But here was also the wish that sporting success would heal
FRANKFURT (2008): DOCUMENTARY, FÚTBOL... 63
who represent the triumph of men from a poor background over the wealthy
and powerful. Eduardo Santa Cruz comments that the football icon, in
the eyes of South American fans, becomes ‘the champion who will defend
our honor, our history, and our collective pride, and/or the man who has
arrived where we would all like to be.’ The world-class footballer from a
poor background thus becomes a representation of popular feelings and
achievements in the face of a world that is often distant and threatening.25
It is fruitful to read how Santa Cruz describes the football icon against
what Lauren Berlant presents as mass society’s historical definition of a
collectivity:
three people might make do with one motorcycle or perhaps take a chance
on a public bus from the 1970s; there are no bathrooms at the practice
field. The state-of-the-art World Cup facilities dazzle in contrast. Social
mobility is a hazy specter from the depth of this income gap.
The campesinos of Frankfurt (specifically, the male-gendered ones) are
able to experience several levels of self-recognition: as fans, as football
players, and on an extra-textual level, as the stars of a documentary. First,
Sandvoss argues that fandom of itself involves a level of self-reflection,
being how integrally it figures in a dedicated fan’s personality construc-
tion: “Fandom has to be analyzed as a form of consumption and hence as
a form of communication … Football fandom is thus based on the duality
of identity and identification/self-reflection.”28 Sandvoss goes on to argue
that media functions as an extension of the world to ourselves and vice
versa, therefore “…the club functions as both screen and mirror at the
same time, throwing back the fan’s self-projection … fans build a strong
emotional bond with their favorite club as their extension, not as them-
selves … their fandom is based upon the reflection of themselves…. ”29 In
the case of Frankfurt, self-recognition goes beyond fandom and into the
more literal realm of playing the game itself. Finally, on the extra-textual
level, rural spectators who watch Frankfurt could also feel hailed to rec-
ognize themselves on screen in a highly emotional and perhaps validating
moment of representation. Not only are they themselves represented; the
national, religious, and fútbol iconography—all symbols in which the star-
ring rural community is emotionally invested—are present. Returning to
the epigraph at the start of this chapter, as Sandvoss argues, fútbol fan-
dom is a public sphere, and the screen magnifies its interaction with other
public spheres such as party politics, citizenship, religion, sexuality, and
ethnicity.
Recalling Carlos Monsivais’s famous comments on Mexican Golden
Age cinema, there is a powerful emotional component to recognizing
one’s own codes and customs on screen, a delight in finding one’s enthu-
siasm and catharsis shared. Berlant might describe it as a type of “nor-
mativity … a felt condition of general belonging and an aspirational site
of rest and recognition in and by a social world.”30 Indeed, at this point
Berlant might say that football’s affective realm is fulfilling desires (at the
very least, the desire to fantasize) and providing emotional relief, but at
what cost?
66 E.K. ROMERO
lives rising before dawn to cut cane, never earning (or winning) enough
to afford them even the most modestly appropriate winter footwear. But
they will always have a football game to talk about.
Frankfurt’s ambiguity is further expressed in the way it threads its way
back and forth between “winning and losing” and between trauma and
relief. Paraguay’s historical border wars continue to play an essential role
in national film production, and more broadly, in the construction of
Paraguayan national identity itself. Even today, Paraguayans widely refer
to the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870) as the moment at which Paraguay
lost decisively, going from being a wealthy nation with a future, to a
nation forever brought to its knees.32 Seen from this angle, Frankfurt’s
trauma is caused by a specific situation of economic hardship with roots
in the historical political conflicts with its neighbors. As Berlant explains
about intimate publics, the political sphere is more often seen as a field of
threat, chaos, degradation, or retraumatization than a condition of pos-
sibility. The collectivity of nacionalismo futbolero generates relief from the
political: “When political desire is failed by politics, participants in the
sentimental tradition have come to choose traumatic cultural mediations
as a way of expressing passionate detachment from politics as such.”33
Perhaps fútbol fanaticism here can be seen not simply as an opiate, but as
an acknowledgement that politics are broken. To extend Berlant’s theory
beyond Frankfurt, to the variety of Paraguayan films emerging in the last
decade to translate the legacy of historical border wars in contemporary
terms, suggests that the dominant focus on loss and trauma has to do
with already having “given up” on politics and finding a passionate way to
express that detachment or loss of faith.
The problem that Berlant posits in regards to “finding refuge” in
the affective realm (in this case, the passion of nacionalismo futbolero),
involves how it facilitates the continuity of the status quo. Nacionalismo
futbolero, like other intimate genres, gives permission to “live small but to
feel large.” The campesino may not have what the world-class footballer
has (living small), but a win is an emotional victory for everyone (feeling
large). The satisfying sentimentality of the win may disavow the political.
Through nacionalismo futbolero, it maintains fidelity to the same world
that produces disappointment in the first place. Berlant describes how “…
political and social worlds are inevitably built across fault lines of con-
tradiction and bad conceptualization that not only do not threaten the
general project but make its endurance possible.”34 Not only is the win
completely absent from Frankfurt, but the loss cuts especially deeply.
68 E.K. ROMERO
The last scene in which the community watches the World Cup begins
with a television broadcasting the Sweden-Paraguay game. As in the home
in the beginning of the film, the television sits against yet another wall
decorated with a collection of religious iconography. There are women
and girls in the scene, preparing ice, cutting up a pig head—not watching
the game with the men. The camera lingers as a young woman saws away
at a pig head. A light-skinned child Jesus, depicted as a shepherd (with a
lamb in his lap) is framed against the television. The camera then focuses
once again on the pig head being prepared and fades to black. When the
documentary resumes, we see the same television, then another woman
from behind; her back is to the television as she clips her nails. The young
girl puts the ice in the freezer next to the television, which is also next
to the bed. The men drink tereré and swear at the game because it is not
going well. Another woman is clipping her nails as she watches the game.
The men’s faces turn more somber and the audio turns silent as the cam-
era zooms in and lingers on their unsmiling, unflinching faces. There is
a toddler on the bed. A man gets up, swears in Guaraní and walks away
to smoke a cigarette. They watch with bated breath as Paraguay loses the
game. Some of them look like they are on the verge of tears.
The close-ups of the tense, suffering faces and the silence bring the
affective power of this scene alive. What is the significance of stressing
this emotion? The perceived divide between modernization/rational-
ity and backwardness/emotion is summarized neatly by Rodolfo Kusch
in Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America: “The industrial soci-
ety … wields rationality; the traditional society wields affectivity.”35 In
Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations,
Jesús Martín Barbero cites José Guilherme Cantor Magnani
that mentions how Paraguay has suffered due to war “Este es un país que
ha sufrido mucho por la guerra…”
Shortly thereafter a scene begins without audio. It is simply a view of
the field in Frankfurt as the game starts rolling. (The television framing
this image is hidden in a move that transports the viewer from Paraguay
to Germany.) The World Cup camera pauses on some of the most famous
players, particularly Roque Santa Cruz and Justo Villar. The chanting and
singing of the Paraguayan fans is audible. Within minutes of the game,
David Beckham is allowed a penalty kick for a foul. Carlos Gamarra tries
to block the ball, but it makes its way into his own team’s goal instead.
Unwittingly, he helps England score a point. The family at home appears
shocked and comment “¡Que bárbaro, fue en contra!” “Aquello que tanto
habíamos planificado se rompe apenas en el minuto tres,” the commentator
remarks as the son and father look on somberly. The screen fades to black.
This scene constitutes one of the major two moments of loss in the
documentary: England beats Paraguay. England’s role in Frankfurt must
be read against its (perceived) historical involvement in the Triple Alliance
War. At the time of the war, Britain was aggressively building infrastruc-
ture, largely in the form of railroads, in neighboring Argentina. Britain was
able to justify this investment given Argentina’s lack of capital and labor
and the fact that Britain was their main consumer of meat and grain.40 The
investment allowed Britain to monopolize Argentina’s infrastructure for
commerce, benefiting the empire while solidifying relations between the
two nations even further. In Paraguay, President Carlos Antonio López
also wanted to build a railroad, but did not want to have the same sort of
dependence/entrenchment with the British Empire, and therefore nego-
tiated a business arrangement in which the government would pay cash
for British engineering. This much of the story has been documented. It
becomes more difficult to prove what is popularly believed: that Britain was
irritated by Paraguay’s unwillingness to enter into the same relationship of
dependence as it had forged with Argentina, and therefore saw Paraguay
as a resistant state that could be subjugated into economic compromise
more easily after the Triple Alliance War. Thus, in the Paraguayan national
imaginary, Britain supported the gang of three’s attack on Paraguay.
There is some historical scholarship available that would refute this claim,
demonstrating that Britain was in opposition to the war because all war
was generally bad for international commerce.41 However, it is a fact that
Sir Edward Thornton, the British Minister to the Argentine Republic,
72 E.K. ROMERO
demonstrated his support of the Triple Alliance with his presence at the
signing of a Treaty of Alliance between Brazil and Argentina.
The Triple Alliance War story haunts Frankfurt as this documentary
(re)presents the story of a small, impoverished nation where people sur-
vive in extreme poverty while in other (urban and European) spaces,
wealth and modernity are booming. Frankfurt illustrates the incredible
scale of this national and transnational inequity in a way that hearkens back
to the inequity of three nations ganging up on one. Perhaps Frankfurt
asks Paraguayans to look at their condition: are we in the same spot as we
were after the Triple Alliance War? Have we substituted colonialism and
empire for the neoliberal world order?
Paraguay’s contemporary relationships with its neighbors are still
tenuous. Many feel that the government has “sold out” to Brazil, par-
ticularly in the soy business. Soberanía violada describes specifically how
many rural farmers on the Paraguay-Brazil border have sold their lands to
Brazilian investors for low values because they were dazzled by the sight
of mounds of cash, out of touch with the fact that $10,000 USD does
not go as far in the capital city as they thought. Once the money and the
land are gone, many of these farmers become destitute homeless people
roaming the capital, surviving through recycling and begging. While soy is
touted as the export that has made Paraguay’s macro-economy one of the
fastest-growing in the region, the percentage of Paraguayans living below
the poverty line has climbed to 19.3%.42 This contradiction between the
macro- and micro-economies of Paraguay draws attention to the quiet,
pro-business permissiveness of the state and the upward redistribution of
resources that Lisa Duggan describes as defining characteristics of neolib-
eralism as it developed in the United States and later, Europe. In Paraguay,
however, in the case of the soy industry, resources are not just redistrib-
uted upward, but outward, as much of the profit exits the country via the
Brazilian investors who actually own the land. Under these conditions,
nationalism can be a place from which to express popular resistance (“Stop
selling us out to Brazil!”) and it can be an ideology to which neoliberalism
can align itself with profitable results, depending on the mechanization.
que brinca, que canta, que alienta, que mira, que sufre; hay gente contenta,
que pide, que cree, que suspira. Hay gente fanática … la pasión se lleva en
el corazón y se celebra. Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica pasión albir-
roja.” The film further links this audio with a visual component: the bare
foot in the foreground and the religious iconography in the background.
At this point, as in others, an audiovisual relationship between the televi-
sion, the flag, the religious iconography decorating the wall, and the fam-
ily is produced. The camera lingers on the frames of television and Niño
Jesús, for example, creating a moment for reflection. This audiovisual lay-
ering creates a relationship between marketing, religion, nationalism, fút-
bol, and poverty. Marketing for products becomes relatable to marketing
for the nation. The fanaticism of fútbol fandom becomes relatable to the
religious experience as an “opiate for the masses.” When the rural poor
buy the products being sold, (particularly in the case of beer), is the end
result less money for them and more money for already wealthy impresa-
rios? When the rural poor buy the nationalism being sold via fútbol, are
they buying into “the failure of the nation to come into its own,” i.e. a
nationalism in service of neoliberalism that only adds to the uneven dis-
tribution of wealth in Paraguay? How does fútbol fandom and religious
ideology seduce the rural poor into acting against their own best interests?
Idelber Avelar recounts José Joaquín Brunner’s article, “Notes on
Modernity and Postmodernity in Latin American Culture” to highlight
his reading of the relationship between Market, State and Church:
Paraguay, like Chile, has had years of experience with military dictator-
ship, its authoritarianism, and its forms of indoctrination (religion, propa-
ganda, torture, kidnapping, etc.) Frankfurt illustrates how certain aspects
of this ideological trifecta are still in circulation, but at the service of neo-
liberal capitalism. Avelar goes on to link religious discourse and patriarchal
authoritarianism in the following way:
74 E.K. ROMERO
What separates the sacrificial scapegoat from the victorious hero is, in a
sense, the secret itself…. Christ holds the secret of his divinity by refusing
the temptation of performing the public miracle that would prove it. The
defeated thus reveal themselves victorious by holding a secret that contains
the key to their defeat…. Could this not be taken to be the meaning of the
Christian axiom that Jesus came down to earth in order to be crucified?45
When they are told we must act, they imagine bombs being dropped,
armored cars rumbling through the streets, a hail of bullets, the police—and
they stay put. They are losers from the start. Their incapacity to triumph
by violence needs no demonstration; they prove it in their daily life and
maneuvering.47
Bloodshed is not required for the working class to understand who holds
the power in their nation; every day is a reminder of who is winning.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, Frankfurt provides the viewer with an ambiguous reading
of the politically charged campesino figure. By producing visual contrasts
between the urban and rural, wealthy and poor, Frankfurt draws attention
to a global and national uneven distribution of wealth. Through images of
daily rural life and sport, Frankfurt suggests ways in which the campesino
makes his/her precarious existence more livable. Coextensively, Frankfurt
intertwines the market, the church, and the state in a way that requires
thinking about their roles in a larger production of systemic violence.
Through relational temporalities, the Triple Alliance War haunts the given
world order in Frankfurt, signaling the potential interchangeability of his-
toric and contemporary binds. By the end of the film, the spectator may
have seen nacionalismo futbolero and country side religiosity as the ulti-
mate expressions of passionate detachment from failed politics; as distrac-
tion where political action should be; or at worst, as fragmentary remains
stubbornly blocking national modernization. Although the reading of the
campesino icon will vary, it is certain that this figure will continue to be
used as a pivot point for political and social movements in Paraguay.
FRANKFURT (2008): DOCUMENTARY, FÚTBOL... 77
NOTES
1. García Espinoza, “Imperfect Cinema,” 81. While the “observa-
tional” style and ethic described here could be linked to more recent
trends in New Argentine Cinema, for example, Gómez’s training at
the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos)
and statements he has made trace his attitude back to the Solanas
generation in a notable “return to the origins.” For example, in his
August 2010 editorial (“Reflexiones”) he specifically turns “scarcity
into a signifier” (King, Magical Reels, 154) stating “A un país pobre
corresponde un cine austero” (Gómez). He later informally retracts
this statement (on Facebook) when Paraguayan film 7 cajas (2012)
achieves box office success and some critical acclaim.
2. Martín Barbero, Communication, 189.
3. Duggan, Twilight, 3.
4. For a blog post that illustrates popular discourse on how Paraguay’s
social problems are traceable to its indigeneity, see “Inventario de
un pueblo diferente” by Marzha Navarro http://estadodebiene-
starsocial.blogspot.com/2013/03/inventario-de- un-pueblo-
diferente-el.html.
5. Sandvoss, Game, 2.
6. Ibid., 57.
7. Ibid., 143.
8. In Miller and Crolley, Football, 66.
9. In Miller and Crolley, Football.
10. Miller and Crolley, Football, 11.
11. Sandvoss, Game.
12. A traditional infusion done with yerba mate that has been toasted
with hot coals.
13. Coquito is a type of bread that hardens and dries out in the same
manner as a soft pretzel. This allows people to buy it in bulk at low
prices and consume it long after regular bread would have gone
stale. It is typically eaten with a hot beverage in which it can be
dunked and softened. It is noteworthy that this youth’s breakfast
does not include any type of protein.
14. In McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons, 92.
15. In Miller and Crolley, Football, 83.
16. In Miller and Crolley, Football, 67.
17. Sandvoss, Game, 57.
78 E.K. ROMERO
18. Ibid., 4.
19. Miller and Crolley, Football, 7.
20. Ibid., 23.
21. Berlant, Female Complaint, 5.
22. Sandvoss, Game, 17.
23. In Miller and Crolley, Football, 107.
24. Miller and Crolley, Football, 7.
25. Eduardo Santa Cruz, Origen y futuro de una pasión: fútbol, cultura
y modernidad (Santiago: LOM-ARCIS, 1996), 85, quoted in
Miller and Crolley, Football, 21.
26. Berlant, Female Complaint, 10.
27. Schulze-Marmeling, Dietrich, and Michael, John. 1992. Der
Gezähmte Fussball: Zur Geschichte Eines Subversiven Sports.
Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt.
28. Sandvoss, Game, 31.
29. Ibid., 39.
30. Berlant, Female Complaint, 5.
31. This phrase in Guarani translates to “Me pica la mano,” a sign of
good luck.
32. The Triple Alliance War is also widely known as the Paraguayan
War. I prefer to use the Paraguayan name for this event. For more
sources on the war, see Saeger, 2007; Chiavenato, 1982; Cardozo,
1965.
33. Berlant, Female Complaint, 150.
34. Ibid., 148.
35. Kusch, Pensamiento indígena, 118.
36. Martín Barbero, Communication, 213.
37. Berlant, Female Complaint, 27.
38. Martín Barbero, Communication, 213.
39. Ibid., 211.
40. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 71–2.
41. See Ricard Salles, Guerra do Paraguai: Memórias & Imagens (Rio
de Janeiro: Bibilioteca Nacional, 2003).
42. Coronel, “Avance sojero”.
43. Avelar, Untimely Present, 55.
44. Ibid., 67.
45. Ibid., 157.
46. Ibid., 136.
47. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 25.
CHAPTER 4
In this chapter I discuss two powerful short films, produced at nearly the
same time, that both feature rape narratives: Karai norte (2009) directed
by Marcelo Martinessi and Noche adentro (2010) directed by Pablo Lamar.
I analyze these films as particular allegories about the Paraguayan nation,
theorizing the rape narrative’s relationship to the nation within the spe-
cific context of (1) filmic representation and (2) some of Paraguay’s main
historical narratives involving rape and more broadly, female sexuality.
Situated within a long tradition of usage of the rape trope to comment on
political power (in art and political rhetoric), these films deploy the trope
in conjunction with other crimes—specifically, murder and theft—from
the ambiguous position of the spectator as witness. I explore the accounts
of two specific events—the moment of la conquista (and its ensuing mes-
tizaje myth) and the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870)—in terms of the
usage of the rape trope in Paraguayan national history. Karai and Noche
both present urgent challenges to the political status quo while recall-
ing historical feminist struggles whose legacy is still active in Paraguay’s
contemporary legal and social environment. Both films present these chal-
lenges while walking the line between representing sexual violence with-
out showing “too much,” and using the rape trope as a violent spectacle
that seduces and excites. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how “rape
narratives help organize, understand, and even arguably produce the social
world,” to cite Sarah Projansky.1 Read in conjunction with historical tropes
regarding rape, female sexuality and the nation, Karai and Noche are fer-
tile grounds from which to study the connections between how the issues
of gender equity and equity in a more general, national sense (or the lack
thereof) are conceptualized in an era of national democratic adolescence.
The recurrent trope of rape in literature and film has been exhaus-
tively explored in four specific works: Rape and Representation, edited by
Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (1991), Watching Rape: Film and
Television in Postfeminist Culture by Sarah Projansky (2001), Public Rape
by Tanya Horeck (2003) and Rape in Art Cinema edited by Dominique
Russell (2010). Higgins and Silver’s anthology is designed to theorize the
meaning of the rape trope and explore who benefits from it. Projansky’s
project takes on the history of the rape trope in American film, “analyzing
filmic examples that address issues of gender, race, class and nation in dif-
ferent, sometimes even conflictual ways, in order to emphasize just how
malleable rape is as it helps to produce and maintain social relations and
hierarchies”.2 Horeck suggests that rape is “a crime that dominates public
fantasies regarding sexual and social difference,”3 and Russell’s collection
looks more broadly at the use of sexual violence in the films of certain
auteurs from world cinema, English-language independent cinemas and
French extremist Cinéma Brut.
Unsurprisingly, these works conclude that rape is a trope with a long
history in film. More surprising, however, is the study of how the trope’s
hypervisibility is perhaps symptomatic of its very effacement: including
rape as pivotal to the narrative has been as key as not showing the rape act
itself. As highlighted by Projansky, this erasure was required in US cinema
by the Production Code, which took effect in the late 1920s and early
1930s, stating that rape and seduction “should never be more than sug-
gested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown
by explicit method.”4 As Higgins and Silver articulate, “the simultaneous
presence and disappearance of rape as constantly deferred origin of both
plot and social relations is repeated so often as to suggest a basic con-
ceptual principle in the articulation of both social and artistic representa-
tions”5 Rather than limiting the rape trope’s uses, this prohibition seemed
to multiply rape’s presence in film, as Russell describes: “Rape serves as
metaphor, symbol, plot device, for character transformation, catalyst or
narrative resolution.”6 Projansky concludes that “by the second half of the
1930s and continuing into the 1940s representations of rape and sexual
violence were predominantly an ‘absent presence’ in cinema.”7
Similarly, this absent presence has proven equally slippery for critics,
who often have treated rape as “something to step around in order to get
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 81
to the ‘real’ (and important) meaning.”8 Yet as Russell points out, the very
reasons critics have given for eliding the topic of rape in art cinema high-
light precisely the importance of examining how rape is deployed in film:
Because art cinema has always pushed the bounds of acceptable representa-
tion of sexuality and violence, because its erotic and scopophilic pleasures
are aimed at a “higher purpose,” that is, because its physicality is so often
subsumed to metaphysical and abstract questions, because it is so concerned
with truth and interpretation and the specificity of film itself, and because
its aesthetic claim is originality and unconventionality, it is essential to note
how it relies on sexual violence for its ends.9
Noche adentro
Noche adentro begins with a black screen but a lively Paraguayan polka
can be heard off screen. The film cuts to an M.C. who makes reference
to a bride and groom who are absent (Fig. 4.1). “¿Quién sabe lo que
estarán haciendo?” the M.C. announces coyly. He introduces a new polka,
82 E.K. ROMERO
dedicated by the best men. This one is equally lively but slightly more dis-
sonant. The musicians play and the wedding party happily dances to the
polka, oblivious of what has transpired between the bride and groom. The
film suddenly cuts to black for several seconds; no audio. The next shot
is of a bloody vulva out of focus. It slowly comes into focus: there is mat-
ted pubic hair encrusted with dried blood—and blood everywhere. The
camera pans up the woman’s body. The wedding dress has been pushed
up above her waist. The groom stands nearby. His shirt is blood-stained.
In the following scene the groom drags the bride’s body down a stair-
case, then down a hall (Figs. 4.2 and 4.3). The groom breathes heavily
and groans as he struggles with the bride’s body. As he drags her, he falls
Fig. 4.2 The groom drags the bride’s body down a staircase in Noche adentro
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 83
Fig. 4.3 The groom drags the bride’s body interminably in Noche adentro
backward, her body falling on him, his white shirt getting progressively
filthier. Exhausted, he lays on the floor of the hallway with her dead body
on top of him.
In the next scene the groom undresses completely at the bank of a river.
As he turns and walks toward the camera/canoe on the river, his bloody
genitals are visible. The sound of the water lapping against the canoe is
amplified. The dead bride lies in the canoe. The groom’s face is emotion-
less as he pushes the canoe down the river. The camera pans to the dead
bride’s face, then down her body, revealing a large blood stain on her
dress, then the black water rippling in the moonlight.
In this manner, Noche becomes part of a long tradition in which direc-
tors such as Pier Paolo Passolini, Lina Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani
have participated, as Dominique Russell points out; a tradition that
uses rape to comment on political power.13 The rape victim is a blank—
someone who the spectator is not allowed to know or identify with at
all: for the duration of the film, she is a corpse and the camera spends
precious few seconds on her face at all. The bride is not given a name
or developed as a character. Wedding night rape and murder does not
point directly to a type of epidemic of sexual violence facing women in
Paraguay, (such as the aforementioned issues of statutory rape and the
pregnancies of minors, for example.) These specific choices lead us to
the tradition of allegorical reading. As David Martin-Jones and María
Soledad Montañez point out in “Uruguay Disappears: Small Cinemas,
Control Z Films and the Aesthetics and Politics of Auto-Erasure,” the
time of cine comprometido has not passed for small cinemas: “Even now,
84 E.K. ROMERO
many Latin American films are judged in terms of their engagement with
either the poverty or the political issues of the region and can be found
deficient if they have a different focus.”14 Since Noche voids the taking on
of specific issues involving literal sexual violence toward women by creat-
ing a macabre scenario instead of a realistic, epidemic one, it pushes the
reading toward a political national allegory inscribed onto a body that is
gendered female.
Before exploring the allegorical ties to the figurative Paraguayan female
body, however, it is worthwhile to examine one of the dominant elements
of Noche’s mise-en-scène: darkness—a pitch black night and black waters
that seem to be everywhere, seeping into everything; completely inscru-
table. This stark contrast between that which is seen and all that which
cannot be seen draws important parallels between Paraguay’s current and
historical political situation. In certain ways, the violence of the Stroessner
dictatorship was more overt, whereas the violence and oppression of the
current, so-called democratic regime is less visible and more systemic.
Corruption itself is invisible while its effects are what can be seen. Likewise,
Noche does not show a rape, but the bloodied body of a rape and murder
victim. By using a rape allegory to explore the relation of the Paraguayan
state to the Paraguayan people, Noche makes systemic violence graphi-
cally visible and elicits a powerful, visceral response. By the same token,
Noche does not show the rape itself, but rather, its aftermath, potentially
safeguarding against certain dangers involving the exploitation of the rep-
resentation of sexual violence.
Returning to the concept of Noche as an allegory about the Paraguayan
state’s relationship to the people, Teemu Ruskola explores the question of
what it means to liken a state to a person and to liken its conduct to rape
in his article, “Raping Like a State.” Ruskola describes the normative mas-
culinity attributed to sovereign states and asserts that “sexual, gendered,
and racial metaphors continue to structure uneven global relations even
today.”15 Ruskola stresses the impossibility of isolating discrete discourses
of gender, sexuality, and race given how they are historically constituted in
relation to each other (a point I delve into more deeply further on, when
I draw Paraguayan mestizaje myths into this analysis). Ruskola goes on to
demonstrate how “… political communities in different parts of the world
fell short of the European ideals of masculinity and homosocial honor,
which in turn gave rise to distinct rhetorics of sexual violation,” specifically
exploring examples of how Oriental civilizations were viewed as effete and
not masculine enough, and therefore, “rapable.”16
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 85
identifying (“I’m not complicit; I’m horrified,”) and can categorize Noche
as “a form of representation premised on the idea that communal look-
ing serves the ends of civic justice.”24 The traumatized spectator is made
to identify with the victim, and ostensibly, inclined to join the struggle
against corruption instead of maintaining silence at best and active com-
plicity at worst. Silence itself is an important element of Noche, as there is
almost no dialogue, and the silencing of the bride is presented as a worse
crime than the rape itself. The rape act itself is not part of the film—most
of the film is dedicated to showing the disposal of the silent, extinguished
body. As Victoria Anderson points out in her chapter on Die Marquise
Von O and Breaking the Waves, “The rape itself does not become either
fully figured or fully meaningful until it is repeated by the mutilation that
ostensibly functions to cover it up … there exists a rhetorical link binding
the term ‘violation’ with ‘silence’…”25 Silence (or silencing) about these
crimes is presented as possibly worse than the crimes themselves; a some-
what ironic consideration given the film’s silent, indirect criticism of the
state through allegory.
That said, in keeping with the tradition of ambiguity which defines art
cinema, the relationship between Noche’s two crimes—rape and murder—
is certainly ambiguous, and as Russell highlights, “ambiguity … is the very
hallmark of the art film.”26 The presence of murder in Noche makes rape
fade into the background, through suppression, in certain scenes. The
direct physical act of the rape itself is unrepresentable and unrepresented.
The spectator does not see a rape taking place. What is, in fact, shown is
the painstaking disposal of the corpse of the raped and murdered bride;
the hiding of the evidence. Russell traces this phenomenon in art cinema:
Rape as an event that can be made to disappear through narrative (as the
story of seduction, or sex) a trauma that depends upon interpretation and
the possibility of multiple truths, introduces the very issues art cinema is
centrally concerned with. When one side of the story is suppressed, rape can
almost disappear: what remains is doubt, loose threads, many possible nar-
ratives, in short, ambiguity.27
combined forces of sex and violence, and two competing stories: depend-
ing on which one wins out the crime itself can disappear … rape is at once
essential and incidental to the narrative.28
The question of whether the rape or the murder is the greater crime
in Noche changes the possible readings of this short film. If the murder
eclipses the rape, one must ask if the short makes rape itself incidental. Is
a commentary on the seriousness of sexual violence elided in favor of the
aforementioned allegorical commentary on state corruption?
Returning to an allegorical script about the Paraguayan state that is
implicit, but less direct, has to do with the history of Paraguay. In psycho-
logical terms, what would drive a groom to commit such a heinous act?
Perhaps being the victim of similar abuse himself. Similarly, the Paraguayan
state’s historical relationship with its neighbors could be seen as a homo-
erotic violation. The case of the Triple Alliance War constitutes a gang rape
of Paraguay by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In this war over 300,000
Paraguayan civilians died—the largest number of casualties reported in
South American military history. (It is widely believed, although not yet
supported, that 90 % of the male population perished in this war.) Seeing
the war from this angle makes it a male (states)-on-male (state/populace)
violation. The Paraguayan state’s wounded psyche and masculinity then in
turn cause it, as a subjugated state, to become a violator itself. Paraguayan
film illustrates the narrative construction of Paraguayan history as the
haunting that Paraguayan corruption has never escaped. But if Paraguay
has never escaped, does that mean it will never escape? Does stressing a
violent history create the expectation of a violent future? Ruskola insists
that “[T]he rape script[s], or the narrative construction of certain entities
as subjects of violation … did not simply reflect the material violence of
colonial relations; they played a key role in enabling it.”29 Does Paraguay’s
rape script convince the resistant to abandon revolution before it can even
begin? Does it teach that defeat is always already here?
edy that this post-war period represents for the nation, as the nation is
feminized, explaining any/all flaws in the Paraguayan male’s character.
While women rebuilt the country, it is widely thought that this moment
of “destruction” of the nation/nuclear family is to blame for many current
socioeconomic problems. While Teodosio González’s writing represents a
mainstream rhetorical celebration of female superiority, it exists in contrast
with a concrete historic subordination of women. For example, Gonzalez
writes that “the Paraguayan woman, even if she might enjoy luxury like
all women, is a hundred times more hard-working, diligent, economical,
and persistent than the Paraguayan man. Intellectually and morally she is
his superior.”35 However, as Roett and Sacks highlight, the leadership of
women at home and in the workforce notably did not translate to political
gains:
Moral laxity could be expected in the postwar period when Allied troops
occupied the country. However, one should understand that nothing like
a Puritan morality ever had prevailed in Paraguay. The number of “natu-
ral” children were always high, and little if any stigma attached to such ori-
gins. The extraordinary surplus of women was in itself sufficient explanation
for looseness in family ties. Perhaps a French writer was correct: “but the
women saved Paraguay, since they bore nameless children and that liberty
of morals that they instinctively practiced in place of marriage … assured
the continuance of the race.” When Benjamin Balanza, the French botanist,
visited Asunción in 1877, he observed that there was one man for each
twenty-eight women.41
Rape is nowhere to be found in these accounts that tell the tale of a coun-
try in which women’s “sexual flexibility” saves the nation, much as in the
way Paraguay’s foundational fiction involves a mestizaje myth that eclipses
European sexual violence with a narrative about indigenous women’s sex-
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 93
Karai norte
Karai norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi, is a black and white
short film adaptation of the short story, “El arribeño del norte,” by Carlos
Villagra Marsal, a writer known as one of the members of the Promoción del
50 in Paraguayan literature. Karai shares themes with Hamaca paraguaya
and Noche adentro in the sense that it features an aestheticized rural pov-
94 E.K. ROMERO
erty through a black and white postcard-like quality and a beautiful, subtle
acoustic soundtrack. In all three films, poor protagonists are the victims
of some grave injustice. Specifically, in Noche and Karai, an unlikely (and
therefore all the more distasteful) rape takes place.
Karai begins with a shot of dry, cracked earth and cuts to the back of
an elderly woman’s head, her gray hair in a bun. It cuts then to a brief
shot of her little hut in the dry, windy, barren landscape (Figs. 4.4 and
4.5). The woman prepares mate cocido at a fire. The wind blows noisily.
The sound of a man arriving on horseback and calling out can be heard
off screen. The woman is visibly afraid; she hides as he approaches. In the
next shot she is seen outside, holding her hands up. She tells the traveler to
take whatever he wants. He tells her he is only hungry. Her hands tremble.
He insists she must have something to eat. She asks where he comes from,
and he points north. She says she will see if she can at least find an egg.
She looks north again; there is nothing to be seen but a clearing and a
tree line in the distance. In the next shot the man is resting in a chair, his
saddle sitting nearby. He whistles a polka. He falls asleep, slumped over in
his chair. The doña gives his horse water and strokes its neck. She awakens
the visitor to offer him the plate of food she has prepared. She asks him to
eat outside, but he says it is better to eat indoors as the north wind is too
strong. As he eats, the doña is shot in a close-up bird’s-eye-view and then
from an eye level angle from behind again. She pulls the bobby pins out
Fig. 4.4 The elderly woman’s gray hair in a bun in Karai norte
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 95
of her bun and lets down her long, gray hair to braid it. She apologizes
for the food as the meat is a little “passed” (old). The man says the meat
is fine as it is. He would have hunted on the road, but he was busy. “Are
you being chased?” she asks. He does not answer, but freezes. He finishes
his meal and offers to pay her something. She refuses to take any payment
and explains that if he leaves money here, it will likely be stolen. She then
describes how bandits came to steal the few things she had: her oil lamp,
her clothes, and her machete among them. She also refers to how they
pushed her on the bed and held her down. “Did they touch you?” he asks.
She does not answer; she simply looks stoically over the dry landscape. “La
revolución ya terminó ¿verdad?” she asks. “Ya terminó hace un mes,” he
responds. “¿Y entonces por qué siguen persiguiendo y perjudicando así a
los pobres?” she asks. “¿Esos que vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del
gobierno?” the stranger inquires, to which she replies “No sé, parece que
fueron mis vecinos no más …. A media legua de aquí está el puesto de los
Cuellar, gente mala como ninguna. Y a un poco más allá, tiene su chacra
Solano Chamorro, un arriero de la peor calaña. Se decía por ahí que yo
tenía plata. Quién sabe si no fue por eso” (Fig. 4.6).
The visitor rides off, and the woman watches him go, as stark as the
landscape around her. There is a musical interlude, (light harp), and a fade
used to indicate that some time has gone by. The next shot is a close-up
of her hands folded and of her gnarly feet. The ring from his plate on the
96 E.K. ROMERO
Fig. 4.6 The elderly woman looking out from her doorway in Karai norte
wood table remains. Then the stranger returns with her stolen belongings.
She is pleased to recover her goods. “¿Cómo voy a agradecerle?” she asks
as he hands her the goods, one by one. “Y me parece que este es el que le
robó,” the stranger declares as he throws a severed head onto the ground.
The women lets out a blood-curdling scream and the man rides away.
Even more so than in Noche, the rape crime is fully eclipsed by the
revenge murder. The rape is never visualized at all, and in fact is only
alluded to by silence, in stark comparison with the revenge which pro-
vides a visually jarring exclamation point to the film as the rapist/thief ’s
head rolls on the ground. Janet Staiger argues that “narrational tech-
niques—such as a clear motivation for a character’s immoral act or a
moralistic ending in which the ‘bad’ characters face just punishment—
regulated, but also justified, representations of sexuality.”43 In such a
case, rape’s reason for being in the narrative is simply to help teach a les-
son about justice in general. In comparison with Noche, Karai’s possible
references to the actual status of women and sexual violence in Paraguay
seem weaker.
Like the bride in Noche, the elderly woman is an unlikely victim of rape,
but for different reasons. Spectators may ask themselves “Who would act
so dastardly as to rape an old woman?” similar to Noche’s question of
“Who would act so dastardly as to rape and murder his own wife on their
wedding night?” As Projansky points out, “no matter how independent
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 97
gobierno) nor those who would attempt to topple it (rebeldes), but rather,
vecinos: her very countrymen, the pueblo itself.
Putting aside the view of various historians (a view not shared by all) that
this was not free love but rather the mere sexual and economic exploitation
of the female workforce, there is another point here that merits attention.
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 99
The impression is given that though this union—or this rape—a new race
was born, that of the “sons of the earth,” the mestizo fruit that would give
rise to the Paraguayan nation.49
The arrival of the Spaniards in 1537 and their “alliance” with the Guaraní
tribes were disasters of the first magnitude for women. Overnight, women
were transformed into concubines, field hands, and procreators—a chat-
tel that could be bought, sold, traded or even wagered in a game of cards.
Women were valued only for the economic work and sexual services they
could perform … Desperate in their new situation, as Paraguay “was being
converted into a concentration camp of physically violated … prostituted
women,” these Indian women resorted to suicide and murdering their chil-
dren. As exploitation increased and the initial “friendship” between the races
waned, the Spaniards resorted to kidnapping women from Indian villages.51
narratives are forged so as to place rape in the past under erasure, while
naturalizing the reality of the presence of rape in Paraguay in the contem-
porary moment. “These aren’t rape victims, as they want to have sex.”
This mentality allows people to ignore the aforementioned facts around
statutory rape, for example. As Lynn A. Higgins comments in her analysis
of L’année dernière a Marienbad (1961), “rape can be rewritten by those
who have the narrative authority to do so.”52 It is this sort of author-
ity that is manifested when Paraguayan Health Minister Antonio Barrios
insisted that the aforementioned 10-year-old rape victim was in sound
enough health to deliver the baby of her rapist and that a late-term abor-
tion would not be allowed: “The pregnancy will not be interrupted,” he
made clear; “We’ve already completely ruled out abortion.”53
While some critics are understandably tired of necessarily reading all
works of Latin American literature and film as national allegories, I believe
that Noche and Karai must be considered allegorically. Within their con-
text, addressing rape is part of the contemporary democratization process,
inexorably linked to revisiting Paraguay’s history of rape (and erasing rape)
and the ways in which these acts have been used to produce relationships
of power and oppression as early as Paraguay’s history of colonization.
Conclusion
Putting Noche adentro and Karai norte into conversation with their filmic
and national contexts through an analysis of the rape trope and gender
allows for a deeper understanding of how rape narratives in different forms
of representation produce social worlds through their powerful deploy-
ment. Noche adentro and Karai norte use allegory to encourage spectators
to consider the contemporary political national context and less directly,
the context of sexual and gender-based violence in which these films were
produced. In order to more deeply understand the deployment of the rape
narrative in the national context, the historic deployment of rape and the
iconicity of la mujer paraguaya (through the mestizaje myth of la con-
quista and the Triple Alliance War) reveal a trajectory in which rape, real or
represented, is either foregrounded or placed under erasure depending on
the way it is deployed and to what ends. Even in literary, filmic, or historic
representation, rape is about power and control; over bodies, over nar-
ratives, over the nation. While these two short films do not show the act
of rape, they use rape as part of a narrative that allows them to show the
body, gendered female, as a site of intense contestation. Bringing up rape
in the Paraguayan context requires questions about what rape’s role is in
RAPE OF THE NATION: KARAI NORTE (2009) AND NOCHE... 101
Notes
1. Projansky, Watching Rape, 7.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Horeck, Public Rape, 4.
4. Maltby, “Documents,” 62.
5. Higgins and Silver, Rape and Representation, 2–3.
6. Russell, Rape, 4.
7. Projansky, Watching Rape, 28.
8. Russell, Rape, 3.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/
2015/05/11/the-horrific-child-rape-case-that-is-tearing-
paraguay-apart/. Abortion is currently illegal in Paraguay except in
cases when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.
11. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/judiciales-y-policiales/
mas-de-680-ninas-con-edades-de-10-a-14-anos-dieron-a-luz-el-
ano-pasado-1361649.html.
12. http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/15122.
13. Russell, Rape, 5.
14. Martin-Jones and Montañez, “Uruguay Disappears,” 40.
15. Ruskola, “Raping,” 1478.
16. Ibid., 1483.
17. Ibid., 1509.
18. Anderson, “Sins,” 75–6.
19. Horeck, Public Rape, 95.
20. MacKenzie, “On Watching,” 170.
21. Horeck, Public Rape, 74.
22. Ibid., 83.
23. Russell, Rape, 167.
102 E.K. ROMERO
As I have discussed in depth in the first two chapters of this book, emerg-
ing Paraguayan films like Hamaca paraguaya (2006), were highly dedi-
cated to representing paraguayidad, through the campesino figure. Most
short, narrative and documentary film followed Hamaca’s lead into the
rural space until 2010, when for the first time a documentary film set
in the urban space had an impact at festivals and in Paraguayan theaters
alike: 108/Cuchillo de palo,1 a Spanish production directed by Paraguayan
Renate Costa. This film queers the proceeding trends in Paraguayan film
in the sense that it (a) features queer protagonists: a first for Paraguayan
film; (b) is set in the urban space, featuring urban protagonists of the
middle and upper classes; and (c) represents a political turn for Paraguayan
film: no film preceding Cuchillo was as overtly political.
The same year, another film, Semana capital (2010), a national pro-
duction directed by Hugo Cataldo, also queered Paraguayan film trends
despite being less political. It also featured urban, queer, and upper class
protagonists at a time in which Paraguayan film was cementing images
pertaining to an imagined national essence with roots in the countryside.
Although one could argue that most Paraguayan films preceding
Cuchillo can be read as political allegories, Cuchillo was the first film to
take on the Stroessner dictatorship in an overt, literal way, by shedding
light on the regime’s persecution of homosexuals (and in the process,
bers of this same class may actually behave when out of view. This chapter
uses Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s classic article, “Sex in Public”
to propose that negative reception of the film is partially the effect of the
discomfort involved in the way Semana explodes the notion of privacy on
which official national culture depends in order to disguise and normalize
the sexualization of national membership. When the reception of both
Cuchillo and Semana are read against each other, these differences shed
light on how Cuchillo deals with the horrors of State-sponsored homo-
phobic persecution in a way that encapsulates contemporary homophobia
in the individual of Pedro Costa, neatly laying the issue to rest. In con-
trast, Semana enrages as it directly confronts the contemporary elite with
their complicity and their own erotically excessive sexuality while blur-
ring the line between the public/private sphere, weakening the exceptions
and privileges that intimate life is supposed to offer under the traditional
nationalist, heteronormative, religious regime.
The reception of the two films could not have been more opposite. In
a personal interview, Cataldo describes how people left the screenings of
Semana either in tears or cussing (“o llorando o puteando,”) something
I see as evidence of what Berlant and Warner refer to as “the spectacu-
lar demonization of represented sex.”4 (550). In the same interview,
Cataldo also describes how he and most of the actors from the film went
underground for a while after the film’s screening, avoiding the public
and mostly playing cards at each other’s homes to pass the time. Other
Paraguayan directors produced thinly veiled criticism of Semana, such as
Ramiro Gómez in his Op-Ed “Paraguay y su cine Z”
Semana’s low production value did not do it any favors; in terms of popular
reception it was dead on arrival while Cuchillo elicited a nearly polar oppo-
site response. Cuchillo was first screened for free at the cultural centers of
Asunción; small theaters filled to capacity turning away many hopeful spec-
tators night after night. When the film finally made it into one of the major
Cineplexes, Cine del Sol, it screened for a record four weeks in 2010: the
QUEERING PARAGUAYAN FILM: 108/CUCHILLO DE PALO (2010)... 107
CUCHILLO’S CHIAROSCURO
Cuchillo begins with shots of Asunción taken from the Paraguay River at
dawn, in which Costa’s voice-over states that the city is known for hav-
ing its back turned on the river (“ciudad que le da la espalda al río.”)
She describes how hard it is to look backward (“Cuánto nos cuesta mirar
hacia atrás.”) The dark, mysterious waters of the river connote linear time
flowing and floating away, carrying the violent histories of the Stroessner
regime farther and farther away from the immediate temporal landscape,
producing a past at which backward glances are difficult to cast (Fig. 5.1).
Esterrich sees this opening of the documentary—with a shot of the city
from “behind”— as a way for Cuchillo “as a documentary (and as a docu-
ment) [to] locate itself away from the center to decisively record the city
from a vantage point that Asunción itself would not recognize.”5 (3). Part
of what Cuchillo does is show a view of the past that would be unrecogniz-
able to many, but also to ask the public to recognize a specific view of con-
temporary Paraguay. The va y ven between these two views is symbolized
by the interplay between dark and light and between the scenes that take
on the subject of the two brothers. As Esterrich so poetically puts it, “the
raw material of cinema, what makes cinema what it is—light and absence
of light—are used literally and figuratively as the methodological bearings
of Cuchillo de palo … .In fact, most of the film has a penumbral quality.”6
He also points out how:
opposite sides: the project of its supersession in total history, and the orga-
nization of its preservation as a dead object in specular contemplation.
One of these moments has linked its fate to social critique, the other to
the defense of class power.”8 (184). Similarly, by virtue of its essence as a
documentary/document meant to read a specific cultural history, Cuchillo
de palo, while claiming to have no sharp edge, actually has two: one that
whittles a much-needed historical revisionism, and one that carves out the
image of populist homophobic thought as it “really is”—a project that can
play into social critique but must also be about transferring class power to
the new democrats.
Before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, however, it is produc-
tive to outline how Cuchillo is a valuable intervention and a much-needed
site of historical revisionism when it comes to Paraguayan nationalistic
narratives. As Gayatri Gopinath describes in Impossible Desires: Queer
Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, mainstream diasporic dis-
course is frequently dominated by a return to the origins. In Chap. 2,
I have argued that the main preoccupation observed in Paraguayan film
was once how to represent a unique essence of paraguayidad through a
visual turn. A queer diaspora, as Gopinath describes it, may also dive into
questions of the past memory and nostalgia, but not to produce a pure
nationalism. Rather, a queer diasporic project is often mounted in order
to revisit “the contradictions and violences of multiple uprootings, dis-
placements and exiles.”9 Uprooting, displacement, and exile are present in
Cuchillo in two primary ways; firstly, in the figure of the director herself,
who, like most Paraguayan directors, necessarily had to emigrate in order
to study film and produce the documentary, given the lack of resources
available for filmmaking in Paraguay at the time of her training. This extra-
national positionality helps Costa challenge the way memory works (or
fails to work) and is elemental to the film’s mission. Costa operates as a
foreign national in Spain most of the time that this Spanish co-production
is in process, making herself, the film as a cultural product, and its object—
her queer uncle, Rodolfo Costa—a story of otherness. Secondly, the film
explores the 108 list and the Aranda list, the two most infamous lists of
“known homosexuals,” that were compiled by the Stroessner regime spe-
cifically to control, terrify, humiliate, weaken, and exile queer individuals,
a fact directly acknowledged by Costa and many of those she interviews.
The documentary is rife with what Joseph Roach and Gayatri Gopinath call
“clandestine countermemories,” that is, memories that are “deliberately
forgotten within conventional nationalist or diasporic scripts”; memories
110 E.K. ROMERO
that challenge “the relentless search for the purity of origins, [which] is a
voyage not of discovery, but of erasure.”10 This deliberate forgetting can
also be thought of as a whitewashing or a purging. A continual symbolic
reminder that Cuchillo traffics in clandestine countermemories comes in
the form of repeated lingering shots of the corner where Rodolfo Costa
had lived. At the time of filming, the corner structure houses a small laun-
dry business displaying its sign: “CLEAN LAVANDERIA.” The sign is a
reminder of how Rodolfo’s story, and the stories of state violence against
so many other Paraguayan gay men had been conveniently forgotten,
placed under erasure, whitewashed, and purged from national discourse.
The countermemories that Cuchillo attempts to rescue involve Renate’s
personal childhood recollections involving her uncle as well as victim tes-
timonies around the Caso Aranda and the Caso Palmieri; two stories that
constitute the most brutal moments of state-sponsored queer oppression
in Paraguay. Caso Aranda occurred in 1959, when Bernardo Aranda, a
radio personality, was murdered and his body incinerated with the fuel
from his own motorcycle. It is widely rumored that the dictator’s own
son, Gustavo Stroessner (“La Coronela”), was in a romantic relationship
with Aranda and was responsible for this crime of passion. To cover-up
the crime while showing the results required from a mano dura regime,
Stroessner initiated a witch hunt in which anyone suspected of being a
homosexual male was arrested and tortured. At this time la lista de los
108 was produced and circulated by the regime so that “society could be
aware of the amoral and sick individuals in their mist.” Caso Palmieri was
the second major homophobic roundup executed by the dictatorship. In
1982, 14-year-old Mario Luis Palmieri was kidnapped from his school.
His body turned up six days later. It is unclear why the police deducted
that this was also a crime of passion involving a gay romantic relationship.
Over 600 gay and/or gender bending men were arrested, interrogated,
and tortured. Their names were circulated in another list. Cuchillo’s work
of recovering these histories and retelling them from the perspective of
the victims and their confidants sets an unprecedented example of placing
clandestine countermemories into circulation at a key moment, when their
presence has the potential to affect new forms of visual culture informing
the national imaginary at a time of (re)establishing return to the origins
narratives. These histories disrupt any project of pure nationalism with the
contradictions and violences of the past, including the uprootings, dis-
placements, and exiles that gay men who found their names on these lists
QUEERING PARAGUAYAN FILM: 108/CUCHILLO DE PALO (2010)... 111
had to endure. Many found their lives, reputations, and businesses ruined,
facing no choice but to leave their home country.
PEDRO COSTA
Another dominant force in Cuchillo involves Renate’s conversations with
her father, Pedro Costa. In these conversations, Pedro displays his own
homophobia and the extreme homophobia with which he and Rodolfo
were raised. The conversations included in the documentary highlight this
homophobia most effectively through the religious rhetoric Pedro offers
in response to Renate’s challenges. These exchanges also help create a
fuller picture of how the Aranda and Palmieri persecutions were justified
by religious and populist thought, and they assist in producing a docu-
mentary in which the nationalist narrative of relationality between men is
upset by making female subjectivity central to its project through Renate’s
questioning.
A scene that illustrates this feminist and queer challenge to heteronor-
mative discipline begins with Pedro painting a window at his shop, shot
from the outside. Pedro’s face on the other side of the glass becomes less
and less visible until he blacks out the panes completely. Visually, he cre-
ates a barrier between himself and the outside world. The blacked-out
window represents the ideological barrier between Pedro and Renate, as
evidenced by the conversation that follows. This conversation is held in
the office of the blacksmith shop; the documentary’s most privileged space
of patrilineage. Pedro sits behind his desk and Renate sits across from
him, the bulky piece of furniture materially reinforcing the insurmount-
able ideological differences between them:
Renate: Entre todos tus hermanos me parece que Rodolfo era el que
más llamaba la atención, ¿verdad? O sea, yo por lo menos siendo
niña, viniendo acá a la casa de la abuela o al taller o viéndole
a él por acá. Pero había una sensación rara cuando él hablaba
con nosotros. Pero no de nosotros, de los adultos alrededor de
nosotros.
Pedro: Y era porque tenían temor de su tendencia, de la tendencia de
Rodolfo, de la homosexualidad. Ese era el temor. Entonces,
¿qué ocurre? Se comienza a poner barreras. Así como decís vos,
que cuando él viene y está hablando con tu hijo se van poniendo
barreras.
112 E.K. ROMERO
de tu hermano. No. Pero como vos sabés que sus amigos son
Enriquito, Josecito, Alfredito … la puta. Llega un momento en
que ya no…
Renate: ¿Pero qué lo que vos hablabas con él? ¿Le pedías a él que él
cambie?
Pedro: Y que deje de eso.
Renate: Pero él era así.
Pedro: Hay algunos puntos que yo no te puedo explicar. Lo natural es
lo natural. Y aparte de eso vos tenés que instruirte. Yo te puedo
enseñar algunas cosas pero vos también tenés que instruirte. Y
ayudarme y ayudarte. No tiene sentido que yo te explique todo
y después vos te vas con otra chica. No tiene sentido. O sea,
¿todo lo que hice está mal? ¿No te instruí, no te enseñé, no te
mostré? Pero te cuento que todo lo que te instruí fue con cariño
y con amor porque sos mi hija. Ahora si vos decidiste otra cosa,
dios mío, lo siento mucho.
Immediately after this scene, the next series of shots take the spectator
to the street. The tone of Renate’s voice-over sounds rather defeated: “A
veces pienso que callar sería más fácil. Callar y olvidar.” She goes on to
recall other details about her uncle: his flamboyancy, how he dressed, how
he danced, how he loved Elvis and how the seat next to him was often
empty. This narration is juxtaposed with images of street graffiti that recall
the Stroessner dictatorship: “Tortura nunca más,” “Stroessner Torturador:
no más ricos al poder” and “Lista 9”—a reference to the Colorado Party
of which Stroessner was a member. These transition images link Pedro’s
heteronormative, homophobic, religious rhetoric to the nation and to the
nation’s political history. In their exchange, Renate clearly outlines the
hurtful behavior that other adults in her family displayed toward Rodolfo
due to their ignorance and fear. Instead of recognizing this homophobia
for what it is, a position of discrimination against an individual’s identity,
Pedro unapologetically uses the word temor to defend his stance and the
stance of others. Similarly, the Stroessner dictatorship linked homosexual-
ity and criminality to justify and normalize gay persecution. Pedro’s justi-
fication for violently attacking Rodolfo’s friends comes on the heels of his
speech about love and the Holy Spirit. In the context of the dictatorship,
violence directed toward the queer population does not require explana-
tion: it is the only responsible and moral response.
114 E.K. ROMERO
Renate brings up the fact that not everyone needs to have children, she
introduces an element that helps queer and disrupt Pedro’s rhetoric by
what Gopinath might call “unmasking and undercutting its dependence
on a genealogical, implicitly heteronormative reproductive logic.”13 It
is helpful to think about the undercutting represented in this exchange
between Renate and Pedro in light of Lee Edelman’s problematization
of the heteronormative life timeline in No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive. Edelman describes political rhetorical devices to which
queerness presents a threat, in that it names an outside to these “dis-
courses of the common good” that present themselves as self-evident.
For example, Edelman describes the Child who is summoned in political
rhetoric as the hope for the future. Any argument that undermines this
Child is unthinkable, being that under the logic of reproductive futur-
ism, any such alternative equals a movement against hope and the future.
Edelman describes reproductive futurism as that which would “…impose
an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the pro-
cess the absolute privilege of heternormativity by rendering unthinkable,
by casting outside the public domain, the possibility of a queer resistance
to this organizing principle of communal relations.”14 Edelman presents
queerness as a refusal of this order and investigates its potential to make
visible the tyranny of reproductive timelines as social structures. The
heteronormative life narrative represents one acceptable series of events,
including heterosexual coupling, marriage under the law, and procre-
ation. When Renate challenges Pedro’s version of the heteronormative
life narrative, and he immediately responds that priests could be an excep-
tion, this unmasks Pedro’s complete inability to think outside of a tyran-
nically rigid set of practices for communal relations. Indeed, when Renate
insists that the social exclusion her family put Rodolfo through was a
much worse pathology than homosexuality, (“A mí me son más enfermos
ustedes que él,”) Pedro cannot deny that he is unwell, yet he sees his
own illness simply as a condition of being a member of society like any
other. Similarly, when Renate challenges Pedro’s ridiculous conversion
project by simply protesting “Pero él era así,” all Pedro can reply is “Hay
algunos puntos que yo no te puedo explicar. Lo natural es lo natural.”
This unmasks and undercuts Pedro’s rhetorical dependence on a fragile
genealogical, implicitly heteronormative reproductive logic that presents
itself as a self-evident “discourse of the common good,” but that does
not hold up under scrutiny.
116 E.K. ROMERO
A nivel acá era una ruleta rusa. No era fácil. Nadie se quería parar en la
esquina. Entonces no aguantamos más y nos tuvimos que pelear con la
policía para que nos dejen en paz. Porque ellos se bajaban a cualquier hora,
si te veían se bajaban y te garroteaban con cachiporra. Te mataban a gol-
pes—era jodido, triste. Si nos mandaban a nuestras casas llegábamos todas
ensangrentadas … Mi mamá lloraba cuando yo salía, pero qué voy a hacer,
yo tengo que sobrevivir pues. No puedo depender también de otra gente …
No tengo también otra alternativa siendo travesti. Acá no me van a dar en
una oficina a trabajar.
In the 1980s, pre-internet age, the most effective way for transgender sex
workers to locate clients was to claim a public space, (one such space was
Plaza Uruguaya), in the early hours of the morning. While this was a way
to engage with clients, this open secret of where and when trans women
could be found also made them targets for harassment and abuse (teen-
age boys would drive by and hurl things, yell obscenities, etc.) That said,
somehow these trans individuals were able to carve out a public space
for themselves, even during the Stroessner dictatorship. As Liz Paola
describes, they were not included in the persecutory listas de homosexu-
ales because this could not “burn” them, as they were already out. While
Paola was arrested during the Palmieri case investigation, her name did
not appear on this list, as she explains:
QUEERING PARAGUAYAN FILM: 108/CUCHILLO DE PALO (2010)... 119
En la lista no salían las travestis, solamente eran todos gays … Creo que esa
lista luego se hizo para quemar a la gente, porque eran muy de la sociedad
supuestamente los gays que cayeron preso. Y como nosotras somos más
liberadas y estamos a los cuatro vientos acá en la esquina … ¿Entonces qué
lo que vamos a quemar…?
The way in which Paraguay’s trans women were visible made them
immune to the dictatorship’s coercion technique reified by the list. While
gay men were outed into silence and exile, the travestis remained. This
made them pioneers of queer visibility and representation in Asunción,
something that no doubt helped start to condition society so that the gay
pride parades of the 2000s could take place. (Whereas the police would
beat Paola and her friends as they attempted to earn a living in the 1980s,
Cuchillo shows police officers safely escorting a small gay pride parade in
the 2010 documentary.) While transgender women paved the way for gay
rights activists, Cuchillo also illustrates how gay men may have allied with
transgender women in other ways. Paola explains that her business with
Rodolfo involved buying hormones from him, and in a given interview,
Carlos, an old friend of Rodolfo’s, states that Rodolfo’s job was one of
“coaching” (asesoramiento artístico). Perhaps Rodolfo assisted many in
their male-to-female journeys and performance.
While some feminists perhaps do not think they owe anything to the
transgender prostitutes they see as sleazy, Berlant and Warner might re-
frame their attitude with a similar challenge to “respectable gays” who
might look down on certain sexual subcultures: “their success, their way
of living, their political rights, and their very identities would have never
been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they now
despise. Extinguish it, and almost all out gay or queer culture will wither
on the vine.”20 Thanks to the transgender women who risked their per-
sonal safety, even when gay people were forced under erasure, the trav-
estis were still able to maintain a space of queer presence and visibility.21
Likewise, what the queerness of both groups does to subvert patriarchal
Catholic rhetoric is essential for advances in feminist arenas, including
acceptance and celebration of female sexuality and female pleasure.
A moment that connects feminism with Rodolfo is narrated by Renate;
a story about her own mother, Mirta. Renate explains that her mother had
fallen in love with someone else—not Pedro, her husband. She became
pregnant with his child and appeared publicly at her mother-in-law’s
(Renate’s abuela’s) funeral. Renate narrates the story this way:
120 E.K. ROMERO
about themselves now that the world can see their national documentary’s
subaltern turn: the uplifting of queer, subaltern voices. Semana, on the
other hand, made the elite feel worse about themselves, as it confronted
them with their own hypocrisy. Thinking of Cuchillo’s success in light of
Avelar’s statement about the rise of testimonio raises important questions:
other on full display. Also, there is a dildo on the table. Constanza tries to
tell Derlis that she has given away a good chunk of her inheritance to an
NGO that helps street children, in a gesture of generosity that she credits
him with teaching her about. He can barely contain his irritation at her
giving away money that he thinks they should keep. They attempt to have
a philosophically sophisticated conversation, but it ends with him con-
fronting her about why the dildo has batteries in it. (Is he mad because
she shouldn’t need it? After all the word he uses to refer to the dildo is
consolador.) The whole exchange is confusing, but not half as confus-
ing as the exchange between Friday’s couple, Josefina and Sofia. They
seem to be two friends casually hanging out in a bedroom, bonding over
gossip in which they cattily criticize another girl for her fashion choices.
There is some awkward contact between them as Josefina lays her head
down on Sofia’s lap, both stretching out on the bed. Sofia talks about
trying on one of Josefina’s tops, which causes Sofia to check herself out
in the mirror. In a breast comparison, both remove their tops. Josefina
makes a move toward Sofia, but Sofia barely responds to the attempt at a
kiss, leaving the room and a panic-stricken Josefina. Santiago and Camila,
Saturday’s couple, are a pair of young hetero ravers who like to talk dirty
to each other, but when their sex talk becomes offensive to Santiago (dur-
ing intercourse, Camila admits that he never made her orgasm), he slaps
her. She starts to cry, which turns into laughter, and it seems that this may
be part of their game. They continue the sexual exchange. Camila eroti-
cally asphyxiates Santiago to the point that it seems he may be dead, but
after a few seconds he gasps for air. The last couple, Sunday’s, are Victoria
and Patricio. She is a flight attendant who is getting up in the middle
of the night to get ready for work. Patricio acts like a child or a puppy,
pawing at her while she tries to do her make-up and get dressed, begging
her not to leave and even threatening to kill himself. She scolds him and
the situation escalates, until finally her ride arrives. As she tries to leave,
Patricio tries to chase her out into the street. In a shot from a stairwell
they descend, spectators see their silhouettes framed against the bars on
a window, stressing the connotation of the film’s title: Semana capital,
as in capital punishment. The specter of heteronormativity as a disciplin-
ary regime is present. Their scuffle finally spills into the street; Victoria
barely gets into the car and Patricio is left standing in the street, totally
nude, crying and screaming after her, “I hate you!” This is the only time
in which the action moves from the interior, private space to the exterior,
public space, punctuating the end of the film.
124 E.K. ROMERO
CONCLUSIONS
As films that broke from the rural, heteronormative trend, Cuchillo de palo
and Semana capital mark a turn for Paraguayan film in 2010; a turn away
from unified, nationalist representations conveying purity in Paraguayan
origins, and a turn toward the inclusion of Paraguayan narratives that
challenge conventional, nationalist scripts by vizibilizing the queer, clan-
destine countermemories and histories that official state and religious dis-
course has placed under erasure. Cuchillo offers unprecedented moments
of queer and feminist resistance while linking heteronormative, homo-
phobic, and religious rhetoric to the nation’s political history and tradi-
126 E.K. ROMERO
NOTES
1. 193 The film’s original title is Cuchillo de palo; the film’s official
USA complete title is 108 Cuchillo de palo and the film’s world-
wide title is 108.
2. Debord, Society, 134.
3. The events known as “Marzo Paraguayo” occurred in 1999. Vice
President Luís María Argaña was assassinated on March 23 of said
year. It was widely believed that the president Raúl Cubas Grau
and his puppeteer, Lino César Oviedo, were responsible for this
assassination. (Oviedo had previously been incarcerated for
attempting a failed coup d’état and was freed by Cubas Grau once
the latter won the presidency.) Crowds protested in the streets over
the course of several days, demanding the end of the Cubas Grau/
Oviedo government immediately. Protesters were fired at by snip-
ers located on downtown rooftops, causing deaths and injuries.
QUEERING PARAGUAYAN FILM: 108/CUCHILLO DE PALO (2010)... 127
Lauded as a symbol of hope for the future while scorned as a threat to the
existing social order, youth have become objects of ambivalence caught
between contradictory discourses and spaces of transition. While pushed
to the margins of political power within society, youth nonetheless become
a central focus of adult fascination, desire, and authority.
After the 2008 election, Fernando Lugo became the second leftist presi-
dent of Paraguay (the first being Rafael Franco, who served from 1936 to
1937) thanks to a voting alliance between the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal
Radical Auténtico or PLRA) and the many small factions that make up
Paraguay’s contemporary political left (Alianza Patriótica por el Cambio).
This defeat shook the Colorado Party (Asociación Nacional Republicana—
Partido Colorado or ANR-PC), challenging them after 61 uninterrupted
years of political supremacy, including the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner
(1954–1989). Fear of marginal elements getting out of control contributes
to major political anxiety in the country as a result of these changes. Being
that Lugo ran on a platform of agrarian reform, protest over contested land
became more frequent and frustrations mounted as Lugo was continually
unsuccessful in producing any type of land redistribution. The Paraguayan
Right, particularly soy exporters, became increasingly paranoid about threats
of class warfare, civil unrest, and wealth redistribution. In June 2012, the
Colorado party took advantage of the discontent of the Liberal party, which
at the time, was being blatantly snubbed by Lugo who refused to return
their calls after having appointed certain Colorado favorites to high-level
government positions. When 17 people died in a gunfight between police
and landless farmers who had been occupying contested land in Curuguaty,1
the Paraguayan government clamored for Lugo’s impeachment. They were
able to do so in less than 48 hours, due to a constitutional clause introduced
after the Stroessner dictatorship allowing the Chamber of Deputies and
the Senate to impeach any president who they overwhelmingly deemed in
“poor performance of functions.” Having upset those who were previously
his allies, and with public approval ratings at an all-time low after multiple
paternity scandals, Lugo had not safeguarded himself against the vulnerabil-
ity of his position. The Chamber of Deputies voted 76 to 1 and the Senate
voted 39 to 6 (four against, two absent) in favor of impeachment. Elected in
April 2013, Horacio Cartes became the president of Paraguay. Embodying
a type of anti-politic, Cartes is a businessman with strong support from the
business sector who is seen as having merely “rented” the Colorado Party
in order to reach the presidency (he joined the party only two years before
the election.)
The only political science panel organized on Paraguay at the 2013
Latin American Studies Association Conference was named “Paraguay at
a Crossroads.”2 This panel name was aptly chosen, as the political cli-
mate of Paraguay has been one of change since Lugo’s election in 2008.
Paraguayan politics swung between Left and Right after the impeach-
ment.3 In the same time period, Paraguay’s macro-economic growth was
celebrated as the greatest in Latin America, yet its micro-economic condi-
tions did not change.4 Looking forward, it is difficult to predict what is in
store for Paraguay. The nation could be likened to an adolescent: a being
in a state of transition, whose choices today could impact them drastically
for the rest of their adult life—a being who has the potential to choose
very different life paths. Concerns about childhood and adolescence in
Paraguay, therefore, are literal and figurative. Recalling Henry Giroux’s
words at the start of this chapter, the figure of the child in film is often
represented in opposing ways based on adult hopes and anxieties. Per the
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Frente por la Niñez y
la Adolescencia, in a 2013 report titled, “La inversión en la infancia: una
condición indispensable para el desarrollo económico y social equitativo
y sostenible,” 43 in every 100 Paraguayan minors live in poverty.5 Yet
THE CHILD AS PARAGUAY’S FUTURE: “CALLE ÚLTIMA (2010)... 131
Paraguayan film’s interest in the child reflects a crisis that goes beyond
the concrete conditions of minors. In Tamara Falicov’s study of San
Sebastian’s 2011 Cine en Construcción line-up, which includes 7 cajas,
she remarks on how:
Despite being from different countries and different storylines, all six fea-
tures had youth as protagonists. This is not surprising, knowing that the
youth demographic typically is the audience that attends the movies …
Perhaps more than an economic imperative, these youth perhaps symbol-
ized a future generation, and those contemporary themes that film makers
from their respective countries wanted to explore.6
Los niños, niñas y adolescentes son la clave para romper el ciclo intergen-
eracional de la pobreza … Invertir en los niños, las niñas y adolescentes no
es una cuestión de caridad o de inducir una dosis de simpatía (o empatía) en
132 E.K. ROMERO
Children are the hope for Paraguay, a feeling presented as beyond idealism
or charity, but rather, as related to concrete solutions to problems caused
by poverty and underdevelopment. This emphasis on children as a sym-
bolic and real touchstone for measuring the future of the nation echoes in
recent Paraguayan culture, including film. Arguably, the most visible rep-
resentations of children and adolescents in contemporary Paraguayan cin-
ema come from Calle Última (Marcelo Martinessi 2010), Mita’í (Miguel
Agüero 2011) and 7 cajas (Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori
2012). Together, these films represent a crossroads for the Child and the
Nation. Calle Última and Mita’í seek to highlight impoverished chil-
dren’s efforts to overcome obstacles to attending primary school, while
7 cajas constructs a world in which children, adolescents and adults have
gone down a path of crime and corruption. These three films present a
spectrum of utopia and dystopia; from the idealistic promises of education
to the violence and havoc the undisciplined adolescent body wreaks as it
takes over its part of the city. Similarly, the films and texts discussed here
show a tension that finds its pivot point in youth; a tension between the
desire to renounce the state and call for the state to act; a tension between
the impulse to bypass politics and the impulse to use politics to get things
done.
Mita´í is a short film directed by Miguel Agüero, which takes place in the
rural space, featuring rural protagonists and dialogue entirely in Guaraní.
Mita´í is the first Paraguayan film that aims at representing the point of
view of a main character with a disability. Although the actor himself,
Rodrigo Paredes, does not have a cognitive disability, this short film does
an unprecedented job of representing the struggle of this particular child
population on the margins.8 That said, it is noteworthy that the director
chose a cognitively abled actor to represent a cognitively disabled pro-
tagonist, when part of the short film’s criticism involves shedding light
on the fact that the cognitively disabled are often not allowed to speak or
THE CHILD AS PARAGUAY’S FUTURE: “CALLE ÚLTIMA (2010)... 133
decide for themselves. Mita´í is a Guaraní word that means “boy” but also
playfully connotes mischief and naughtiness (picardía, travesura) associ-
ated with youthful, lively energy. Indeed, Mati (short for Matias) displays
these qualities by the end of the film even though perhaps spectators are
not expecting it. The film plays repeatedly with the viewer’s expectations
and stereotypes around people with cognitive disabilities.
The film begins as Mati stokes a fire indoors. The film cuts between
Mati at the fire and outdoor shots showing smoke billowing from the
windows of the shack. Indoor fires set for cooking and/or warmth are
a known health hazard in many rural Latin American communities. Mati
seems oblivious to this fact as he sings the French nursery melody, “Frère
Jacques” in Guaraní. The film cuts again to Mati’s face; he is staring off
with an inexplicable, wistful smile. The film cuts to a group of children
in school uniforms. Mati stops them to say hello. “You are on your way
to school, right?” he asks. They have a conversation about what they are
learning in school, and Mati tells them that he went to school up until
second grade, but he could not go on. “Can you read?” the schoolchildren
ask him. “Yes,” he replies, “but the teacher was mean to me, she said I was
special.” The word special, used this way in the Paraguayan lexicon, gently
insinuates that there is something unusually difficult about dealing with
this person, usually related to an idiosyncratic need particular to a given
individual’s undesirable personality trait. One of the younger children
immediately challenges the teacher’s label: “But you’re not,” she protests.
As the children run along so as not to be late to school, Mati tells them to
go quickly and study hard, espousing the values of punctuality and educa-
tion. He then sadly turns away, saying to himself “I used to go to school.
I want go back to school” as sad music swells to establish this exclusion as
a shame and a tragedy. The aforementioned UNICEF report also draws
attention to the extreme disadvantage at which children with disabilites
find themselves: “Se estima que al menos el 10% de los niños/as de 5 a 17
años no asisten a ningún centro educativo; sólo 36% de los niños y niñas
con discapacidad declara haber asistido y alrededor del 70% de los niños
indígenas solo llegan a la educación básica.”9 The cards are stacked against
children who may want to attend school if they have a disability; even more
so if they are also indigenous. While Mati is not an indigenous character,
his mestizo racial qualification certainly enters into this common equation
where disability and race overlap in situations of the most precarity.
Mati is visibly different from the children he meets on their way to
school: they are all wearing school uniforms and he is not. Yet when he
134 E.K. ROMERO
mentions the phrase the school teacher uses to set him apart, the school
children reject this othering and marginalization by protesting “But
you’re not.” The child characters show empathy in contrast with the adult
figure of the teacher. In all three films discussed here, parents—and more
broadly, adults—fail children and adolescents though their actions or sim-
ply through their absence. Young people find themselves surviving despite
their parents with the help of siblings and peers. The narrative situation in
which siblings/peers are privileged over parents/adults reflects a broader
transition in Paraguay: faith in the return of a paternalistic, authoritarian
regime (such as the Stroessner dictatorship) is supplanted by a general-
ized anti-politics evident in Paraguay’s contemporary political, economic,
and social situation. Ironically, amidst this trend of putting overt politics
under erasure, (as exemplified by Cartes’s “rental” of the Colorado Party)
the Left has found the child and education to be among the few rhetorical
shelters sufficiently devoid of politics from which to operate.
In the following scene, Mati’s mother scrubs clothes by hand while
Mati cries because he cannot go to school. She assures him that she will
take care of his uniform and when he is older there will be a “special
grade” and he will be able to resume his education. She also tells him that
men should not cry and it is silly that he is crying. Her lack of support in
this scene reflects a downplaying of Mati’s emotional needs—by his own
family member—as regularly experienced by people with disabilities and
even more broadly, as a male-identified person being pressured to conform
to sexist notions of masculinity and toughness. While Mati technically has
the right to an education under the law, his legal capacity is diminished
because he cannot exercise this right due to his disability, his class, his eth-
nic status, and his geographic location in the rural space. In essence, his
situation equals a civil death; he is not supported nor is he allowed to make
his own decisions. As Tina Minkowitz describes, no country’s legal system
is ever neutral. (Latin America specifically suffers the legacy of its founda-
tion in paternalistic and patriarchal Roman Law.) As Minkowitz spells out:
the spectator now realizes was related to a memory of love, laughter, and
affection involving someone close to Mati. The film sets up a trap in which
the spectator makes a false assumption to which attention is later drawn.
In the following scene, Mati’s mother informs Anita that she must go
away to work for a woman. Although the details are not explained, in
Paraguay it is common for adolescent girls to migrate from the country
into the city to work as domestic servants for urban households. Anita tells
her mother she does not want to go, but her mother explains that they
have no choice. “I cannot do this alone any longer. We cannot go on buy-
ing on credit from the store,” she explains. When Anita asks who will take
care of her younger siblings, her mother responds that Mati is big enough
to take care of them. He is hard working and he already knows how to
cook. Mati hears this as he eavesdrops from the hall. It is noteworthy
that Mati’s sister’s departure is conditioned not by Mati’s disability, but
by his ability. In this sense, Mati does not fall into the category of “sad-
crip” or “supercrip” as identified by Mark Rapley in his book, The Social
Construction of Intellectual Disability. Mati is neither so severely disabled
that he evokes pity (sadcrip), nor has he transcended his disability so
totally that his figure summons a discourse of exceptionalism and respect
(supercrip). In this sense, Mita´i highlights that people with disabilities
have needs and feelings, just like the cognitively able. For example, when
Anita starts to cry, her mother scolds her as she scolded Mati: “Don’t cry,
the poor do not cry, my daughter. We have to help each other.” Just as
their parent’s lack of emotional support intersected previously with Mati’s
disability and gender, now, for Anita, this lack intersects with her age and
their poverty. As the eldest child, the burden of breadwinning falls upon
her. Anita is forced to begin the business of labor and self-sufficiency; she
is forced to abandon the comfort of living in a home where her parent
provides and she can remain a child. Similarly, people in Paraguay face the
end of paternalistic, authoritarian regimes and seek new relationships with
politics, even if those relationships are better described as anti-politics.
was also involved in its production. The film features at-risk youth assisted by
organizations like Don Bosco Roga, (an orphanage for street boys), Grupo
Luna Nueva (an NGO whose mission is to improve the lives of children and
adolescents who have been victims of sexual exploitation) and Callescuela, (a
pro-child and adolescent organization that focuses on the Villa 9 de Marzo
and Mercado Central de Abasto areas of Asunción.) The at-risk youths sto-
ryboarded their ideas with the guidance of director Marcelo Martinessi, tell-
ing stories from their own lives and translating those stories into a narrative
appropriate for a short film. Months before filming, the youths (aged 9 to
15) participated in acting and screenplay writing workshops.
Calle Última also features obstacles keeping the young protagonists
from attending school, but instead of the idyllic, pastoral backdrop, the
urban space and the criminality Latin American film has traditionally asso-
ciated with street children are major elements of the short. Miriam, a poor
adolescent, is mocked at school over her footwear to such a degree that
she feels she cannot return. The camera begins the short at floor height;
we see Miriam’s rough feet in flip-flops surrounded by other students’
feet in closed-toe shoes and socks. The mocking increases in volume to
the point that it drowns out the teacher’s lecture (Fig. 6.1 and Fig. 6.2).
Miriam decides to visit her “boyfriend,” José, to see if he can help her
get new shoes. Miriam meets him at a warehouse where other street boys
Fig. 6.3 José and friends breakdance for change at a stoplight in Calle Última
Fig. 6.5 Miriam contemplates the future after talking to her friend; an underage
mother, in Calle Última
his mother. In one of the final scenes, Doña Mary says to Mati, “Your
mom made a big mistake, getting together with that good-for-nothing.
You probably don’t even know your father, and that’s why you turned
out a little crazy.” While Mati rejects Doña Mary’s statements and later
calls her a liar, Mati’s father is totally absent from the short film; he is “off
the hook,” never even presented for judgment. Miriam’s icy accusation
of her own mother “Why do you stay with him?” goes completely unan-
swered. The woman is too tired, too defeated and has too many children
to expect more from the man who is helping her provide for them all. In
Moral Spectatorship, Cartwright describes the “psychoanalytic specter of
the unloving, demanding mother” as the pathological figure who pro-
duces psychological disorder in her child, “launching a mid-century wave
of maternal blame and shame.”17 Given the traditionally lopsided bur-
den that society has placed on mothers versus fathers, it is not surprising
that even progressive development discourse places uneven emphasis on
“investing in girls”—they are mothers in the making. Certainly societies
should invest in girls, but when boys and men are left out of the education
discourse, this sends the message that society has already given up on their
potential to approach paternity, family finance, and community involve-
ment responsibly.18
Victor and his friend Liz as they transport the boxes, lose them, recover
(some of) them, discover what is inside them and dodge the police and a
local gang in the process, finally realizing that they have been implicated
in a dangerous criminal plot involving kidnapping, murder, and ransom.
The action begins while Victor is distracted by a Hollywood-style action
flick playing at a DVD booth. Victor is totally absorbed by this showdown
in which one man is held at gunpoint by another. The film is in English,
but Victor mouths the dialogue in Jopará: the Guaraní-Spanish mix that
is commonly spoken in Asunción (and the predominant linguistic register
of 7 cajas). Victor makes a living transporting people’s goods through
the market by pushcart. He suddenly realizes that a potential customer
is being lured away by Nelson, another pushcart driver. Victor protests
but does not win back the customer. He and Nelson insult each other,
and Nelson specifically calls Victor a patotero infeliz, an insult related to
gang activity, anti-social behavior, and violent criminality. Indeed, all of
the male characters who do business in the Mercado Cuatro area exhibit
criminal behavior ranging from petty theft and smuggling to kidnapping
and homicide. (The only group of male characters unrelated to criminality
is the police—an irony given the severe levels of corruption for which the
Paraguayan police force is infamous; a fact not lost on Calle Última, for
example).
In the second scene of the film, Victor is visited by his sister attempting
to sell a cellular phone for her friend. When Victor realizes that this phone
has a video camera function, he becomes obsessed with it, because it is
“just like being on TV.” At several different moments in the film Victor
finds himself mesmerized by the fantasy of seeing himself televised, which
is arguably the fantasy that motivates him most forcefully and moves the
plot forward, culminating in the happy ending: Victor finally gets to see
himself on the national news after he has been held hostage during a show
down between the police and the local gang. The “individualistic consum-
erism and seductive beats of transnational youth culture” that Podalsky
draws attention to in Mexican cinema and that I relate to Calle Última
are also significant in 7 cajas given the privileged positions of cellular
phones in the film coupled with Victor’s obsession: seeing his own image
recorded and broadcast. In the final scene, it is indeed a cell-phone video
recording of the showdown between the police and Nelson’s crew that
allows Victor’s dream to come true.
The rampant criminality characterized as fundamental to the informal
economy of Mercado Cuatro is presented as threatening in terms of the
146 E.K. ROMERO
to no avail. The fact that Nelson becomes more violent and organizes
others into a violent gang makes it difficult to sympathize with his cause,
even though it is perhaps the most noble.21 By the end of the film, when
Nelson is shot in the head by a police officer, it is likely that the spectator
has already forgotten about his wife and child, who never re-appear in the
film.
Calle Última and 7 cajas represent a world in which adolescents seem
to fall into only two categories: students (hopefully) on the path of profes-
sionalization or street kids (unfortunately) on their way to a life of crime.
This narrative echoes the language of the UNICEF report:
While the factors discussed in the report are no doubt related to each
other, the dichotomy is reduced into a story of children and adolescents
at a crossroads in which they either choose well (and become students)
or poorly (and become street kids). The danger lies in the conceptual
line these children may cross when they are framed in literal and figu-
rative “street kid territory.” In Henry Giroux’s exploration of the link
between media panics, politics, and representations of adolescents, he
states that “Young people are no longer seen as a symptom of a wider
social dilemma—they are the problem.”23 At what point does the advocacy
and empathy in favor of the child no longer apply to the street kid whose
identity as a child has been overshadowed by his identity as a criminal?
7 cajas’ undeniable success at the box office, at film festivals, and among
critics has been good for putting Paraguayan cinema on the map, but it
is rather unfortunate in terms of its problematic contributions to Latin
American street kid narratives. Mainstream audiences mostly overlook
the film’s damaging representation of Mercado Cuatro morality simply
because they are delighted to see such an “authentic” representation of
the Paraguayan underclass; especially in the film’s hero and side-kick.
Conveniently packaged stereotypes and misconceptions about Latin
America’s urban poor are mostly brushed aside much like they were in the
148 E.K. ROMERO
case of the hype surrounding Slumdog Millionaire (2008) for one reason
primarily—the movie is fun to watch.24
… and to repress them … This would not be the first or last time that state
policies bolstered ideas of troublesome youth in order to benefit the ruling
party.”27 In the aforementioned contexts, the figure of the child criminal
is deployed to benefit certain political sectors through fear mongering—a
move antithetical to any campaign designed to increase awareness of the
struggles of minors living under the poverty line.
The political divide in contemporary Paraguay displays certain paral-
lels with the neoliberal turn in US economics and its political expression.
Giroux argues the following about the U.S. context:
As the political tide has turned against the well-being, support and hap-
piness of working-class and black children, further weakening support for
the very young in troubled families and social circumstances, a new form
of representational politics has emerged in media culture fuelled by degrad-
ing visual depictions of youth as criminal, sexually decadent, drug crazed,
and illiterate. In short, youth are viewed as a growing threat to the public
order.28
The Child represents a site for denouncing precarity and making demands
of the government while using a language that makes appeals to integrity,
human rights, and economics; concepts that bridge the Left-Right divide
and furthermore, are nearly impossible to question in a Catholic nation. In
No Future, Lee Edelman describes the child who is summoned in political
rhetoric as the hope for the future. Any argument that undermines this
child is unthinkable, being that under the logic of reproductive futurism,
any such alternative equals a movement against hope, against the future,
and against the undeniable, wide-eyed child. Reproductive futurism is
what Edelman describes as the “organizing principle of [heteronorma-
tive] communal relations.”31 Trotting out the child is a politically savvy
rhetorical move for the Left, as the child is totally congruous with the
heteronormative life narrative (heterosexual coupling, marriage under the
law, procreation) to which conservative regimes so doggedly cling.
Education and the Future
Access to education has become a major talking point in Paraguayan pub-
lic discourse. Many believe education is the simplest answer to all social
ills and that Paraguay’s low standing in quality of education is greatly to
blame for national underdevelopment in general. The UNICEF report
outlines just how dismal Paraguay’s ranking in terms of education is:
Conclusion
Paraguayan national film represents a unique opportunity for analysis, as
it involves such a small and recent body of films. Perhaps Paraguayan film
finds itself working through the crisis of transition even more pointedly
than other Latin American national cinemas, being that Paraguayan film
defines itself at the same moment in which the nation faces new challenges
to self-definition. In this sense, the adolescent going through transitions
on film offers a site for exploring anxieties around the course of the nation
and its future; specifically, anxieties about a changing political and eco-
nomic landscape, individualistic consumerism, criminality, marginal ele-
THE CHILD AS PARAGUAY’S FUTURE: “CALLE ÚLTIMA (2010)... 153
Notes
1. Servin, “Paraguay.”
2. At the time of this writing, University of Kansas is planning a 2017
Paraguayan Studies conference also called “Paraguay at the
Crossroads”, https://latamst.ku.edu/Paraguay2017.
3. h t t p : / / b i g s t o r y. a p . o r g / a r t i c l e / p a r a g u a y - 1 7 - k i l l e d -
violent-land-dispute.
4. http://ea.com.py/avance-sojero-y-pobreza/.
5. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 11.
6. Falicov, Cine en Construcción, 260.
7. UNICEF, 1.
8. Paredes won the award for Mejor Actuación as part of the 3°
Concurso Nacional de Cortos Ta’anga Kyre’y (2011). The judges
awarded the piece Mejor Cortometraje, “Por el llamado a la reflex-
ión sobre el valor de la educación y el acceso igualitario a ella sin
discriminaciones, en una propuesta estética intensa y fuertemente
arraigada en el paisaje campesino.” (http://www.abc.com.py/
espectaculos/dan-a-conocer-las-peliculas-favoritas-del-festival-de-
cine-312855.html).
9. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 21.
10. Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, 224.
11. Podalsky, “Young, Damned,” 145–6.
12. Ibid., 146.
13. Ibid., 150.
14. Rocha, “Introduction,” 96.
15. Butler, Frames, 25.
16. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 5.
17. Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, 191.
18. For specific examples of development language that excludes boys,
see Reesor-Keller, Leah. “The real reason it’s worth educating
girls.”
19. Mur, 2013.
20. http://www.cinematropical.com/Cinema-Tropical/paraguayan-
hit-7-boxes-coming-to-the-us-this-february.html.
21. As I mentioned previously, much like CalleÚltima,7 cajas singles
out a particular part of Asunción, divorcing its rampant criminality
from bourgeois Asunción, making it threatening but also exotic
THE CHILD AS PARAGUAY’S FUTURE: “CALLE ÚLTIMA (2010)... 155
and distant. This move is further complicated by the fact that two
of the actors from Nelson’s violent street gang are also actors from
Calle Última.
22. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 30.
23. Giroux, Breaking Movies, 175.
24. See for example R. Koehler’s review of “Slumdog Millionaire” in
Cineaste. 34.2 (2009): 74–77.
25. Del Pozo, “Olvidados,” 125.
26. Ibid., 148.
27. Podalsky, “Young, Damned,” 146–7.
28. Giroux, Breaking Movies, 174.
29. Paraguay’s Congress Gives President New Powers to Use Military
Intervention Against Citizens.
30. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 6–7.
31. Edelman, No Future, 2.
32. UNICEF, “Paraguay,” 21.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Pérez, “Queer Children,” 146.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
108/Cuchillo de palo. Dir. Renate Costa. 2010. DVD.
7 cajas. Juan Carlos Mangelia and Tana Schémbori. (Breaking Glass Pictures),
2013. DVD.
Calle Última. Dir. Marcelo Martinessi. (Undistributed), 2010. Web.
Frankfurt. Dir. Ramiro Gómez. (Undistributed), 2008. DVD.
Hamaca paraguaya. Dir. Paz Encina. Transeuropa Video Entertainment, 2006.
DVD.
Karai norte. Dir. Marcelo Martinessi. 2009. DVD.
La chiperita. Dir. Hugo Cataldo. (Undistributed), 2015. Web.
Mita’í. Dir. Miguel Agüero. (Undistributed), 2011. Web. 25 March 2014.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3-qMS0tC-A.
Noche adentro. Dir. Pablo Lamar. 2009. DVD.
Semana capital. Dir. Hugo Cataldo. 2010. DVD.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 163
determinism, 3, 48, 51, 93 gender, 1, 3, 46, 47, 51, 57, 74, 80,
development discourse, 17, 28, 84, 98, 100, 101, 104, 110, 114,
48–50, 144 116, 124, 136
dictatorship, 5, 6, 12–15, 17, 19, 20, gender and class, 1, 3, 51, 80, 98
24, 27, 37, 38, 49, 73–5, 84, 97, gendering, 17, 28, 49
103–5, 110, 113, 116–20, 124, Getino, Octavio, 28
126, 127n3, 129, 130, 134, Gini coefficient, 38, 41
148, 149 Gómez, Ramiro, 16, 55, 56, 106
disabled, 21, 132, 135, 136 González, J. Natalicio, 48
documentary, 2, 5, 16–18, 45, 50, Guaraní, 2, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 22n1,
52n11, 55–78, 103–5, 107, 109, 22n2, 23n12, 28, 42, 48, 55,
111, 119, 121 66, 68, 78n30, 98, 99, 132,
Duarte, Nicanor, 14, 16 133, 145
durée, 32
H
E Hamaca paraguaya (2006), 17,
educational system, 152, 153 27–54, 57, 70, 75, 103
emigrated, 39 heteronormativity, 114, 117, 121,
England, 59, 62, 64, 70, 71 123, 124, 126
“éramos felices y no lo sabíamos”, Historic isolation and isolationism, 4
14, 97, 148 homosexual men, 2, 17
Espinosa, Julio García, 29, 56
Experimental Latin American Cinema,
23n4, 30 I
illiteracy, 7, 8, 11, 12, 105, 126,
143
F impeachment, 12, 15, 21, 27, 130
fan, 55, 57, 58, 60–5, 71, 74 Indian melancholy, 45
female sexuality, 18, 79, 90, 119 indigenismo, 56
feminist struggles, 19, 79 indigenous peoples, 45
Frankfurt (2008), 16–18, 52n11, indiosincracia, 56
55–78 the inferiority complex, 44
free markets, 50 intimate public(s), 62, 67
Frente por la Niñez y la Adolescencia, invisibility, 5, 31, 40, 98
21, 130 Itaipú, 151, 152
fútbol, 17, 18, 56, 65, 67, 72, 73 Italian Neorealism, 35, 52n18
G J
gaze, 45, 51 Jopará, 7, 23n12, 145
GDP, 39, 151
INDEX 167
K N
Karai norte (2009), 18, 79–102 nacionalismo futbolero, 18, 63, 67,
72, 76
national anthem, 57, 62
L national identity, 2, 3, 7, 9–11, 28, 45,
labor, 32, 33, 35, 39, 51, 66, 71, 91, 55, 56, 60, 67, 70, 104, 105
99, 136 nationalism, 10, 43, 46, 56, 57, 62,
la conquista, 19, 79, 100 72, 73, 109, 110, 114, 117, 120,
Lamar, Pablo, 16, 18, 25n30, 79 126
Lezcano, Benjamín “Toto”, 27 nationality, 3, 51, 52n10
liberales, 14 negative sublime, 47
López, Antonio Carlos, 14, 25n22, neoliberalism, 2, 4, 6, 8, 18, 50, 56,
71 72, 73
López, Francisco Solano, 14, 25n22, new democrats, 1, 2, 7, 21, 105, 108,
37, 70, 71, 75 109, 126
“Los fondos excedentes de Itaipú Noche adentro (2010), 18, 79–102
deben ser para la educación”, nostalgia, 14, 46, 59, 109, 148
152 nutrition, 143
Los paraguayos, 16, 57, 70
Lugo, Fernando, 12, 14–16, 21,
25n30, 27, 39, 129, 130 O
108/Cuchillo de palo (2010), 16, 19,
103–28
M othering and exoticization, 45
macroeconomic growth, 21
Martinessi, Marcelo, 16, 18, 79, 93,
132, 137 P
martyrdom, 60, 75 paraguayidad, 18, 28, 39, 55, 99,
mate cocido, 58, 70, 94 109, 116
mediatization, 60, 61 Paraguay’s future, 17, 21, 28, 39,
melancholia, 36, 47, 48 129–55
Mercado Cuatro, 144–7 patrimony, 7, 41
MERCOSUR, 39 Pérez, Sixto, 27
mestizaje, 19, 79, 84, 92, 98–100 popular, 7, 9, 12–15, 39, 41, 46, 50,
mestizo, 13, 41, 42, 48, 61, 99, 57, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 99,
133 106, 117, 131
Mita´í (2011), 21, 129–55 populist nationalism, 56
modernization, 18, 41, 44, 49, 50, postcoloniality, 51
56, 68, 69, 76 poverty, 5, 7, 21, 39, 48, 51, 53n21,
modernization theory, 50 56, 58, 66, 70–2, 84, 93, 130,
mortality rates, 143 132, 134, 136, 138, 143, 149,
mutants, 39 151, 153, 818
168 INDEX
R
race, 1, 3, 35, 40–50, 57, 80, 84, 92, T
98, 104, 133 television, 12, 18, 56–63, 66–72, 74,
racialization, 17, 28 80, 122, 145
rape, 18, 19, 79–102 television broadcasts, 57, 72
rape trope, 18, 19, 79–81, 86, 99, 100 temporality, 3, 17, 28, 33, 36, 45, 51,
raza cósmica, 41, 61 52n10
realism, 38 tereré, 30, 51n9, 68
reproduction, 33, 87, 117, 124, 126, Tierra roja (2006), 16, 55
135 transition, 1, 5–12, 21, 38, 49, 105,
reproductive futurism, 33, 115, 150 113, 117, 130, 131, 134, 152
révélateur, 39 Transnationalism, 10
Riquelme, Blas, 15, 27 transparency, 6, 7, 105
Rodriguez, Andrés, 14 trans women, 2, 17, 105, 118, 119
Triple Alliance War, 12, 14, 19,
25n22, 25n24, 37, 41, 48, 67,
S 70, 71, 74–6, 78n31, 79, 89–93,
self-recognition, 63–5 100, 101, 102n31, 117
Semana capital (2010), 19, 20, 2006 FIFA World Cup, 18, 56
103–28
7 cajas (2012), 21, 22, 23n12, 76n1,
129–55 U
slowness, 29, 31–3, 36, 38, 52n11 United Nations Children’s Fund
Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 148 (UNICEF), 21, 130, 133, 135,
small cinemas, 3–5, 83 136, 143, 147, 149–51
Solanas, Fernando, 28, 76n1 urban poor, 2, 7, 17, 147
INDEX 169
V Y
Vidal, Vega, 27 yerba mate, 66, 70
visibilizes, 117
W
wastrels, 32, 39