Eva Karene Romero (Auth.) - Film and Democracy in Paraguay-Palgrave Macmillan (2016)

FILM AND
DEMOCRACY IN
PARAGUAY
Eva Karene Romero

Film and Democracy in Paraguay
Eva Karene Romero
Film and Democracy

in Paraguay
Eva Karene Romero
Tucson, Arizona, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-44813-8 ISBN 978-3-319-44814-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959049
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Acknowledgments
I remember a decade ago, when Film and Democracy in Paraguay was

just a twinkle in my eye. It takes a village to raise a book. Frankly, there
is no end to the gestation metaphors I could employ here, but let’s just
say it all started with Andy Valdovinos. He was working on a few budding
film projects back in 2006 when I asked him the question: “Do you think
there are enough Paraguayan films now that I could write a dissertation
about them?” His encouragement came with a list of names of people
working on film projects. The conversations I had with Patricia Aguayo,
Hugo Cataldo, Fredi Casco, Manuel Cuenca, Renate Costa, Paz Encina,
Ramiro Gómez, Pablo Lamar, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori,
Marcelo Martinessi, Paulo Meileke, Augusto Netto Sisa, Aníbal Ríos,
Claudia Rojas, and Mariana Vázquez Tandé helped me understand that
something big was happening. I thank all of these people for so freely shar-
ing their dreams, trials, and tribulations with me.
I am greatly indebted to the following people, whose support, kind-
ness, help, encouragement and labor have gone into this project in one
way or another: to the Valdovinos family, thank you for welcoming me
into your homes and hearts every time I return to Paraguay. Lidia, Isabel,
and Elba, thank you for all the domestic labor that went into taking care
of me when I didn’t have the time to take care of myself. Sonia, Rosanna,
and Norita, thank you for being my primas. Hugo Biedermann, Vincent
Carlisle, Mario Franco, Belén Herrero, y Belén Perez, nuestro amor va
más allá del tiempo-espacio.
I am deeply indebted to many, many people who were part of my intel-
lectual journey at The University of Arizona. I would especially like to thank
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Abraham Acosta, Katia Bezerra, Laura Briggs, Daniel Calleros, Malcolm

Compitello, Laura Gutiérrez, Lucy Blaney-Liable, Andy Guzmán, Juliana
Luna Freire, Andrew Rajca, Olimpia Rosenthal, Jamie Wilson, and Sasha
Woolson. I would also like to thank all the members of the Pop-up
Dissertation Support Group: Rosario Hall, Roberto Mendoza, Elizabeth
Phillips, Maisa Taha, and Wasilia Yapur; it was so very replenishing to share
greasy food, failures, and victories with you when we were just starting to
get the hang of this writing thing. And thank you, Guillermo Martínez-
Sotelo, for assisting with my understanding of soccer rules.
Besides the aforementioned, if this book were a sculpture, you would
also see the fingerprints of the following individuals who passed it around,
leaving their mark on different parts they helped to form with their feed-
back in important ways: Benjamin Fraser, Brian Gollnick, Joanna Page,
Amy Parziale, Aly Patsavas, Carolina Rocha, Ignacio Sanchez Prado, and
Georgia Seminet, I thank you.
I extend my gratitude also to those who attended conferences, institutes
and talks that helped shape my work, particularly Rafael Climent-Espino,
Marlowe Daly-Galeano, Laura Gronewold, Araceli Masterson, and every-
one who attended the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of
the Americas 2011. I am also indebted to my colleagues at Universidad de
Buenos Aires, who encouraged me to continue the work by incorporating
my dissertation into their curriculum. The conversations I had at UBA’s
Tercer Congreso Internacional Artes en Cruce with Héctor Kohen, Ana
López, Ana Laura Lusnich, Ricardo Manetti, Nicolás Ezequiel Mazzeo,
María Luisa Ortega Gálvez, and Laura Podalsky set a fire under me.
I am deeply indebted to Desiree Adaway, who so generously and intui-
tively involved me in the Mastermind 2015 Cohort, introducing me to
a group of fighting women who saw me through some of the painful
work of writing and grieving and ending and exiting. Paige Baker, Kirsten
Bunch, Heather Conyers, Heather Laine Talley, Melinda Miles, Melissa
Nussbaum, and Tina Mutungu, thank you for being awesome.
To the baristas at Caffe Luce who caffeinated me at six a.m. on dark
winter mornings, bleary-eyed and unable to even swipe a credit card cor-
rectly: John and Brandi, thank you for making me feel at home as your
writer-in-residence.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to Michelle Livingston, who listened to
the story of this book (and my life) as we shared twelve hours in her truck
on the way to and from Las Vegas. Her love of film kindled my interest,
and she was the one who picked me up when I was shot through with
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
rejection. Michelle also whipped my book proposal into shape, seeing

what I was too close to see, and creating a sparkling new re-write using
her brilliant marketing skills. I owe the publication of this book to her.
I also want to thank Michelle for insisting I make time to celebrate the
victories as they happened, and I want to thank some of the dear friends
who made time to celebrate with me: Xandi Aranda, Georgia Armstrong,
Araliya Glessinger, Gabriel Higuera, Sara and Brandon Kobilka, November
and Dale Prentiss, Rupa Shenoy. Having friends to celebrate the victories
with is an important thing.
Thank you to Shaun Vigil, my editor at Palgrave, for being so enthusi-
astic about my book proposal from the start. Shaun’s enthusiasm gave me
the energy to make that final push to see the book to completion. It was
a pleasure to work with Shaun throughout the publication process, and
because of his kindness and attention I will always look back at my first
experience with Palgrave fondly.
The final polishing of this manuscript depended heavily on Isis Sadek,
friend, colleague, and professional wordsmith. Friend and design wizard,
Kieran Delaney developed inspiration for the front cover.
Endless thanks to Andrew Haberbosch for so much support that I
could not begin to describe it here, and to Sonora Romero Haberbosch
for being my sunshine.
Contents
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
4 Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009) and

Noche adentro (2010) 79
5 Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de palo

(2010) and Semana capital (2010) 103
6 The Child as Paraguay’s Future: “Calle Última (2010),

Mita´í (2011), and 7 cajas (2012)” 129
Bibliography 157
Index 165
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Photograph by Cristian Núñez 29

Fig. 4.1 The M.C. in Noche adentro82
Fig. 4.2 The groom drags the bride’s body down a staircase
in Noche adentro82
Fig. 4.3 The groom drags the bride’s body interminably
in Noche adentro83
Fig. 4.4 The elderly woman’s gray hair in a bun in Karai norte94
Fig. 4.5 The elderly woman’s home in Karai norte95
Fig. 4.6 The elderly woman looking out from her doorway
in Karai norte96
Fig. 5.1 Photograph by Gabriela Zuccolillo 108
Fig. 5.2 Photograph by Gabriela Zuccolillo 118
Fig. 6.1 Miriam visits José in Calle Última137
Fig. 6.2 Miriam visits José in Calle Última138
Fig. 6.3 José and friends breakdance for change at a
stoplight in Calle Última139
Fig. 6.4 The iconic overpass in Calle Última139
Fig. 6.5 Miriam contemplates the future after talking to her friend;
an underage mother, in Calle Última141
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Statement of Aims
Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a study of Paraguayan film, an indus-

try that surged substantially in the 2000s. More than a collection of film
studies, however, Film and Democracy in Paraguay constitutes an in-
depth exploration of Paraguayan studies. Written from a cultural studies
perspective—that is, using an approach in which the formal elements of
films, the content of the films, and the contemporary/historical contexts
of the films are explored in detail—each chapter takes a film or films as its
jumping off point, then zooms out to encompass elements of the national
political, economic, social, and historical context. The main concern of
Film and Democracy in Paraguay is what many see as the nation’s most
urgent contemporary crisis: post-dictatorial transition of power. This con-
cern is explored through representation and social relations; particularly
the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
At the crux of Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a particular ten-
sion: the desire to advocate for underclasses and the fear that if they are
not drawn into a new, post-dictatorial democratic order—the order of
the new counter-elite—they pose a serious threat. Young directors con-
stitute an important segment of this counter-elite, a group that Kregg
Hetherington refers to as the “new democrats”; a small, educated, urban
segment of the population with an increasingly influential role in media,
social analysis, public criticism, and international relations. Film and
© The Author(s) 2016 1

E.K. Romero, Film and Democracy in Paraguay,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_1
2 E.K. ROMERO
Democracy in Paraguay takes recent films as its object of study, focus-

ing on the ideologies of which the new democrats and these films are a
product and analyzing efforts to democratize Paraguay by putting visual
information regarding “the people” into circulation, creating a visual turn
with the goal of opening access to memory and national identity beyond
the symbolic use of the few.
The signs traditionally preferred by the elite were replaced with sym-
bols recognizable to those inhabiting subaltern subject positions; the
first group recognized by Paraguayan film being specifically campesi-
nos. Guaraní replaced Spanish as the language of Paraguayan cinema in
an effort to invert the traditional order of linguistic power, despite the
difficulty that this presented for most directors: asuncenos with limited
fluency in the Guaraní language. The Guaraní/Spanish dynamic has tra-
ditionally produced a cultural divide between literate, Spanish speakers
in Asunción and “backwards,” Guaraní-speaking campesinos with little
access to written language. (While Guaraní, an indigenous language, is
an official language of Paraguay along with Spanish, it is spoken by a
significant percentage of the population who are not ethnically members
of indigenous tribes.)1 Eventually, examples of the subaltern classes rep-
resented in these narrative and documentary films extended to the con-
cerns of women, the urban poor (particularly, the minors for whom the
street has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are
inadequately protected or supervised—that is to say, minors represented
by the “street kid” trope) and the persecuted queer subject (primarily
represented in this study by homosexual men and trans women). Film
and Democracy in Paraguay illustrates how the visual and rhetorical lan-
guage of new democrats in Paraguay is marked by an erasure of politics
substituted by a preference for a call to universal values and advocacy in
the name of the common good with an eye toward the aforementioned
subaltern classes. What these depoliticized causes hide, however, is how
they function specifically in the service of the new counter-elite. Film and
Democracy in Paraguay analyses how the subaltern classes are included
rhetorically, yet simultaneously marginalized by the resulting new lan-
guage of power.2
Recent film production in Paraguay provides a window (a recurring
device in the films herein) through which to explore the ensuing ideologi-
cal clashes, such as those between democratizing strategies and neoliber-
alism; and also between a burgeoning emphasis on the representation of
subaltern subjects and long-held, deeply ingrained deterministic ideolo-
INTRODUCTION 3
gies around these segments of the population. This determinism is related

to a secondary, but key focus of this book: how temporality is folded into
the axis of social structure inclusive of race, class, and gender, integrally
linking how people, places, and products are related to the past, present,
or future, how this relates to their race, gender, nationality, and ranking
in the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress that is often pre-
sented as a statement of fact, devoid of politics. In these films, Paraguayan
national identity is constructed in a manner that contributes to dominant
ideologies that have the effect of justifying and explaining away unequal
distribution of wealth and power—no one can help “the way things are.”
The business of forging national identity in the name of inclusive politics,
once more, is a matter of exclusion.
Small Cinemas and Small Countries Matter

Historically, the majority of US scholarship on Latin American Cinema has
been predominantly dedicated to production from the “big four”: Mexico,
Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina.3 More recently, the focus has shifted to be
more inclusive of film from Chile and Uruguay as well. There has also
been a tendency to concentrate on Latin American cinema from the 1960s
to the present. Revolutionary film movements, such as Cinema Novo in
Brazil, the post-revolution cinema of Cuba or films about Allende’s Chile
have dominated scholarship, while small cinemas outside of revolutionary
contexts have largely been ignored. Considering this situation and the
relative shortness of the Paraguayan film production history—or boomcito,
as Paraguayan directors affectionately call it—it is unsurprising that there
is so little academic literature published on the topic of Paraguayan film
studies at this time.4 That said, more and more attention is being paid to
the smaller cinemas of Latin America, with the understanding that their
inclusion is integral to the study of Latin American cinema as a whole. In
Tamara Falicov and Jeffrey Middents’ introduction to their special section
on small cinemas in Studies of Hispanic Cinemas, they cite Puerto Rican
film-maker and scholar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner:
When speaking about a politics of small problems, we are then referring

to a set of political investments and critical assumptions: that despite the
fact that major public and intellectual attention tends to gravitate toward
‘big’ objects; places, practices, and peoples thought of as small are central to
thinking about how the larger world works.5
4 E.K. ROMERO
This question of why scholars should study small cinemas—and indeed,

small countries—is deeply offensive from a humanistic perspective, as if
the lives and art of people from small countries mattered less. The fact that
small cinemas and their study often have to be sold as valuable due to their
relationship to larger cinemas reveals that the current dominant critical
assumptions around the politics of small problems are structured by con-
temporary neoliberal thought. The question of why study small cinemas
demonstrates an inability to imagine a way to think about “value” with-
out measuring, quantifying, and proving with numbers as neoliberalism
demands. The important question is not why small cinemas, but rather,
what can be learned specifically from particular cinemas (regardless of
their size). Analyses are more complete when films are considered within
the larger contexts that inform them. But when a small cinema’s study can
only be justified by its relationship to another, bigger industry, scholars
must ask themselves if marketing problems are taking up the space in our
brains that used to be occupied by a thirst for knowledge.
Obstacles to Paraguayan film studies and Paraguayan studies in general
have not only been ideological, however. Historically, Paraguay is not an
outward-facing society, but rather, an inward-facing one. Historic isola-
tion and isolationism have made it difficult for Paraguayans to market
their country to the world outside their borders, a legacy that has con-
tributed to a vigorous contemporary debate about how to go about con-
structing a marca país for foreign consumption. US-based students often
contact me about their interest in doing research in Paraguay, seeking to
find answers about the most basic questions regarding logistics (“Where
do I stay?”; “How do I get around?”; “What do things cost?”). At times,
Google searches have revealed that I was easier to find than this informa-
tion. Perhaps many Paraguayan businesses do not think much about their
online presence because only 20% of Paraguayan households have internet
access at home.6 Word-of-mouth is still the most effective search engine
in-country. Often I tell scholars to take a leap of faith and understand that
most of their problems will be solved after they land on Paraguayan soil
and start talking to people.
Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson address this history of isolation
and describe its effects in The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics:
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
and culture. This has led to considerable misunderstandings of the coun-

try … Ignorance has allowed Paraguay to become a perfect blank space …
Paraguay is still seen as a surprise package, a small plucky nation somewhat
out of its depth against international opposition … Such invisibility … is
apparent in far more important arenas, such as trade, investment, tourism,
diplomacy, and politics with damaging results.7
Indeed, this ignorance of Paraguayan history and silencing of Paraguayan

voices has resulted in a blank onto which outsiders have projected depic-
tions that revealed their own fantasies and desires most clearly; “Paraguay
is portrayed as an unspoiled land, a pre-industrial utopia, a blank canvas for
the creation of paradise on earth … For foreigners … often seeking to cre-
ate their own utopias over existing realities.”8 One infamous and fascinating
example of this history is Nueva Germania, the German white supremacist
colony started by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche
and her husband, Bernhard Förster in 1887. (The colony did not thrive
and Förster committed suicide in 1889.) Film and Democracy in Paraguay
is a critical contribution aimed at filling this dangerous void of knowledge
in Paraguayan film studies and Paraguayan studies at large. Here I argue
that as part of the Latin American film context, Paraguayan film is often
submitted for judgment (figuratively in the case of publics—and more lit-
erally in the case of funding and festivals) in terms of its engagement with
either the poverty or the political issues of the region. While this engage-
ment is often designed with post-dictatorial advocacy in mind, analyses
of representation also demonstrate strong anxieties regarding the poten-
tial failure to fold the subaltern classes into the new order. I advance the
idea that the most visible narrative and documentary film production from
Paraguay represents previously unrepresented classes and identities—a fact
for which it has been celebrated and rewarded—while also representing a
byproduct: dominant transnational ideologies regarding what it means to
democratize and develop nationally in neoliberal times, juxtaposed with
post-colonial, deterministic anxieties informed by narratives of a specific,
Paraguayan national history.
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
considered more accessible to the masses. These transitions occur within

the context of larger global transitions, such as the shift from the national
to the post-national9 and the shift from regulated economies to neoliberal-
ism (or arguably, post-neoliberalism.)
In consideration of the transition from regulated economies to neolib-
eralism, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-
first century has been thus far characterized by an urgent concern regarding
how nations can transition from authoritarian or corrupt regimes to more
democratic ones; the fear being that if the people do not take over the
power vacuum left by totalitarian governments, undesirable elements will,
challenging peace and stability while creating a more fertile environment
for organized crime and terrorism. Implicit is the assumption that democ-
racy is unquestionably the most superior model of political organization
available, and necessary for the economic deregulation that neoliberalism
requires. Questions of how to support democratic transition boil down
to how to transfer more power from the elite to the people and how to
“free” the market. The post-dictatorship economic growth spurt of the
early 1990s in Latin America, for example, was touted as evidence that
free market reforms were working, once more supporting the idea that
economic liberalization was intrinsically tied to political democracy. The
question of how to increase democracy was similarly answered by gather-
ing information about the population and making this type of informa-
tion transparent and available to the public, an issue Kregg Hetherington
explores in Guerilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal
Paraguay—with which this study is dialogic. The larger critical agenda I
aim to establish both draws from and shares in certain theoretical aspects
of Hetherington’s book, in which he advances a critical rearticulation of
the developmental antagonisms between mass information projects and
questions of accessibility—who can produce, distribute, access and use
information and to what ends. Much as neoliberalism is presented as an
inherently perfect order, transparency became an unquestionable priority
for democratization: “democracy was in fact formally similar to capital-
ism—a rule-based playing field on which the rational choices of citizen-
consumers equipped with transparent information were to discover and
elect optimal governments.”10 Following this logic, transparency was
thought to be achieved with the establishment of agencies and organi-
zations that would gather and publish data, making information on the
conditions of the poor and marginalized known to all. “New democracy”
INTRODUCTION 7
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
As the author of this study, I believe it is important for me to acknowl-

edge where I am located in relation to this context. I am certainly a new
democrat as well. I have dedicated a good part of the last decade to advo-
cating for the importance of Paraguayan studies through my critical stud-
ies of Paraguayan film. This focus has likely set me back professionally
in the US academy where Paraguayan studies is still underrepresented.
During my graduate studies I was practically advised by well-meaning
mentors not to write my dissertation on Paraguayan film alone, but rather,
to at least do a comparative study. I had too much to say about Paraguayan
film to follow their advice. For this reason and others related to a ter-
rible academic job market, I find myself fighting for my own chances at a
piece of the pie in US and South American academies, respectively. I have
worked intensely to position myself in an increasingly influential role in
Paraguayan critical studies, particularly with this book, which I am finish-
ing as a self-funded, (read: spouse-funded), independent scholar. I also
disclose that my personal relationships with certain people mentioned in
this study are indeed very close, and I have struggled with that. I am part
of the power structure of which I write in this book, and my work cannot
be precluded from the same critical lens that I turn on the work of oth-
ers. That said, certain individuals in Paraguay, unfamiliar with film studies,
have interpreted my previous publications as personal attacks on specific
directors and will likely interpret this book the same way. Even so, my
work is never about filmmaker intentions, but rather, about how the ways
of being and thinking of an era can be identified and analyzed through the
creative projects of that era.
The aforementioned economic and political shifts also relate to a tran-
sition from the national to the post-national in Latin American stud-
ies. Drawing from Abraham Acosta’s succinct description of the field in
Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America and the Crisis of Resistance,
Latin Americanist approaches to political reflection on the region have
in many cases been limited by assumptions regarding cultural essence
and authenticity. These assumptions became the theoretical weapons
with which to “rescue” the subaltern classes, those excluded from offi-
cial narratives of the nation. An analysis was defined as counterhegemonic
or resistant only if it featured the people of a given nation at their most
authentic. What these assumptions ignore, among other things, is that the
very formation of the modern nation-state was necessary for the global
capitalist flows intrinsic to uneven accumulation and the perpetuation of
global poverty under neoliberalism: “It is beyond a doubt that the n arrow
INTRODUCTION 9
and limited framework in which representation/national identity has

been understood so far has become constitutive of the very crisis it was
deployed to resolve and which now needs a new analytic approach.”16
Acosta elegantly argues that a celebratory cultural analysis with a back-
bone in authenticity cannot stand.
While thought in Latin American studies moves beyond approaches
based on authenticity, film studies also challenge the previously widely and
uncritically accepted relationship between the nation and film. As Valentina
Vitali and Paul Willemen describe in Theorising National Cinema, this
relationship was originally reinforced by a film industry attempting to
monopolize a market by making it a geopolitically bounded one—that is
to say, the category of “foreign film” was reinforced as a weapon against
extranational competitors. In order for early film companies to strengthen
a monopoly, they needed to first develop and unify a national market. By
integrating critical interrogations of film and nation, one can examine the
historical conditions that constitute the national while mediating the socio-
cultural dynamics that inform cinematic production. Theorising National
Cinema also furthers the idea that the most common way of obscuring the
manner in which economic relationships affect cultural issues at the level
of production and consumption has been to invoke the “metaphor of the
national body and its organic formation in a myth-like ‘natural’ past.”17 A
jumping off point for Film and Democracy in Paraguay involves the idea
that the nation is imagined and commonly activated rhetorically in order
to benefit the bourgeoisie economically. “The people” is often equated to
“the nation,” with both in binary opposition to the politics of the state of
which they are a victim. However, as Gareth Williams argues in The Other
Side of the Popular, the failure of Latin American leftist revolutions (i.e.
Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan), which had been considered the site
of hope for the nation’s coming into its own, marked a transition from
national to post-national analytical approaches. Many Latinamericanist
theorists responded to this failure by shifting toward a study of global
accumulation in an effort to get away from foundationalism and totalizing
narratives. That said, foundationalism and totalizing narratives persistently
found their way back into the work produced on global accumulation in
development circles. Even during the writing of this book, the Fulbright
hopefuls who contacted me seemed to consistently believe that their
approach to the study of Paraguayan film must require a thesis on some
essential identity related to the Paraguayan nation; a furthering of the
idea that Paraguay’s small cinema is somehow purer and more culturally
10 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
the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of imperialism as nation-

states extended their domination over others, creating at one and the same
time the hegemonic sense of the ‘national culture’ and the ‘problem’ of
national identity for the colonized territories … any discourse of national-
cultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional.18
Nationalism—and national film—were in fact forged by the colonial situ-

ation and the market and mostly can only forestall the questions that are
essential to the issue of inequality and the modes of thinking that sustain
inequitable economic arrangements. A post-national approach, in other
words, requires that conceptualizations of the nation follow the money.
Cultural frameworks must always be juxtaposed with economic and politi-
cal ones in order to reveal how the nation and the identities it projects
are related to global accumulation of capital. While this book focuses on
the neoliberal context broadly, it is also important to consider how seed
money coming primarily from European film festivals and foundations
has influenced the kind of Paraguayan subject “independent” Paraguayan
cinema has produced. As this project qualifies as more film analysis than
industry studies, I do not go into this part of the context at length, but
a substantial body of work has been published on the subject of how
national cinemas use recognizable indicators of their difference to appeal
to film festivals.19
In light of the epistemological crisis in Latin American studies described
above, it became important for me to consider how to write about
film specifically from Paraguay without privileging the national frame.
Transnationalism is helpful in this regard, as a category of analysis that
does not privilege the perceived fixity of the national frame, but rather,
takes nationalism as an ideology as given. A transnational approach does
not ignore the nation, but rather intentionally integrates acknowledge-
ments of the forces of nationalism, imperialist aggression, and their linkage
with capitalist formation. Transnationalism involves actively vizibilizing
“the moments of slippage that reveal how the nation is always contested
and shot through with contradictions.”20 Latin American film has always
INTRODUCTION 11
been a transnational cultural product, rarely operating as an autonomous

cultural industry and often operating in close relation with Hollywood
film: either as a model to emulate or as that which “Third Cinema” should
necessarily react against. For Paraguay specifically, the transnational move-
ment of finance capital, films and film-makers has always been essential
given the lack of specific technologies and expertise within Paraguay as
a nation with little history of film production, compared to its film giant
neighbors, Brazil and Argentina. Transactions and interconnections have
been and continue to be integral to Paraguayan film. The historically
transnational movements of finance capital, film, and film-makers are only
intensified with modern digital technologies and the internet. Film’s par-
ticularly unbound nature reveals national tensions particularly well. As
Rey Chow posits in her classic film study, Primitive Passions, many con-
sider that one of film’s functions is to exhibit ethnic cultures, as museums
and galleries do, but film can do so in a way that makes the visuality of
exotic cultures part of an everyday, mediatized, global experience—any
place in the world brought to your living room through the magic of
Netflix.
In tandem with transitions in the global economy and the challenges to
how areas of study conceptualize the nation and national identity, transi-
tions in Paraguay have involved the transfer of power and democratiza-
tion. In the arts, the democratizing intention of power sharing with the
masses has taken the form of a cultural turn away from the written lan-
guage of the elites and toward a visual language that is theoretically more
inclusive of the subaltern classes. As Néstor García Canclini has argued,
the dominance of the literary in conceptualizing Latin American patri-
monies has historically contributed to the divorce between the elite and
the rest of the population. In societies like Paraguay’s, with a high rate
of illiteracy, documenting and organizing culture through literature has
been a way of reserving memory and the use of symbolic goods for the
privileged minority. Being cultured in Paraguay has historically implied
repressing the arena of the visual and the oral, transcribing its symbolic
elaboration into written records. In The Paraguay Reader, Lambert and
Nickson point out how
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
In Paraguay, the very concept of culture has been relegated to an exclusive,

class-based realm. Augusto Roa Bastos, for example, has long been upheld
as “the father of Paraguayan culture” due to his success as a globally rec-
ognized boom writer. The fact is, however, that his brilliant post-modern
multi-lingual masterpiece, Yo El Supremo, has hardly been read by anyone
in Paraguay or elsewhere. Even US and Latin American academics shy
away from its study due to its complex form and linguistic challenges (the
incorporation of written Guaraní without glosses, for example). Especially
in a society with a high rate of illiteracy, access to such a novel is limited; its
cultural value has in fact been heightened by its status as a symbolic good
for the use of the few.
The Stroessner dictatorship’s legacy also reinforces the idea that “cul-
ture” is only for the elite. The dictatorship’s mode of domination involved
squelching ideas, creativity and critical thought. “Culture” is still seen as
something that the elite may use to mark their status but that otherwise
has little practical value. Many young directors trafficking in images hoped
that Paraguayan film could contrast literature as a form that would be more
available to the masses, particularly with the birth of TV Pública Paraguay
in 2011, which had as part of its mission the goal of broadcasting audio-
visual works produced in Paraguay. (Since Fernando Lugo’s impeach-
ment, however, the original management of the channel was removed and
much of the channel’s original mission was abandoned.) Many equated
the political movement away from the remaining post-dictatorial power
structure with the rise of a more accessible form of “culture” in Paraguay.
The Present Past

In regards to the legacy of dictatorship, it is worthwhile to dedicate a part
of this introduction to Paraguay’s specific history of dictatorship, being
that an essential part of the transition around which these film studies
pivot is the transition from dictatorship to democracy. In my analyses, cer-
tain national historical events dialogue extensively with the films produced
from 2006 up until the time of this writing: the moment of colonization,
the Triple Alliance War,22 and the Stroessner dictatorship.23 Paraguay has
a particular history of dictatorship as well as a particular popular ideology
around the concepts of dictatorship and democracy. Perhaps in no other
Latin American nation is such a distant past brought so heavily into the
present to inform contemporary ideologies.24 Paraguay’s independence
from Spain and the Viceroyalty of La Plata (1810–1811) is contiguous with
INTRODUCTION 13
the beginning of its history of dictatorship. Shortly after the Paraguayan

defeat of the Argentine army, a popular congress conferred the title of
Dictador on José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who remained in power
until his death in 1840. Due to the radical restructuring of social, eco-
nomic, and political institutions during this dictatorship, historians such
as E. Bradford Burns25 and Richard Alan White26 qualify this period as
the first autonomous revolution in the Americas. These historians recount
how, with strong popular support, Francia was able to set up a socialistic
regime in Paraguay involving a planned economy with a state monopoly
on foreign trade; import and export prices were set by the government.
Radical land reform was carried out, taking power from Spanish and cre-
ole elites through the confiscation of most of their property. Similarly, the
government kept control over the Catholic Church, starting with land
confiscation. Allegedly, Paraguay created a diversified and self-sufficient
economy. Taxes were lowered, budgets balanced, and sustainable develop-
ment became the priority.
Dictatorship as revolution? I will not defend or dispute Burns’ position;
however, I present Burns’ idea as an invitation to consider a specific type
of public sentiment regarding dictatorship, particularly for the working
class in Paraguay. Burns describes the Francia dictatorship in the following
way:
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
This dictatorship is still configured in the national imagination as one

of the wealthiest periods in Paraguay’s history and as a foundational
moment. Francia may have been cruel, but unlike his predecessors, he
was indiscriminately cruel: “No admitía escusas ni reconocía privilegios.
Ricos y pobres, militares o civiles, eran medidos con el mismo rasero,”
writes Paraguayan historian Efraím Cardozo.28 Francia’s regime represents
an origin; an imagined past previous to the moment in which the mestizo
working class lose their dignity to Paraguay’s European elite.
Jump to the Fundación de Asunción holiday, Aug. 15, 2010. I take a
taxi home from the port after a weekend cruise on the Paraguay River. On
the topic of the holiday, democracy, and free speech, the driver says “Antes
14 E.K. ROMERO
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:
La cultura era de gente rica … Si te tomaste un café en París eras culto o si

no, no … El arte fue dejado de lado. La dictadura hizo que la gente tenga
menos educación, que se cuestionen menos las cosas, y bueno, el arte y la
cultura tienen muchísimo que ver con eso … pero a través del Internet y
de la nueva tecnología la gente se da cuenta que el mundo es mucho más
amplio que salir y compartir un asado y una cerveza…33
Indeed, controlling audiovisual production was much more important to

the Stronato than encouraging it to flourish, and this control was not dif-
16 E.K. ROMERO
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
thering analyses regarding the tension between the desire to democratize

through advocacy for the underclasses; and the fear that if they are not
drawn into a new order, they pose a serious threat. The films included in
this study are analyzed within the specific dynamics of Paraguay’s historic
and contemporary, post-dictatorship context. Examples of the subaltern
classes represented in these narrative and documentary films include the
rural campesino/a, the urban poor (particularly, the street kid) and the
persecuted queer (specifically, homosexual men and trans women).
Chapter 2, “Hamaca paraguaya (2006): the Campesino and Circular
Time,” analyzes the national/transnational context, form and content of
the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize of the 2006 Cannes film festi-
val, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence—the
film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could be suc-
cessful on international screens. Film and Democracy in Paraguay uses
Hamaca paraguaya as its foremost example because of the film’s position
as a pioneer and model for what would become certain dominant trends
of a foundational period for Paraguayan cinema: a rural setting, campesino
protagonism, Guaraní dialogue, and a focus on loss as the historical ref-
erent. Hamaca tells the story of an elderly campesino couple who wait
for their son to return from war and for rain to relieve their dry crops.
Chapter 2 addresses how specific formal choices related to temporality
make Hamaca a potential site for resistance, yet also make this film a
palimpsest onto which a historical, subordinating national and transna-
tional order is inevitably grafted. By temporal choices, I refer specifically
to the way in which a lack of action produces a tempo that is slow in
comparison with the tempo of mainstream, Hollywood cinema and how
Hamaca represents two temporalities simultaneously: one that is con-
gruent with familiar, lineal time and another that is circular. Finally, this
chapter addresses how the main characters themselves are temporalized,
linking this to a problematic racialization and gendering congruent with
deterministic development discourse condemning Paraguay’s future to
more of the same underdevelopment. The hope that this film’s triumph
represents is juxtaposed with its entrenchment within a cultural, economic
and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian poli-
tics: the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and
transnational imbalances of power and wealth.
Chapter 3, “Frankfurt (2008): Documentary, Fútbol and the Campesino
Icon,” analyzes this documentary film, which again, takes the campesino
figure as its protagonist, and includes dialogue spoken almost entirely in
18 E.K. ROMERO
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
umentary directed by a Paraguayan—Renate Costa—and Semana capi-

tal, a narrative film of Paraguayan production directed by Hugo Cataldo.
These films both queer the Paraguayan film archive in the sense that they
go against the trends that had been dominant by featuring queer pro-
tagonists (a first for Paraguayan film) and by being set in the urban space,
featuring urban protagonists of the middle and upper classes. At a time
in which Paraguayan film was cementing images pertaining to “national
essence,” two new arenas were unexpectedly represented in Cuchillo.
Coinciding with this break from dominant spaces and subjects, the film
also offers a political turn. No film preceding Cuchillo was as overtly
political. Although I argue in previous chapters that many Paraguayan
films are political through allegory, Cuchillo premiered as the first to take
on the Stroessner dictatorship in an overt way by shedding light on the
regime’s persecution of homosexuals. Cuchillo follows Costa, the direc-
tor, as she returns to Paraguay after living in Spain, to solve the mystery
behind her queer uncle’s death, and to expose the secrets surrounding his
life. In the process, she tells the story of homosexual persecution under
the Stroessner regime. Cuchillo represents a break with unified, nationalist
representations conveying purity in Paraguayan origins, by highlighting
queer, Paraguayan, clandestine countermemories and histories that official
State and religious discourse have placed under erasure.
Despite lacking the overtness of Cuchillo’s political content, Semana
capital is also a pioneering film in that it dares to turn the camera toward
the urban elite, shedding light on their often dysfunctional romances.
I draw from 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 homophobic persecution in a way that encapsulates con-
temporary homophobia in the individual of Pedro Costa, neatly laying
the issue to rest. In contrast, Semana enrages spectators as it directly
confronts the contemporary elite with their complicity and their own
erotically excessive sexuality while blurring 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.
INTRODUCTION 21
Chapter 6, “The Child as Paraguay’s Future: Calle Última (2010),

Mita´í (2011), and 7 cajas (2012)” describes the political climate of
Paraguay since the 2008 election of Fernando Lugo and his lightning-swift
impeachment in 2012. During the same time period, Paraguay’s macro-
economic growth was reported as one of the greatest in Latin America,
yet living conditions for the majority of the population did not change.
Looking forward from this vantage point, it is difficult to predict what is
in store for Paraguay. This chapter analyzes representations of the figure
of the child in contemporary Paraguayan film while tying in rhetorical
analyses of documents specific to national concerns about the future of
the Paraguayan child and the nation itself. In dominant political narra-
tives illustrated in this chapter, the nation is likened to an adolescent in a
state of transition, whose choices today could impact her/him drastically
for the rest of her/his adult life. I argue that the aforementioned films
represent concerns about childhood and adolescence in Paraguay that are
both literal and figurative. According to 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.36
Yet Paraguayan film’s focus on the child reflects a crisis that goes beyond
this situation. The child embodies concerns about the state of society, the
family, criminality and corruption, economics, politics, and education in
a nation in transition. In Calle Última a poor schoolgirl is shunned due
to her low status signaled by inadequate footwear, finding herself forced
to consider prostitution and a life on the streets. In Mita´í a cognitively
disabled rural boy is barred from going to school because there is no spe-
cial education available through his school system. In 7 cajas, urban street
kids dabble in crime but face even worse criminals as they are embroiled
in a kidnapping/murder. The disenchantment with the parent/child rela-
tionship in all these films, but especially reinforced in Mita’i, allegorically
expresses a denunciation of the totalitarian state (while ambiguously repre-
senting a call for state action). Where the child/parent-church-state triad
used to operate, symbols of the sister/brother-friendship-school triad take
their place. The child protagonists of these three films are failed by their
parents and ultimately the only support of consequence they receive (if
any) does not come vertically, but horizontally. I argue that this shift in
referents signals the new democrats’ desire to move the nation away from
the fantasy of one authoritarian leader who will solve all of Paraguay’s
22 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
the French Film journal Cinémas d’Amérique latine featured an

interview with Paraguayan director Hugo Gamarra; “¿Existe el
cine paraguayo?” and in 2006, the same journal printed a follow-
up interview with Gamarra: “A la espera del cine paraguayo.”

Finally in 2010 lack is no longer the only theme in publications
regarding Paraguayan film. The Film Edge: Contemporary
Filmmaking in Latin America, edited by Eduardo Angel Russo,
includes a chapter by Paz Encina on Hamaca paraguaya. Cynthia
Tompkins also includes a chapter on Hamaca in her 2013 book,
Experimental Latin American Cinema: “Life is and is not: Paz
Encina’s Hamaca paraguaya.”
5. Falicov and Middents, “Small cinemas,” 259.
6. Core indicators on access to, and use of ICT by households and
Individuals, latest available data, International Telecommunication
Union, accessed on September 24, 2012.
7. Lambert and Nickson, Paraguay Reader, 3–4.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. See Gareth Williams, The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism
and Subalternity in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002).
10. Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors, 4.
11. Whether this promise is kept is highly debatable, considering how
many people have access to the cinema of Paraguay in Paraguay. In
other words, what percentage of the population can afford to pay
for a ticket at a Cineplex or a video rental or would even consider
attending a free screening at a cultural center? What even smaller
percentage would be part of an audience at a film festival?
12. Jopará—Guaraní for “mix”—is a colloquial form of Guaraní which
uses large numbers of Spanish loan words. See for example the
dialogue of 7 cajas (2012).
13. For an excellent summary of Paraguayan film history, see Leen, C
(2012) ‘Independent Cinema and Globalization: The Case of
Paraguay’. In: Lorraine Kelly and Bill Richardson (eds.) Power,
Place and Representation: Contested Sites of Dependence and
Independence in Latin America, Peter Lang: Oxford.
14. Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors, 2.
15. 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
24 E.K. ROMERO
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
Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1995).
20. Laura Briggs, G. McCormick, J.T. Way, “Transnationalism.”
21. Lambert and Nickson, Paraguay Reader, 8.
22. 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 James Schofield Saeger, Francisco Solano
López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Julio José Chiavenato,
Genocídio americano: a Guerra do Paraguai (São Paulo, Brasil:
Brasiliense, 1982); Efraím Cardozo, Breve historia del Paraguay.
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1965).
23. For multiple perspectives on these three historical moments, see
Lambert and Nickson, Paraguay Reader.
24. Consider for example this promotional video for Universidad

Católica Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, produced in 2015, which
makes explicit reference to the role of Paraguayan women after “la
guerra grande” (aka the Triple Alliance War, 1864–1870): Mass
Publicidad. “Traicioná la mediocridad—Universidad Católica
‘Nuestra Señora de la Asunción’,” YouTube video, January 8,
http://youtube.com/watch?v=B2BPCi2Ktp0.
25. Burns, Latin America.
26. White, Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution.
27. Burns, Latin America, 77.
28. Cardozo, Breve historia, 62.
29. Some, like Brazilian historian Julio José Chiavenato, have referred
to this war as a Paraguayan genocide, as it resulted in the eradica-
tion of nearly all males between the ages of fourteen and
sixty-five.
30. In a personal interview, when asked about what the Lugo presi-
dency might mean for Paraguayan film, director Pablo Lamar made
the connection in the following way:
A nivel político ocurre un cambio. Yo al gobierno de Lugo lo tomo

como la posibilidad de la palabra cambio. Que para él es una respon-
sabilidad gigante porque la palabra cambio es un estuche vacío
donde todos proyectan lo que quieren como cambio … Pero sería
un momento, un quiebre, que por lo menos es la negación de lo que
venía antes simbólicamente hablando. Quizás no hubo ningún cambio
26 E.K. ROMERO
verdadero de estructura ni de paradigma de pensamiento ni nada más

allá de los discursos […] Pero simbólicamente me parece muy fuerte.
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
Hamaca paraguaya (2006):

The Campesino and Circular Time
Periodization is inevitable but never innocent.
Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State”
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

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_2
28 E.K. ROMERO
decade has been highly dedicated to representing a Paraguayan national

identity, or paraguayidad, through the campesino figure. Notably,
Hamaca paraguaya (2006) takes the campesino figure as its protagonist,
and includes dialogue spoken entirely in Guaraní. In this chapter I ana-
lyze the form, content and national/transnational context of Un Certain
Regard winner of Cannes 2006 Hamaca paraguaya, widely recognized as
the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film
that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could be successful on
world screens. I address how specific formal choices related to temporal-
ity make Hamaca a potential site for resistance, while also accounting for
how certain temporal choices and structures liken Hamaca to a palimpsest
onto which a historic, subordinating world order is still grafted, and can-
not be completely erased. By temporal choices, I refer specifically to (1)
the way in which a lack of action produces a tempo that is slow in com-
parison with the tempo of mainstream, Hollywood cinema and (2) how
Hamaca represents two different temporalities simultaneously: one that is
congruent with the familiar arrow of time in which one moment is pro-
ceeded by the next, and another time that could be described as circular.
Finally, I address how the main characters themselves are temporalized,
linking this to a problematic racialization and gendering congruent with
deterministic development discourse condemning Paraguay’s future to
more of the same. I see the hope that this film’s triumph represents as jux-
taposed with its entrenchment within a cultural, economic, and political
system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the build-
ing blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational
imbalances of power and wealth.
A Film in Which Protagonists Do Almost Nothing,

Dialogue Is Never Spoken and Important
Characters Remain Invisible
Early Latin American film manifestos such as Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino’s “Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for
the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World” consider
that formal difference from U.S. cinematic models is needed so as not
to replicate the forms emerging from and demanding compliance with
the ideology of U.S. finance capital.2 This move in and of itself was seen
as “an attempt at cultural decolonization.”3 Similarly, in “Cinema and
Underdevelopment,” Fernando Birri also describes cinema as a tool to
HAMACA PARAGUAYA (2006): THE CAMPESINO AND CIRCULAR... 29
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
Fig. 2.1 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

30 E.K. ROMERO
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”
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

32 E.K. ROMERO
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
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
inaccessible to the intellectual and extends her critique to the work of

the Subaltern Studies Group. She problematizes their reappropriation
of Antonio Gramsci’s term subaltern in order to identify a “voice” or
“collective locus of agency” in postcolonial India. Certain problems with
intellectuals re-presenting a collective subaltern speech are: (a) a logo-
centric assumption of homogeneous cultural solidarity among a hetero-
geneous people and (b) a legitimization of Western intellectuals as the
“voice” of the subaltern condition. This positionality in fact reifies the
subaltern position as subordinate. In “Deconstructing Historiography,”
Spivak also highlights how the subject-effect seems to operate as a subject
but instead may be part of an immense discontinuous network as the
effect of operating subjects. Spivak suggests that the historical texts of
counter-insurgency locate a “will” as the sovereign cause when possibly it
is not a will, but an effect of the subaltern subject. The fact that Hamaca’s
characters are speaking and are not speaking at the same time could self-
reflexively draw attention to the very situation that Spivak describes.
Spectators might think of the plight of the poor represented by Hamaca,
but also, the fact that mouths never speak serves to continuously remind
the spectator of what the Western intellectual’s work (a film, a book) can-
not say about the “consciousness of the subaltern” (campesino). In an
attempt to make a film about Paraguayan subaltern struggles, by making
it impossible for the protagonists to speak, the film calls attention to the
fact of its own project’s impossibility: the attempt to present one family’s
story as the story of a larger, heterogeneous people, and the attempt of a
privileged intellectual to “voice” the subaltern condition. Hamaca’s form
serves as a reminder that representation can only allude to a subaltern
positionality from the perspective of elite culture (which, as Spivak insists,
is evidenced by the fact that the subaltern is originally defined by subtrac-
tion: those without power). One could describe Spivak’s overall point
as an effort to describe how history is narrativized into logic. Similarly,
Edelman calls attention to the epistemic violence that takes place through
the process of storytelling, as it is a system bound by the straightjacket of
temporal conceptualization:
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
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

Dual Temporalities and a Record of Violence: No
Future
The dual temporality produced by Hamaca’s slowness and circularity con-
trasted with the film’s major “events” (Máximo’s goodbyes and the mes-
senger’s report of his death) lends itself to an analysis that also requires a
double register. First I discuss the implications for resistance of the pres-
ence of dual temporalities in this film, whereas further on I analyze the
implications of dual temporalities as a temporalization of the characters,
which I argue is more complicit than resistant in terms of its relationship
with the economic status quo in Paraguay and for Paraguay vis-à-vis the
global market.
Hamaca’s dual temporalities recall a type of melancholia that domi-
nates Paraguayan History/Present: a state of being “stuck” in mourning
for the massive losses Paraguay has gone through while other parts of the
world perceive development, progress, and forward motion. There are
two main events in Paraguayan history that have left such a mark on the
national imaginary that Paraguayans speak of them as if they had occurred

only yesterday: the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870) and the Stroessner
dictatorship (1954–1989). The Triple Alliance War was a devastating event
in which over half of the population perished. Historians such as Milda
Rivarola and James Schofield Saeger agree that the president of Paraguay
during that time, Francisco Solano López, bore the brunt of the respon-
sibility for the war and its devastating mismanagement. Not surprisingly,
the second most devastating regime for Paraguay, the Stroessner regime,
invested in one major film project: the film Cerro Corá (1978)—a film
entirely dedicated to re-enforcing a historical discourse about Francisco
Solano López representing him as the national hero. Perhaps the regime
was hoping that if the people could see López as a hero beyond the trail of
the dead he left behind, then they might also be able to uphold Stroessner
as a hero regardless of his crimes.
The legacies of the Triple Alliance War and the Stroessner regime
involve pessimism about the future and turning a blind eye toward the
past violence of the regime, neutralizing it in a nostalgic reminiscence of
better times when there was less crime and more cheap food. Similarly,
38 E.K. ROMERO
Cándida and Ramón’s conversations at times echo this deterministic atti-

tude toward the future left in the wake of the dictatorship and the Triple
Alliance War. While people may hope that things can change, will change
and perhaps are about to change in Paraguay, they waver between that
hope and hopelessness. If things have never changed for the better (selec-
tive torture replaced by indiscriminate street crime), how can they ever?
The transition period from dictatorship to democracy has not yet hap-
pened, as so many of the same people who were in power during the
dictatorship continue to control the majority of the nation’s wealth and
political power.
In Hamaca, the constant comments about the rain that never comes
represent a timeless, collective rural life intrinsically subjugated to
nature’s indifferent, destructive force. “No hay nada que hacer,” Cándida
complains repeatedly, demonstrating a powerlessness and frustration with
their situation. The futility of fighting nature produces a sense of hope-
lessness that is not unlike the dominant pessimism among Paraguayan
youth. Professional opportunities are few in a nation that has an unem-
ployment rate of nearly 20%. As Sonia Brucke of the Senate’s Cámara de
Género points out in a personal interview, Paraguay’s income inequality
metrics are the highest in South America, comparable to those of Haiti.
(Its Gini coefficient was a whopping 53.2 in 2009, ranking Paraguay
as the 15th most unequal nation in the world.)19 Ninety percent of the
national territory is owned by about 5% of the population, roughly a
dozen families. Foreign and local investors alike are discouraged from
attempting projects that would provide jobs because there is little security
for their investments given the level of corruption of the police and the
legal system. For people who are not already among the most privileged,
waiting for opportunity to knock is indeed much like waiting in the dark
for a desperately needed rain that never comes. In the long takes and gen-
eral slowness of Hamaca, “filmic realism offers the spectator a different
temporal relationship to perception, ‘glimpsing the fleeting presence’ of
things and meanings missed by ordinary seeing.”20 Hamaca is a machine
that allows the viewer to experience some of the tedium and despair that
young and/or disenfranchised Paraguayans might feel at some point in
their lives.
In Hamaca there is something even more pressing than the wait for
rain (opportunity); it is the wait for the couple’s son, Máximo, to return
from war. In their dialogue the couple go back and forth between hope-
fulness that Máximo will return and hopelessness. In one conversation,

Ramón says, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you? That we the poor are always
at war?” And in this border war with Bolivia, Cándida does not encourage
Máximo to protect Paraguay; quite the contrary. When he comes to say
goodbye, she discourages him from fighting at all and pleads with him to
hide, hoping to get him home alive. Although the film may aestheticize
rural labor as it constructs paraguayidad, it constructs a paraguayidad that
is not uncritical of the ruling class and the national situation of extreme
inequality. In fact, the plight of the poor is presented by Hamaca as a
true tragedy for the couple, and by extension, as a pessimistic forecast
for Paraguay’s future, given that Máximo does in the end die at war, a
loss that is directly juxtaposed with the nation’s win, as Paraguay histori-
cally defeated Bolivia. Similarly, contemporary Paraguay’s nation-form
maintains its access to the global economy, but this access benefits only
a small, powerful minority while the masses continue in poverty and in
precariedad, a term that designates their limited access to functioning
social services.21 It is popular opinion that Paraguay’s overall economy
does not benefit from involvement in MERCOSUR for example, but
select people are making money from this involvement. It is also true that
while Paraguay’s macroeconomic improvement made it the least indebted
nation in South America with an ever-growing GDP thanks to booming
exports such as raw soy bean during the Lugo presidency, unemployment
has risen and the minimum wage has not kept up with rising costs. There
continue to be only a few low-functioning social programs. Between 2001
and 2007 alone, 280,000 Paraguayans emigrated, mostly in search of bet-
ter job opportunities. Said figure represents one out of ten economically
active members of the population and one out of twenty individuals con-
stituting the general population.22
Generally speaking, as Paraguay the Nation gets richer, Paraguay’s
poor get poorer. In this sense, Cándida and Ramón are representative
of Deleuze’s “mutants” and Schoonover’s “wastrels.” Gilles Deleuze
describes particular “mutants” as a certain type of filmic postwar protago-
nist for whom “Even the body is no longer exactly what moves; subject
of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather the devel-
oper [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tiredness and waitings
(Antonioni).”23 Schoonover describes the wastrels as:
[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
attempt to make empty or nonproductive time visible through the presence

of these onscreen bodies reverberates with a late twentieth-century anxiety
about how to qualify human labor and the more general concern about the
value of human life in late modernity.24
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.
To Disavow Race Results in a Haunting by Time

Thus far I have described Hamaca paraguaya’s potential for resistance
through formal subversion, historical revisionism, a self-reflexivity that
acknowledges the problems of subaltern representation and politi-
cal denunciation. It is not my intention to downplay the importance of

the aforementioned achievements, but rather, to describe the palimpsest
formed by Paraguayan film and the way its traces still bleed through to
mark this particular text.27 Not even the most well-intentioned director
can keep their film from being the product of power negotiations between
local and national identities and transnational practices at the levels of
production and consumption.
In Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini states that “Faced with
the ‘catastrophes’ of modernization … the countryside and its traditions
will represent the last hope for redemption.”28 In the case of Paraguay,
national “catastrophes” are as much a part of the past (the Triple Alliance
War) as they are of “modernity” (the Gini coefficient). It would seem
that at the level of representation, post-dictatorial redemption somehow
requires the rural space. That said, according to Renato Rosaldo in the
foreword to Hybrid Cultures, Canclini also contends that “Latin American
nation-states’ … attempt to be both modern and culturally pure led to
metaphysical versions of the nation’s historical patrimony that did more to
justify present domination than they did to describe the past.”29 What are
the effects of “being modern” (creating a new film archive) while being
“culturally pure” (insisting on representing Paraguayan “authenticity” in
costumbrista returns)?
In order to begin approaching these questions it is helpful to describe
the mestizo campesino figure dominating Paraguayan national film pro-
duction at the Hamaca moment. Mestizo discourse in Paraguay does
not have the type of history that was so important to Mexico with
Vasconselos’s raza cósmica conception, for example. In fact, racial dis-
course is mostly absent from official Paraguayan politics: public discourses
of race are substituted by language politics. As the language of 70–80% of
the population, Guaraní earned its “rightful place” as an official language
in 1992. According to linguists like Tadeo Zarratea, however, the lack
of real avenues for Guaraní-speaking monolinguals to gain access to ser-
vices (such as bilingual government employees or translators) “convirtió
a los monolingües guaraní en el grupo menos desarrollado y en el más
explotado económicamente” (Última Hora30). It is noteworthy that dia-
logue for Paraguayan films is usually written in Spanish by urbanites who
do not have the type of fluency required to produce natural-sounding
Guaraní conversations. The dialogue is then translated into Guaraní by
linguists and Spanish subtitles are added. The second and third most
popular subtitles to add, which are frequently required for film festival
42 E.K. ROMERO
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
innocent.” Temporalization is always somehow present, but its possibili-

ties for meaning and representation should not be ignored or taken for
granted.
As Walter Benjamin demonstrates while analyzing nineteenth-century
industrial capitalism, in order for the “new” to exist the “old” must be
constructed. Benjamin describes how archaic images are produced in order
to suggest something historically new about commodities. Similarly, it is
only through the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of one, synchronic
time progressing to, accumulating upon and being replaced by the “next”
that people are able to make sense of national progress.
Anne McClintock discusses how secularizing time represents three
points of significance for nationalism:
First … the world’s discontinuous nations appear to be marshaled within a

single, hierarchical European ur-narrative. Second, national history is imag-
ined as naturally teleological, an organic process of upward growth, with
the European nation as the apogee of world progress. Third, inconvenient
discontinuities are ranked and subordinated into a hierarchical structure of
branching time—the progress of “racially” different nations mapped against
the tree’s self-evident boughs, with lesser nations destined, by nature, to
perch on its lower branches …35
These points of significance reveal discourses of linear time that posit

progress from a European perspective, serving European colonial and
post-colonial interests while linking the past with colonized peoples, spe-
cifically those who have been constructed as racially separate. Under this
discourse, theirs becomes a preexisting, original traditional space acted
upon by modernity. The past becomes a passive, non-Western reality
upon which modernizing forces work naturally and independently of any
group’s special interests. Hamaca’s lack of action produces passive charac-
ters who are also “racially different” in comparison with the European film
festival judges who found them so attractive. Also, Hamaca’s characters’
static temporal location makes them victims without perpetrators.
Franz Fanon explores discourses of the civilized/primitive binary in
Black Skin White Masks. Similarly to the way in which Benjamin describes
the need to produce antiquity in order to sell “new” commodities, Fanon
states that “it is the racist who creates his inferior”36 (93). In order for the
colonizer to be dominant, s/he must construct a discourse of inferiority
and an Other to apply it to. Fanon explores this process through his cri-
44 E.K. ROMERO
tique of the work of M. Mannoni, who discusses what he refers to as “the

inferiority complex.” Fanon argues that Mannoni naturalizes the inferior-
ity complex by presenting it as something that antedates colonization.
Fanon explains that a Malagasy past cannot be presented in such a way
because since colonization, the Malagasy have been reconstructed by the
European: “What M. Mannoni has forgotten is that the Malagasy alone no
longer exists; he has forgotten that the Malagasy exists with the European
… alterity for the black man is not the black man but the white man.”37
Fanon reminds us that the Malagasy as we know them are a construct of
their colonizers. Despite white dominance, the white perspective is not the
universal point of departure nor should it be normalized as such. Consider
the way that Benjamin and McClintock’s work suggests that the premod-
ern as a coherent cultural sphere does not preexist the modern, but is
instead a discursive construction of modernity itself through recourse to
a fictive space outside itself—defined as its lack. The notion of the pre-
modern is a modern concept retroactively constructed to legitimize mod-
ernization in the same way that the historicized black man in Fanon’s
example is constructed retroactively to legitimize white domination.
In the same vein, Stuart Hall conducts a useful exploration of the con-
struction, complexity, and fluidity of identity. Hall follows Fanon’s point
about identities being fashioned in line with interests of the dominant
class. “The ways we have been positioned and subjected in the dominant
regimes of representation were a critical exercise of cultural power and
normalization, precisely because they were not superficial. They had the
power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’ ” (706).38 At the
intersection of Hall and Fanon we find a construction of the Other that is
strikingly similar to the construction of the past presented at the intersec-
tion of Benjamin and McClintock. Just as a person in Fanon’s example
experiences her/his own Otherness as vividly as if s/he were split in two,
the dominant regimes of representation present time’s progression as
synonymous with progress in a powerful, universalizing way. Paraguayan
directors know that given the lack of internal resources, if they are to suc-
ceed, they must follow a formula that can win at European film festivals.39
As Paraguayan director Augusto Netto describes recounting the French
sentiment at a transcontinental film production meeting:
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
interested. Now, if you try to show me something that I as a viewer do not

have or do not know of, yes, that is interesting.’ Paraguayan cinema is under
pressure. There is no Paraguayan identity formulated from the inside.40
Hamaca presents a Paraguayan racial identity (difference) which is argu-

ably fashioned in line with interests of a dominant class (through othering
and exoticization) inextricably linked to a static or “backward” temporal-
ity, which on the level of the national allows the “European nation” to
continually be cast, in contrast, as the apogee of world progress. Race,
temporality and nation converge in a postcolonial maze with no exit. While
Paraguayan narrative and documentary film is currently about Paraguayan
national identity, this identity can only be established and sanctioned by
the “first world” gaze, whose owners already privilege certain ideas about
what “third world” skin (and time) should look like.
The construction of the Other and the construction of the past are
also grafted onto one another in Anne Cheng’s example of “Indian
Melancholy:”
In Beyond Ethnicity Werner Sollors talks about ‘Indian melancholy,’ refer-

ring not to how Native Americans process their history of genocide but to
how dominant American culture romanticizes and naturalizes ‘the cult of
the vanishing Indians.’ The rhetoric of the ‘melancholic Indian and his fate’
serves to legitimize the future of the white conqueror.41
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
O’Gorman also describes this as a dominant aspect of colonial thought in

his book La invención de América:
En este programa de liberación y transformación el indígena quedó al mar-

gen por su falta de voluntad o incapacidad o ambas, de vincularse al destino
de los extraños hombres que se habían apoderado de sus territorios, y si bien
no faltaron serios intentos de incorporarlo y cristianizarlo, puede afirmarse
que, en términos generales, fue abandonado a su suerte y al extermino como
un hombre sin redención posible, puesto que en su resistencia a mudar sus
hábitos ancestrales y en su pereza y falta de iniciativa en el trabajo, se veía la
señal inequívoca de que Dios lo tenía merecidamente olvidado.43
Argentine academic Rodolfo Kusch echoes the same temporalization of

indigenous thought in El pensamiento indígena y popular en América:
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
In the Sollors, O’Gorman and Kusch examples, hegemonic structures are

legitimized and formalized through the characterization of indigenous
cultural identities as rooted in the past. In this way, racial hierarchies are
presented as the continuation and repetition of an always already socially
sanctioned structure. The fixed identity constructed for the oppressed
people by the dominant class becomes ever more difficult to question
unless one recognizes that all identity undergoes constant transformation
and is subject to power plays as well.
Identity, of course, is not limited to race or ethnicity. Anne McClintock
demonstrates how discourses of time and progress extend not only to race,
but to gender through the domestication of national time:
[T]he temporal anomaly within nationalism—veering between nostalgia

and the impatient, progressive sloughing off of the past, is typically resolved
by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a natural divi-
sion of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body
of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and natural), embodying
nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, repre-
sent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent,
and historic) … Nationalism’s anomalous relation to time is thus managed

as a natural relation to gender.45
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:
In 1917 Freud wrote an essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” which pro-

poses two different kinds of grief. According to Freud, “mourning” is a
healthy response to loss … Melancholia, on the other hand, is pathological.
It is interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is, the melancholic
cannot ‘get over’ loss) … Melancholia thus denotes a condition of endless
self-impoverishment.47
The loss we are referring to within the context of aforementioned discur-

sive constructs is twofold: as Cheng would posit it, the unassimilable racial
other is “lost,” but “The melancholic must deny loss as loss in order to
sustain the fiction of possession.”48 I suggest that the second component
of loss here is the loss of the past. The positions we explore present a com-
pletely naturalized binary in which the past is lost yet that loss is denied by
a melancholic upholding of the future as progress.
The subject of Paraguayan national trauma, mourning and psycho-
analysis in literature has been explored by Jennifer French in works such
as “Traumatismo y la nación telúrica: La raíz errante de J. Natalicio
González” and “El peso de tanta pena: La Guerra de la Triple Alianza
como trauma intergeneracional.” French analyzes González’s work with
the aid of Freud’s theories around war trauma and the compulsion toward
repeating or revisiting traumatic experiences. She also uses Dominick La
Capra’s concept of the negative sublime, which involves the transforma-
tion of trauma into the sacred base of collective identity: “una nación
48 E.K. ROMERO
que apenas ha sobrevivido la aniquilación emerge como una identidad

singular y orgánica en la cual la existencia colectiva predomina sobre las
individuales” (11).49 French sees the tendency toward sacrifice as a natural
characteristic of the Paraguayan subject in González’s work. French also
finds the topic of intergenerational trauma in other Paraguayan literature
and the concept that trauma can be handed down from generation to
generation. She even mentions the critiques of excessive determinism such
psychoanalytic theories have received. Given the many similarities between
La raíz errante and Hamaca, for example, it is unsurprising that French
would find the same kind of pessimism and determinism around indige-
nous characters in literature and a psychoanalysis that explains the tragedy
and inevitability of their demise, relating this to a larger collective identity
and national trauma.
Returning to Cheng, she states, “Melancholia offers a powerful critical
tool precisely because it theoretically accounts for the guilt and the denial
of guilt, the blending of shame and omnipotence in the racist imaginary.”50
Any discourse of “underdevelopment stuck in the past” can be analyzed
as a type of melancholia; society cannot get over the loss brought on by
racist violence, and the more we deny the loss, the more we incorporate
further racism by repeating and naturalizing discourses on the linearity of
time and its connection to the static and inferior positioning of oppressed
peoples. In the case of Paraguay’s place within “first world” development
discourse, Paraguay has been racialized as brown, gendered as female and
temporalized in the past, all identitarian means of domination. As a nation
that is primarily mestizo and bears the mark of Spanish colonization,
the connection between darkness of skin and poverty has been natural-
ized over centuries. Theft problems are blamed on traditional Guaraní
communal societal structure where private property does not exist as it
does in the West, but rather, all objects belong to the tribe.51 Paraguay
has been infamously gendered as female/inferior as a result of the Triple
Alliance War in which Paraguay staved off Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay
for five years. The war cost Paraguay most of its male population. Women
rebuilt the country, and it is widely thought that this moment of “destruc-
tion” of the nation/nuclear family is to blame for many current socio-
economic problems.52 In John King’s foundational book Magical Reels:
A History of Cinema in Latin America, there are only a few pages on
Paraguayan film. Within those pages, King cites Paraguayan boom author
Augusto Roa Bastos: “The daily routine, the monotonous and insistent
rituals, the power of religion and the grinding poverty are all captured in
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:
Implicitly assuming or explicitly asserting that their style of democracy is

superior to all other modes of political organization, North American and
European writers frequently asked what was ‘wrong’ with Latin America.
Or with Latin Americans themselves. What passed for answers was for many
years a jumble of racist epithets, psychological simplifications, geographical
platitudes, and cultural distortions. According to such views, Latin America
could not achieve democracy because dark-skinned peoples … were unsuited
for it …54
While “democracy” has been related to “developed” political organiza-

tion, the U.S.-supported coup d’état that overthrew the Stroessner dic-
tatorship continues to be a point of conflict in Paraguayan society. Many,
particularly of the working class, argue that the uncontrollable increases
in crime, corruption, and living expenses that the dictator once predicted
upon his ousting have come to pass.
Skidmore and Smith go on to describe how in the 1950s and 1960s
“modernization theory” appeared, which by name alone situates Latin
America in the past (while simultaneously gendering and racializing it if
one considers how the aforementioned theorists present the theoretical
frames the present/past binary consistently activates). The tenants of mod-
ernization theory described how economic growth would generate social
change and therefore more “developed” politics. The transition from rural
to urban societies would cause an overhaul of “moral values.” Magically,
a larger middle class was prognosticated to emerge. It was thought that
“Latin America and its citizenries were not so inherently ‘different’ from
Europe and North America. Instead they were simply ‘behind’ ” (6) as
Skidmore and Smith explain.55
50 E.K. ROMERO
Of course, the predictions of modernization theory did not pan out.

As Skidmore and Smith describe, in the 1960s and 1970s, economic gains
resulted in even more inequality in distribution of wealth. Domestic gains
were proven not to be able to compete with transnational capital. The
middle class, instead of playing a progressive and moderating role as pre-
dicted, developed a “class consciousness” in which they identified with
the ruling classes and in opposition to the popular masses. Politics took an
authoritarian turn instead of a democratic one.
Although modernization theory and other grand theories of devel-
opment have been generally debunked, dominant neoliberal discourse
maintains some of the core concepts of modernization theory: primarily,
the secular faith that unregulated economic policy is neutral, natural and
solves all problems. Just as modernization theory predicted that all Latin
American social issues would be resolved with sufficient economic growth,
neoliberalism, as defined by David Harvey, preaches that “human well-
being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial free-
doms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade”56 (2). In this sense,
modernization theory is still alive and well. What goes along with this line
of thought is its logical extension: if one is not well-off under neoliberal
rule, it could only be because the individual is simply lacking the will to
exercise his or her entrepreneurial freedoms. As Rodolfo Kusch states in
Indigenous and Popular Thinking: “Volition—everyday personal effort—
is what will solve all problems.”57 He then goes on to describe how the
downfall of certain criollos in the new world can be attributed to their pas-
sivity: “[T]hey do not exercise their volition in bettering their life circum-
stances.”58 The connection between Kusch’s temporalization of Indian
thought, deductions about failure being attributable mainly to lack of will,
and the implications for neoliberal doctrine should not go unnoticed.
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
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.
15. Debin, “Cleansing with Blood,” 2.
16. Ibid., 65.
17. Schoonover, “Wastrels,” 71.
18. Neorealism’s influence on Latin American film (through Fernando

Birri and others) is well-documented. See Tamara Falicov on schol-
ars currently examining the impact of Italian Neorealism on the
aesthetics of global art-house film, especially from the Global
South, in “ ‘Cine en Construcción’/‘Films in Progress’: How
Spanish and Latin American filmmakers negotiate the construction
of a globalized art-house aesthetic,” Transnational Cinemas, Vol.
4 no 2 (2013), pp. 253–271.
19. See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
rankorder/2172rank.html
21. In 2006, studies concluded that 38% of Paraguay’s population was
living below the poverty line. Unemployment was found to be at
11.4% and underemployment at 24% despite national economic
growth of 4.3%. “Aún con el flujo migratorio y la menor tasa de
crecimiento demográfico, el crecimiento económico no ha sido
capaz de disminuir el desempleo, el subempleo y la pobreza en
forma significativa” (Borda in “Ampliando horizontes: Emigración
Internacional Paraguaya.”)
22. “Ampliando horizontes.”
23. Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi.
26. Ibid., 5.
27. I thank Laura Briggs for applying this fitting metaphor to my work.
28. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 109.
29. Ibid., xiii.
30. “En el Día del Idioma Guaraní, la lengua reclama su justo lugar.”
Ultima Hora 25 Aug 2009. Web. 14 Oct. 2011.<http://www.
ultimahora.com/notas/249443-En-el-Día-del-Idioma--
Guaraní,-la-lengua-reclama-su-justo-lugar>
31. Ibid., xiii.
32. Lund, Impure Imagination, xv.
33. Lund stresses that “Obviously the critique here is not hybridity the
thing or the word, but rather the mechanisms and processes
through which the concept ‘hybridity’ enters into discourse” (xix).
34. Lund, Impure Imagination, 33.
35. In McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons, 92.
36. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 93.
54 E.K. ROMERO
37. Ibid., 97.

38. Hall, “Cultural identity,” 706.
39. For more on how producers and directors find themselves shaping
their work to appeal to the taste of those deciding which films get
selected, and how festivals find themselves entwined with advertis-
ing and distribution, see “Time Zones and Jetlag: the flows and
phases of world cinema” by Dudley Andrew in Ď urovičová and
Newman, World Cinemas.
40. Netto Sissa, Personal interview with Eva Karene Romero.
41. Cheng, Melancholia of Race, 14.
43. O’Gorman, La invención, 157 (italics mine).
44. Kusch, El pensamiento indígena, 2.
46. Ibid., 93.
47. Cheng, Melancholia of Race, 8–7.
48. Ibid., 9.
49. French, “Traumatismo y nación,” 11. LaCapra’s concept is devel-
oped in his Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins, 2001), 23.
50. Cheng, Melancholia of Race, 12.
51. 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-u n-pueblo-
diferente-el.html
52. For more on this see Barbara Potthast-Jutkeit and Carmen Livieres
de Maynzhausen, “Paraíso de Mahoma” o, “País de las mujeres”?: el
rol de la familia en la sociedad paraguaya del siglo XIX (Asunción:
Instituto Cultural Paraguayo-Alemán, 1996).
53. King, Magical Reels, 101.
54. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 5–6.
55. Ibid., 6.
56. Harvey, Neoliberalism, 2.
57. Kusch, El pensamiento indígena, 118 (my translation).
58. Ibid., 118 (my translation).
CHAPTER 3
Frankfurt (2008): Documentary, Fútbol

and the Campesino Icon in Paraguay
It is only through a conceptualization of the public sphere as a unified yet frag-

mented condition in which the accelerating interchange of information takes
place that we can meaningfully analyse how football and politics inform each
other, how citizens become fans and fans citizens. It is precisely because football
and its fans are part of a single – though not coherent – public that themes such
as religion, sexuality, party politics and ethnicity inform and reflect discourse.
(Cornel Sandvoss, A Game of Two Halves)
Due to the censorship of the Stroessner regime (1954–1989) and the

restricted access Paraguay has had to film technologies historically,
Paraguayan film production developed the most momentum after the year
2000. Emerging Paraguayan cinema was highly dedicated to representing
a Paraguayan national identity, or paraguayidad through the campesino
figure and the Guaraní language. Notably, Frankfurt (Ramiro Gómez
2008) takes the campesino figure as its protagonist, and includes dialogue
spoken almost entirely in Guaraní, but the difference between Frankfurt
and many other narrative, documentary, and short films produced in
Paraguay at the same time, is that the Paraguayan national identity or
paraguayidad that seems to pre-date capitalism in other films, is visually
linked to neoliberal capitalism in Frankfurt. Instead of representing a
way of life that seems almost timeless, where people have been living the
same type of life for decades, “uncorrupted” by modernity, rooted in the
very tierra roja, Frankfurt represents a unique metaphor with which to
explore the interwoven discursive threads of rural life, nacionalismo futbo-

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_3
56 E.K. ROMERO
lero, religiosity, Paraguay’s location in the global neoliberal world market,

and the division of Paraguayan classes.
In a personal interview with director Ramiro Gómez he describes his
method for shooting Frankfurt. He talks about going to live with several
rural families (specifically located in Borja and Isla Alta.) He makes a point
of not using any material from the first three days of his stay in order to
give the residents time to get used to his presence and the presence of the
camera. His documentaries do not include any voice-over commentary.
Gómez states that his goal is to simply shoot what he sees. This approach
echoes Julio García Espinosa’s prescription of showing the process of a
problem without providing commentary as a way “to submit [the prob-
lem] to judgment without pronouncing the verdict.”1 Frankfurt is shot in
the aforementioned rural communities during the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
The camera follows them about their day as they prepare and eat meals,
harvest crops, watch and/or listen to World Cup games on television, and
play fútbol in their own community leagues.
As Jesús Martín Barbero discusses in From Media to Mediations:
Modernization and Mass Mediation in Latin America, from the 1920s to
the 1940s particularly, social analysis in Latin America was split into two
camps: a populist nationalism that tries to recover lost national identity
through the rural space, particularly through indigenismo, and a progres-
sive rationalism that sees the “indolent and superstitious nature of the
populace [as] the fundamental obstacle to development”2. In the latter
camp, Martín Barbero describes the “indolence” that accounts for why the
rural poor are poor, putting the responsibility for their poverty squarely on
them, divorcing their poverty from any structural violence, simultaneously
representing them as the reason for their nation’s subaltern economic posi-
tion. The social analysis Martín Barbero describes from the 1920s through
the 1940s has a contemporary counterpart in neoliberal ideology. As Lisa
Duggan explains, “neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural
and identity politics and cannot be undone by a movement without con-
stituencies and analyses that respond to the fact.”3 An economic ideology
that elevates the unbridled market to the level of divinity—that figures
itself as natural and blameless—is congruent with an ideological heritage
that sees rural poverty and brownness as not only its own problem, but
as the country’s burden, “la indiosincracia paraguaya.”4 The question I
ask of Frankfurt is: who are its campesinos—the victims of the neoliberal
world order or the stubborn obstacles to Paraguay’s economic growth and
modernization? Is this question answered differently depending on how
FRANKFURT (2008): DOCUMENTARY, FÚTBOL... 57
we read the campesino relationship to football, nationalism, politics, the

media, and popular Catholicism in Frankfurt? How is Frankfurt dialogic
with a group of films recently produced in Paraguay that demonstrate a
clear preoccupation with historic border wars and their translation into
contemporary transnational affairs: narrative and documentary films such
as Hamaca paraguaya (2006), Los paraguayos (2006), and Soberanía
violada (2007)? Additionally, if we are to highlight the ways in which
Frankfurt is about race and class, how can we also examine the role of
gender in this film?
TELEVISION, DIVISION AND INCLUSION

Frankfurt features scenes in which campesino fans participate in the 2006
World Cup by consuming the mass mediated games through television
broadcasts. In multiple scenes the television is framed as if it were another
member of the family. One of the first scenes takes time to establish the
location of the television in the home and its relationship to family mem-
bers as well as other elements in the home. The television is set against a
wall decorated with Catholic religious iconography, such as an image of a
light-skinned God holding a baby Jesus, which is then triangulated with a
Paraguayan flag that the mother hangs in order to prepare for the singing
of the pre-game national anthem. (I refer to her as the mother, as the first
character the camera introduces is her young adult son. This emplotment
leads us to identify her in relation to the young man. No proper names
are used throughout the documentary.) The television is featured first and
last in this early establishing scene as it broadcasts images from Frankfurt,
including images of Paraguayan fans wearing national colors: red, white,
and blue.
In A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalization, Cornel
Sandvoss stresses the role of television as “the single most important fac-
tor behind the transformation of football in the past 50 years.”5 Sandvoss
argues that mass media’s expanding role has contributed to the complex-
ity, fragmentation, and inclusivity of the public football sphere.6 First I
examine the fragmentation resulting from the televisual representation of
football; what Sandvoss refers to as “the growing divide between unmedi-
ated and mediated event and ultimately of the authenticity of the latter.”7
While Richard Giulianotti also comments on the appearance of “…a
new class of disenfranchised fans … missing out on the club’s profit-
ability, unable to afford entry to grounds, and reduced to watching the
58 E.K. ROMERO
spectacular game on pub television” in Europe,8 Alan Gilbert extends this

phenomenon to Latin America in his chapter, “From Dreams to Reality:
The Economics and Geography of Football Success.”9 In Football in the
Americas, Rory M. Miller and Liz Crolley confirm that “Most South
American domestic football has seen a steady decline in attendance over
the past 30 years.”10 Sandvoss draws a connection to Guy Debord’s work
on spectacle, encouraging thoughts about how “all that was once directly
lived has become mere representation … spectacle in Debord’s argument
has thus ‘colonized’ all sections of social life.”11 In analyzing Frankfurt
from this angle, one must ask if the televised World Cup is represented as
an extension of empire (or perhaps, essential to empire).
From the beginning Frankfurt calls attention to the divide between the
fans who watch from home and the fans at the stadium. The documen-
tary’s establishing shot is taken from the ground, drawing attention to
the dirt floor in the home and the young man’s bare foot wearing a flip-
flop despite the cold winter weather (which we can deduct from the fire
he is building, the gray sky, and the layers he is otherwise wearing). The
sound of a chicken clucking nearby is audible. The youth whistles a polka.
There are a cat and dog warming themselves next to the fire. The young
man takes the water that has been heating on the fire to make his mate
cocido12 for breakfast, which he drinks with coquito.13 These details are all
signifiers of poverty, quickly recognizable within Paraguayan iconography:
dirt floors, flip-flops, animals indoors (indeed, there are no doors), polka
and coquito. In contrast, the Paraguayan fans at the games in Frankfurt
are lighter-skinned. The money needed to attend a World Cup game in
Europe can hardly be estimated from the vantage point of the dirt floor.
Yet there they are: crowds of thrilled Paraguayan fans in Germany. The
geographic and economic distance between these two groups of fans may
be remarkable, but mediation itself introduces yet another difference: the
wealthier, urban football fans are visible on the television screen whereas
the campesino fans are not visible in the international or national parts of
the broadcast. However, they are more visible than the wealthy urban fans
at the level of enunciation of the documentary itself. Frankfurt presents
the order of things and its inversion in a double-register that consistently
results in some level of ambiguity.
In Frankfurt the television can be read as an element of empire, but it
may also be read as the only window to participation (through consump-
tion). In a particular scene, two girls are getting ready for their day in a
home with a broken television. The sound of chicks peeping is loud. The
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
This “First/Third World” relationship includes historical economic

echoes that are of special historic significance to Paraguayan audiences,
a point which I expand upon in the second half of this study. Frankfurt
links this relationship to the present-day market. Immediately after the
broadcast of the BBC correspondent in downtown Asunción, the televi-
sion cuts to a beer commercial. While the audio for the football-themed
beer commercial is maintained, the editing cuts to the family home and
the son’s bare foot in the foreground with Catholic religious iconography
in the background. The viewer also sees the father smoking a rustic cigar.
Off screen we hear a commercial being broadcast on the television: “Hay
gente que sufre. Hay gente que espera, 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 albirroja.” During this audio, the
camera provides a close-up of each of the icons on the wall, particularly
Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The youth’s face is somber. His father contin-
ues to smoke silently. In yet another commercial we hear children chant:
“Paraguay! Paraguay! Paraguay!” and then, an announcer who states: “La
pasión por el fútbol y la fuerza de nuestros colores está en cada rincón del
Paraguay.”
At this juncture, football, mediatization, the market, suffering to the
point of martyrdom, and the “First/Third World” relationship are all
thread together by Frankfurt. Does the market produce suffering through
mediatization? In his chapter, “Transformations in National Identity
through Football in Brazil: Lessons from Two Historical Defeats,”
J. Sergio Leite Lopes argues that the mediatization of football through
television has added to its commercialization, resulting in the inflation
of an international market of highly-paid players. Just as Frankfurt draws
attention to the income gap between the rural and urban Paraguayan
World Cup fans, Leite Lopes argues that the increased commercialization
of football has resulted in a disruption of
…the balance between the lower football divisions, comprising semi-

amateur and semi-professional football, and the top-level divisions. This dis-
rupts the ordinary communication and circulation of players between these
divisions … The selection of a small group of youths who learn and train
in the big European clubs from a young age and thus stand out from aver-
age good players in Brazil ends up creating a restricted circuit of well-paid
super-players, eliminating the channel which connects local football with its
sources of renewal.15
Leite Lopes argues that the increased commercialization of football has

resulted in a widening gap between the players in Latin America (Brazil,
specifically in his case) and the players who are snatched up by European
clubs at a young age. When those players are bumped up to the next
level, they are geographically removed from the space which they would
otherwise be helping to renew through contact with other young players.
Alan Gilbert also draws attention to the way in which, increasingly, the
career progression for Latin American players begins with their national
league, followed by a quick move to a leading club in Argentina, Brazil,
or Mexico before moving on to a larger European club.16 As commercial-
ization through mediatization increases, the gap between the poor fan/
player and the wealthy fan/player increases. This increasing gap is ironi-
cally juxtaposed with the articulation between fans of different classes—
and skin-types—that the football player embodies. Is it a coincidence that
most Paraguayan football players have mate skin and dark hair and eyes?
Are they not perfect mestizo portraits a la raza cósmica? Seen as a type
of heroic symbolic merchandise that all fans can relate to, the Paraguayan
football player is a marketable opportunity for rhetorical inclusion mask-
ing political exclusion.
FOOTBALL AND (SELF) RECOGNITION

Frankfurt draws attention to a division in football fandom and sport, yet
there is an equally important element of inclusion, a suture. Sandvoss
argues that mass media’s expanding role has contributed to the complex-
ity, fragmentation, and inclusivity of the public football sphere.17 Sandvoss
recalls geographer John Bale’s interpretation of early folk football as “a
mass participation event blurring distinctions between actor and spectator
reminiscent of traditional carnival,” and also notes Schulze-Marmeling’s
(1992) emphasis on the “subversiveness” of the game: “…as a temporary
inversion of the social order….”18 Miller and Crolley also highlight how
one of the early attractions of football was that “the poor could compete
with the rich and win”19 and that “historically, football has offered an
arena where ethnic or other social groups can affirm identity, but where
they can also integrate themselves—and not just on the elite’s terms—into
62 E.K. ROMERO
the nation.”20 The possibility of inversion and inclusion permeate football

scholarship.
Certainly the distinction between actor (player) and spectator is also
blurred by Frankfurt. Spectating itself is represented in an active way.
Returning to one of the first scenes, the family prepares for the Paraguay
vs. England game by hanging the flag in their home. The son, mother, and
father rise for the national anthem and sing along as it plays on television.
All clap after the anthem: the family in Paraguay, the players on the field,
and the fans in the stands. The commentator is heard saying “El público
paraguayo; espectacular.” In this scene spectators also act: they watch and
sing simultaneously. Both the actions of watching and singing constitute
their inclusion within the conceptualization of the público paraguayo.
Lauren Berlant’s description of an intimate public is particularly useful
here:
An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers,

claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular
core interests and desires. When this kind of “culture of circulation” takes
hold, participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is
common among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from
their history and their ongoing attachments and actions.21
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
the social, political, and economic divisions, too real to be overcome by

symbolic gestures, and that a magical displacement (from added value to
‘football passion’) would allow the transnational corporations to reap their
rewards.”23 Build a feeling of belonging to a nation first, and corporate
desire fulfillment will follow.
Fanatic emotion cuts across geography and class to rhetorically join dis-
parate groups under the umbrella of nacionalismo futbolero, but Frankfurt
also calls attention to a more literal type of self-recognition in the campesino
fan. A rural person can see him/herself as a fan of the Paraguayan team,
and recognize other fans in the stadium: there is delight to be found in
recognition and visibility, especially for a nation that has been historically
isolated and less visible on international screens. Rural Paraguayans can
also see themselves in the players as well, being that frequently players
come from poor rural communities. Nelson Haedo Valdez is one such
player who represented Paraguay in the 2006 World Cup.
Frankfurt draws attention to the fact that many campesino fans can
easily see themselves in World Cup players being that they themselves are
also football players. A particular scene shows three brothers all riding
together on a small motorcycle down a bumpy, red dirt road. They follow
a 1970s Mercedes bus of the type that are still in regular use in Paraguay.
A group of men get off the bus and pay their dues. They then change
into their uniforms and warm up for the soccer match they are here for.
The referee urinates in the woods. (There is nowhere else to urinate.) For
some privacy, he stands behind a cab displaying a sign: “Villarica.” This
gives the audience further information about the possible location. As the
game starts there is a considerable amount of wind in the audio. There is a
brief shot of a bull on the sidelines of the soccer field; he turns his head to
look rather comically, directly at the camera. At half time the players break
and talk about strategy; the coach lectures them about better communica-
tion very animatedly and seriously. There is a shot of a light-skinned man
shaking the coach’s hand and asking in English, “Are you the new coach
here?” The man laughs and the coach looks uncomfortably at the camera;
obviously he does not speak English. There are a few more shots of the
game, then a fade to black.
This scene makes a connection between Frankfurt and football schol-
arship’s emphasis on the attraction of football as a space where “the
poor could compete with the rich and win.”24 By going from shots of
the television broadcast of the World Cup and the campesino spectators-
cum-players running on their own field, Frankfurt draws attention to the
64 E.K. ROMERO
dream of social mobility: specifically, stars like the aforementioned Nelson

Haedo Valdez,
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:
…what counts as collectivity has been a loosely organized, market-structured

juxtapolitical sphere of people attached to each other by a sense that there
is a common emotional world available to those individuals who have been
marked by the historical burden of being harshly treated in a generic way
and who have more than survived social negativity by making an aesthetic
and spiritual scene that generates relief from the political.26
Campesinos in Paraguay have undoubtedly been marked by the historical

burden of being treated as less than their lighter-skinned, Creole counter-
parts. The fact of the social hierarchy to which the rural poor are subject
is brutal, and the political institutions to which they have anything that
remotely resembles access have failed them. Power is indeed located in
some place that is not here, not the rural space, but rather, it is located in
a space that can only be conceived of as “distant and threatening”: a place
like Frankfurt, England, or even Asunción. While Schulze-Marmeling and
Michael John place emphasis on the historic significance of the “subver-
siveness” of football, they do so to draw attention to the impossibility of
finding relief elsewhere in feudal society: “The carnavalesque element of
football In the Middle Ages as a temporary inversion of the social order
thus reflects a lack of physical and social mobility in the feudal societies of
medieval Europe.”27 While the aforementioned scene draws attention to
the satisfying sense of self-recognition that campesino footballers may have
while watching the World Cup, it also draws attention to the infrastruc-
tural lack that formulates part of their daily lived experience: dirt roads
are not paved and lack maintenance; modes of transportation are limited:
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
WINNERS, LOSERS AND AFFECT

Does Frankfurt ask campesinos to recognize themselves as winners or los-
ers in the game they have conceded to play? The final scenes of the film
are helpful for examining this message. The penultimate scene is set a little
before dawn. It is still very dark and a fog lies over the landscape. The
moon is still bright in the sky. The fire is started for warming the mate,
and we see the elderly man (the father) from the first scenes of the docu-
mentary drinking out of a guampa inscribed with the words “República
del Paraguay” and decorated with an etching of a Paraguayan flag. (This
film is thus bookended by national symbols related to yerba mate, being
that the first shots feature Yerba Mate Pajarito packaged in the colors of
the flag.) The man packs two machetes and heads to the road. As it gets
lighter he walks further down the red dirt road. The camera zooms in on
his flip flops and bare feet; yet he is wearing a warm jacket. He is smoking
a cigar as he did at the beginning of the film. The length of the scene sug-
gests he walks quite a ways. The camera pans into the gray sky.
In the final scene the same man cuts cane while smoking. His son and
another farmer, also cutting cane some meters away, talk about a local
football game as they work. They are dexterous with their machetes, mak-
ing short work of the cane. The camera changes angle and we see the third
man cutting cane, and a horse grazing. The horse eats the leaves off the
cut stalks of cane.
What are the possibilities for “winning” under these conditions?
Becoming a wealthy world-class footballer is a possibility, but a slim one.
Frankfurt draws attention to the slim chances of “winning” in this way
through the use of the mirror, a recurrent image. The mirror appears
at times when campesinos could not only see extensions of themselves in
televised football players, but could also see themselves as “winners” rep-
resented in television commercials. For example, in one scene a deodor-
ant commercial featuring Ronaldinho is shown playing on the television
followed by a lottery ticket commercial: “Seneté—millionarios de verdad.
¡Che poremoi!”31 The commercial promises a chance at winning money
and a truck. Frankfurt cuts away to a young campesino looking in the mir-
ror. The wealthy world-class footballer dream is visually associated with
the lottery, and if it were not clear to the campesino that this market-
ing is directed at him, the usage of Guaraní should dispel any doubts.
Frankfurt’s final scenes, however, depict a more likely condition: one of
poverty and labor. The father and son will likely spend the rest of their
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
Popular conceptions of family are considered conservative; popular tradi-

tions are looked upon as fragmentary remains of a rural and pre-capitalist
cultural past; the tastes of the popular classes are molded by the corruptive
influence of the mass media; their leisure pastimes are nothing more than
escapism; their religiosity, a factor of alienation; and their life plans, no more
than frustrated attempts at upward social mobility.36
The potential problem that Berlant locates in the sentimental-political is

its tendency to protect and work in service of the system which causes
the suffering. “In a sentimental worldview, people’s ‘interests’ are less
in changing the world than in not being defeated by it, and meanwhile
finding satisfaction in minor pleasures and major fantasies.”37 A related

characteristic of the sentimental-political as defined by Berlant is optimism
for change without trauma. This is coherent with the ideology that Martín
Barbero describes as endemic to the writing-off of those who are not con-
tributing sufficiently to the market: “Forms of daily existence not directly
linked with structures of economic production are looked upon as depo-
liticized, irrelevant, and insignificant.”38 Martín Barbero might describe
such an application of Berlant’s theories as part of a damaging trend:
This tendency of critical theories is … a preoccupation with actions of vindi-

cation of rights and movements which unite people for struggle. Everything
else—the practices which make up the rhythm of daily life—has tended to
be considered an obstacle to conscientization and mobilization for political
action.39
Does Frankfurt visually construct a story about campesino life as an

obstacle to political mobilization? The empty promises of the World Cup
are visually triangulated with religious icons, (“their religiosity, a factor
of alienation”). The segregation between the men and women in the
scene can cause discomfort (“Popular conceptions of family are consid-
ered conservative”). The camera lingers on the pig head as it is being
prepared; a sight that can easily cause distaste in an urban audience who
might otherwise be used to consuming meat post-processing and pack-
aging, who might see the pig head as an unappetizing sign of “a rural
and pre-capitalist cultural past.” Does this scene depict football fandom
as “a leisure pastime [that is] nothing more than escapism”? Are dreams
of becoming a professional player “no more than frustrated attempts at
upward social mobility”? Is the presence of the television, the radio, and
the cell phone in Frankfurt a sign of “the corruptive influence of the mass
media”? Is the emotion Frankfurt foregrounds represented as evidence of
a traditional society wielding affectivity, and simultaneously, its incapacity
to wield rationality or to help the nation move in the direction of “prog-
ress,” modernization and democratization?
70 E.K. ROMERO
HISTORICAL BORDER WARS AND CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL

NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM
It is worthwhile at this point to return to the very first scene in the docu-
mentary. Frankfurt opens with the shot from the dirt floor: a bare foot
wearing a flip-flop. This foot belongs to a young man wearing an athletic
track suit and fanning a fire. The sound of a chicken clucking is audible.
The youth whistles a polka. There is a cat and a dog curled up next to the
fire. An older man is nearby; presumably, the younger’s father. The young
man takes the water that has been heating on the fire to make his mate
cocido con coquito for breakfast. The yerba packaging displays the colors
of the Paraguayan flag (Yerba Mate Pajarito). The sound of a radio or
television is audible in the background. Commentators are preparing the
audience for a World Cup game: England vs. Paraguay. We can only make
out a part of what one of them says, presumably about Paraguay: “Este es
un país que ha sufrido mucho por la guerra…”
As previously mentioned, Paraguay’s historical border wars play an
active role in the contemporary constitution of national identity in
Paraguay; specifically, the Triple Alliance War (with Brazil, Argentina, and
Uruguay) and the Chaco War (with Bolivia). For a relatively small filmic
archive, this is evident in the preoccupation with these historic border
wars and with current border issues: the film Cerro Corá (1978) is a fascist
re-writing of the Triple Alliance War produced by the Stroessner regime;
Hamaca paraguaya (2006) brings historical revisionism to the Chaco War
by erasing the glory of this win and replacing it with the loss felt by the
couple who gave their son for the war; Los paraguayos (2006)—a docu-
mentary by Marcelo Martinessi, commissioned by the Brazilian oil com-
pany, Petrobras—re-visits the contested “heroism” of the Triple Alliance
War icon, President Francisco Antonio López. Soberanía violada (2007),
directed by Mariana Vázquez Tandé, equates current-day Brazilian soy
agroindustry’s methods in Paraguay with an attack on Paraguay’s borders
and sovereignty. What is the meaning of historical border wars as a refer-
ent for present day audiovisual production in Paraguay? Like the afore-
mentioned films, Frankfurt also translates these historical border wars
into a current-day economic world order echoing colonial relationships
and loss through transnational processes and cultural iconography. In the
scene I describe above, the visual symbols of poverty that are so integral to
the establishing shot (dirt floors, flip-flops, animals indoors, polka, wood-
burning fire, mate cocido con coquito) are linked to the audio commentary
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.
THE MARKET, THE STATE AND THE CHURCH

In other instances, the television broadcasts commercials that make obvi-
ous appeals to nacionalismo futbolero in order to sell beer. For example, in
one scene the audio states: “Hay gente que sufre. Hay gente que espera,
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:
Brunner shows how authoritarianism performed the function of “main-

taining the order adequate to the new model of capitalist development,”
thus being organic to the implementation of market values in Chile. Market
ideology, military doctrine, and religious traditionalism—the three compo-
nents of the “authoritarian conception of the world”—are demonstrated to
form a coherent, unified ideology.43
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
As the comforting language of Christianity fitfully complimented the heroic

and militaristic rhetoric of “the armed vanguard,” the dictatorship achieved
a fundamental victory, for the language in which its atrocities were narrated
was, in its essence, the very same language that it cultivated and promoted:
macho militarism seasoned with pious Catholicism.44
Militarism may be absent from Frankfurt in a literal sense, but in a meta-

phorical sense it is definitely present. The World Cup connotes a confron-
tation of nations that is easily comparable to a type of warfare; the football
field becomes a battle field—especially given popular belief about Britain’s
role in the Triple Alliance War. The gendered environment, on the soc-
cer field as in the home, is visibilized in Frankfurt given how women are
mostly absent from the documentary. When they are present, they are
not featured in starring roles but in supporting ones. While men play the
game and men watch the game, women are mostly shown doing house-
hold chores such as preparing food and washing dishes. The only way a
woman can “get on television” it seems, is to put her body on display as a
sexy cheerleader (Tania); a position of more visibility, but still a supporting
role. It is important to note how the uneven distribution of wealth across
classes runs parallel with severe gender inequity in this equation.
Returning to the language of the Pilsen beer commercial, one may find
that before hearing the last line, the audio could easily be mistaken for
a description of Catholic devotees instead of soccer fans. Suffering plays
such an important role that it is mentioned twice: (“Hay gente que sufre
…”). The language could be describing people who have made a pilgrim-
age to pay for a promesa, as is customary during the annual peregrinata
para la Virgen de Caacupe: “Hay gente que espera … que pide” (who ask
for miracles and wait for their prayers to be answered), que canta, (who
sing hymns), “que alienta,” (who support each other in their faith,) “que
mira,” (who strengthen their faith by gazing at icons), que cree, (who
believe) and finally, “hay gente contenta;” (people who are made happy
by their faith). Interestingly enough, the word chosen to celebrate this
faith is the word “fanaticism:” “Hay gente fanática.” Authenticity and its
empty promises are not left out of the equation: “Pilsen, sponsor oficial de
la auténtica pasión albirroja.”
Avelar’s reading of the functionality of Catholicism within the context
of a military dictatorship, specifically in terms of Christ’s story, is particu-
larly important for analyzing Latin American penchants for mano dura
regimes:
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
Suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion, and martyrdom are the priorities of this

brand of Catholicism. Avelar stresses this, asking “How do we explain
the paradox of a God who conquers and emerges victorious precisely by
surrendering Himself to crucifixion by His own followers? … what is the
process through which the reactive ideology of suffering martyrs becomes
the backbone of national imaginaries and identities?”46 Suffering, sacrifice,
crucifixion and martyrdom are precisely the elements that make the Triple
Alliance War story so haunting: 60 %–70 % of the population, the presi-
dent and his son, territory, and financial independence were all sacrificed.
Paraguayan industry was destroyed and the nation went into extreme debt
with Britain (one million pounds) after having been so proudly debt-free
and isolationist for so long. Although the president (Francisco Solano
López) sacrificed his life on the battle field and has been elevated—espe-
cially by dictatorship historicism—to the level of a martyr, more recent
scholarship revises history to depict him as the man who in fact sacrificed
Paraguay by leading it into the Triple Alliance War. Either way, Paraguay
is left having to make sense of its loss, and using either or both versions of
history to explain its current subaltern position and the subaltern position
of its working class. Continuing loss and a focus on loss is perhaps a way of
not coming to terms with defeat, but, as Avelar explains, a way of elevating
defeat to the level of divinity. Relating back to Berlant’s description of the
sentimental-political as a tool for surviving the world, it is not ironic that
the Paraguayan working class should be crucified to by their own country-
men in the upper classes, just as it is not ironic that Jesus was crucified by
his own followers. The affective power of the religious experience trans-
forms the unendurable into the divine. Not only is loss, lack, sacrifice, and
suffering integral to Frankfurt, it is a major component of so many other
Paraguayan films as well. In Hamaca paraguaya (2006), for example, the
elderly couple who have almost nothing sacrifice their only son for the
nation in the Chaco War.
Here my reading of religiosity has to do with its circulation as a specific
discourse activated politically in the service of the market. It is important
76 E.K. ROMERO
to consider, however, how close this analysis could be to the historical

theorizations of religious and cultural practices as reflections of racial infe-
riority as those previously mentioned by Martín Barbero. In a similar vein
is the argument that if the Paraguayan rural class does not mount its own
revolution, then they have only themselves to blame for their conditions.
This argument also leaves out the conception that Franz Fanon is so adept
at inserting into arguments of racial inferiority:
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.
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.
78 E.K. ROMERO
18. Ibid., 4.
20. Ibid., 23.
21. Berlant, Female Complaint, 5.
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.
27. Schulze-Marmeling, Dietrich, and Michael, John. 1992. Der
Gezähmte Fussball: Zur Geschichte Eines Subversiven Sports.
Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt.
29. Ibid., 39.
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.
34. Ibid., 148.
35. Kusch, Pensamiento indígena, 118.
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.
CHAPTER 4
Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009)

and Noche adentro (2010)
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-

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_4
80 E.K. ROMERO
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
With this in mind, I believe it is important to begin this study acknowledg-

ing the actual context regarding crimes of sexual violence in Paraguay at
the time of this writing. The horrific case of a 10-year-old girl raped by her
stepfather, impregnated and denied an abortion swept the global media
in April 2015.10 Six hundred and eighty girls between the ages of 10 and
14 gave birth in 2014 in Paraguay, a country of 6.8 million people. In the
same year, 28 minors died due to complications from childbirth. Fourteen
underage mothers died due to failed abortions.11 While the World Health
Organization estimates that 20% of Paraguayan women suffer gender-
based violence, these numbers are certainly underreported. Cases of sexual
abuses are rarely prosecuted due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms
and mistrust of the judicial system, which more often than not, engages
in re-traumatization through victim-blaming.12 What is the significance of
the rape trope brought to bear within this context of sexual and gender-
based violence? Noche and Karai both summon this powerful trope to
draw attention to the urgency of their political denouncement and to the
national trauma that the Paraguayan people have undergone—particularly,
Paraguayan women. In this chapter I argue that these films indirectly draw
upon moments of physical rape through their historical connections, while
also producing national allegories that rely on sexual violence for their ends.
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
Fig. 4.1 The M.C. in Noche adentro
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
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
Although Noche does not constitute an example of state-on-state

homoerotic violation, extending the question of what makes a state rap-
able to what makes a pueblo rapable provides us with productive allegorical
results. In Noche’s “state on pueblo” heterosexual violation and homicide,
Paraguay’s pueblo is the bride and the state (more specifically, the network
of politicians and businessmen who run it) is the groom with his best men.
One can arrive at this allegorical reading by noting the weight on the com-
plicity of the best men, who are referred to right at the beginning of the
film as the M.C. introduces a polka, dedicated by them. The polka itself
represents the type of “bread and circus” that totalitarian regimes often
use to distract the populace from egregious forms of corruption. (A typical
campaign strategy used in the countryside makes for a good example: buy-
ing votes with sacks of flour and bottles of whiskey, among other goods.)
Ruskola demonstrates how trade, by definition, constituted a form
of consensual “intercourse” between states; there is a “right of inter-
course” between the state and its pueblo, as there would be between a
bride and groom. In Noche, however, instead of an exchange of plea-
sure, the groom’s “pleasure” seems to only be satisfied by the complete
extinguishing of the bride. The romance script that describes the type of
sexual exchange between partners on their wedding night might involve
romance, affection, talk of love, and the giving and receiving of pleasure.
It is assumed that intercourse on a wedding night would happen through
mutual consent. In evoking the wedding night and the assumption of
consent, the allegorical reading of Noche echoes the neoliberal discourse
of “personal responsibility” or even, “true economic liberalism” which
“requires a consent that is given voluntarily. Once obtained, consent in
turn justifies anything, or as Hobbes put it, ‘Nothing done to a man by his
own consent can be injury.’ ”17 Similarly, the allegorical reading of Noche
demonstrates how, because of this relationship of consent, the Paraguayan
state has been able to exploit, oppress, or “rape” the Paraguayan people
without consequences. This rape has been as normalized as heterosexual
sex on a wedding night.
Historically, marriage was conceived of as a relationship beyond consent,
given that under marriage law, women were men’s property. In “Rape and
the Rise of the Novel,” Frances Ferguson points out that in Hebrew and
Saxon law, a husband’s rape of his wife was theoretically impossible, since
she “belonged” to him. Traditionally, rape and marriage have functioned
in a tense relationship. The etymology of the word rape derives from the
Latin rapere; to seize or carry off (property) by force; which derives the
86 E.K. ROMERO
crime of raptus, in other words, “bride kidnapping” under Roman law.

For many centuries and across cultures, rape was conceptualized as the
unlawful theft of a “bride.” As Victoria Anderson also stresses in “Sins of
permission: the union of rape and marriage in Die Marquise von O and
Breaking the Waves,” in the case of the woman’s husband, rape simply
ceases to exist because it has been, by definition, absorbed into marriage.18
The proper owner, and thus the rightful “victim” of the crime, was the
bride’s male protector, be it her father or husband.
The murky historical relationship between marriage and rape echoes
the murky justifications corrupt politicians use when it comes to bankrupt-
ing state institutions instead of making them work for the people. The
people are the property of the state; they are to be exploited—not served.
That said, contemporary conceptualizations of marriage as a romantic
union and of the state as a democracy in service to people make this situ-
ation all the more distasteful to the spectator: the rape and murder of the
bride are made especially gruesome by the fact that the perpetrator is the
groom and the crime is committed on their wedding night. The situation
suggests that the state’s role to the people should be one of protection and
service, and for that reason, the acts of violence and exploitation are even
more heinous. The groom’s grunting as he drags the body down the hall-
way, a scene that finally ends with the groom collapsing under the weight
of the bride’s corpse, is a macabre parallel to the type of moaning and cou-
pling of bodies that the spectator would otherwise expect on a wedding
night. Night, or Noche, is everywhere: in the sky without light, the black
water of the river that washes away the crime by carrying the evidence off
into the night, but most importantly, inside the groom’s soul—adentro.
While the allegorical role of the groom/state is the clearest, Noche also
features what we might interpret, allegorically, as the complicity of oth-
ers in positions of power; the oblivion of the general populace and male
command of national power. While the rape, murder, and hiding of the
evidence takes place, the wedding party happily dances to a polka (the
oblivious general populace). The only ones who seem to have some aware-
ness of the situation are the best men, who represent the behind-the-scenes
corruption of nepotism, clans, and family-centered behavior that guarantee
the majority of political and business deals in Paraguay in the absence of
a functional judicial system. The mention of the best men also recalls the
commonality of the rape trope’s presence as a very masculine exploration
of desire, in which women are often metaphors—as frequently is the case
in the works of Freud—for specific masculine concerns. This is an especially
salient consideration in instances of sexual violence that involve two or

more men. As Horeck points out, the central dynamic of gang rape appears
to have as much to do with men’s relationships to each other as with their
relationship with women.19 Power between men is part of the daily reality
of Paraguay; a country in which men make decisions and women live with
the consequences. Men speak and women listen. Women’s bodies are the
inert battleground on which the nation was and is forged.
On the concept of complicity, however, it is important to consider
how complicity could also extend to the spectator, particularly through
the construction of the opening shot of the film in which a bloody vulva
comes slowly into focus. Scott MacKenzie notes how “the spectator’s
uneasy complicity” with images of violation fuels “a tension between the
desire to look and the compulsion to look away.”20 Shooting the vulva out
of focus, only gradually bringing it into focus, involves camerawork that
forces the spectator to look intensely. If looking is figured as a type of com-
plicity, the spectators must ask themselves if they are part of Paraguay’s
corruption problem. Do they stand at the sidelines and watch—or even
facilitate—embezzlement, nepotism, cronyism or other types of corrup-
tion? In Public Rape, Horeck discusses the rape of Cheryl Ann Araujo; a
particularly horrific case of gang rape due to the fact that a whole bar full
of male witnesses turned the act into a spectator sport by looking on and
cheering instead of intervening. Indeed, “The law of the land … does
nothing to censure those who look.”21 While the spectator of the film/
witness to corruption cannot be convicted for a crime per se, the discom-
fort presented by Noche is twofold: on one hand there are the allegorical
implications that beg the question: “What do you do when you witness
corruption and injustice?” but on the other hand, there is the more imme-
diate question of what Horeck refers to as a focus on the technology of
the camera; the anxiety regarding visual technologies in relation to rape.22
Russell also draws attention to the idea that “the camera, at least in regard
to some kinds of documentary images, is itself a tool of rape.”23 While
the film’s work is the representation of rape, there is also a real act the
spectator is summoned to witness: the camera’s physical intimacy with the
blood-spattered vulva. What does the spectator feel upon being forced to
look at it through the close-up they are presented with? Shock? Horror?
Excitement? This recalls Seltzer’s definition of spectacular violence: “a vio-
lence that is inseparable from its reproduction as spectacle” (186). The
gift of spectatorship in this case is that, depending on their response, the
spectator can either feel complicit or can cancel out this complicity by dis-
88 E.K. ROMERO
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
As Russell points out; however, in contrast with rape, murder is a more

straightforward force, inciting fewer questions:
Murder of course, is fascinating fodder for narrative because violence excites,

and because a corpse commands a story; rape, on the other hand, has the
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?
The Triple Alliance War

With the aforementioned historical and contemporary moments in mind,
a feminist lens demands serious inquiry into the presence of rape cul-
ture in Paraguayan history. As Russell recalls, “Feminists … introduced
the term rape culture to describe a culture in which sexual violence is a
normalized phenomenon, in which male-dominant environments (such
90 E.K. ROMERO
as sports, war, and the military) encourage and sometimes depend on

violence against women …”30 It is worthwhile to bear this definition of
rape culture in mind while deeply examining a major historical event in
which the Paraguayan woman is narratively equated with the nation: the
Triple Alliance War. In this war, Paraguay staved off Brazil, Argentina,
and Uruguay for 5 years. The war cost Paraguay most of its male popula-
tion, leaving women—and to a lesser extent, children and the elderly—to
rebuild the nation.31 According to Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson,
“A major recent study calculated that the population fell from around
420,000-450,000 in 1864 to around 140,000-166,000 in 1870. This
represents a loss of 60 to 69 percent of the prewar population, far higher
than previous estimates.”32 The task of rebuilding in the face of a catastro-
phe of this magnitude was indeed huge, but the narratives around the role
of la mujer paraguaya from this time bare a heavy load of ambiguity on a
continuum running from a celebration of female strength to regret about
the “feminization” of the nation; something that must be read in conjunc-
tion with anti-woman Paraguayan legislation to follow in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries (see for example, female suffrage, divorce, and
abortion laws). Rape was also an undeniable part of the post-war period,
but a part that is mostly placed under erasure by historians in favor of an
emphasis on the “looseness” of female sexuality seen as an effect of the
lack of men of reproductive capacities surviving after the war.
In “The Women of Piribebuy,” Juan O’Leary illustrates how children
and women became part of the re-writing of this Paraguayan national
epic. Women were indeed involved in every aspect of the long defensive
campaign, but their role was not highlighted until the nationalist period.
In O’Leary’s piece, the Triple Alliance War is recast in a revisionist inter-
pretation, in “which he sought to transform [the war] in terms of collec-
tive memory from a national catastrophe to a heroic national defense—the
epic encounter of the Paraguayan nation.”33 In his piece, O’Leary recounts
how “the desperate defense of Piribebuy in the last year of the war, the
heroism of the Paraguayan defenders—and especially the women, is set
against the cold brutality of the victorious assailants.”34 Women and their
bodies become the battlegrounds on which an attempt to recast the trag-
edy of the Triple Alliance War as a tale of heroism and survival against
all odds is written. In many narratives, this historic moment elevates the
Paraguayan woman in a way that represents her as superior to Paraguayan
men, but this celebration of those gendered female is cast against the trag-
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:
As a result of the decimation of the male population during the Triple

Alliance War (1864-70), in the early decades of the Liberal period there was
a marked predominance of women in the labor force. The establishment of
female-headed households, a cultural tradition that persists to the present
day, dates from the period following that catastrophic war. But despite this
quasi-matriarchal economic structure, women retain a subordinate role in
society, suffering widespread discrimination in a society heavily dominated
by machista cultural values. It was only in 1961, following international
pressure, that legislation was passed granting women the right to vote, the
right to be elected to political office, and the right to join together and
organize themselves within political parties.36
How does one explain the prevalence of statements such as Gonzalez’

about the superiority of the Paraguayan woman, juxtaposed with the fact
that Paraguay was the last Latin American country to give women the
right to vote in 1961?37 Ana Barreto Valinotti writes about the purpose of
this lip service in her chapter, “Abnegación y patriotismo en la figura de la
prócer Juana María de Lara. Construcción e idealización de ‘la matrona’
como perfil femenino ideal en el Paraguay de inicios del siglo XX.” She
describes the post-war political narrative around women, using de Lara’s
example, as a “unifying and domesticating discourse.”38
The celebration of Paraguayan women as valiant defenders in the face
of a devastatingly cruel war stands in direct contrast with the account of
historian Harris Gaylord Warren. He describes the condition of Paraguay
immediately following the Triple Alliance War in his book, Paraguay and
92 E.K. ROMERO
The Triple Alliance. In it he highlights the shocking social conditions that

could be found after the war: “rape was so common that no woman was
safe without a strong male escort.”39 This stated, the prevalence of sexual
violence perpetrated by men during this time period is mostly glossed
over by historians in favor of an emphasis on the “loose” sexual behavior
of women, often seen as an effect of the “lack of men.” Barbara Potthast-
Jutkeit’s book, “Paraíso de Mahoma”, o, “País de las mujeres”?: el rol de la
familia en la sociedad paraguaya del siglo XIX, uses this widely accepted
social narrative as the jumping off point of her research:
La amplia propagación del concubinato y el gran número de <<madres

solas>> y de hijos ilegítimos en el Paraguay del siglo XX se debe—según
muchos autores—al desequilibrio total entre los sexos. Al mismo tiempo, en
el “país de las mujeres” se habla frecuentemente de una estructura matriar-
cal, al menos dentro de la familia, que también se atribuye a la dominancia
numérica de las mujeres después de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza, y también
al hecho, que esta experiencia se repitiera setenta años después en la Guerra
del Chaco, aunque aquel conflicto no haya tenido, ni aproximadamente, la
envergadura del anterior.40
To put it bluntly, the slut shaming phenomenon that Potthast-Jutkeit

highlights in historical accounts of Paraguay can even be traced back to
Warren’s descriptions of 1877:
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-
ual willingness. By re-introducing the topic or trope of rape into conver-

sations about the nation through their short films, however allegorically,
Noche and Karai bring up the issue of historic and contemporary sexual
violence against women along with even broader questions regarding the
rhetoric implementation of the mujer paraguaya icon and the political
future of the nation.
The view of Paraguay as infamously gendered as female/inferior as a
result of the Triple Alliance War is one that in fact has impacted Paraguayan
film long before directors such as Lamar and Martinessi became active,
however. In John King’s foundational work, Magical Reels: A History
of Cinema in Latin America, there are only a few pages on Paraguayan
film. Within those pages, King cites Paraguayan boom author Augusto
Roa Bastos: “The daily routine, the monotonous and insistent rituals, the
power of religion and the grinding poverty are all captured in an impla-
cable portrait of this ‘land without men and men without land.’”42 The
cultural influence of books written by Roa Bastos (and films in which he
was involved; see El trueno entre las hojas, 1956) and King make the inclu-
sion of this phrase in the only three pages dedicated to Paraguayan film
in Magical Reels 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 (men without land). If we read Noche and
Karai as political allegories denouncing corruption in which women stand
for the nation, we must ask where they fit in or break out of this tradition
of linking Paraguay’s “feminization” with its inequality. It is too easy to
use the body gendered female for denuncia stories; the nation/people are
vulnerable, abused, in need of saving. But where is the agency and the
claims to female power in this equation? As in my previous analyses of the
campesino figure in other chapters, referring to la mujer paraguaya simi-
larly carries a sense of determinism and pessimism in terms of agency and
the future of democracy and development in Paraguay.
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
Fig. 4.5 The elderly woman’s home in Karai norte
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
and self-sufficient a woman is … rape heightens her vulnerability.”44 She

also mentions how innocence itself makes women vulnerable to rape.45
Both of Projansky’s observations apply in the case of Karai; shots of the
woman’s leathery, gnarly hands, for example, highlight her age but also
her hardiness and independence. Her kindness with the stranger from
the north, his horse and her tempered language about those who victim-
ized her suggest a gentle innocence about her. No matter how strong and
moral (or perhaps because of this strength and morality) she is a woman
who lives alone in an isolated place—a fact reinforced by the long shots of
her shack standing alone in the desolate landscape—and her vulnerability
is forcefully foregrounded.
In both cases, rape is only a part of the crime: Noche’s crime involves
homicide and the rape in Karai seems to be an afterthought compared to
the theft. The noteworthy difference in Karai has to do with the ambigu-
ity about who the perpetrators were. This complicates possible allegorical
readings. To begin with, it is unclear whether the man from the north is
a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” He is evasive about where he comes from
and what the conditions of his journey are. Yet despite—or due to—being
exploited/pillaged/raped by strangers, the woman decides to feed this
new stranger. Perhaps she finds the strength to trust again, but the more
likely explanation is that she knows she has no real choice: the stranger
is stronger than her and armed. Brute force reigns in this lawless, barren
land, yet the empty landscape seems to denote a peaceful solitude when
coupled with the soundtrack. The woman’s hands and hair seem to hold
the same stark and weathered beauty of the landscape and the rugged,
rustic shack that occupies it.46
Not only is the stranger from the north’s background dubious, he
becomes the hero of the story through a crime: homicidal revenge on the
rapist/thief. If he were likened to the state, he would be most representa-
tive of the mano dura politics of past dictatorships: an authoritarian figure
who disregards the law himself, but dispenses rigid and violent “justice”
on people who threaten the dictatorship’s “order.” Making him into the
hero would be in line with the nostalgic “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos”
discourse. The ambiguity about the identity and motivation of the per-
petrators is most evident in the woman’s recounting of the crime. When
the stranger asks her “¿Esos que vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del
gobierno?” she replies “No sé, parece que fueron mis vecinos no más…”
By allegorical extension, the “bad guys” are neither the state (fuerzas del
98 E.K. ROMERO
gobierno) nor those who would attempt to topple it (rebeldes), but rather,
vecinos: her very countrymen, the pueblo itself.
La Mujer Paraguaya and Foundational Mestizaje

Myths
Once more, it is difficult not to consider an allegorical reading of this
short film, being that it does not take on a pertinent social problem
(rape of the elderly is not endemic). Being set in a shack on an unmarked
landscape and shot in black and white, the short film takes on a timeless
quality; it could be set in 2016 or in the late 1800s. This indistinction
summons Paraguayan history, and by extension, its history of rape—of
women, specifically—and its intrinsic relationship to the nation within the
specific context of Paraguay’s main foundational fictions. Projansky ana-
lyzes filmic examples that address issues of gender, race, class, and nation
in distinct—sometimes even conflictual—ways in order to emphasize just
how malleable rape is as it helps to produce and maintain social relations
and hierarchies.47 Similarly, an analysis of the Paraguayan woman as icon is
inseparable from rape within recent moments of Paraguayan historic revi-
sionism. A study of Paraguayan history reveals how agents of colonization
used rape to organize the nation to their liking, to control women and the
entire indigenous population. The unnamed elderly woman in Karai is
clearly of indigenous descent, also summoning in this way histories involv-
ing indigenous women and the nation.
Ignacio Telesca describes the role of Guaraní woman in his piece,
“People of African Descent in Paraguay: Invisibility, Mestizaje, and the
Presentation of Our National History” by citing Efraim Cardozo’s foun-
dational text, El Paraguay colonial. In it, Cardozo recounts how under
Spanish conquistador Domingo Martínez de Irala’s leadership, “there
began in Paraguay the most extraordinary campaign of reciprocal cap-
ture of two races through the vehicle of free and untrammeled love …
Everywhere there was the free and voluntary surrender of nubile women
to the recent arrivals.”48 And so went the history I learned when I was a
girl: Paraguay was peacefully colonized by the Spaniards who instantly
fell in love with the Guaraní women. Telesca challenges this historically
dominant narrative:
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.
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
Telesca critiques the myths so dominantly propagated by certain histori-

ans, taught in primary schools and widely figuring as part of the national
imaginary. Instead of painting a peaceful, erotic narrative in which native
women are willing sexual partners and laborers, Telesca suggests that not
only is this history misrepresentative, but in fact the exact opposite of the
truth; native women were raped, and the Paraguayan nation constitutes
the fruit of this act of violence against women. Telesca connects this era-
sure of women’s victimhood with the historical erasure of the indigenous;
“This was not a process of mestizaje, but one of whitening; to be Spanish
would be replaced by being Paraguayan, and both words were synony-
mous with being white.”50 Telesca’s historical revisionism constitutes an
attempt to reintegrate considerations of women’s perspectives as well as
indigenous bloodlines. From this original moment, Woman’s relationship
to the Nation is one that involves violence and exploitation.
In “The Status of Women,” Riordan Roett and Richard Scott Sacks
further challenge the “friendly alliance” myth, shedding light on the raids
that followed this period in which indigenous women were kidnapped:
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
In this essential foundation fiction regarding the origins of the Paraguayan

people, we see the rape trope at its most versatile; presented as a romantic,
erotic narrative that forges paraguayidad, at the same time that physical
rape is a means for the end of cheap labor—sexual and otherwise. Rape
in this instance is a form of social control—historically used to control
women and used in the present to maintain the suppression of cumulative
outrage that could fuel the political demands of contemporary Paraguayan
indigenous people and women. The aforementioned popularized colonial
100 E.K. ROMERO
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
Paraguayan history; we find that it was covered up with stories of romantic

love between indigenous women and Spanish conquistadores. We also find
that rape after the Triple Alliance War was covered up with rhetorical exal-
tation of la mujer paraguaya, and that there are echoes of this in more con-
temporary examples of rape, gender-based violence, and marginalization of
Paraguayan women. Using the site of the body gendered female as a place
from which to denounce current political and social problems allegorically
may not be unproblematic, but it does draw attention to a host of issues
that require attention, despite the discomfort that attention may produce.
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.
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.
14. Martin-Jones and Montañez, “Uruguay Disappears,” 40.
15. Ruskola, “Raping,” 1478.
16. Ibid., 1483.
17. Ibid., 1509.
18. Anderson, “Sins,” 75–6.
20. MacKenzie, “On Watching,” 170.
22. Ibid., 83.
102 E.K. ROMERO

5. Anderson, “Sins,” 76.
2
27. Ibid., 5.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. Ruskola, “Raping,” 1484.
31. Consider the impact of this historical event, in light of this promo-
tional video for Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de la
Asunción, produced in 2015, which makes explicit reference to the
role of Paraguayan women after “la guerra grande” (aka the Triple
Alliance War, 1864–1870): Mass Publicidad. “Traicioná la medioc-
ridad—Universidad Católica ‘Nuestra Señora de la Asunción’ ”
Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 8 Jan. 2016. Web. 12 Jan.
2016. youtube.com/watch?v=B2BPCi2Ktp0.
32. Lambert and Nickson, Paraguay Reader, 395.
33. O’Leary, “Women,” 104.
34. Ibid., 104.
35. González, “Causes,” 166.
36. Roett and Sacks, “Status,” 433.
37. In contrast, the nations of North America and most nations in
Central and South America passed women's suffrage before World
War II.
38. Barretto Valinotti, “Abnegación,” 143.
39. Warren and Warren, Paraguay, 134.
40. Potthast-Jutkeit and Livieres, “Paraíso,” 13.
41. Warren and Warren, Paraguay, 135.
42. King, Magical Reels, 101.
43. Staiger, Interpreting, 26.
45. Ibid., 30–32.
46. I explore the implications of narrative connections between the
rural campesino and the land in depth in Chap. 2.
48. Cardozo, Paraguay colonial, 64.
49. Telesca, “People,” 411.
50. Ibid., 412.
51. Roett and Sacks, “Status,” 434–5.
52. Higgins, “Screen/Memory,” 31.
53. Miller, “Child Rape,” 1.
CHAPTER 5
Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de

palo (2010) and Semana capital (2010)
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,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_5
104 E.K. ROMERO
shedding light on contemporary homophobia). Cuchillo follows Costa as

she returns to Paraguay after living in Spain, to solve the mystery behind
her queer uncle’s death, and to expose the secrets surrounding his life.
In the process, she tells the story of homosexual persecution under the
Stroessner regime, specifically, the torture and interrogations that were
part of the Palmieri case, the resulting list of “known” homosexuals, (la
lista de los 108) produced by the dictatorship, the Aranda case and its ensu-
ing list, as well.
In this chapter I explore the question of how we are to interpret the
work of queer representation in Cuchillo, a documentary that offers the
first filmic opportunity for direct political criticism of an historical dicta-
torship contextualized by a filmic backdrop obsessed with national iden-
tity and return to the origins narratives. Here I explore how queer theory
can further an analysis of these representations “by considering interrela-
tions of sexuality, race, and gender in a transnational context, attempt-
ing to bring the projects of queer, postcolonial and critical race theories
together with each other and with a feminist analytic that itself has been a
key factor in the critique of social identity,” to quote Phillip Brian Harper,
Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen in their intro-
duction, “Queer Transections of Race, Nation and Gender.” Cuchillo rep-
resents a break with unified, nationalist representations conveying purity
in Paraguayan origins, by highlighting queer, Paraguayan, clandestine
countermemories and histories that official State and religious discourse
have placed under erasure.
For these reasons, among others, Cuchillo does important work that
Carmelo Esterrich describes in “Filming Remembering Forgetting: The
spectacle of erasure in Cuchillo de palo/108,” by constituting “a pleth-
ora of moving pictures that document and complicate the contemporary
questions around nation, citizenship and the mediated image” and by
dealing specifically with what Esterrich refers to as “post-memorial recu-
peration” (1); that is, a kind of historic revisionism that disrupts tradi-
tional discourses of power. That said, Cuchillo’s limits involve its form as
a type of spectacle that sets out to revisit history in such a way that new
power dynamics return and are also present in the film. As Guy Debord
so succinctly puts it in Society of the Spectacle, “reasoning about history is
inseparably reasoning about power.”2 In Cuchillo there are two tempo-
ralities with two different power structures that enter into its reason: the
power structure of the military dictatorship and the power structure of the
new democratic order.
QUEERING PARAGUAYAN FILM: 108/CUCHILLO DE PALO (2010)... 105
As Kregg Hethertington describes in Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of

Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, a primary concern in international
development involves how nations should transition from authoritarian
or corrupt regimes to more democratic ones, a fear being that if the peo-
ple do not fill the power vacuum left by the exiting regime, undesirable
totalitarian or fundamentalist elements will. Implicit is the assumption that
democracy is unquestionably the most superior model of political organi-
zation available for fighting totalitarianism. Questions of how to support
democratic transition became inseparable from questions of how to “free”
national markets as the post-dictatorship economic growth spurt of the
early 1990s in Latin America, for example, was touted as evidence that free
market reforms were working. The road to democratic politics was seen as
going hand in hand with a strong economy and both were tied to the pri-
oritization of information—especially the conditions of the poor and mar-
ginalized: gathering, organizing, and distributing this information. In the
case of Paraguay, young directors constitute an important segment of the
group that Hetherington refers to as the “new democrats”: a small, edu-
cated counter-elite from Asunción with an increasingly influential role in
media, social analysis, public criticism and international relations. With this
in mind, Cuchillo is a documentary that documents in two specific ways:
(1) it documents an effort to democratize Paraguay by visually providing
information regarding a subaltern subject position in Paraguay—specifi-
cally gay men and trans women—as part of a visual turn that promises to
open access to memory and national identity beyond the symbolic use of
the power center and (2) it documents this sincere desire to move a nation
in the direction of the universal ideals of greater freedom and economic
equality, juxtaposed with profound anxieties regarding the populist threat
to democracy. While Paraguayan underclasses need help and empower-
ment, they are also seen as voting masses whose illiteracy, irrationality, and
weakness for totalitarian, populist leaders (such as Alfredo Stroessner and
Lino Oviedo)3 make them a threat to democracy. This underclass is most
profoundly embodied by the figure of Renate Costa’s father: Pedro Costa.
While Semana lacks the depth of Cuchillo, its similarities to and differ-
ences from Cuchillo allow spectators to expand our picture of how turn-
ing the camera on the ruling class causes deep discomfort and profound
anxiety. Semana represents seven couples’ hidden sex lives and romantic
relationships, showing a double-standard at best and an extreme hypocrisy
in the worst of cases, in regards to Paraguay’s most privileged population’s
claims to “proper morals” contrasted with suggestions about how mem-
106 E.K. ROMERO
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”
Últimamente vemos en entrevistas a talentos del audiovisual paraguayo

declarar lo siguiente: - Esta, más que una película, es un experimento. Para
luego ensoquetarnos arriba de 60 minutos de algo imposible de digerir.
Este talento, gracias a sus amigos y a un grupo de creyentes que asistieron al
estreno de su experimento pagando algunas entradas, llega a considerar que
él, realmente, hizo una película. (Última Hora)
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
longest time a film directed by a Paraguayan had played continuously in

this shopping mall’s Cineplex. Cuchillo competed at the Berlinale Film
Festival and also won awards at the Buenos Aires International Festival of
Independent Cinema and the Málaga Spanish Film Festival.
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:
Looking at the film’s structure, Cuchillo de palo/108 sways between the

director traveling the city in search of information about her uncle and an
extended conversation with her father about his gay brother. These two sec-
tions are strikingly different, both stylistically and narratively … Even though
in those scenes the topic of conversation is almost always his brother, the
audience gets to know much more about the father than about Rodolfo.7
Just as Cuchillo plays with dark/light, the invisible, dead brother

(Rodolfo) and the visible, living one (Pedro), the unknown and the dis-
covered, it also works in the service of two different projects: a recovering
108 E.K. ROMERO
Fig. 5.1 Photograph by Gabriela Zuccolillo
of a specific, queer history and a condemnation of a certain segment of

the Paraguayan population who have historically contributed to bringing
populist strongmen to power. To diminish them is also to advocate for a
new openness that would hopefully lead to a transfer of power to the new
counter-elite; new democrats like Renate Costa. As Guy Dubord explains
in regards to spectacle: “The end of cultural history manifests itself on two
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
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
Renate: O sea no te das cuenta que eso es lo que le hacía mal.

Pedro: Solo sé que a mí me tocó vivir con un hermano que estaba en
esa situación y que yo tenía también que tratar de defenderlo.
¿Qué lo que le iban a hacer sus amigos? Renate lo destruyeron.
Lo destruyeron, Renate. Te cuento, el homosexual no es un
varón, es un indefinido. ¡Él no tuvo hijos, no se casó! Hay una
misión en esta vida.
Renate: Bueno pero no todo el mundo tiene que tener hijos.
Pedro: Si vas a ser sacerdote no. Pero si dios te concede sí. Pero si vos
nos querés cambiar … Hasta los últimos tiempos yo hablaba de
eso con él. Y él me decía “Pedro pero yo no puedo.” Porque la
gente dice que es difícil—no, no es difícil—¡es imposible sin el
espirito santo! Imposible, quiero que sepas.
Renate: Una cosa es que Rodolfo haya sido homosexual. Punto. Esa es
su vida. Pero después no puede ser que le no le dejen estar con
nosotros. A mí me parece totalmente diferente eso.
Pedro: Pero nadie te prohibía tampoco.
Renate: Claro que prohibían. Pero poner una cara larga, o que él le
alce a un sobrino y todos venir corriendo para ver si le alzó al
sobrino y si le tocó o si no le tocó. Eso es enfermo. A mí me son
más enfermos ustedes que él.
Pedro: Yo no te puedo decir que yo soy sano. Y sé que estoy enfermo,
sé que soy un pecador. Yo no tengo ninguna duda de eso. Por
eso estoy donde estoy. Te cuento, yo no tengo ninguna duda de
eso. Mi mente y me corazón son perversos. ¡Soy un pecador, yo
no te niego eso! Pero vos tenés que luchar contra eso, contra tu
mismo yo, contra tu mismo interior.
Renate: Cada uno.
Pedro: ¡Cada uno!
Renate: Pero no vos exigirle al otro.
Pedro: Claro, yo no le puedo exigir al otro. ¡Nunca Renate, no puedo!
Solamente al otro le puedo amar y invitarle.
Renate: Pero eso no se aplica a Rodolfo…
Pedro: Eso sí yo te puedo decir. ¡Yo con Rodolfo he conversado cien
veces! Y por eso inclusive nos tomamos a trompadas aquella
vez allá porque … Mirá, primero vos conversás, y después le
seguís, y después le atajás, y después ya vienen sus amigos y
después te tomás a trompadas. Eso es un proceso, Renate. En la
primera noche no te vas a tomar a las trompadas con los amigos
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
Elsewhere Renate describes Rodolfo’s unwillingness to embrace the

patriliniage of the family through his rejection of his father’s trade—
blacksmithing: “Rodolfo era el único que no quería ser herrero; el más
desobediente de la famila.” In contrast, Pedro is presented as the son
who has followed the patriliniage so closely that he now resides at the
workshop that used to belong to his father; literally and physically the son
now occupies the father’s space, and the conversation takes place in this
space. The conversation between Pedro and Renate begins with Renate
bringing up her clandestine countermemories from childhood, introduc-
ing in this way what she experienced as homophobia, and what Pedro
experienced as natural ways to react to someone who refuses to receive
spiritual treatment for his contagious disease. Coupled with Pedro’s
exemplary maintenance of the patrilineage is the sacredness of conserva-
tive, homophobic, and sexist thought epitomized in Pedro’s statements
about why he beat Rodolfo’s friends in an effort to “defend” Rodolfo,
to keep Rodolfo from being “corrupted” by them. As Gopinath asserts,
“Dominant nationalism institutes heterosexuality as a key disciplinary
regime…”11 While elsewhere Pedro reveals that the order to “protect”
Rodolfo comes directly from the paternal heterosexual chain of command
(a nationally instituted heteronormativity embodied by Pedro’s father,
and by extension, Paraguay’s dictator), and Pedro does everything to
honor this supreme rule—even resorting to the use of violence—Rodolfo
and his friends still subvert this disciplinary regime. The spectator knows
this is the case, as s/he comes to find that Rodolfo went on to mentor
transsexual clients, guiding them through hormone therapy and provid-
ing performance coaching.
Another key element of this heteronormative discourse involves
Pedro’s “evidence” of Rodolfo’s failed life; “Le destruyeron, Renate. Te
cuento, el homosexual no es un varón, es un indefinido. ¡Él no tuvo hijos,
no se casó! Hay una misión en esta vida.” When Renate retorts that not
everyone needs to have children, Pedro replies that priests are an excep-
tion, but if “God concedes” (if one is fertile) one should reproduce.
In Pedro’s equation, a fertile man (who is not a priest) who does not
reproduce cannot claim the male gender. Rodolfo’s failure to perform his
gender role properly and follow the heteronormative timeline disqualify
him from full homosocial participation—he is relegated to gender limbo
(“es un indefinido”). As Berlant and Warner so succinctly put it, “peo-
ple feel the price they must pay for social membership and a relation to
the future is identification with the heterosexual life narrative.”12 When
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
MACHO MILITARISM SEASONED WITH PIOUS CATHOLICISM

Pedro’s use of religious rhetoric in this conversation, immediately fol-
lowed by shots of graffiti recalling the dictatorship, remind the spectator
of the link between military doctrine and religious traditionalism. In The
Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of
Mourning, Idelber Avelar illustrates how “market ideology, military doc-
trine, and religious traditionalism—the three components of the ‘authori-
tarian conception of the world’—are demonstrated to form a coherent,
unified ideology.”15 Under Stroessner, Paraguay had years of experience
with military dictatorship, its authoritarianism and its forms of indoctrina-
tion (religion, propaganda, torture, kidnapping, etc.) Avelar’s work helps
explain how Cuchillo arrives at this linking of religious discourse and patri-
archal authoritarianism in the following way:
As the comforting language of Christianity fitfully complimented the heroic

and militaristic rhetoric of “the armed vanguard,” the dictatorship achieved
a fundamental victory, for the language in which its atrocities were narrated
was, in its essence, the very same language that it cultivated and promoted:
macho militarism seasoned with pious Catholicism.16
Post-dictatorship morality among Asunción’s traditional ruling class is rigidly

wrapped up with Roman Catholic ideals of what constitutes socially accept-
able sexual behavior. The accompanying machismo to which Avelar refers
is also still dominant in political discourse in Paraguay,17 and as Cuchillo’s
story illustrates, public gender bending alone has been (and can still be) met
with acts of violence. Homophobia is perhaps even more strongly justified
by Catholicism in Cuchillo’s case because of the nation’s history with the
military dictatorship’s language and practices of discipline and control.
However, even beyond the link between machismo and Catholicism,
Berlant and Warner see an essential connection between the nation and
heterosexuality: “National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which core
national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling
and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship.”18 Given the time
at which Cuchillo was produced—a time at which much filmic production
was dedicated to representing some sort of unique essence of paraguay-
idad on screen—the disruption that Cuchillo represents is remarkable.
What do all these institutions into which so much faith is placed have in
common? Their frailty. It turns out that machismo, like Catholicism, is a
belief system that can be rejected at any time on the simple grounds that
“I don’t believe that.” Similarly, the nation’s borders were determined

with some degree of arbitrariness. In the specific case of Paraguay, after the
Triple Alliance War, the country could have easily been absorbed by Brazil
and Argentina, but the two countries decided instead to leave a buffer zone
in between each other, as it would mean investing much less resources if
a future border war were to occur. Due to this history, Paraguay is some-
times referred to as a country that should not exist (one of two land-
locked countries in South America). Heterosexual monogamy is also a
concept that disappears into thin air in the Paraguayan context when even
lightly scrutinized: many women are so expectant of male cheating that
they will address the topic preemptively with new partners: “I know that
you will eventually cheat on me—just make sure I never find out.” Even
with the aggressive ideological structures to prop them up, critical think-
ing quickly pokes holes in the machismo, monogamy, Catholicism, and
even nationalism that constitute interrelated, mainstream ways of thinking
and being in contemporary Paraguay.
Perhaps one of the greatest vulnerabilities that Cuchillo unmasks has to
with the dictatorship itself. As Skidmore, Smith, and Green discuss in the
introduction to their book, Modern Latin America, historically, the mili-
tary dictatorships of Latin America, like heterosexual culture, have had no
more than provisional unity: “Once thought to be dominant and mono-
lithic, authoritarian regimes came to display a good deal of incoherence
and fragility.”19 Cuchillo works to reveal just how frail and contradictory
the strategies of religion, nationalism, heteronormativity, and sexism are
and how precarious their modes of self-maintenance and reproduction.
TRANSGENDER WOMEN, GAY MEN AND FEMINISM

Cuchillo visibilizes connections between feminism, gay men, and trans-
gender women in a way that shows what each group owes each other in
the national struggle against patriarchal Roman Catholic heteronormativ-
ity as a disciplinary regime. The first queer group to present themselves
publicly in Asunción were the travestis, as these trans M/F individuals
called themselves. Some of these biological males would dress as women at
night, others lived full-time transgender lives. There were varying degrees
of surgical transitions taking place in the 1980s, with breast implants being
among the most popular. As Liz Paola describes in her exchange with
Renate, being a transgender woman was difficult and the only type of
work she could get was sex work (Fig. 5.2):
118 E.K. ROMERO
Fig. 5.2 Photograph by Gabriela Zuccolillo
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:
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
Mama encontró otra pareja, un bailarín, y quedó embarazada … Me acu-

erdo que mamá se presentó al velorio con una barriga gigante. Nadie se
sentó a su lado. Nunca voy a poder describir lo que sentí cuando Rodolfo se
le acercó, le dio la mano y rezó con ella.
The rhetoric of the dictatorship, “macho militarism seasoned with pious

Catholicism,” is queered, subverted and re-signified by Rodlfo in this show
of solidarity. Rodolfo and Mirta are both shunned by their family for the
sexual transgressions of which there is public evidence on display (Mirta’s
pregnancy, Rodolfo’s flamboyancy). Rodolfo understands how hard it can
be for the seat next to her to remain empty, so he responds by accompany-
ing Mirta. When he holds her hand to pray with her, he re-appropriates
Catholicism in a way that demonstrates how he rejects the dogma that
would justify her shunning—and his own shunning. It is also noteworthy
that this narration comes immediately following a scene taken from a fam-
ily video where the whole family is happily singing “Happy Birthday” to
abuela on her eightieth birthday. Renate deviates from the official family
history as it is documented: happy and unified. Instead, she rescues the
sexually marginalized community in her own family and re-imagines their
relationship to official family memories. By narrating a different history,
Cuchillo memorializes the injustices of the past while representing alterna-
tive modes of being that extend beyond those traditionally accepted by the
limited scope of Catholicism, heterosexuality, and nationalism.
CONTRASTING RECEPTIONS: SEMANA CAPITAL

While Cuchillo had to turn away spectators due to cultural center the-
aters at capacity and then broke records at Cine del Sol, Semana capital
was screened only once publicly. The public response was overwhelm-
ingly negative: director Hugo Cataldo described how people left the
screening either in tears or cussing (“o llorando o puteando”). While both
films included queer Paraguayan subjects for the first time, how does one
explain the major discrepancy between the films’ receptions? To begin
with, one might cite Cuchillo’s much higher production value and the
fact that it was screened at European film festivals before it was screened
nationally. Semana, in contrast, was the experimental product of an act-
ing workshop which did not include the same level of audio production
or editing that it would have needed to leave a more polished impression.
Yet beyond production value, Cuchillo allowed spectators to feel better
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:
It is imperative, however, to interrogate the triumphant rhetoric with which

the phenomenon was surrounded during the 1980s, especially in the United
States and largely, I believe, as an imaginary compensation for the succes-
sion of defeats undergone by the Left in recent decades. In circumstances
of political isolation it is all too comforting to imagine that redemption is
just around the corner, being announced by a subaltern voice transparently
coincident with its experience and supplying the critical-oppositional intel-
lectual with the golden opportunity to satisfy good conscience.22
Making Rodolfo Costa the absent hero of Cuchillo is convenient. He

cannot talk back; he has no voice of his own. Rodolfo is a ghost; the
documentary can only reconstitute him through a photograph, a few sec-
onds of home video and interviews with people who knew him. There
are no opportunities for Rodolfo’s voice to not coincide with the experi-
ence and positionality the documentary expects. Likewise, all Paraguayan
homophobia is neatly contained by the figure of Pedro Costa, who imme-
diately satisfies the intellectual’s good conscious in that his homophobia
is contained, placed on display, and condemned within 93 minutes. The
viewer is perhaps so comforted by this, in fact, that Pedro Costa has pub-
licly appeared at multiple screenings with Renate and even posts on the
documentary’s Facebook page “Cuchillo de Palo-Estreno en Paraguay!”
In just one screening, the intellectual can be outraged and put that out-
rage to rest. Semana, on the other hand, does not offer comfort, solace,
or redemption.
Semana holds up a mirror (a frequent technique in the film) to
Asunción’s elite class and asks them to recognize their erotically excessive
sexuality and how it is out of line with the dominant rhetoric, in what
essentially constitutes an affront to the entire societal system. Semana’s
queerness scratches away at the veneer of national heteronormativity and
pious sexual behavior (for procreation, between married heterosexuals).
In this way it challenges what Berlant and Warner would call the “Practical
heterosexuality [that] … guarantees the monocultural nation.”23 As they
argue in “Sex in Public,” an essential part of official national culture is
122 E.K. ROMERO
the sexualization of national membership, which depends on a notion of

privacy to hide this fact about itself.24 The queer culture-building present
in Semana refers to what Gopinath so succinctly describes as “a range of
dissident and non-heteronormative practices and desires that may very
well be incommensurate with the identity categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian.’
”25 Even the heterosexual couples in the film present alternative possibili-
ties for Paraguayan identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex as they
displace the normal heterosexual couple as the referent, or “privileged
example of sexual culture.”26 Even the heterosexual couples in Semana act
in ways that violate the sanctity of private spaces and betray their promise
to the Roman Catholic nation, their promise to at least keep their deviant
sexual practices private.
Originally inspired by “the seven deadly sins” or capital vices, Semana
capital refers to seven days, sins and couples, each engaging (or failing
to engage) in a tryst on different days of the week. Monday is Martina
and Castorino’s day. They have sex off screen as the intro credits roll.
Once the camera pans across the kitchen in which they have coupled, the
audience can deduce that this sex act happened somewhat spontaneously,
interrupting Martina’s cooking, as food has spilled everywhere and a pot
still boils on the stovetop. Post-coitus, Martina goes about matter-of-
factly explaining the recipe as Castorino cries uncontrollably; “Tengo 38
años, ya no estaba en mis planes” he blubbers. The audience later comes
to find that he works at a sex shop, defying expectations and playing with
the Catholic virginity narrative in which losing it is traumatic for the girl
and a conquest to be celebrated for the boy. Here it is Martina who must
comfort the shaken Castorino. Tuesday’s couple, Joaquin and Clemencia,
watch television from a sofa. She is silent, depressed-looking and dead in
the eyes. Joaquin tries to encourage her to go out more, and puts lipstick
on her although she ignores him completely. Her reaction is catatonic.
He finally goes down on her in a failed attempt at producing a passionate
exchange, as she falls asleep. He seems very depressed himself at this real-
ization. It is difficult to say what is more distant from the machista script:
his sadness at the failure to engage her sexually, or his concern for her sex-
ual pleasure and emotional wellbeing. Wednesday’s couple, Horacio and
Roberto, are the first of two same-sex couples in the film. They engage
in a fully enthralling give and take involving erotic vomiting. Thursday’s
couple, the wealthy and attractive young Constanza and Derlis, have a
conversation at the dinner table about generosity, pleasure, and money
in which we can see their thoughts subtitled; their hypocrisy toward each
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
Semana represents an assault on heteronormativity and its parallel

romance narratives by representing how “even people who are committed
to hetero intimacy are nevertheless unhappy … Recognition of hetero-
sexuality’s daily failures agitates … as much as queerness.”27 Perhaps the
fact that Semana’s heterosexual characters do not adhere to the standard
narratives of their gender was more frustrating to audience members than
the gay couples’ subversive sexuality. The characters of the male gender
in particular behave in a way that is out of line with the dictatorship’s
brand of masculinity: Castorino cries when he loses his virginity, Joaquin
is distraught because he cannot arouse his partner, Patricio is infantilized
by his obsession with Victoria. If we consider what Berlant and Warner
state, and “People feel that the price they must pay for social member-
ship and a relation to the future is identification with the heterosexual life
narrative,”28 Semana’s spectators are agitated because this film represents
hetero romance life narratives that no one seems to be soothed by iden-
tifying with. Instead, Semana widens a crack in normalization’s façade: a
neat distribution around a statistically imagined norm is disrupted by a
representation of heterosexuals who are also deviant from the mass.
Semana’s affront however, is not only constituted by the kind of sex
represented, but even more broadly, by the fact that the film is mostly
dedicated to publicly representing the sex lives of the Paraguayan elite. As
Berlant and Warner theorize, when it comes to sex, a function of the pub-
lic/private divide is to produce a special sphere that belongs to the indi-
vidual; a sphere that is differentiated from the spheres of work, politics
(and perhaps even religion and morals). As long as the upright individual
maintains the public appearance of keeping up with the codes and val-
ues the heteronormative nation demands, the intimate, private realm can
be “a privileged institution of social reproduction, the accumulation and
transfer of capital, and self-development,”29 This divide between public
and private also allows for intimate life to be
the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven

that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and eco-
nomic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of a mass society, and
shames them for any divergence between their lives and the intimate sphere
that is alleged to be simple personhood.30
Perhaps the transgression audiences found most disturbing in Semana

involved how the film breached the public/private divide by representing
the intimacy and sex lives of the Paraguayan elite in a publicly-screened

film. Blurring the line between these public/private spheres weakens the
exceptions and privileges that intimate life is supposed to offer. That said,
I differ from Berlant and Warner’s readings of the function of the inti-
mate haven in regards to the element of shame: maintaining the public/
private divide is exactly the price that heterosexuals of the Paraguayan
elite pay for having an intimate sphere in which they can make allowances
for divergences. For heteronormative males in self-proclaimed committed
monogamies, putting on a pious face at church and keeping dirty laundry
under wraps is not hypocrisy, but rather, exactly what allows for mistresses,
sex parties, prostitutes, and other types of secret infidelities considered
necessary evils for the satisfaction of the “insatiable male libido.” The fact
that Semana illustrates what might happen behind closed doors encour-
ages a public to look at the same arena where the public/private divide
encourages a respectable public to never lay eyes. The zone of heterosex-
ual privacy is not protected as it should be; instead it is exposed, making
its audience a kind of unwilling sex public, dirty and complicit with the
most freaky and nasty of transgressions: the blurring of the line between
private and public. That is why the film’s final scene delivers the lowest
blow: Patricio and Victoria’s scuffle escalates to the point of spilling out
into the street. Victoria escapes into the car and Patricio is left standing in
the street, totally nude, crying and screaming. Patricio betrays the brand
of masculinity he should uphold by showing all his naked vulnerability,
by appearing pathetic, by begging, by crying, by losing control. All this
would have been more acceptable behind closed doors, but the fact that
he brings this transgressive performance to the street provides the film’s
final slap in the face.31
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
tional disciplinary regimes. Cuchillo and Semana both work to visibilize

the incoherence and frailty of the strategies of religion, nationalism, het-
eronormativity, and sexism while revealing how precarious their modes of
self-maintenance and reproduction really are. By the same token, the two
films’ different receptions suggests that Cuchillo deals with the horrors
of state-sponsored homophobic persecution in a way that encapsulates
contemporary homophobia in the individual of Pedro Costa, neatly laying
the issue to rest. While its gestures toward resistance are laudable, the fig-
ure of Pedro Costa represents the counter-elite’s anxiety about the voting
masses whose illiteracy, irrationality, and historic weakness for totalitarian,
populist leaders make them a threat to democracy—as a system of govern-
ment would favor a new openness leading to a transfer of power to the
new counter-elite. Cuchillo de palo’s parallel projects involve much-needed
historical revisionism, but it also shows transferring class power to the new
democrats while working against the figure of Pedro Costa as a representa-
tion of the populist threat to democracy by connecting his homophobia
and irrationality to the military dictatorship. In contrast, Semana enrages
as it attacks the ruling class head-on, confronting them with their own
erotically excessive sexuality and blurring the line between the public/
private sphere, weakening the exceptions and privileges that intimate life is
supposed to offer under the traditional nationalist, heteronormative, and
religious regime.
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.
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 mobil-
ilzed by Cubas Grau and Oviedo, and instructed to attack the
protestors.
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.
4. Berlant and Warner, “Sex,” 550.
5. Esterrich, “Filming Remembering,” 3.
6. Ibid., 4.
7. Ibid., 6–7.
8. Debord, Society, 184.
9. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 4.
10. Ibid., 4. See also Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead.
11. Ibid., 9.
16. Ibid., 67.
17. The current president of Paraguay, Horacio Cartes, was famously
cited as saying publicly “Si yo tuviera un hijo gay me pegaría un
tiro en las bolas” while he was running for election. After election,
he was also famously quoted for likening Paraguay to an “easy
woman” in an effort to describe how the country should become
more attractive to foreign investors (“Horacio Cartes y la frase de
la polémica: ‘Paraguay tiene que ser esa mujer linda, tiene que ser
128 E.K. ROMERO
fácil’”; “Cartes: ‘Me pego un tiro en las bolas si mi hijo quiere

casarse con otro hombre’”).
19. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 10.
21. Trans individuals in Paraguay still pay the price for their greater
visibility, as their appearances in Paraguayan mass media become
favorite clips for on-line meme-making, auto-tune mash-ups and
other types of creative mockeries. See viral YouTube videos such as
Travestis delicadas y finolis. malubobadillaacosta1. YouTube, 15
Dec. 2010. Web. 2 Jan. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=0C-uTk968oU and Travesti vs. Borracho Duelo
Autotune! Soytansutil. YouTube, 21 Dec. 2013. Web. 2 Jan. 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K12cOevoDcw.
23. Warner and Berlant, “Sex,” 550.
24. Ibid., 547.
27. Ibid., 556.
28. Ibid., 557.
29. Ibid., 553.
30. Ibid., 553.
31. It is worth noting that the film also transgresses the public/private
divide in that most of the scenes were shot at the director’s per-
sonal residence.
CHAPTER 6
The Child as Paraguay’s Future: “Calle

Última (2010), Mita´í (2011), and 7 cajas
(2012)”
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.
—Henry A. Giroux, Breaking into the Movies

(Giroux, Breaking in, 171).
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

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_6
130 E.K. ROMERO
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
As Henry Giroux describes in Breaking into the Movies, representations

of youth in popular culture have historically constituted a site in which
cultural crisis is expressed. The child in Paraguayan film embodies con-
cerns about the state of society, the family, criminality, and corruption,
economics, politics, and education in a nation in transition. In this chap-
ter I analyze representations of the figure of the Child in contemporary
Paraguayan film using a transnational category of analysis, considering
scholarly work involving problems of representation of children and ado-
lescents in Latin American and US film more broadly, while tying in the
rhetorical analyses of documents specific to national concerns about the
future of the Paraguayan child; namely the aforementioned report “La
inversión en la infancia: una condición indispensable para el desarrollo
económico y social equitativo y sostenible” and materials produced by
#AHORApy, a movement communicated via multiple media platforms,
organized around securing greater funding for education. I read all of
these instances of representation against Paraguay’s contemporary politi-
cal backdrop.
“La inversión en la infancia: una condición indispensable para el desar-
rollo económico y social equitativo y sostenible,” was designed to inform
the political and public debate related to the 2013 presidential elections.
The first section is subtitled “El bienestar de sus niños es el mejor indica-
dor del desarrollo de un país” and it places children and adolescents at the
center of concerns about the nation’s overall social and economic future:
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
una estrategia de desarrollo económico. Se trata de invertir en el desarrollo

humano, de crear una sociedad cohesionada y una economía fuerte incluy-
endo efectivamente a este grupo etario del cual depende nuestro futuro,
aunque paradójicamente lo olvidamos en el presente.7
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 (2011): The Independent Short

and Disability
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
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 legal system may also be effectively unavailable to us as a positive mech-

anism for reasons related to poverty, discrimination, rural living, or other
kinds of marginalization. In general, the legal system, and legal capacity, are
most effective for those who are most privileged in mainstream society and
least effective for those who are most oppressed. People with disabilities are
in general among the most oppressed—by discrimination as well as intersec-
tion with poverty, racism and other issues.
Her point is congruous with the aforementioned statistics from the

UNICEF report showing the disadvantage faced by disabled children—
particularly indigenous disabled children—who want to attend school.
In contrast with the lack of empathy shown by the adult figures of
the teacher and the mother, in the next scene, when Mati asks another
group of children if he can play hide and seek with them, the children
initially reject him but then are sensitized to his need for inclusion. As
he starts to cry and charges the children with “being mean to him”—a
code phrase that corresponds with any instance in which Mati wants to
denounce exclusion or unfair treatment on the basis of his disability—the
children quickly amend their position and assure him that he can play
with them, but he must not cheat. Mati then becomes the seeker, cover-
ing his eyes and counting to ten as best as he can “one, four, eight…”
In these scenes, we once again see how children are more supportive of
Mati than adults are. While this scene highlights Mati’s inability to play
hide and seek “properly,” it is not a mockery, but rather, a display of his
empathy and connection to his peers, despite their difference. In Moral
Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of
the Child, Lisa Cartwright describes acts of mimicry in the autistic subject:
“…mimicry is not a rote, mechanistic, camera-like operation of reproduc-
tion. Rather, it is a deeply empathetic operation, involving projection and
introjection … to mimic is not to perform fully as a social subject. It is to
pose ‘as if’ one were a normally functioning individual.”10 Mati’s effort to
play like the other children does not represent a failed attempt, but rather,
shows how Mati seeks a connection despite the cognitive difference that
sets him apart. The other children appreciate Mati’s gesture and include
him in the game even though he cannot adhere to the rules as rigidly as
they do. This scene models the essence of a humanistic approach to people
who require accommodations.
The need for connection, affection, and love are also highlighted through
Mati’s memory of lying in the grass with his sister, Anita. They laugh and
talk about an enjoyable activity: riding a carousel. Mati farts and they laugh
about it, playfully poking and touching each other. The sound of a cow
mooing can be heard; there are echoes of the Rousseaurean child that rep-
resents a return to nature, possessive of pastoral innocence. An echo effect is
added to the audio indicating that this is a memory, and the viewer discovers
that this was Mati’s memory from the first scene, to which the short briefly
cuts, in which he is tending to the indoor cooking fire and smiling wist-
fully. What was originally unexplained and possibly chalked-up to idiocy,
136 E.K. ROMERO
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.
Calle Última (2010): The Pro-Child Project

Calle Última (2010) is another short, narrative film which takes on the topic
of at-risk youth. The film was part of a project called “Derecho a una vida libre
de violencia para niños, niñas y adolescentes en situación de calle, explotación
sexual y otras condiciones de exclusión social,” funded by the European
Union and Fondo de Cine de la Ciudad de Asunción (Fodecica). UNICEF
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. 6.1 Miriam visits José in Calle Última

138 E.K. ROMERO
Fig. 6.2 Miriam visits José in Calle Última
are sleeping, breakdancing, sniffing glue, doing other drugs, gambling

and splitting the spoils of a stolen purse. As one inspects a stolen cell-
phone, he mentions that it is the model that the police officer had asked
for—a subtle denunciation of the corruption of Asunción’s police force
and its intimate relationship with street crime. José reminds Miriam that
he had asked her not to come here, and she explains the shoe problem.
José offers her the stolen purse, now empty.
Miriam hangs back a while. From the vantage point of an overpass
that is an iconic landmark of this part of Asunción—Calle Última—she
watches José breakdance at a stoplight for change. The overpass displays a
large sign that ironically welcomes all to this area known for poverty and
criminality: “Bienvenidos.” When José finishes dancing he joins Miriam
and inquires about her shoe size (Fig 6.3 and Fig 6.4).
Miriam takes the purse to a roadside bar and tries to sell it to some
of her friends who engage in sex work there. It becomes apparent that
she has dabbled in prostitution herself when a friend asks her “Does it
still hurt?” At this point in the film the street kid paradox that Diego del
Pozo describes has essentially been established. In his article, “Olvidados
y re-creados: La invariable y paradójica presencia del niño de la calle en el
cine latinoamericano,” Del Pozo draws attention to how typically Latin
American street kid films have presented themselves as denunciations of
Fig. 6.3 José and friends breakdance for change at a stoplight in Calle Última
Fig. 6.4 The iconic overpass in Calle Última
horrible living conditions and poverty, yet manage to reinforce a youth-

hood-crime triad that leaves out other institutions and social narratives
that are essential for an explanation of structural violence. Through its
title alone, Calle Última singles out a particular part of Asunción, framing
urban violence and prostitution as specific to this poorer side of town and
divorcing it from the larger political economic and social structure. The
brief allusion to police corruption is an exception, but there are not many
references to the world outside of Calle Última otherwise. The problems
140 E.K. ROMERO
of crime and prostitution are therefore presented as problems specific to

said area: the poor here are victims of the crime that “their kind” perpe-
trates. It is Miriam’s own parents, for example, who fail her.
Following Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Del Pozo argues that
delinquency is made threatening while depicted as still far away enough
to be exotic. This issue is one of Calle Última’s most consistent prob-
lems of representation. The delinquency depicted is threatening due to
its proximity to bourgeois Asunción, yet it is also made exotic and dis-
tant through the film’s constant stressing of the location: Calle Última.
Take for example the aforementioned scene in which José and his friends
breakdance at a busy stoplight. Their boom box blasts a hip-hop beat and
the lyrics “Bad girl, you’re so hot” in English. They breakdance in front
of the lanes of cars, dramatically backlit by headlights as they perform
acrobatic dance moves. While stoplight performers are a quotidian spec-
tacle one commonly encounters at major intersections of Asunción, José
and company are also represented here in contrast with the adult, lighter-
skinned car owners—they are dark-skinned adolescents performing acro-
batic dance moves. Their exoticism is stressed by the English language,
transnational hip-hop beats. In Laura Podalsky’s article, “The Young, the
Damned and the Restless: Youth in Contemporary Mexican Cinema,” she
situates recent youth films alongside discourses in circulation regarding
“the problem of today’s youth,” arguing that a question commonly asked
of young people is “[I]n an economic climate that supports the unfettered
flow of goods across national borders, have young adults abandoned social
commitment to follow the siren call of individualistic consumerism and
the seductive beats of transnational youth culture?”11 (Fig. 6.5)
Arguably, a similar question is posited by Calle Última. For exam-
ple, when Miriam goes into the warehouse district to ask José for help
procuring the shoes, she waits outside the warehouse and the camera,
which has been following her from behind, goes in without her, allow-
ing the viewer to see the other street boys sleeping, breakdancing, doing
drugs, gambling and divvying up stolen goods. When José comes out to
meet her, he repeats that he has asked her not to come here. An audio-
visual contrast is created between José and Miriam: José inhabits a space
in which individualistic consumerism feeds their informal economy (i.e.
stealing cell phones for the police) and the “seductive beats of transna-
tional youth culture” fill the air. Miriam stays outside of this realm. In a
shot of the street p erformance at the stoplight, Miriam is well-removed:
the camera reproduces her point of view as she looks down at José from
Fig. 6.5 Miriam contemplates the future after talking to her friend; an underage
mother, in Calle Última
her elevated position on the footbridge overhead. As Podalsky asserts,

“Youth has often been defined as a transitional period and young adults as
unstable. Frequently these assumptions have produced rigid classifications
that divide young adults into two categories: the properly socialized and
the troublesomely marginal.”12 The same classificatory scheme applies to
Calle Última. Where some children choose well and others choose poorly,
to become a more productive member of society is presented as more of
a matter of choice and less of a systemic trap produced by a national
condition of vast inequity. Miriam is upheld as a youth who struggles to
become properly socialized and socially committed by attending school,
while José is one of the troublesomely marginal. Despite this image of
José, his nobility redeems him as he tries to keep Miriam out of this cor-
rupted space by asking her not to visit him in the warehouse district, and
by the end of the film, he is also redeemed through his success in procur-
ing the shoes Miriam needs to go back to school with dignity. In fact, it is
only after Miriam has given up on going back to school and José restores
her hope by delivering the shoes that the two are able to act like children
again. The film ends with the two of them jumping in water puddles left
after the rain, giggling and splashing each other. As Podalsky states about
Mexico:
142 E.K. ROMERO
By privileging the perspective of the poor protagonists, these films help to

attenuate the concept of such youth as violent “other” … or as poor-but-
ethically-pure moral exemplars … Yet, despite the care taken to make their
characters’ plight understandable, these films’ depiction of young violence
as a consequence of uncontrollable bodies further weakens their efforts to
underscore structural inequalities.13
While José proves to be an uncontrollable body though theft and wild

breakdancing, Miriam is also on the edge. Her feet refuse to be contained
by a close-toed shoe, she cannot be forced to go to school and her body is
no longer chaste. Calle Última’s question seems to be written more along
the lines of, “Will these children find the discipline they need?” and less
along the lines of “Will the state improve structural inequalities?”
As Miriam walks home from the bar, she is greeted by a younger child
who begs her to push him as he swings from a gate. At first she resists, but
the child finally wins her over. They both laugh as she pushes him and he
“swings” on this street version of playground equipment. Through her
interaction with this younger child, Miriam is able to escape her worries
and for a brief instance her innocence is returned. However, it is quickly
interrupted by an adult man who appears from the shadows to smile at
Miriam, his shirt unbuttoned. She looks alarmed and runs away. It is
unclear who he is, but given the previous scene, it seems possible that he
has paid for sex acts with her in the past.
In this instance and in the scene that follows it, the adults in Miriam’s
world are part of her problems, whereas other youths are the only ones
who come close to helping her with solutions. The next day, as Miriam
prepares for school, her mother’s domestic partner picks on her for not
having sold the oranges she was supposed to sell yesterday. As he eats
breakfast, he warns her “She shouldn’t even think of having any of these
rolls. She will have to eat the rotten oranges she didn’t sell.” As Miriam
approaches her mother, she first views her through a mirror in which she is
also looking at herself as she puts her hair in a ponytail. Miriam sits down
on a bed next to her mother, who is visibly pregnant and has two other
small children sleeping on the bed next to her. Her mother silently hands
Miriam an orange. “Why do you stay with him?” Miriam asks disdainfully.
Her mother does not answer. In fact, she never utters a word. The way
this scene is shot, Miriam first seeing her mother’s reflection alongside
hers, reminds the viewer that Miriam could easily end up like her mother
if things do not work out differently for Miriam somehow.
Although Miriam is dressed for school, she decides to stop by the

cobbler first to see if she can buy a good pair of used shoes. When she
arrives, rather than asking what she needs, the cobbler immediately offers
her huffing glue. She explains that she is there for shoes, but she is not
impressed with the quality of his selection. Once again, the adult she goes
to for help proves to be part of the problem: just another obstacle to her
education. As previously discussed in the case of Mita’í, adults repeatedly
fail Miriam. It is only her peer, José, who takes action to help her get
back to school. In Carolina Rocha’s introduction to the Special Section on
Children in Hispanic Cinema, she highlights Cary Bazalgette and Terry
Stapels’ assertion that: “[Children’s films] foreground the problem of
coping with adults, or coping without them.”14 (96). In Mita’i, and Calle
Última the young protagonists survive despite their parents’ poor choices
and a dichotomy of “minors versus adults” emerges. The precarious con-
dition denounced is defined by poverty, but exacerbated by childhood.
Judith Butler describes precariousness as “…that politically induced con-
dition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic
networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence
and death.”15 The UNICEF report stresses the need for Paraguay to rec-
ognize the failures of national networks of support as resulting in illiteracy,
inadequate nutrition, high mortality rates, and other kinds of violence that
affect children disproportionately:
Ningún país ha sostenido un crecimiento económico—y menos aún con

equidad–-con altos niveles de analfabetismo, desnutrición generalizada,
morbilidad endémica, violencia, abuso, trata y explotación de su población,
y particularmente cuando afectan en mayor medida a su niñez.16
This narrative move in which siblings/peers are privileged over parents/

adults reflects the loss of faith in government generally, but especially
in a government historically embodied by Alfredo Stroessner, who pre-
sented himself as the proud father of a nation to which he single-handedly
brought peace, stability, and order. When it comes to Paraguay’s children,
these films stake the claim that neither biological nor figurative parents can
be trusted to do their job.
In both of these short films, the child’s marginalization is due in part
to no-good fathers, but more importantly; mothers are blamed for hav-
ing chosen the no-good fathers. Mita’i ends with Mati taking revenge
on his superficially involved guardian, Doña Mary, for her judgment of
144 E.K. ROMERO
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
7 cajas (2012): The Blockbuster

7 cajas, directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori, has
received a great deal of attention as the first feature-length blockbuster
of national production. It beat out Titanic (1997) as the most success-
ful film in Paraguay’s box-office history, amassing 330,000 spectators
over a six-month run.19 The directors achieved their goal of producing
a Hollywood-style thriller, which won multiple awards at international
film festivals. In 2014 it underwent its North American theatrical, VOD
(Video on Demand), iTunes, and Netflix releases.20
The entire film takes place in the Mercado Cuatro area of Asunción,
and the film’s establishing shots introduce this area as a congested, busy,
dirty but colorful marketplace. Much like Calle Última, 7 cajas singles
out a particular part of Asunción, divorcing its rampant criminality from
bourgeois Asuncion, making it threatening but also exotic and distant.
Victor, the adolescent main character, is asked to transport seven boxes of
mysterious contents in exchange for half of a torn USD $100 bill and the
promise of the other half upon completion of the delivery. The film follows
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
excess of “young violence as a consequence of uncontrollable bodies,”

returning to Podalsky’s phrase, but it is also, paradoxically, minimized by
certain scenes in which the spectator is invited to have a chuckle about
the absurdity of a moral system into which criminality has been so seam-
lessly integrated. For example, in one instance, the kidnappers who Victor
unwittingly finds himself working for are sitting in a vehicle, waiting for
the Syrian-Lebanese shop owner who has hired them to kidnap his wife.
(The plan was to extort a ransom from his father-in-law without anyone
catching on to his own son-in-law’s involvement.) As the kidnappers wait
in their vehicle with the windows open, parked on a Mercado Cuatro
street after dark, two adolescents hold knives to their necks and demand
they hand over their cellular phones. The spectator does not feel much
sympathy for the victims—they are even more serious criminals them-
selves. The scene is funny because the adolescents are very pleased with
their steal and high-five each other as they run away, but they do not know
that they could have stolen much more given that their victims were hold-
ing the ransom: USD $250,000 in cash. Shortly after, Victor tries to con-
tact the kidnappers only to have the adolescent muggers answer the stolen
cell phone. They say that the men cannot be reached as their cell phones
have been stolen. Victor explains that it is a “matter of life and death”
and he must communicate with the phone’s previous owner immediately.
The adolescent tells him where the vehicle was parked when they stole the
phones, and Victor thanks him. The whole conversation is friendly and
informal. The young thief understands Victor’s predicament and responds
sympathetically by providing the information Victor needs. While the
young thief has no ethical quandaries about holding a knife to a stranger’s
throat, he also helps a stranger over the phone without hesitation. It is
evident that this bizarre moral universe is rife with contradictions, compli-
cating judgments regarding which actions are right or wrong.
Also puzzling is the moral structure the film produces around Nelson,
the movie’s main villain. Nelson is introduced as Victor’s arch-enemy,
and as the film progresses he represents an ever-increasing threat, until he
finally holds Victor at gunpoint in a showdown with the police. Nelson,
however, has perhaps the most selfless motivation, as exemplified in an
early scene at a drugstore. Nelson takes his young wife and their feverish
infant child to the pharmacy to procure the NPH insulin the baby needs.
Nelson does not have enough money to pay for it, and cannot convince
the pharmacist to give him credit, even after he offers his cell phone as a
security deposit. “It’s not for me, but for my son,” Nelson protests, but
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:
[E]xiste un incremento paulatino del abandono escolar de los adolescentes

urbanos debido a repitencias sucesivas, a la falta de atractivo para ellos de los
contenidos escolares tradicionales, a la insuficiente oferta de una formación
profesional y las expectativas o necesidad de ingresos monetarios personales
de manera rápida. Estos jóvenes suelen estar en la calle y expuestos a entor-
nos violentos, bandas callejeras, criminalidad, violencia armada y la droga-
dicción, que son factores que comprometen su futuro.22
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
The Child and Political Anxiety

The events of June 2012, detailed at the beginning of this chapter, are
read by many as the manifestation of an extreme fear of marginal elements
in Paraguay getting out of control, and writ even more broadly, of the
political Left getting out of Colorado Party control. Could a film like Calle
Última or 7 cajas be read as in favor of the restoration of the old political
order? In his aforementioned article, Diego Del Pozo refers to Pedrazzini
and Sánchez to discuss the potential effects of projecting images of young
delinquents: “…el poder no está interesado en reducir la inseguridad sino,
muy por el contrario, en amplificarla […] no se trata necesariamente de
amplificarla realmente. Sino que su amplificación en el imaginario de la
gente ha sido suficiente para que el poder logre el éxito.”25 Indeed, la
inseguridad y la inestabilidad are two of the keywords that Paraguayans
most bring into circulation to voice their concerns regarding la situación
en Paraguay. Nostalgia for the Stroessner dictatorship is exemplified in the
“éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse, which insists that at least under
Stroessner (Colorado authoritarianism) the streets were safer and food was
cheaper. Increase in street crime and political unrest is related in the minds
of many to the rise of the political Left. Therefore, violent suppression of
criminals and mediatic suppression of the Left go handin hand and are
justified in the name of safety and security for all. Del Pozo refers to how
criminal suppression only lead to the compounding of violence in Caracas,
as Julio de Freitas describes:
La exageración que ha hecho la prensa de la violencia en los barrios ha ser-

vido para fomentar la idea de que sólo en los barrios se producen hechos
violentos y, por ende, que tales hechos violentos son de la autoría exclusiva
de quienes habitan estos espacios, lo que ha generado una represión policial
carente de cualquier tipo de límites.26
Similarly, Podalsky refers to depictions of delinquency regarding the cha-

vos banda controversy that arose in Mexico in the late 1980s, highlight-
ing how the media represented these punk-rock kids as a problem that
required state intervention. She describes how “the PRI-led government
(under President Salinas de Gortari) attempted to both co-opt the gangs
… 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
Giroux describes a situation in which, as support for social programs

dwindles, mediatic representations of youth grow increasingly morally
problematic and threatening. As the neoliberal turn in Paraguay becomes
stronger—as evidenced by the new, pro-business, anti-politics symbolized
by the Cartes presidency—representations of public disorder function as
justifications for greater uses of force required to oppress protests in the
name of security. Only two weeks after Horacio Cartes’s inauguration,
both house and senate granted the president new rights to swiftly deploy
the military. This move was intended to facilitate sending troops to fight
so-called leftist rebels (el Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo—or the EPP)
without having to declare a state of emergency; in other words, without
prior legislative approval. Understandably, this was an alarming develop-
ment for many in a country that spent much of the twentieth century
under military dictatorship (Servin).29
Seen from the perspective of the Paraguayan left, the child may repre-
sent the best site for lobbying in favor of social responsibility to the poor
in a way that strips away overt politics and frames the argument in terms of
the indisputably innocent, good and pure. While the UNICEF report was
produced specifically with the goal to inform political decisions, “alentar y
enriquecer el debate político en el país, con pensamientos y propuestas, en
torno a los temas más relevantes de una agenda de políticas públicas para
150 E.K. ROMERO
el período de gobierno 2013–2018,”30 (4), the same report stresses its

advocacy as primarily motivated by ethical and economic concerns:
Este argumento parte de considerar a la inversión social como un imperativo

ético … Desde esta óptica, la inversión social se constituye en un instru-
mento de implementación de derechos, y por tanto de equidad y bienestar
… Este argumento trata de evidenciar los estrechos y complementarios vín-
culos existentes entre la política social y la política económica y, con ello, los
beneficios derivados de la inversión social sobre el crecimiento económico
y la productividad.
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:
De acuerdo al informe de competitividad global 2012–2013 del Foro

Económico Mundial (WEF), que evalúa a 144 países, Paraguay fue ubicado
en la posición 133 en cuanto a la calidad del sistema educativo, en la 140
calidad de la enseñanza primaria, en la 104 en cuanto a la matriculación en
la enseñanza secundaria y en la 70 en la educación terciaria, en la 131 en
cuanto al acceso a internet en las escuelas y en la 121 en cuanto a la dis-

ponibilidad de servicios de investigación y formación.32
Although the fight for access to education unwittingly divorces precarity

from other major structural problems in Paraguay (corruption of govern-
ment, the legal system, and police forces; severe poverty and inequality;
etc.), for many on the Left it may seem that this is the only indisputable
platform from which to fight for state action without being called out as
a leftist, which is currently a dirty word (zurdo) in certain circles. Take for
example #AHORApy, which describes itself on its YouTube channel as:
un grupo de personas auto convocadas de la sociedad paraguaya de diferen-

tes ámbitos y sectores comprometidos con la educación y que no responde
a intereses políticos, ideológicos ni religiosos. #AHORApy busca sentar las
bases de inclusión, equidad y excelencia en la educación pública para lograr
una sociedad transformadora.
With revenues available from renegotiations of sales of Itaipú dam hydro-

electric power, (approximately USD $240,000,000), groups such as
#AHORApy lobby aggressively for legislation guaranteeing these funds
be invested in the public education system. The UNICEF report also
calls attention to the need for a greater allocation of the GDP toward
education:
Paraguay destina 9,7% de su PIB a la inversión social, de los cuales alred-

edor del 50% está dirigido a la infancia, mientras que la inversión social de
nuestros vecinos se sitúa entre el 15 y el 26%. Si se tiene en cuenta que la
Unesco recomienda destinar el 7% del PIB sólo a educación, y que reciente-
mente Brasil aprobó destinar 10% a este sector, es evidente que nuestro país
debe redoblar esfuerzos por una mayor y mejor inversión social.33
#AHORApy has a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, and a Twitter

account; and they have published Op-Eds in national newspapers. Their
Facebook community has broadcasted messages such as “¿Querés mejorar
el país? MEJOREMOS LA EDUCACIÓN. Sumate a esta causa nacional”
amidst photos of miserably dilapidated schoolhouses. By presenting edu-
cation as a nationalist goal of unquestionable integrity (“Do it for the
children, do it for our future!”) #AHORApy is able to make points about
uneven distribution of opportunities and wealth without being written off
as a zurdo production and hopefully without igniting Right-wing panic:
152 E.K. ROMERO
Las aulas en malas condiciones edilicias no son espacios de aprendizaje, o

por lo menos no son espacios propicios para aprender cosas positivas. Lo
que le dice a un alumno un aula en ruinas, sin terminar, o destrozada es: “no
sos bienvenido”, y lo que se aprende allí es que hay ciudadanos de primera
y segunda categoría, y que si uno no es miembro de una familia con condi-
ciones económicas para pagar por su educación, no es digno siquiera de una
silla decente en la cual sentarse. (“Los fondos excedentes de Itaipú deben
ser para la educación”)
Potentially, patching-up school buildings is a project that everyone can

get behind, as it makes no mention of what will be taught in those build-
ings. While the Left will cling to the idea that more education for all will
help decrease income inequality in the long run, the Right can also see
the money requested as an investment in what Jorge Pérez reminds us
is one of the most effective biopolitical apparatuses of control on which
the concept of childhood rests: the educational system (alongside the
bourgeoisie family and the Catholic Church).34 Framed this way, we
must investigate what it may mean that all three of the films discussed
denounce the failures of the parent-child relationship, and two of them
do so only to uphold access to the educational system as the ultimate
“solution.” In Paraguay, the Left finds itself having to come up with
creative ways to fight for the ideals of the Left without being perceived
as having any leftist political alliance. In order to lobby for the rights of
the poor, children, and education, Mita’i and Calle Última make com-
promises that veil critiques of the state so much that those critiques are
nearly omitted.
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-
ments, poverty, the educational system, and structural inequalities. While

Paraguayan film may be unique, it is still informed by the same referents
that inform all Latin American film, and likewise displays some of the same
problems of representation that scholars have rigorously tackled in their
analyses of street kid movies.
When the political language of the past is exhausted, new symbols
and icons rise to positions of prominence and come into circulation.
Treatments of the child in Paraguayan film have to do with the lessons
they teach, the shelving of certain old symbols and the preference for cer-
tain new ones. The disenchantment with the parent/child relationship,
especially as seen in Mita’i, metaphorically expresses a denunciation of the
state (while ambiguously representing a call for state action). Where the
child/parent-church-state triad used to operate, symbols of the sister/
brother-friendship-school triad seem to have taken their place. The child
protagonists of these three films are failed by their parents and ultimately
the only support of consequence they receive (if any) does not come ver-
tically, but horizontally. Could this shift in referents in film finally signal
a move away from the fascist dream of one authoritarian leader, a father
figure who will solve all of Paraguay’s problems? Could this shift in refer-
ents represent a move toward greater civic engagement, participation and
organization for the Paraguayan public (as possibly exemplified by the
#AHORApy campaign)?
While such a hope may seem celebratory, coextensively the child figure
must also be investigated as a site for lobbying for the poor, children,
and education that puts overt politics under erasure in order to bypass
the Right’s paranoid overreactions to any mobilization of the Left per-
ceived as a threat of class warfare, civil unrest, and wealth redistribution.
Similarly, lobbying for the child can easily placate the Right, as the child
figure is completely congruous with the heteronormative life narrative to
which conservative regimes rigidly proscribe. 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 represent-
ing street kids less as a symptom of structural inequality, and more as a
problem in themselves, localized to a specific part of the city. 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.”
154 E.K. ROMERO
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Pérez, “Queer Children,” 146.
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INDEX
A Cerro Corá (1978), 16, 37, 70

adolescent, 21, 130–2, 134, 136, 137, Chaco War, 51n8, 70, 75
140, 144, 146, 147, 152 child, 21, 22, 33, 40, 60, 68, 90, 92,
authenticity, 8–10, 41, 57, 74 114, 115, 119, 123, 129–55
Circular Time, 17, 27–54
citizenship, 62, 104
B coloniality, 51
Bastos, Augusto Roa, 12, 49, 93 colorados, 14
Berlinale Film Festival, 16, 107 consumerism, 62, 140, 145, 152
“Borda in “Ampliando horizontes: consumers, 6, 62
Emigración Internacional consumption, 4, 9, 41, 50, 58, 62, 65
Paraguaya.”, 53n21 Costa, Renate, 16, 20, 103, 105, 108
Britain, 71, 74, 75 criminality, 21, 113, 131, 137, 138,
144–6, 152, 154n21
Curuguaty, 15, 26n31, 27, 130
C
Calle Última (2010), 21, 22, 129–55
Cámara de Género, 38 D
campesino icon, 17, 51, 55–78 de Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez, 13
campesinos, 2, 7, 15, 18, 24, 27, 56, delinquents, 148
62, 64–6, 127n3 democracy, 5–7, 9, 12–15, 17, 38, 49,
Cannes film festival, 16, 17 86, 93, 105, 126
Catholic Church, 13, 152 democratize, 2, 5, 17, 105
Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5
166 INDEX
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
precarity, 133, 150, 151 soy bean, 39

presence/absence, 4, 35–40, 56, 69, spectacle, 19, 58, 79, 87, 104, 108,
72, 80, 86, 88, 89, 100, 107, 140
110, 119, 134 street kid, 2, 17, 21, 22, 138, 147,
progressive rationalism, 56 153
psychoanalysis, 47, 48 Stroessner, Alfredo, 7, 12, 14–16, 20,
27, 37, 49, 55, 70, 84, 103–5,
107, 109, 110, 113, 116, 118,
Q 129, 130, 134, 143, 148
queer, 2, 10, 11, 17, 20, 32–4, 103, Stronato, 14–16
104, 108, 109, 113, 115, 117, structural inequalities, 142, 153
119–22, 125 subaltern classes, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11,
quotidian microevents, 32 16, 17
subject-effect, 34
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

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I remember a decade ago, when Film and Democracy in Paraguay was

Abraham Acosta, Katia Bezerra, Laura Briggs, Daniel Calleros, Malcolm

r­ejection. Michelle also whipped my book proposal into shape, seeing

4 Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009) and

5 Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de palo

6 The Child as Paraguay’s Future: “Calle Última (2010),

Fig. 2.1 Photograph by Cristian Núñez 29

Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a study of Paraguayan film, an indus-

© The Author(s) 2016 1

Democracy in Paraguay takes recent films as its object of study, focus-

gies around these segments of the population. This determinism is related

Small Cinemas and Small Countries Matter

When speaking about a politics of small problems, we are then referring

This question of why scholars should study small cinemas—and indeed,

and culture. This has led to considerable misunderstandings of the coun-

Indeed, this ignorance of Paraguayan history and silencing of Paraguayan

considered more accessible to the masses. These transitions occur within

As the author of this study, I believe it is important for me to acknowl-

and limited framework in which representation/national identity has

the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of imperialism as nation-­

Nationalism—and national film—were in fact forged by the colonial situ-

been a transnational cultural product, rarely operating as an autonomous

In Paraguay, the very concept of culture has been relegated to an exclusive,

The Present Past

the beginning of its history of dictatorship. Shortly after the Paraguayan

This dictatorship is still configured in the national imagination as one

La cultura era de gente rica … Si te tomaste un café en París eras culto o si

Indeed, controlling audiovisual production was much more important to

thering analyses regarding the tension between the desire to democratize

umentary directed by a Paraguayan—Renate Costa—and Semana capi-

Chapter 6, “The Child as Paraguay’s Future: Calle Última (2010),

the French Film journal Cinémas d’Amérique latine featured an

Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. (New York:

A nivel político ocurre un cambio. Yo al gobierno de Lugo lo tomo

verdadero de estructura ni de paradigma de pensamiento ni nada más

Hamaca paraguaya (2006):

Periodization is inevitable but never innocent.

Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State”

© The Author(s) 2016 27

decade has been highly dedicated to representing a Paraguayan national

A Film in Which Protagonists Do Almost Nothing,

Fig. 2.1 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

Fig. 2.2 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

Fig. 2.3 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

inaccessible to the intellectual and extends her critique to the work of

Fig. 2.4 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

Fig. 2.5 Photograph by Cristian Núñez

national imaginary that Paraguayans speak of them as if they had occurred

Cándida and Ramón’s conversations at times echo this deterministic atti-

fulness that Máximo will return and hopelessness. In one conversation,

attempt to make empty or nonproductive time visible through the presence

To Disavow Race Results in a Haunting by Time

cal denunciation. It is not my intention to downplay the importance of

i­nnocent.” Temporalization is always somehow present, but its possibili-

rejection. Michelle also whipped my book proposal into shape, seeing

4 Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009) and

5 Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de palo

6 The Child as Paraguay’s Future: “Calle Última (2010),

Fig. 2.1 Photograph by Cristian Núñez 29

the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of imperialism as nation-

innocent.” Temporalization is always somehow present, but its possibili-