Identidades en tránsito: la (supra)nación en narrativa, cine y espacios de difusión cultural latinoamericanos del siglo XXI

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Latin American novels, films, and anthologies of short narratives of the twenty-first century that reflect on the construct and questioning of national and regional identities. The texts I study rely on motifs related to movement that establish an allegorical relationship between mobility and nation building. While nation building in Latin America has been occurring for more than two centuries, the works I examine reveal that it is still an important topic to address in the present, because when faced with the effects of globalization, the same idea of nation is either challenged or shored up. As a result, it is necessary to examine how transnational and postnational discourses influence the different constructs of the nation, and vice versa. In the first chapter I analyze the motif of the return in the novels La novela de mi vida (2002), by Cuban Leonardo Padura, and El testigo (2004), by Mexican Juan Villoro. In both works, the main characters return to their land of origin after a long exile to research events and figures from the past. While doing so, they revisit the constructions of their own identity, and the official discourses of their nations. Chapter two focuses on a figurative mobility represented in formation films from the same countries. In the Cuban section, I argue that children protagonists of Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, 2005), Habanastation (Ian Padrón, 2011) and Conducta (Ernesto Daranas, 2014), embody new ways of perceiving the concept of the “Hombre Nuevo” by Ernesto Che Guevara, and their coming-of-age represents the transition that the island is experiencing during the first years of the new millennium. On the Mexican side, the films explored are Temporada de Patos (Fernando Eimbcke, 2004), Después de Lucía (Michel Franco, 2012) and Güeros (Alonso Ruiz Palacios, 2015), whose adolescent protagonists are facing a critical moment in their process of maturation, representative of the nation’s political and social stage. Finally, after dealing with motifs of return and internal travelling (transformation), the third and last chapter is pinned to the trope of migration, specifically the Latin American intellectual diaspora in the United States. The anthologies Se habla español: Voces latinas en USA (2000), edited by Alberto Fuguet and Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Sam no es mi tío. Veinticuatro crónicas migrantes y un sueño americano (2012), edited by Aileen El-Kadi and Diego Fonseca, participate in the construction of a supranational identity supported by the academia and the market. They also serve as an example of spaces of cultural dissemination that are trying to portray the Latin American experience in the United States. Therefore, this project contributes to critical research on mobility, historiography, postcolonial theory, film and cultural studies of Latin America. It follows a deductive and growing pattern, from the nation to the supranation, to show the common factors that produce national identities, and how they are being manifested during the first years of the twenty-first century.