Film as a Tool for Teaching Latin American History and Culture

Professor E. Bradford Burns (professor of history at UCLA, 1964–93) led the way at US universities with the Latin American Social History course that he offered in the winter of 1973. Incorporating film as an integral part of the curriculum, Burns sought to show how visual images and cinematic recreations of events could help his students to better appreciate and understand history. Each of us was influenced by Burns’s approach towards teaching with film. Dennis West developed one of the first Hispanic film courses in the United States in the mid-1970s at Indiana University. Dale Graden showed films in Latin American history courses he taught while in graduate school in the 1980s. For the past six years, we have had the opportunity to share our ideas about how best to employ movies in interdisciplinary approaches to teaching.

The motion picture is the most powerful medium of the 20th century and merits consideration as a valuable tool for instruction. This essay is a brief introduction
to a few movies useful in teaching the history and culture of Latin America. We have selected 10 major feature films that are accessible on the US market for purchase or rental. Furthermore, we have divided the motion pictures into groupings to demonstrate the way in which they depict five major themes in Latin
American history: poverty, revolution, Latin American–United States relations, gender, and race. The essay offers background notes on the movies and their
directors because we recognize the critical importance of the conditions of production and of the historical milieu that inspired the filmmakers.

 

Cinematic Depictions of Poverty

Perhaps the most famous feature to examine the theme of Latin American poverty is director Luis Buñuel’s 1950 classic Los olvidados (which appeared in
the United States with the title The Young and the Damned), a masterpiece that has not aged across half a century. This well-researched film was produced quickly on a modest budget within the context of the Mexican commercial movie industry. In spite of the restrictions and limitations imposed on the director by the powerful studio system, Buñuel was nevertheless able to express his own iconoclastic vision as he explored the poverty-stricken lives of a gang of delinquent boys in Mexico City.

This exploration was influenced by the Italian neorealist film movement—an episodic plot portraying workaday characters, a documentary look fostered by on-location shooting in real slums, and forceful social criticism that exposes serious problems but proposes neither political nor socioeconomic solutions. But
Buñuel, who had been influenced as a young man by surrealism, modified the neorealist approach by adding suggestive surrealist visions and dreams in order to
give greater psychological depth to his characters.

Buñuel’s pessimistic vision of modern urban capitalist society allows these boys no escape from their “culture of poverty,” in the words of Oscar Lewis. Employment opportunities are either exploitative or abruptly ended. Families are dysfunctional since fathers are absent and mothers are too occupied with menial work to see properly to the care and education of their offspring. Social institutions also fail the lads, as is best exemplified by the liberal director of a work farm whose actions are well meaning but dangerously ineffectual in a hostile social environment. So hostile is this environment that the police murder a youth, and the boys murder each other. Buñuel’s famous characterization of his entire oeuvre clearly applies to Los olvidados: “The final sense of my films is this: to
repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets or believes to the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.”¹

In Latin America, the rural environment can be just as hostile to the poor as the urban environment. Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos explores the
plight of a peasant family subsisting in poverty in his classic of Cinema Novo (New Cinema), Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1963), which is one of the finest  adaptations of a literary masterpiece (Graciliano Ramos’s homonymous novel) in the international history of cinema. The film simply follows the daily lives of a couple and their young boys as they struggle to survive in the drought-stricken northeastern sertão (hinterland).

The Italian neorealist production model influenced Santos in rejecting the studio system in favor of a low-budget independent production; a small crew shot the film on location in the sertão using available-light cinematography and little-known actors. Vidas Secas was thematically and ideologically influenced by neorealism, since it depicts the lives of ordinary folk representatives of the “little people” who most suffer the socioeconomic ills of society.

The challenges facing the landless peasant family are formidable. They have no permanent residence and so may be forced to migrate as dictated by conditions in the physical environment and the whims of landowners. Since they are uneducated, inarticulate, and politically and socially naïve, they are routinely exploited and abused by the authorities: mayor, landowner, tax collector, soldier. Famine becomes so powerful that the family relies on their dog to capture wild cavies for
food, and the pet parrot is unceremoniously strangled and eaten. In Santos’s vision, we glimpse only two possible escapes from rural poverty: the paterfamilias
can join a group of mounted, armed men—evidently jagunços (hired assassins)—or the family can migrate to the big city, which is indeed how the film ends. Although Vidas Secas is set in the early 1940s, the socioeconomic problems explored, such as the need for agrarian reform in the Northeast, are still relevant.

Revolution has been one of the recurrent themes in the history of Latin American cinema, and it is the overarching theme of revolutionary Cuba’s film institute, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or ICAIC. This government-supported institute was founded in 1959, because revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro recognized the immense ideological-political power of the film medium. The law that established ICAIC called on revolutionary filmmakers to draw their themes from Cuban history and to fight against Hollywood aesthetic models by “reeducating” the taste of Cuban moviegoers. A founder of ICAIC,
and a pillar of the organization until his death in 1996, was Cuba’s most prominent director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

Gutiérrez Alea was an innovative and politically committed revolutionary filmmaker who experimented with an array of genres and narrative and aesthetic approaches to explore the Third World’s grand themes: dependency and underdevelopment, oppression and resistance, imperialism and colonialism, and the
many facets of social revolution. His biting critiques of Cuba’s contemporary revolutionary society, such as the Death of Bureaucrat (1966) and Strawberry and
Chocolate (1993; codirected with Juan Carlos Tabío) were presented in a liberal and humane tone from within the revolution. These critiques succeeded because of the director’s profound understanding of human nature and his remarkable ability to use humor, irony, and satire to explore the problems and challenges facing people in a revolutionary society.

Strawberry and Chocolate is a comedy-drama that follows the development of a friendship between two young men in Havana in 1979, a period of considerable
discrimination against homosexuals. Diego is an intelligent, cultured, and sophisticated gay who has seen his options in society dwindle because of his
sexual orientation; his straight friend is a naive but convinced communist militant raised on the party line. At the end of the film, discrimination and professional and personal pressure cause Diego to emigrate in spite of his prorevolution sympathies and his friend’s claim that there is a valued place for gays within the Cuban Revolution.

The serious treatment of gay characters had been almost unknown in Cuban revolutionary cinema before Strawberry and Chocolate. This cinematic invisibility is not surprising given the revolution’s historically harsh treatment of gays. In the mid-1960s the infamous UMAP work camps (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la
Producción) attempted to rehabilitate alleged antisocial elements such as gays, and the denunciations and purges of homosexuals continued into the 1980s.
Even today gays are restricted from joining the Cuban Communist Party, though in recent interviews Castro has shown a more tolerant attitude toward the homosexual community. Ideologically, then, Strawberry and Chocolate appears to represent a belated attempt to incorporate the gay community (and by extension other minority groups) into the Cuban revolutionary project. The film’s central message of tolerance calls in effect for revolutionary solidarity in the face of the current economic crisis and an increasingly cloudy political future.²

Strawberry and Chocolate draws on the conventions of mainstream realist cinema, and it does not break new ground stylistically (as Gutiérrez Alea’s radical masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment does, for instance). This feature represents the high-water mark in ICAIC’s efforts to “decolonize” the aesthetic taste of the Cuban moviegoing public by using self-reflexive and other innovative approaches: the director appears as himself in ICAIC in order to characterize this very film as a “collage,” and Edmundo Desnoes, author of the original novel, is shown participating in a “real-life” roundtable discussion on literature and underdevelopment. Furthermore, the film incorporates historical motifs—speeches by Kennedy and Castro, and documentary and TV footage—in order to portray the protagonist against a backdrop of the momentous historical events that are leaving him behind.

The protagonist is a middle-class intellectual and would-be writer trapped between his sympathy for the revolution and his inability to commit himself fully to
it. The setting is Havana in the turbulent months preceding the October 1962 missile crisis. As the city prepares for war, the unengaged and “historically irrelevant” protagonist can only observe events from afar. Memories of Underdevelopment occupies a unique place in the history of Latin American cinema. It stands as a stylistic tour de force and as a complex and subtle portrait of an individual swept up in a tide of revolutionary change in the Third World.

“Inevitable revolutions” in Central America, in the words of the historian Walter LaFeber, resulted in costly interventions by the United States. Oliver
Stone’s Salvador focuses on debates over the US presence in El Salvador during a critical period in 1980–81. The movie tells us as much about the United States as it does about El Salvador. During these months, thousands of peasants, four priests, four North American churchwomen, the rector of the National University, and the archbishop of El Salvador all died at the hands of “death squads” and El Salvador’s US-trained and -supported military. The period also marked a major transition in the domestic political scene in the United States with the presidential victory of Ronald Reagan. Stone—shaped by his personal experiences in the Vietnam War—asks why the US government and military were unable to come to terms with yet another Third World revolution. Produced in 1986 at the
height of the conflict, Stone’s low-budget film ran only a few weeks in US theaters.

Through the character of a journalist, Richard Boyle (played by James Woods), Stone prods his audience to consider reasons other than the simplistic notion that
the spread of communism from Castro’s Cuba or Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua led to revolution in the region. Instead, he points to internal factors like persistent poverty and exploitation of the majority of El Salvador’s population for the benefit of a minuscule elite. In spite of his aggressive style, Boyle gains access to individuals of different backgrounds and political views. He meets members of the guerrilla movement known as the Farabundo Martî National Liberation Front (FMLN), human rights workers, journalists from various nations covering the war, the US ambassador, and high-ranking Salvadoran and
U.S. military officials. Several characters allude to major events from El Salvador’s violent past. One elderly woman puffing on a cigar comments to Boyle, “We’re living in a bad time. Like 1932 again, I detect a bad feeling in the air.” Her statement is an allusion to the matanza (killing) of 1932 when government troops executed some 30,000 Indians and campesinos protesting worsening social and labor conditions. For a fictional movie from Hollywood aimed at a North American audience, Salvador includes an impressive amount of information and historical facts useful for teaching history.³

A portrayal of revolutionary turmoil from a Central American perspective, Alsino and the Condor, appeared in the mid-1980s. Jointly funded by four Caribbean
Basin nations (Nicaragua, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Mexico), the main characters in this fictional film speak Spanish (in contrast to Salvador). Most of the English spoken is by a US military adviser named Frank (Dean Stockwell), who defines a “General Plan” to Latino soldiers he is advising. Goals of this counterinsurgency
strategy include “isolation” of guerrilla fighters from possibly sympathetic inhabitants in the countryside by evacuating villages, “efficiency,” and “strict control over water provisions.” The movie offers a cynical portrait of military repression directed and financed by the United States and its allies. The story concerns the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s that culminated in victory for Sandinista forces (FSLN) in July 1979.

The main character in the motion picture is Alsino (acted by Alan Esquivel), a dreamy young boy who wants to fly. Sensitive to the natural environment around him, Alsino watches birds, runs in the open fields, and plays with his friend Lucia. His relationships are with lower-class rural folk. The war, however, shatters
his childhood world. Alsino observes planes bombing villages; he witnesses a mass execution of campesinos by official military personnel; he takes a ride in a military helicopter (named Condor). In spite of a physical handicap (having hurt his back by falling out of a tree), Alsino seeks out his friend Manuel at a hidden guerrilla camp in the mountains. He watches the enemy helicopter manned by the US adviser shot out of the sky. In the final scene of the film, Alsino flies, but not with modern technology. Instead, he rises off the ground, lifted by the force of his own will. Alsino’s flight is a metaphor for a child coming of age; it is a symbol for support of the insurgency and determination to rid his land of unwanted foreigners. Director Miguel Littín’s creation of this character who wants to fly draws on three important literary references: the classical myth of Icarus, José Enrique Rodo’s famous essay Ariel (1900), and Chilean writer Pedro Prado’s poetic novel Alsino (1920), which Littín has politicized and resituated in Central America.

The Question of Gender

Gender relations are an important theme in the documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is [sic] My Business and also in Frida. Portuguese-born and raised
in Brazil, Carmen Miranda (1909–55) became well known in Brazil by the early 1930s as a film actress, radio personality, recording artist, and entertainer. Invited to New York in 1940 by a Broadway entrepreneur, she commenced a career in the United States that gained her international fame as the woman in the tutti-frutti headdress and platform shoes.

Carmen Miranda provides compelling evidence of Carmen’s ambition to succeed as both an entertainer and representative of Brazil. Through rich documentary
footage, we see an always smiling Carmen mixing Portuguese and English in her shows on stage. One of the highest paid female stars during the 1940s, she became a renowned symbol of the Latina for US audiences. In statements on radio and in television appearances, Carmen expressed joy over her success in the United States. Yet all was not well. Through insightful interviews with several persons who knew Carmen well, including a member of her band and Hollywood personalities, a different portrait of the woman emerges. Her sister Aurora describes an abusive marriage to the American David Sebastian, which contributed to depression that in turn led to electric shock treatment in Brazil shortly before her death. One observer points to Carmen’s desire to evolve into more significant roles, but this proved impossible: she remained trapped under the tutti-frutti hat. Staying up into the early morning to perform, Carmen became dependent on sleeping pills to fall asleep. All of this led to her tragic death at age 46.

Filmmaker Helena Solberg interposes reflections on her own Brazilian childhood throughout the documentary. Using a paper cutout of Carmen, Solberg fits the
famous fruits over the head of a Carmen Miranda figurine. She wonders, Who was, really, Carmen Miranda? And why did Helena Solberg’s mother not allow her
young daughter to go out in the streets of Rio de Janeiro on that sun-filled yet dark day in 1955 when Carmen’s body returned from California? This film helps one to appreciate Carmen Miranda’s achievements in a male-dominated industry. It also offers sensitive commentary on 20th-century Brazilian culture by an astute film director.

Frida Kahlo (1907–54) was the intelligent, spirited, and sexy Mexican beauty whose scandalous bisexual love life included an affair with Trotsky. The flamboyantly dressed, on-again, off-again spouse of the legendary muralist and womanizer Diego Rivera, Frida was a leftist and a revolutionary committed to
Mexicanidad (pride in Mexico) and to the Mexican Revolution. She was the heroic survivor of miscarriages and abortions, a crippling traffic accident, polio, and
numerous surgical operations. Perhaps Latin America’s greatest woman artist, at her death she left behind a legacy of some 200 extraordinary paintings, including scores of self-portraits.

Mexican filmmaker Paul Leduc structured his docudrama Frida: naturaleza viva (1984) in accordance with the imagined free flow of the artist’s consciousness as
she lay on her death bed: a series of vignettes, many of them linked chronologically and thematically, reviews significant moments of her life as a girl and as a prominent figure in the vital art scene in Mexico during and after the mural renaissance. The themes which run through these vignettes include Latin American
and Spanish leftist politics and betrayal—by husband, sister, and her own body. Art, however, is Frida‘s great theme, since it was the painter’s means of coping with life and all of the difficulties she suffered. The key images of the film are the artist’s own face and mirrors, which Leduc uses to suggest the multiple facets of her complex personality. The film’s constantly traveling camera is an effective visual metaphor for Leduc’s exploration of Frida’s life as well as a viable economic solution for a director working in a low-budget, independent situation.

Although everything in the film is based on historical documentation, Leduc does take substantial liberty in interpreting this material—in his “invention” of a love letter from Trotsky, for instance.⁴ Frida does not examine certain important aspects of the artist’s life: her financial situation, her experiences as an international traveler, and her association with prominent Mexican and international figures such as film superstar María Felix, Nelson
Rockefeller, and French surrealist André Breton. Therefore, this film is not a definitive or conclusive biography; it works best as a thought-provoking introduction to the painter. Among the film’s strengths are an outstanding performance by lead actress Ofelia Medina, an uncanny Frida lookalike, and splendid art direction that makes use of well-preserved historical sites such as the Frida Kahlo residence and the house where Trotsky lived during his Mexican sojourn (both houses are now museums).

Cinematic Perceptions of Race

The history of Latin America has been profoundly influenced by racial diversity. In Brazil, the first Europeans who arrived encountered some ten million native Americans. As a result of sickness and violent treatment, Brazil’s 206 Indian nations that remain have decreased in population to an estimated 270,000 today. A film that insightfully portrays Indian-European relations in the 16th century is Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman.

Produced in 1971, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is considered a major contribution to the Cinema Novo movement that flourished in Brazil from 1960 to the early 1970s. One goal of this popular cinema movement was to reevaluate interpretations of history. Dos Santos contrasts the documentary record on colonization left by Europeans—he presents excerpts from nine letters sent back to Europe—with his own views about what actually occurred. The historian Randal Johnson has written that “history, or at least the official version of history, is called into question as the director presents us with another, contradictory version.”⁵

In this anthropological black comedy, the unfortunate Frenchman Jean (Arduino Colasânti) is captured first by Tupiniquim and then by Tupinambá Indians. Unable to convince his Tupinamba captors that he is in fact French (and therefore an ally), Jean is condemned to die, but only after a period of eight months. The tribe provides the foreigner an Indian wife named Sebiopepe and allows them to live independently. Jean soon is able to speak the language Tupi, learns about the mythology of the Tupinambá, and helps his hosts to fight against their enemies. In spite of an increasingly intimate relationship with the tribe (at one point he even paints himself red), the Frenchman is never fully accepted by the Tupinambá. When the desperate Jean attempts to flee by canoe, Sebiopepe wounds him with an arrow and turns him over to the village elders. In the final scene, she looks into the camera while munching on the neck of the recently executed Frenchman.

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman depicts the first contacts between two distinct races—European and Indian. Not surprisingly, each group distrusts the
other. The Europeans write that the “natives are barbarous savages, different from us, without any religion, or any knowledge of honesty or virtue.” Jean considers himself superior to Tupinambá, going so far as to fantasize that he can play the role of the powerful Tupinambá god Mair. The Indians obviously find it difficult to comprehend why “civilized” Europeans act in such uncivilized ways. The Indians quickly tire of exchanging natural goods like wood and spices for
manufactured trinkets from Europe. By focusing on the arrogance and trading practices exhibited by Europeans in their dealings with indigenous peoples, the
director aligns himself with dependency theorists who exerted an influential role among historians of the 1960s. Dos Santos illustrates for his audience the links
between racial tension and cultural conflict since the first Europeans stepped on to the shores of the Americas.

Black pride is a key motif in the 1983 movie Sugar Cane Alley. The film is dedicated to the millions of descendants of the African diaspora residing on “Black Shack Streets” around the world; the shacks of the rural village of Rivière Salée and city of Fort-de-France in Martinique provide the settings for this brilliant film. The main character José Hassam (Gary Cadenat) resides in a shack with his maternal grandmother M’man Tine (Darling Legitimus). Like thousands of other black inhabitants of the Caribbean, she labors on a plantation cutting sugar cane for a pittance. M’man Tine is an unforgettable character. Determined to prevent her grandson from becoming a common laborer, she does everything in her power to help José receive a formal education. The African Martinican director-writer Euzhan Paley shows the remarkable journey of José from his origins in a plantation ghetto to an elite French school in the capital.

Several episodes in the movie help one to appreciate African Caribbean history and the impact of colonial rule. Scenes from inside the shacks and pay day at the
plantation reveal that the conditions for black cane cutters are not far removed from slavery. The young boy José often walks up into the hills above the sugar
plantation with the elderly Monsieur Médouze, a black man hardened from years of manual labor. Médouze knows about the history of his people, and he
shares his insights with José. Through this oral communication, José learns about slavery and emancipation, about Africa, and about the profound spirituality of
black Martinique. Soon after arriving in Fort-de-France, José meets a young woman named Flora. A beautiful light-skinned mulatto, Flora sells tickets at a
movie theater. Hoping to improve her status by marrying a white man, she states, “Except for my color, I’m not black.”

Unlike José, this young woman has not learned how to find pride in her racial identity. She mistakenly believes that associating with whites and “lightening” her
children will assure a better life. In another episode, Léopold, a young friend of José, faces a crisis when he overhears his dying father refuse to acknowledge him as a legitimate son. Offspring of this white manager of the sugar company and a light-skinned black woman, Léopold struggles with his mixed racial identity. In
an act of revenge, he steals ledgers from the company to prove how management exploits the black work force. Caught by the police, he is dragged away in chains to suffer an unknown fate at the hands of government authorities.

As in other parts of the Americas, racial affirmation among nonwhite inhabitants been a difficult struggle. In Martinique and throughout the Caribbean, black people tend to be poor, marginalized, and considered inferior to light-skinned elites. Persons of mixed race—the descendants of white masters who had sexual intercourse with their black female slaves—ironically have often considered white skin superior to black. Sugar Cane Alley touches on such themes in a sensitive way by affirming the richness of black culture and showing the complex world of a young African Martinican coming of age.

Hundreds of excellent motion pictures have been produced in Latin America that never have reached audiences in the United States. Reasons for this failure
include the absence of a ministry of culture in the United States that might aid in this process, concerns by those who purchase the rights to foreign films about
effective distribution in the US market, and the powerful appeal of Hollywood blockbusters among North Americans. Nevertheless, the films discussed here, as
well as others, are available in 35 mm, 16 mm, laser disk, or one-half-inch videotape formats. Such movies provide extraordinary visual images, perspectives on history, and insights into the many cultures of Latin America.

Notes

1. Carlos Fuentes, “The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel,” New York Times Magazine (March 11, 1973), 93. [↩]
2. Dennis West, “Strawberry and Chocolate, Ice Cream and Tolerance: Interviews with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío,” Cinenste 21:1-2 (1995), 16-20. [↩]
3. Dale T. Graden and James W. Martin, “Revolution for the Unacquainted: Oliver Stone’s Salvador,” Film and History 28:3-4 (1998), 14-23. [↩]
4. See Dennis West, “Frida: An Interview with Paul Leduc,” Cineaste 16:4 (1988), 55. The same issue of Cineaste contains a useful review of the film by Joan M. West and Dennis West. [↩]
5. Randal Johnson, Cinema Novo x 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 193. [↩]