Every place is sad: ecologies of violence and biopolitical paradigms in contemporary Central American cinema

This dissertation examines how contemporary Central American cinema responds to legacies of violence and civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Despite the Treaty Accords of the nineties, a fragile if not untenable peace hovers over the region. The films under discussion fall under three main critical paradigms: the logic of autoimmunity and the body; states of exception and the bare lives of migrants; and the human-animal ethical divide. I analyze seven fiction and documentary films: Julio Hernández Cordón’s Gasolina (Gasoline, 2008) and Polvo (Dust, 2012); Ishtar Yasin's El camino (The Path, 2008); Diego Quemada-Díez’s La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream, 2013); Gabriel Serra’s La Parka and Neto Villalobos’s Por las plumas (All About the Feathers), both from 2013; and concluding with Tatiana Huezo’s El lugar más pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011). The underlying preoccupation in this study points toward the ecological dimensions of violence that still need to be acknowledged and reckoned with in Central America. I explore the specific ways cinema traces the material effects of violence on on both humans and nonhumans, including other animals, objects, toxic substances and the physical environment. In doing so, this study contributes to conversations in three main fields: Central American Studies, Latin American Cinema Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. I argue that these films develop a complex and nuanced poetics of (in)visibility by way of illness, migration, and a precarious animality between humans and other animals. These three conditions register the mechanisms through which the migrant, the indigenous, the poor, the disappeared and the displaced have been rendered politically insignificant, “invisible,” and a thing of the violent past, while revealing ecologies of violence in which they become politically salient again. The dissertation is organized into three chapters with close readings of a pair of films alongside four continental philosophers: Jacques Derrida, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas. The first chapter examines Derrida’s logic of autoimmunity and Esposito’s immunitary paradigm in relation to illness, substances and the human body, that is, the human body at the limits of illness and a damaged memory. The second chapter explores the figure of the migrant alongside Agamben’s biopolitical concepts of Homo sacer, bare life and state of exception. In this chapter devoted to geography and movement, the migrant finds herself at the limits of a political and juridical system that cannot ensure her protection nor guarantee her rights as a citizen. The third chapter considers a shared animal precarity that cuts across the presumed limits between humans and other animals by way of Levinas’s ethics of the Other. I conclude with a brief analysis of a Salvadoran documentary as a response to the spectrum of violence running across contemporary Central American cinema. The filmmakers I study form part of a transisthmian network of artists that continues to produce a nuanced and mobile cinema both within and outside the region, challenging its own geographical limits. Central America may have moved away from its strategic position between different political ideologies played out during the Cold War of the 20th century. However, in terms of the critical migrational forces caused by civil unrest in this new century, the region’s position—both imaginable and tangible—between North and South America remains as relevant as ever. These films reveal ecologies of violence that speak to the urgency of a more expansive human engagement with other forms of life sharing this same world. In doing so, Central America cinema asserts a more visible and dynamic presence within Latin America and beyond it. Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference