Facing the Specter of Immigration in Biutiful

Abstract

While news reporters and academic scholars alike have often linked the specter of immigration in Spain to a history of Muslim conquest and Christian reconquest, very little scholarship seems to connect Spain's ability—or inability—to grapple with the “ghost” of contemporary immigration to a pattern and history of emigration. This analysis of the award-winning film Biutiful (2010), by Mexican director, cowriter, and producer Alejandro González Iñárritu (1963–present), aspires to do precisely this: to examine divergent ghosts, to consider how they dialogue with each other, and to see what an analysis of these specters might indicate to us about Spain's relationship to migrants and migration in the present day.

Keywords:

• Javier Bardem
• Biutiful
• Jacques Derrida
• emigration
• hauntology
• immigration
• Alejandro González Iñárritu
• Spanish film

Notes

¹The writings of Jo Labanyi, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, and José Colmeiro, who have primarily focused their research on post-Civil War fiction and film, have informed this work. Readers interested in examining the relationship between immigration and hauntology in Spanish literature should look to Nieves García Benito's Por la vía de Tarifa, Ignacio del Moral's La mirada del hombre oscuro, Lourdes Ortiz's short stories “Fatima de los naufragios” and “La piel de Marcelinda,” Cristian Ricci's Letras marruecas. Antología de escritores magrebíes en castellano,” as well as Andres Sorel's Voces del Estrecho, to name a few. Feature films of interest include Fernando León de Aranoa's Princesas (2005), Chus Gutiérrez's Retorno a Hansalaand (2008), and Imanol Uribe's Bwana (1996).

²All quotations from Biutiful are taken directly from the film.

³In a radio interview with Andrea Chase, Iñárritu implied that the name “Uxbal” most likely came to him as a result of having lived on a street in Mexico called “Uxmal,” an Aztec word meaning “built three times” (Chase). This, to me, only strengthens the implication that Uxbal serves as a marginal character and that his father was most likely a charnego.

⁴Igé's math does not add up. It would seem that Samuel is almost fourteen months old, but she says that he is four days shy of being thirteen months old. Perhaps this, too, is a Derridean sign of time being “out of joint” in the movie.

⁵Catalonians use charnego to refer to those who came to Cataluña during Franco's dictatorship. The term is never used to refer to contemporary immigrants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria DiFrancesco

Maria DiFrancesco is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Ithaca College. She holds a PhD from the University at Buffalo, where she specialized in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Spanish peninsular literature. She is particularly interested in issues of gender and sexuality in contemporary Spain and has more recently focused her research on human immigration as portrayed in Spanish literature, film, and other popular media.