Quechua-Andean and Spanish Knowledges in Fernando León de Aranoa's Amador (2010)

ABSTRACT

While documentary films have reflected the increased diversity and visibility of Latin American immigrants in Spanish cinema by exploring the experience of both South American and Caribbean women in Spain, there has been a tendency in Spanish fiction films to focus on the lives of Caribbean characters from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. This article argues that with the release of Amador in 2010, Fernando León de Aranoa ruptures this propensity to render invisible the existence, experiences, and knowledges of other Latin American immigrants in fiction film by creating Marcela, the Peruvian protagonist. By focusing its narrative on Marcela, Amador considers the potential that the immigrant's point of view—in Marcela's case one that is informed by the Quechua-Andean concept of tinkuy—has to facilitate socioeconomic mobility and agency of female immigrants and to positively impact the Spanish discourse around the contentious topic of immigration.

KEYWORDS:

• Amador
• Fernando León de Aranoa
• Latin American immigrants in Spain
• Spanish cinema
• tinkuy

Notes on contributor

Marie-Eve Monette is an assistant professor of Spanish with a specialization in Latin American cinema and Andean studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama. She is working on her first monograph, Cinemascape of Indigeneity: The Bolivian Andes in Film and Video. She has published “Cinematic Tourism in Madeinusa” in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and is currently completing an essay on “Andean Indigenous Socioeconomic and Cultural Memory in Claudia Llosa's La teta asustada (2009).”

Notes

1. As of January 2013, Latin American immigrants were believed to make up 25.1% of the migrant population (Araujo and González-Fernández 17).

2. According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, women comprised 55.9% of South American immigrants in Spain in 2013.

3. According to statistics drawn from the Peruvian National Institute for Statistics and Information in 2008, Peruvian women at the time made up 50.6% of Peru's migrant population in Spain (Paerregaard, “Commodifying Intimacy” 497).

4. It is only after various viewings that I myself caught a glimpse of the passport, and I even had to pause the image to read which country's name was written on the cover. Without pausing, it is such a rapid detail that most viewers miss it. Until spotting this minute yet crucial detail, I had falsely believed, based on the writings of various film critics, that the character Marcela was originally from Ecuador.

5. Solier is most known for her roles in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa (2005) and La teta asustada (2009), but she has also acted in Mateo Gil's Blackthorn (2011), which takes place in Bolivia; in Mario Selim Alcayaga's Ñusta Huillac, la Tirana (2012), a Chilean film about an Incan princess; and in Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's film Altiplano (2009) about indigenous resistance against extractive activities in the Andes, among others.

6. It is important to note that Marcela only feels guilty for holding Amador back from transitioning into the afterlife. It is the Catholic priest of the church she attends who assuages her conflicted emotions and confirms that Amador and she are actually helping each other: “Su presencia nos ayuda a estar mejor. A vivir en buena medida aunque haya muerto ya. Como las flores que nos siguen dando su aroma aun después de muertas” (Aranoa 01:18:34). While Marcela's reaction may not reflect fully the Andean philosophy of complementary opposition, the fact that the Spanish Catholic beliefs of the priest somehow echo it demonstrate further the tinkuy present in the film—that is, the encounter between differing views that join for a common goal.

7. This argument can be extended to his financial support of his daughter's house by the sea. By sustaining Marcela's activities, Yolanda will keep receiving her father's pension and be able to finish building the house. As Yolanda says toward the end of the film: “Él hubiera estado de acuerdo, eh. No le gustaba que las cosas se quedaran a medias” (Aranoa 01:44:03).

8. This emphasis in Amador reflects Ballesteros's comment that “in current immigration systems, the construction of citizenship is understood exclusively in terms of labour and production” (12).

9. Soo Kim's argument that the native characters of Flores de otro mundo remain caught in a world shaped by the colonial order, while the immigrant characters operate in a postcolonial framework, should be applied to the analysis of all Spanish immigration films, particularly when the immigrant characters come from former Spanish and other European colonies (175).

10. In Quechua, t'anta means “bread,” and wawa means “baby” or “child.”