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Abstract
The question of immigration in Spanish cinema demands to be analysed within the frame of the global accumulation of capital. Fernando León de Aranoa’s Amador (2010), engages directly with the immigrant’s experience in the neo-liberal transformation of work. In this paper, I argue that this transformation is deeply intertwined with the domestic space. In depicting the home as bound by precariousness, Amador portrays work performed by the immigrant subject as a continuation of domesticity inherited from the nineteenth century that promoted the functionality of the public sphere at the expense of the oppression of women in private.
Notes
1 Later Spanish films that broach the question of the immigrant include: Tomándote (Isabel Gardela, 2000); En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001); Salvajes (Carlos Molinero, 2001); Poniente or Frente al mar (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002); El traje (Alberto Rodríguez, 2002); Ilegal (Ignacio Vilar, 2003); Extranjeras (Helena Taberna, 2005); Princesas (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2005); Próximo Oriente (Fernando Colomo, 2006); 14 kilómetros (Gerardo Olivares, 2007); Un novio para Yasmina (Irene Cardona, 2008); Retorno a Hasala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008); and No habrá paz para los malvados (Enrique Urbizu, 2011).
2 Tabea Alexa Linhard, ‘Between Hostility and Hospitality: Immigration in Contemporary Spain’, MLN, 122:2 (2007), 400–22 (p. 400).
3 For further consideration of the figure of the ángel del hogar in fin de siglo Spain as well as for an understanding of the dissemination of this figure in nineteenth-century literature, specifically in works by Benito Pérez Galdós, see Bridget A. Aldaraca, ‘El ángel del hogar’: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Dept of Romance Languages, 1991).
4 The notion of expendable, wasted or ‘precarious’ lives has been theorized by an array of thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that include: Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/New York: Verso, 2006); Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans., with notes, by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2004 [1st French ed. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2001]); and Giorgio Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998 [1st Italian ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1995]).
5 To understand different uses of biopolitics in contemporary debates, see studies that include: Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Heller-Roazen; and Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008 [1st Italian ed. Torino: Einaudi, 2004]). In the case of Spain specifically, see Hacer vivir, dejar morir: biopolitica y capitalismo, ed. Sonia Arribas, Germán Cano & Javier Ugarte (Madrid: Catarata, 2010).
6 The narrative of the fractured nature of sovereignty and the political representation of the People in the historical process of Spanish transition to democracy is indebted to José Luis Villacañas Berlanga’s important argument in Historia del poder político en España (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2015).
7 Aristotle’s Politics, trans., with an intro., notes & glossary by Carnes Lord, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), xi.
8 Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, trans. Selina Stewart (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2000), 62.
9 Aristotle's Politics, trans. Lord, xi & xii.
10 Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1998), 13.
11 For more on the crisis of care in twenty-first-century Spain, see Clara Serra, Leonas y zorras: estrategias políticas feministas (Madrid: Catarata, 2018), 95; and Carolina León, Trincheras permanentes: intersecciones entre política y cuidados (Madrid: Pepitas de Calabaza, 2018).
12 Serra, Leonas y zorras, 95.
13 Silvia Federici & Arlen Austin, The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory and Documents (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2017), 11.
14 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore, 3 vols (New York: New York International Publishers, 1967), I, 394–95.
15 For a historical account on the separation between the home and the public sphere in the nineteenth century, see Jesús Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. P., 2011), specifically Chapter 3, ‘Home From the Inside’, 52–90.
16 Aldaraca, ‘El ángel del hogar’, 33.
17 Aldaraca, ‘El ángel del hogar’, 32.
18 This angelic figure can be seen in a wide selection of realist and naturalist novels such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta. Dos historias de casadas (1887), Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarin’, La Regenta (1885) and Emilia Pardo Bazán, Memorias de un solterón (1896).
19 The filmic gaze highlights this abjectness by rotating between Gloria whose work as a cleaner continues once she is home, Cristal, (Verónica Forqué) her overly-cheery neighbour who works as a prostitute, and Gloria’s mother-in-law and upstairs neighbour, Juani (Kiti Mánver) who are both represented through the lens of hysteria.
20 Marvin D’Lugo & Paul Julian Smith, ‘Auteurism and the Construction of the Canon’, in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Jo Labanyi & Tatjana Pavlović (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 113–51 (p. 125).
21 See Anny Brooksbank Jones, Women in Contemporary Spain (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1997).
22 Helen Graham, ‘Gender and the State: Women in the 1940’s’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995), 182–195 (p. 184).
23 Graham, ‘Gender and the State’, 184.
24 See Mary Nash, ‘Género y ciudadanía’, in Politica en la Segunda República, Ayer, 20 (1995), 241–58.
25 Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholarship has problematized the process of democratization in order to reveal Franco’s legacy in both political and cultural transformations beyond his death. For seminal readings on this topic, see studies that include: Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Cultura herida: literatura y cine en la España democrática (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2002); Teresa Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición española, 1973–1993 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998); and Germán Labrador Méndez, Culpables por la literatura: imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968–1986) (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2017).
26 See Jonathan Holland, ‘Amador: Thoughtful but severely overstretched’, Variety Magazine, 17 October 2010; available online at <http://variety.com/2010/film/reviews/amador-1117943850/> (accessed 30 January 2018); see also José López Pérez, ‘Crítica de la película “Amador”: Fernando León de Aranoa cambia de registro’, El Blog de Cine Español, 29 September 2010; available online at <http://www.elblogdecineespanol.com/?p=2614> (accessed 30 January, 2018).
27 López Pérez, ‘Crítica de la película “Amador” ’.
28 Holland, ‘Amador: Thoughtful but severely overstretched’.
29 Holland, ‘Amador: Thoughtful but severely overstretched’.
30 It is interesting to note that the choice of casting Bugallo for the role of Amador in Amador was a direct response to León de Aranoa’s earlier film, Los lunes al sol. In this film, a character named Amador also played by Bugallo, is part of a group of unemployed friends in a port town in Galicia who all lost their jobs when the shipping industry relocated overseas. In Los lunes al sol, Amador commits suicide after years of masking his lonely existence with stories of an aloof wife. His death effects his friends in a profound way, especially Santa, the most rebellious of the group of unemployed middle-aged men, but it also serves as a broader reminder that capitalism relies on the destruction of bodies as it morphs into the later stages of its power.
31 For more on the relationship between capital and the new regime of human reproduction, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008); and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
32 Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Pache, 12.
33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Collector’s Edition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 38 & 28.
34 Pérez López, ‘Crítica de la película “Amador” ’.
35 Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, New Left Review, 69:2 (2011), 1–23 (p. 6); available online at <https://newleftreview.org/issues/II69/articles/isidro-lopez-emmanuel-rodriguez-the-spanish-model.pdf> (accessed 25 June 2019).
36 López & Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, 3.
37 Nigel Townson, Is Spain Different? A Comparative Look at the 19th and 20th Centuries (Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 142.
38 López & Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, 19.
39 Marisol García, ‘The Breakdown of the Spanish Urban Growth Model: Social and Territorial Effects of the Global Crisis’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34:4 (2010), 967–80 (p. 968).
40 García, ‘The Breakdown of the Spanish Urban Growth Model’, 969.
41 López & Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, 5.
42 López & Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, 11.
43 The space of the home has recently been engaged as a central trope for political transformations and public communities in contemporary Spanish scholarship. See Marina Garcés, Un mundo común (Barcelona: Bellatera, 2013); Luis Moreno-Caballud, Culturas de cualquiera: estudios sobre democratización cultural en la crisis del neoliberalismo español (Madrid: Antonio Machado, 2017); and Amaia Orozco, ‘De vidas vivibles y producción imposible’, Rebelión, 2 June 2012; available at <http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=144215> (accessed 25 June 2019).
44 See Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (New York: Verso, 2013); Federici, Caliban and the Witch; and Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, trans. Liz Mason-Deese (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2017).
45 Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London/Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), 100.
46 Illich, Shadow Work, 100.
47 Illich, Shadow Work, 100.
48 López & Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Model’, 19.
49 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2010), 204.
50 For a thorough study of the erasure of care from capitalism, see Federici, Caliban and the Witch and, more specifically in Spanish contemporary thought, see Marina Garces, Filosofía inacabada (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015).
51 Janet Wolff, ‘keynote: unmapped spaces—gender, generation, and the city’, Feminist Review, 96 (2010), 6–19 (p. 9).
52 Adriana Cavarero has emphasized the function of male verticality and rectitude as opposed to female inclination in the foundation of the modern public sphere. See her Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2016).
53 León de Aranoa first explores the complicated relationship between the marginality and nationality of sex workers in his box-office hit, Princesas (2005).
54 Esposito, Communitas, trans. Campbell, 204–05.
55 Jorge Moruno, La fábrica del emprendedor: trabajo y política en la empresa-mundo (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2015), 25.
56 Elettra Stimilli, The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism, trans. Arianna Bove (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2017), 149.
57 Stimilli, The Debt of the Living, trans. Bove, 12.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.