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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the groundbreaking film Amores Perros by the acclaimed director Alejandro González Iñárritu through the auteur's innovative deployment of popular music. By first articulating border rhetorics to popular music (both scholarly concerns of the late D. Robert DeChaine), I argue that sound representations by Iñárritu are strategically thought-provoking and culturally significant examples of U.S.-Mexican intercultural discourse. Also debunking mainstream sonic representations of “Mexicans” and/or “Mexican-ness” as tired “sonic stereotypes,” this research demonstrates how Iñárritu's film serves as a powerful tool for cinematically constructing “Mexicans” (and by logical extension, non-fictional U.S. Latino/a/xs) in more updated and potentially realistic ways.
Notes
1 See, for example, D. Robert Chaine, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience,” Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2002): 79–98; Also, D. Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 43–65; Also, D. Robert DeChaine et al., eds., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 1–15.
2 For example, see Josh D. Kun, “The Aural Border.” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 1–21.
3 Johnny Wingstedt, Sture Brändström, and Jan Berg, “Narrative Music, Visuals and Meaning in Film,” Visual Communication 9, no. 2 (2010): 193–210, doi:10.1177/1470357210369886; 206.
4 D. Robert DeChaine, “Introduction,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, eds. DeChaine et al. (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 3.
5 Ibid., 3.
6 Ibid., 3–5.
7 DeChaine, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience,” 85.
8 Ibid., 86.
9 Ibid., 89–90.
10 Kent A. Ono, “Borders That Travel: Matters of the Figural Border,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, eds. D. Robert DeChaine et al. (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 19–32.
11 Ono, “Borders that Travel,” 24.
12 Kun, “The Aural Border,” 2.
13 Ibid., 4.
14 Ibid., 4–5.
15 Ibid., 5.
16 Ibid., 6.
17 For example, see Paul J. Smith, Amores Perros (London, UK: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona; Deborah Shaw, The Three Amigos: Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013); Alejandro González Iñárritu (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010); and Dolores Tierney, New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), among several others.
18 Shaw, The Three Amigos, 2.
19 Ibid., 4.
20 Ibid., 7.
21 Ibid., 97.
22 Smith, Amores Perros, 11.
23 Deleyto and del Mar Azcona, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 132.
24 Shaw, The Three Amigos, 102.
25 Ibid., 102–3.
26 Ibid., 97.
27 Ibid., 107.
28 Ibid., 104–8.
29 Ibid., 102–4.
30 Ibid., 95–96; emphasis added.
31 Ibid., 107.
32 Ibid., 110.
33 For example, see Julia Khrebtan-Höerhager, and Roberto Avant-Mier, “Despicable Others: Animated Othering as Equipment for Living in the Era of Trump,” The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2017): 441–62, doi:10.1080/17475759.2017.1372302.
34 See Wingstedt, Brändström, & Berg, “Narrative music, visuals and meaning in film,” 197–8.
35 Shaw, The Three Amigos, 107. Film scholars noted how the popularity and ubiquity of the new medium (music videos) had influenced film production by the late 1990s, essentially facilitating narrative structure in films. For example, see Hilary Lapedis, “Popping the question: The function and effect of popular music in cinema,” Popular Music 18, no. 3 (1999): 367–79.
36 Ibid., 369–70.
37 The Hollies were a popular 1970s rock band from England whose major hit (“Long Cool Woman”) and success was actually in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.
38 Shaw, The Three Amigos, 107.
39 Ibid., 26.
40 Ibid., 109.
41 Regarding pachucos as a border phenomenon, see Rosa L. Fregoso, “Born in East L.A. and the Politics of Representation,” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (1990): 264–80.
42 Toby Miller, “The Ragpicker-Citizen,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, eds. D. Robert DeChaine et al. (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 213–26; 216.
43 I call them the “Big Three” here in order to avoid other insensitive monikers such as “The Three Amigos,” which is often used by Anglophone scholars, although it is worth noting how they are otherwise called “Los Tres Mosqueteros” (The Three Musketeers) in their home country.
44 DeChaine, “Introduction,” 9.
45 DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary,” 61.
46 Ibid., 61.