Messing with the Enemy: Movement and Cinematic Representations of the Traitorous Intermediary in Neoliberal Bolivia

Abstract

This paper examines a shift in cultural and movement discourse in Bolivia, arguing that as neoliberalizing governments and organizations attempted to enforce ‘surgical’ austerity measures, indigenous movements and aligned intellectuals began to focus on internal rather than external threats, naming and attempting to expel the figure of the traitorous intermediary from the national body. By analyzing Jorge Sanjinés’ 1989 drama La Nación Clandestina alongside the writings of Bolivian movement intellectuals, this paper shows how Bolivian cultural representations and movement representatives in the neoliberal era animate the figure of the traitorous intermediary in an attempt to revive an indigenous nation. This discourse of the traitorous intermediary draws on the long history of mestizaje that frames the colonial rape and exploitation of indigenous women as an evidence of women’s betrayal and traitorousness. After demonstrating how, in neoliberalism, women and their demands for gender equality are seen once again as symptoms of selling out the nation, this paper moves to the more recent period, analyzing how Rodrigo Bellott’s 2007 film ¿Quien Mató a la Llamita Blanca? and government responses to lowland indigenous groups over the Villa Tunari – San Ignacio de Moxos Highway – playfully stage but ultimately reinforce this tradition.

Keywords:

• Gender
• neoliberalism
• mestizaje
• TIPNIS
• Jorge Sanjinés
• Rodrigo Bellott

Notes

[1] Thanks to Nancy Postero, Josie Saldaña-Portillo, and Patricia Stuelke.

[2] While Mary Weismantel (2001) has argued that the kharisiri phenomenon is disappearing, recent studies refute this claim. Alison Spedding (2005), notes that while experiences with other kinds of supernatural beings have declined in recent decades, kharisiri cases have persisted.

[3] ‘Por tus intereses, hermano,’ and ‘Indios de mierda!’

[4] Gayatri Spivak advances a similar formulation around the same time in her (1988) essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

[5] Sanjinés’ 1995 film Para Recibir el Canto de los Pajaros stages most clearly, if allegorically, these failures of political and esthetic representation. In the film, creole and mestizo filmmakers, attempting to make a radical film about the conquest in an indigenous community, mistake the leader’s verbal consent for the consent of his community and then literally cannot record the sound of the birds with their film equipment. Sanjinés (1989) has also written eloquently about the violence of Western film techniques and how, in filming La Nacion Clandestina, he attempted to create an alternative, communitarian esthetic.

[6] Recent readings of La Nacion Clandestina’s relationship to indigeneity diverge widely: Jeff Himpele (2008) argues that LNC ‘attempts to portray the inherently plural sense of Bolivian identity’ while Quispe (2012) argues almost the opposite, that the film rejects any sense of cultural mestizaje in favor of a pure (and idealized) indigeneity. Building on the analysis of David M. J. Wood (2012) and Rivera (2005), I’m more interested in the way the film imagines indigenous politics, as opposed to Western systems of representation, and formulates strategies for arriving at the purification and redemption of indigenous society.

[7] One exception is Maximiliano Ignacio de la Puente (2010), who notes that Sebastián ‘forces [Basilia] to have sex through a kind of “kidnapping”’ and argues that this is Sanjinés’ comment on the machismo of the Aymara community.

[8] Freya Schiwy (2009, p. 105) argues that Sebastián’s persistence as a lone figure in the final scene suggests the film’s ultimate insistence on ‘the primacy of social struggle over cultural revival,’ and I agree that his solitariness is an odd way to close a film that purports to move toward the goal of reintegration. But the resurrection scene seems too earnestly invested in Sebastián’s transformation to be read as a failure. I would argue instead that we should imagine that Sebastián’s triumphant reintegration is to happen offscreen, in a moment of ayllu democracy that Sanjinés cannot quite imagine; the utopian ‘secret nation’ the film would recuperate remains secret, even to him.

[9] Domitila’s name, as well as her heroic role in the film and radical class analysis, resonates with that of the Bolivian mining-community radical Housewives’ Committee leader, Domitila Barrios de Chungara.

[10] ‘Como te vas a meter, pues, con nuestros enemigos?’

[11] Reproductive futurity is Lee Edelman’s (2004) term for ‘the fantasy subtending the image of the Child [that] invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought,’ a fantasy that demands both reproduction and the curtailing of present liberties in the name of a future represented by imaginary children.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Molly Geidel

Molly Geidel is at Harvard University, Humanities Center, Barker Center 136, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA (Email: [email protected]).