PORTALES: The Undergraduate Journal of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

¿Dónde estabas tú?

Ignacio Sánchez Urdaneta — 2021-02-19

Short story

Revolutionary Queimada and Pre-1959 Cuba

Michelle Yan — 2021-02-19

Released in 1969, the Italian-French film Queimada! directed by Gillo Pontecorvo narrates a fictitious Caribbean nation’s quest for self-determination amidst competing imperial interests. Queimada! provides many interesting analytical frameworks for the critic-historian in its portrayal of consistent exploitation of brown bodies in the Caribbean; challenges shared by Caribbean nations as they strove for liberation from European and U.S. imperial agendas; and to evade the defining and evaluating of the West. This paper, however, examines a less discussed historical category in academia––the agent provocateur––that is thoroughly explored in the film through the protagonist William Walker. Specifically, this paper compares Queimada!’s cinematic depiction of Walker, as he fueled revolutionary movements on the island by arming revolutionaries and inciting violence, with the diplomatic policies of the United States for Cuba in the pre-1959 antebellum period.

Latin America in Cinema and Television of the Americas

Shannon Lukens — 2021-02-19

Cinema is often a reflective form of media which demonstrates popular opinion on a certain individual, group, or subject. The variety in subject of cinema reflects the vast amount of opinions that exist on every discernable subject. Due to this, film analysis is a particularly relevant form of studying society or a specific subset. Racial or ethnic groups are one example of what can be studied through film analysis. Hispanics/Latinos as an ethnic group have received a long history of bias, and are oftentimes represented by racial portrayals in North American media, and Latin American cinema is rarely consumed in North America.

Archivar lo que se va a destruir

Carolanne Boughton — 2021-02-19

Las prácticas sacrificiales llegaron a definir la espiritualidad y devoción azteca. Para los conquistadores, esto implicaba que los nahuas tenían una concepción espiritual del universo. Esta noción resultó prometedora para los españoles que se aventuraron al Nuevo Mundo con la intención de lograr su conversión al cristianismo. Para los conquistadores, la brutalidad del sacrificio humano representada en los códices legitimaba la conquista espiritual y física que emprendían, con el fin de erradicar este derramamiento bárbaro de sangre. Sin embargo, las representaciones de la actividad religiosa indígena eran esenciales. Era importante articular, para un público occidental, que estos sacrificios humanos tenían un propósito espiritual para los aztecas. Así, los aztecas potencialmente podrían ser receptivos a los ideales católicos.

Gego: The German-Venezuelan Étude

Ignacio Sánchez Urdaneta — 2021-02-19

A review of Gego’s 33-inch mobile, Reticulárea, which hung in the MoMA’s exposition “Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction.”

La reproducción de narrativas coloniales en "También la lluvia" y su relación a la política boliviana

Hannah Leoni-Hughes — 2021-02-19

También la lluvia, dirigida por Icíar Bollaín, relata la filmación de una película sobre la colonización de una isla en Cochabamba, Bolivia, durante un conflicto local sobre la privatización del agua. Bollaín emite una crítica del uso de representaciones del colonialismo en el cine moderno, sin reconocer las luchas en curso de la gente colonizada hoy día. No obstante, la representación de la Guerra de Agua de Cochabamba en También la lluvia perpetúa narrativas perjudiciales sobre la historia boliviana.

Resisting Modernism

Simon Yang — 2021-02-19

Following the lead of modernist architects such as Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, postwar Brazil aimed to devote considerable resources to the development of a newly homogenized national identity through central planning. Despite this widespread impulse towards modernization, the continued prominence of the favelas even to this day undermines the ideals of modernist urban renewal. The supposed “backwardness” of the favelas challenges the success narrative of Brazil’s modernist program. The paradoxical growth of the favelas in the midst of state-sponsored modernist renewal illustrates not only the failure of the modernist program, but also the internal contradictions within modernism itself. The failure to eradicate the favelas has instead resulted in the emergence of a heterogeneous national identity, contrary to the national goal of seamless modernizing integration. In recent decades, as the favelas resisted national efforts towards eradication, the culture of the favelas has become only more complex. Indeed, the rise of vernacular culture within the favelas has paradoxically allowed Brazil to promote itself internationally under the sign of heterogeneity and cultural difference. Contrary to the modernist ideal of abandoning all vernacular culture, the heterogeneous national identity derived from Brazil’s favelas boasts an organic amalgam of historical cultures. Ranging across music, religion, and architecture, this “heterogeneity” takes influence from diverse cultural spheres within Brazil. Resisting modernism’s characteristic emphasis on integrated, hierarchical planning, the heterogeneous favela culture instead proceeds through gradual incorporation and reinterpretation, effecting an organic novelty.