Por que te me disso isso?: Uneven access to border-crossings
Unable to view Y tu mamá también on campus, I opted for the Youtube version with Portuguese subtitles and transnational subtleties. Nevertheless, I had to rely heavily on my four years of high school Spanish. Since the visual dialogue of the film explained so much, it was surprisingly easy to follow the spoken dialogue. Perhaps this accessibility is the reason why the film appeared in thirty-nine countries. Besides casting a wide net to a global audience through Youtube, the film has many other qualities of transnational cinema.
Set in Mexico in 1999 on the cusp of the presidential elections, Y tu mamá también highlights many particularities of Mexican politics, economics and society. Simultaneously the film addressed themes that were prevalent throughout the world. The film showed how Mexico’s dominant ruling party was voted out after 71 years. One-party control was common throughout the latter 20th century world, particularly throughout Latin America. With the election of Vincente Fox, Mexico entered a new phase of economic liberalization and political realignment known as NAFTA. In all of this the film is both a national and transnational product, “transcend[ing] the national as autonomous cultural particularity while respecting it as a powerful symbolic force” (page 2).
The backdrop of the film is marked by disparities between rich and poor; urban and rural; politically well-heeled and disenfranchised. Economically speaking, 1999 represents the final victory of capitalism over communism and the ascendency of neoliberalism as instituted globally through the Washington Consensus. The film depicts a Mexican political economy that was/is occurring throughout the world. The owners of Mexican fabricadores grow filthy-rich, due to low-paid workers who manufacture cheap goods for a global market. As such its particularities make the film both a national film to which Mexicans can relate, as well as a transnational film with its universalizing themes of the growing wedge between those who benefit from neoliberal reforms and those who do not.
As the protagonists drive deeper into rural Mexico, the mens’ national identities are blurred by the rural landscape harsh lives of their Mexican brethren. The camera perspective changes between the perspectives of safe, mobile passengers to the heavily regulated and immobile rural denizens, making clear the “imaginanary nature of any notion of cultural purity” (4). The passengers – under the protective, political aura of Tenoch – drive unperturbedly past armed soldiers in the truck bed, and barely glance at the soldiers force locals into an execution-style line. Indeed the three passengers seem to be moving in a different, more privileged direction than the Mexican citizens they leave behind, calling into question Mexican solidarity. “This leave-taking often entails, to use Freud’s term, a becoming-unheimlich both to oneself and to those who are variously invested in the diasporic subject’s remaining recognizable” (11). The three passengers seem to possess the requisite pedigrees or associations to move seamlessly through Mexican terrain, while the disenfranchised rural citizens are treated like Zapatista terrorists, whose border crossings pose danger to Mexico’s society.
Like the three cosmopolitan, upwardly-mobile passengers, who are “most ‘at home’ in the in-between spaces of culture…between the local and the global”, UMD’s campus body is neither a culturally pure of entirely separate body politic (4). A simple search for “UMD campus advisory” delivers twenty unread advisory messages alerting UMD students of off-campus burglaries, armed robberies, and most recently an off-campus incident where a female UMD student was attacked from behind by a man holding a knife. The brave young woman broke free and managed to escape from the man described as wearing a red flannel shirt and having “dirty fingernails and a foul odor” (http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/27410206/police-releases-description-of-suspect-in-umd-off-campus-attempted-kidnapping) . As important as it is to alert students of dangers in surrounding areas, the frequent advisory messages suggest that no where but campus is safe for UMD students and that all community members are dangerous and suspicious. Like community relations, transnational “cinema is borderless to varying degrees, subject to the same uneven mobility as people [who cross them]” (5).
It appears that town-gown relations have a long way to go.