Capitán Latinoamérica: Affect, Bodies, and Circulations in the Superhero Genre

Abstract

This article examines the general characteristics of recent portrayals of superheroes in Latin America cinema, paying attention to character construction, genre conformity, and the deployment of well-known tropes. Citing films such as El Man, el superhéroe nacional (Colombia, 2009) and Chinche-Man (Honduras, 2015), I contend that the genre can be characterized by the recycling of U.S. superheroes as a point of parody, a critique (of domestic and U.S.-local relations) and a point of inflection for concerns specific to a national context. The masked protagonists in these films permit an exploration of plurivalenced issues of cultural, social, political, and economic anxieties that are both idiosyncratic to the local context, and to the Latin American position within global geopolitics. Then I examine Ernesto Díaz Espinoza's Mirageman (Chile, 2007), a film that breaks with this prototypical model. By rejecting parody as a narrative mode, the study of Mirageman allows for an exploration of the possibilities of a production not tied to local genealogies. I argue that the film provides an originary tableau in which the spectator may observe the poiesis of a character within a genre, to thereby extrapolate similar strategies to other superhero films both in and outside Latin America.