Film Review – La Negrada

Abstract

Film Review:La Negrada Javier Ramirez (bio) Directed by Jorge Pérez Solano, performances by Magdalena Soriano, Juana Mariche Domínguez, and Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera, Tirisia Cine, 2018. 104 mins. In preparation for the 2020 Census, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, or INEGI) conducted the Intercensal Survey (2015), and for the first time ever, included an afrodescendiente (Afro-descendant) category, a watershed moment for afromexicanos (Afro-Mexicans).1 Prior to 2015, Afro-Mexicans lacked constitutional recognition. The Mexican government quite literally did not count them in census data. Afro-Mexicans's invisibility dates back to the 1917 Constitution, which erased African heritage from a nascent Mexican identity.2 A postrevolutionary Mexican government furthered the erasure of Afro-Mexicans by unifying the country's heterogeneous population under the umbrella of mestizaje, a term that celebrates the racial mixing of indigenous and European ancestries.3 In 2013, after nearly fifteen years of campaigning, two organizations, Huella Negra (Black Footprints) and México Negro (Black Mexico), successfully challenged Mexico's anti-Black, mestizo national identity.4 Such efforts proved historic when Afro-Mexicans were afforded the ability to self-identity in a census survey, thus officially acknowledging their existence. Even with the Mexican government finally recognizing them, Afro-Mexicans remained largely invisible. Nowhere is their existence more marginalized than in Mexican cinema, where stereotypical representations frame Afro-Mexicans and, by extension, Blackness, as foreign to the Mexican popular imaginary. Producer and director Jorge Pérez Solano sought to correct the cinematic neglect of Afro-Mexicans. His movie La Negrada (2018) marked the Mexican film industry's first-ever feature-length movie comprised of an all-Black Latinx cast. The studio-driven fiction film offers a fascinating portrayal of an Afro-Mexican coastal community living in Costa Chica, an area in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The story chronicles the romantic entanglement of Magdalena (Magdalena Soriano) and Juana (Juana Mariche Domínguez), two estranged friends who share the same [End Page 503] lover, Neri (Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera).5 Tears in the marital dynamic appear after Juana's hospital stay reveals a terminal diagnosis. Magdalena hopes for a future of just Neri and herself, but he is unwilling to forgo his polygamist view on relationships. Ultimately, Juana's inevitable death realizes a new path for Magdalena, proving there is a life without Neri. Despite its narrative simplicity, La Negrada's slow cinema aesthetic pronounces the everydayness of the Afro-Mexican community. The film's opening moments features two semi-long takes, one with Neri fishing with his son and another of Sara (Sara Gallardo), Juana and Neri's daughter, casually walking between her home and her grandmother's house. Such stillness in the everyday accentuates the tranquility, colorfulness, and beauty of the Costa Chica region—home to many Afro-Mexicans. The quietude of the uncompressed shots also foregrounds the area's coastal acoustics, and in doing so, offers a sharp contrast to the noise-filled and fast-paced urban environment. Perhaps more importantly is how slowness allows viewers to contemplate the Afro-Mexican experience. In an effort to help her ailing mother, Sara travels to a nearby city in hopes of finding medicine that will minimize Juana's pain. Her return trip takes a turn for the worse when, at a migration checkpoint, a Mexican immigration officer orders Sara and several others off the bus. Because they lack IDs, Sara and two other gentlemen must "prove" their Mexican citizenship by singing the Mexican national anthem from a specific starting point. Only Sara is able to "prove" her Mexican citizen status. Elongated cinematic time in the scene, to quote Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, "encourages a mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking."6 In other words, temporal slowness urges viewers to contemplate the racist anti-Blackness that pervades Mexican societal structures. Linked closely to the film's slow cinema aesthetic is its borrowing of the cinéma vérité style. La Negrada is by no means a documentary, but the employment of an observational cinema technique serves the...