Mexico on the Skin

Abstract

A sweeping psychological narrative of a young woman's descent into delusion, extreme sexual behaviour and self-destruction, the film Leap Year (Michael Rowe, 2010) chronicles twenty-nine days in the life of Laura, a journalist who moved from her rural background in the Mexican province of Oaxaca to Mexico City. As the film is so steeped in the subtleties of local racism, the article reads the film in relation to the discussion of gender and racial politics in contemporary Mexico, especially in the light of multiculturalist state reforms. The article also addresses the discussion of female-racialised aesthetics by tracing back the politics of representation of the female indigenous body in Mexican art, and the way this body has acted as an allegory of the motherland in line with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist ideology. The author argues that in Leap Year the female indigenous body is still a field of political and semantic tension, yet, due to the film's script and aesthetics, its protagonist's body does not act merely as a figure that embodies a corpus of ideology: its polysemic activation is evident due to its performativeness.