Migration on Film during the Tucumán Crisis

Abstract

Migration on Film during the Tucumán Crisis Matt Losada Argentine militant cinema of the 1960s and '70s is universally recognized to vehemently reject the representational conventions of the national version of the industrial "first" cinema that was dismissed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino as "a spectacle aimed at a digesting object" (42), yet the inverse reaction, that of commercial to militant cinema, has been neglected in scholarship.1 Studies of the commercial cinema of those decades emphasize continuities with earlier industrial cinema—such as a relationship with its spectator characterized by escapist distraction—while possible novel responses to the documentation and denunciations of its contemporary militant film go unexamined. While at first glance this neglect might appear justified by the two cinemas' distinct thematics and apparatuses of production and exhibition, as well as a somewhat differentiated viewership, it represents a failure to adequately account for the oppositional relationship between the two, the degree, that is, to which the films of each are informed by a consciousness of the representations produced by the other. Since the commercial cinema has doubtlessly had a far wider viewership and societal impact, this lack of attention by scholars misses an opportunity to account for strategies of reaction to left or progressive representations, which could be the basis for a critical optic with which to regard parallel reactions that have surged recently in Latin America, the United States and Europe. [End Page 459] This essay, then, postulates a consciousness on the part of certain creators of commercial cinema of the representations articulated by militant film, and assumes a reaction to these in their own films. It initiates study of this reaction by examining how one militant and one commercial film respond to representations of a single phenomenon, that of internal migration from the province of Tucumán in the late 1960s and early 1970s. First, I will first account for the context of these migrations and representations of them, then I will examine a militant representation of the phenomenon—that of Gerardo Vallejo's El camino hacia la muerte del Viejo Reales (1971)—and finally a representation by a commercial cinema that identified more with the interests of state and capital, Enrique Carreras' Palito Ortega vehicle Yo tengo fe (1973). In this way, I hope to begin to elucidate a contribution to political debates of the widely consumed commercial cinema that is often considered to be pure apolitical escapism. The concentration of national industry in the Buenos Aires region begun in the 1930s created a gravitational center for large-scale internal migrations that continued through the 1970s and beyond. The fact that many of the migrants were racially and culturally differentiated from the majority of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires exacerbated tensions between established city dwellers and the new arrivals, who were often despectively labeled cabecita negra. The theme of internal migration was highly politicized at the national level during the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón and the period following his overthrow in 1955, and representations of internal migrants were seen in well-known anti-Peronist literary texts in the 1940s and '50s that included "La fiesta del monstruo" (1947), by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and "Las puertas del cielo" and "Casa tomada" (both 1951), by Julio Cortázar. In these stories, the migrants are either demonized—as monsters or as mersa—or are left unseen yet feared, and no attempt is made to locate the migrants in their historical context nor to reference the motives for the migrations. In the cinema, representations of internal migrants appear frequently after the first Peronist period and are associated with the villa miseria, the shanty towns that sprung up in spaces where new arrivals could build precarious dwellings. Migrants appear as central characters in Rosaura a las diez (Mario Soffici, 1958) and Detrás de un largo muro (Lucas Demare, 1958)—played in both these films, incongruently, by the glamorous blonde Susana Campos, whose physical appearance is far from the stereotype of the cabecita negra—and the theme is then taken up by some of the Generation of 1960 filmmakers, notably in Pajarito Gómez (Rodolfo Kuhn, 1966) and [End Page 460...