The young and the damned: street visions in Latin American cinema

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In the last of his three-volume state-of-the-world report entitled The Information Age, the Catalan urban theorist Manuel Castells examines the rise of what he calls the ‘Fourth World’ within the new world order of informationbased global capitalism:The Fourth World comprises large areas of the globe …. But it is also present in literally every country and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion. … And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons. … Everywhere, they are growing in number … as the selective triage of informational capitalism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is inseparable from the rise of informational, global capitalism. (1998, pp. 164-5)I shall examine here some examples of recent Latin American cinema which are responding, in different ways, to the violence inherent within, indeed generated by the structural transformations of global capitalism. I shall be comparing these recent examples to the historical tradition of films dealingwith social exclusion in Latin America, with a focus (although not exclusively) on the particular phenomena of street children and urban youth culture. The social exclusion of juveniles poses a particular nexus of representational problems within cinema, mostly deriving from the fact that in many Latin American societies street children occupy an unacknowledged or disavowed representational space within the social imaginary itself. Film makers have been drawn, historically, to this disavowed social representation because it seems to offer the chance for cinema to intervene in an issue that transgresses the historically constructed boundary between the imaginary and the social. The film maker can use the representational power of cinema to ‘make visible’ the invisible lives of the socially excluded, although always at the risk of implicating the medium itself with the very structures of power (and representational systems) that produce social exclusion in the first place.