Broken Topographies: Crisis, Criminal Enframing,

and the Migration Genre in Diego Quemada-Díez’s

La jaula de oro

José Luis Suárez Morales

Indiana University

In 2010, a horrifying event shook Mexico as details of a massacre in San

Fernando, Tamaulipas came to light. Gunmen of Los Zetas slaughtered seventy-
two migrants from Central and South America. The tragedy only became known
through extreme fortune. Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, an Ecuadorian migrant,
miraculously survived a coup de grace and lay on the ground faking his death
until it was safe to escape. A second San Fernando massacre occurred one year
later. Migrants, in turn, now commonly run the risk of abduction by sicarios and
face death if they refuse to join a criminal organization, a family member in the
United States does not pay a ransom, or simply because a rival gang oversees
their transportation.
The San Fernando massacres, along with other tragedies, are evidence
of the ubiquitous collaboration of Mexican authorities with different criminal
organizations.1 Since 2007, drug cartels have been allowed to operate to such a
degree that they have shaped migration patterns and how Mexico positions itself
vis-à-vis its southern neighbors.2 While Mexico has painted itself as a hospitable
destination for exiles from political conflicts, the experience of transient Central
American populations undermines this country’s self-conception as a haven from
political violence.3
Here, I analyze Diego Quemada-Díez’s 2013 film La jaula de oro (Golden
Dreams), which describes the perils that migrants encounter on their path from
Central America to the United States. La jaula de oro, the Winner of the Un Certain
Talent award for movie direction and cast ensemble at the Cannes Film Festival
and the Ariel award, tells the story of three adolescents from Zona 3 in Guatemala
City, Sara, Samuel, and Juan, who are later joined by an indigenous teenager
from Chiapas named Chauk, all of whom attempt to cross through Mexico to
reach the United States. This film portrays the hurdles migrants face on their way
north, such as brutality and unlawful deportations by the Mexican authorities, sex
trafficking portrayed in Sara’s abduction, and attacks and extortions from criminals
and far-right groups, like the murder of Chauk by a Minuteman militiaman. The
experiences of horror are intertwined with solidarity from ordinary citizens, Las
Patronas, and Father Solalinde, all of whom aid the migrants. As Rodolfo decides
not to continue the trip, the film emphasizes the relationship between Sara, Chauk,
and Juan. While Sara is sympathetic to Chauk, the light-skinned Juan shows
racist attitudes against the indigenous teenager. Furthermore, the trip changes
144 Broken Topographies

the relationship between the two boys. On the one hand, they form a love triangle
and compete for Sara’s affection. On the other, Juan becomes increasingly more
accepting of Chauk until the latter’s death.
The film’s production in Mexico is no small feat. Traditionally, Mexican
representations of migration have denounced the poor treatment migrants receive
in the United States and their experiences of foreignness, cultural disarray, and
alienation. La jaula de oro joins a larger reaction to the increasing number of
attacks against Central Americans while pointing out the racism and hypocrisy
of the Mexican public that remains highly concerned with the treatment of its
citizens abroad but overlooks the treatment of migrants at its southern border. The
film’s critique of migration goes beyond denouncing the treatment of migrants
by Mexican authorities and reflects on the crisis of the modern state’s ability to
mediate the impacts of economic and technological forces on its citizens. The
legitimacy of the modern state’s monopoly of violence came from the guarantee that
its institutions would protect its citizens’ lives from internal and external threats.
Outbursts of anomic violence, such as those that transpired in San Fernando,
suggest that states that comprise the North American region are incapable and
unwilling to maintain order through a monopoly on violence and thus have entered
a state of protracted crisis. The massacres in San Fernando and episodes of violence
in La jaula de oro point not only to sovereignty’s incapacity to contain violence but
also to the transformation of migrant populations from citizens, or even refugees,
into a dispensable workforce that is now produced and circulates transnationally.
Ultimately, my analysis engages with the idea that the unmoored
expansion of market forces, and the technological encompassing of the world, for
which Martin Heidegger coined the term enframing, are the main cause for the loss
of the common ground of politics. Politics is no longer a foundation that allows
a society to organize and protect itself. Instead, during globalization, economic
and technological development organize our life. Contrary to the spatialization
and organization of life performed by politics, the globalized market economy
currently shapes our understanding of the world. Drawing from various critiques
of modern technology, I consider whether the rise of new forms of technological
and biopolitical production of life comes at the expense of the political order of
modernity and if the notion of crisis of the political remains useful at all. Starting
with the notion that technological globalization has undermined the modern
sovereign order, I examine the extent to which the state’s demise is dependent
upon an opposition between a pure ontology of politics pitted against technology.
Contrary to the belief that politics is entirely distinct from technology, whether
because the former is an existential antagonism or a set of democratic or republican
values that are under threat by the unleashing of technics, I contend that politics
is another form of tekhne ̄ , whose grip on society appears to be fading away.
The question of politics vis-à-vis technology might seem not entirely
pertaining to migration nor to its cinematic representations. However,
understanding the transformation that politics has undergone under globalization
is key to understanding contemporary migration. As such, modern migration was
José Luis Suárez Morales 145

grounded on politics and therefore regarded as a consequence of the abuses of state

power or economic forces. As such, pushback against immigration came from
beliefs that the undocumented functioned as a reserve army of labor willing to be
employed for lower salaries. From the Latin American perspective, immigration
served as an escape route from the growing precarity in the region, regardless of
the reason of departure: economic crisis resulting from free trade agreements,
natural disasters, or the growth of criminal violence. This piece argues that La
jaula de oro shows how the rise of technology-driven globalization has upended
the understanding of migration in the terms laid out by modern politics. While
not thoroughly addressing political contexts nor “push factors” or immigration
triggers, this movie’s portrayal of the space comprised of North and Central
America cannot be understood without the changes in the political and economic
cartographies that resulted from the region’s integration.

The Migration Genre and the Broken Topographies of Modernity

Images of migrant caravans, abuse of children in detention centers, and the

constant pressure aimed at Mexico from the United States to contain immigration
from its southern neighbors are all symptoms of a different crisis of immigration.
Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends suggests that a conceptual map of
the crisis of migration and its causes evades comprehension. As Luiselli points
out regarding the 2014 unaccompanied migration crisis, the violence perpetrated
by the militarized and hemispheric campaigns against drug trafficking, which is
in large part driving this regional exodus, has the effect of extending the concept
and spatiality of “war” beyond its established borders:

the drug circuit and its many wars––those openly declared and those
that are silenced ––are being fought in the streets of San Salvador, San
Pedro Sula, Iguala, Tampico, Los Angeles, and Hempstead. They are
not a problem circumscribed to a small geographic area. The roots and
reach of the current situation branch out across hemispheres and form a
complex global network whose size and real reach we can’t even imagine.
It’s urgent that we begin talking about the drug war as a hemispheric war,
at least one that begins in the Great Lakes of the northern United States
and ends in the mountains of Celaque in southern Honduras. (26)

These words should not be read as a lack of imagination from Luiselli to

think about the relationship between drug trafficking and immigration; if anything,
her text relentlessly attempts to grasp the complexities of these issues. Luiselli’s
“can’t even imagine” points to the limits of a political lexicon grounded on the
state that is exceeded by globalization. This questioning of the lexicon of politics
takes distance from the explanations grounded strictly on geopolitics or political
economy, such as Luis Astorga’s claim that the rise of criminal activities is due to
146 Broken Topographies

a weak democratic transition or Oswaldo Zavala’s argument that drug cartels are
a façade for the state (countering the notion that Mexico is a weak or failed state),
and global extractivism (the criminal enforcement of The Mesoamerica Integration
and Development Project). I concur with these authors that the war on drugs and
the many narratives circulating about drug lords overpowering the government
is a charade that hides extractivist and neocolonial practices. However, much like
Zavala criticizes those who have naturalized the word cartel (criminal organizations
rarely operate as economic cartels), and take the narratives produced about narcos
at face value, we could further question if Zavala and Astorga still put too much
weight on the state as the center of public life.
In contrast, this piece questions the centrality of the state in forms of
biopolitical control and the language of the state—namely politics––to address
these issues. This is not to say that the state is helpless against the market (if
anything, its surveillance apparatus are increasingly advancing surveillance
capitalism) but that the market is now entangled in a broader net of actors that
partake in global extractivism. The works of Roberto Esposito and the French
collective Tiqqun offer a window for thinking differently about the changing
topography of globalization. These authors agree that modern sovereignty’s
monopoly of legitimate violence produced an “other” against whom political
antagonism is directed. This definition of the state aligns with Esposito’s concept
of immunity for grasping the political. The state is an immunological institution
in as much as it is responsible for safeguarding the community’s life against the
turbulent outside and internal dissent by paradoxically inflicting violence on the
body politic.
Immunity can illuminate many of the logics at play in immigration.
In the United States, the presence of immigrants can be deemed an “economic
success” both personally and for their native country’s economy (in the form of
remittances) as well as the host country’s economy. Concomitant to the progressive
integration of migrants into economic production, nationalist discourses constitute
themselves around defending the body politic from “aliens.” While it is true that
immunological institutions cannot fully safeguard a community, one of the greatest
misunderstandings about globalization is the belief that the homogenizing forces
of the markets could do away with political exclusions. If anything, contemporary
capitalist accumulation is predicated on producing a new form of labor that is at
the same time constituted from within the repressive state apparatuses and outside
its regulatory framework.
The notion that the state is the sole legitimate bearer of violence loses
its legitimacy when sovereignty cannot shelter its citizens from global forces or
from internal dissent. In line with the idea that the world has become a flat space
suited for an eased circulation of bodies and commodities, border protection has
simultaneously become despatialized from its physical demarcation as well as
increasingly repressive. As the collective Tiqqun argues, globalization did not
do away with borders but instead rendered spectral these physical demarcations
by detaching them from their traditional spatiotemporal referents. Conversely,
José Luis Suárez Morales 147

the state’s monopoly of violence has given way to Imperial sovereignty, which
has technologization at its core. In the words of Tiqqun: “no point of space or
time and no element of the biopolitical tissue is safe from intervention. The
electronic archiving of the world, generalized traceability, the fact that the means
of production are becoming as much a means of control, the reduction of the
juridical edifice to a mere weapon in the arsenal of the norm—all this tends to
turn everyone into a suspect” (57).
La jaula de oro’s imagery portrays a paradoxical condition of the region’s
immigration landscape during the height of globalization. On the one hand, the
film’s special attention to how immigrants are exploited as cheap workforce in the
United States and as a commodity to be transported by criminals pinpoints the
vital role that immigration plays in the region’s economic growth (this includes
legal and illegal activities). On the other, the film shows how the production of
this transnational force is highly dependent on the production of gender and
ethnic differences. In other words, by looking at immigration from a regional and
global perspective rather than as a local one, the film presents immigration as a
transnational workforce that increasingly transcends the space and, therefore, the
protection and the oppression of the nation-state. As Tiqqun has suggested, this
movie shows that while the frontiers between nations are porous for the circulation
of commodities, the border has now impinged on certain subjects, racialized and
feminine bodies. This film’s treatment of immigration as outside the control of
the nation-state points to the larger crisis of modern politics, more specifically, to
the notion that the unmoored expansion of technology and global markets have
upended the state’s grip over public life but also uprooted forms of life such as
those represented by the indigenous protagonist of the film.
The film, which brings together different elements from Testimonio,
the “migration genre,” and what Nadia Lie calls a “counter road-trip movie,” is a
denunciation of the perils that immigrants face on their path to the United States,
as well as a demystification of Mexico and the United States as hospitable places
for migrants.4 Much like journalism and Testimonio, the close resemblance to
lived experiences is one of the great assets of this movie to potentially generate
solidarity for migrants from its audience. A sense of authenticity emerges with the
film’s planning. The script is based on the experiences of six hundred migrants
interviewed by the director and his crew. The film features a cast of natural
actors whose performances have been acclaimed internationally. Likewise, the
film’s shooting locations and schedule, and the “indirect style” of filming the
scenes underscore the realistic dimensions of the film. The shooting of La jaula
de oro followed the chronological and geographical order of an actual migratory
journey from Guatemala to the United States. In the case of an “indirect style” of
direction, actors were encouraged to improvise and only became knowledgeable
of the script’s content before shooting a specific scene, which contributes to the
feeling of genuineness.5
As Richard Curry argues in his piece on this movie, the fact that La jaula
de oro begins in medias res, without the need for “push factors” (52) that show
148 Broken Topographies

the personal, social, or political causes for migration means that these causes are
somehow already presupposed by the viewer. The film’s primary focus on migration
makes the movie belong to a genre of film that can be dubbed the “migration genre”
due to the expectations set up by the entertainment industry. Therefore, movies
like La jaula de oro reproduce and differ from other migration films.
Prima facie, the film’s in medias res start appears to repeat the spectacular
depiction of migration that appears in news coverage, since the images of large
groups of migrants crossing Mexico elide the historicization of migration. Yet,
various scenes from La jaula de oro create a layering of history. The opening
sequence, a traveling shot that follows Juan around the labyrinthine slum that
he is about to leave, captures images of armed soldiers passing by, which brings
echoes of the Guatemalan state forces during the Civil War that lasted from 1960
to 1996 (Fig. 1). When the camera diverges from Juan, it lingers on two small
children playing with plastic rifles, alluding to the present and future iterations
of Guatemala’s violence (Fig. 2). Similarly, as the teenagers are about to cross
into Mexico, the camera captures a worn-out and graffiti-ridden wall with the
pictures of desaparecidos (Fig. 3). This image is another stark reminder of the
wounds that remain from the various Guatemalan military dictatorships, but also,
an anticipation of the fate of two of the protagonists, Sara and Chauk, whose
fate resembles that of the previous desaparecidos. The association between the
desaparecidos during the Guatemalan Civil War and the new loss of life at the
border shows that there is a historical and sociological continuity with the victims
of political violence during the 20th century.6 Nonetheless, if politics provided a
reason for past violence (i.e., opposing sides attacking each other), these images in
Jaula de oro recall Luiselli’s comments about the lack of conceptual frameworks
and ethical categories to account for these deaths. This is not to say that the region’s
governments do not bear responsibility for the countless victims of migration.
However, as the movie shows, the state is only one actor, even if it remains the
most prominent, amongst a much broader network of other actors (criminal groups,
right-wing militias in the United States, etc.) that transcends the traditional political
spatialization of the nation.
As expressed by Curry, La jaula de oro avoids portraying sociological
causes for migration. Yet, the symbolic presence in the film of historical traces
unsettles the presentism of contemporary politics that constructs migration not
as the product of a complex game of economic and political forces but merely
as spontaneous, irrational, and, most of all, as ahistorical events. Like other
consequences of the market economy, migration is frequently presented as ever-
present and, most importantly, presumably endless.
While La jaula de oro refrains from being a dehistoricized account of
migration, it also avoids depicting migration through a traditional concept of
politics. In short, the film pushes our understanding of the spatiality of the state
and the functioning of a market economy in contrast to the film’s treatment of
migration with the corrido by Los Tigres del Norte, from which the film derives
its title.7 As Alicia Estrada argues: “The corrido’s dystopia foreshadows the film’s
José Luis Suárez Morales 149

characters broken ‘American dream’ and their foreseeable isolation from USA as
well as from Mexican and Guatemalan societies” (179). The corrido’s poetic voice
realizes that his only possible abode is the homeland and that economic prosperity
is no substitute for freedom and the shared values of a political community.
In contrast to the imagery of the corrido, which still holds to the
modern idea that the state is the placeholder of a political community, the movie
acknowledges the difference between Guatemalan and American spaces while
simultaneously highlighting a continuum of alienation between them produced
by globalization. Tellingly, the crossing from Guatemala into Mexico is one of the
most understated scenes, as the viewer only has a glimpse of a road sign signaling
their entry into a new country. In contrast to the ease by which the protagonists
leave Guatemala, the true and most effective control of transient populations begins
within the Mexican territory. As Tiqqun claimed in their assessment of the new
political spatiality, when stripped of their physical manifestations, borders emerge
exceptionally in spaces that ought to be free of immigration control. Moreover,
the fact that Chauk, who joins the group in Chiapas, is also deported from his
own country shows that even if law enforcement is detached from its territorial
referent, it can also become increasingly “attached” to certain bodies. In this case,
the immigration officers immediately associate the ethnic features of a Mayan
boy as incompatible with those who are free to circulate. Chauk’s deportation is
likely a reflection of the infamous cases in which indigenous Mexican citizens are
deported from their country (which is, of course, juridical nonsense) as they are
racialized by immigration officers as “Guatemalans.”8
Examples such as Chauk’s racialization show that market and technology
have rendered spaces like the Americas completely flat to facilitate the flow of
commodities. If anything, the difference between the center and the periphery
becomes more evident. In the same guise, the film’s critique of the American
dream as an ideology to be implanted in the Latin American periphery continues
in the stark contrast between national spaces. As Juan finally arrives in the United
States, the previously idealized American space is presented through cage-like
images that exclude and, at the same time, entrap Juan and Chauk. Images like an
overwhelming and grim highway and the industrial zone holding an American flag
(Fig. 4) show the American space as a territory only suited for the circulation of
commodities. The United States appears as a place where the diversity of languages,
natural spaces, and characters in the southern spaces breaks down.

Technological Enframing and the Crisis of Modernity

So, whereas the borders become diffused and the difference between
“developed” and “underdeveloped” spaces seems to grow starker, it is only
logical to ask, where does the border begin? By revisiting Heidegger’s notion of
technological enframing as a totalization of the world during late modernity, I will
look at the complicated topography of the border. For Heidegger, while there is
150 Broken Topographies

no question that modernity and its technical development have thoroughly altered
our world’s spatiality, a serious critique of technology must move forward from
the notion that technology is only a byproduct of modern science or a perpetual
increase in efficiency. Heidegger argues that “technology is a mode of revealing”
(13) of being, whereby being is revealed to us, that is, how is it that we encounter
the world and meaning that surrounds us?
Opposed to the idea of an objective outer world available to a subject
to encounter it at any time, Heidegger claims that it is rather history, our own
contingent world to which we are brought to, that demands us to bring forth
beings in a specific way. Heidegger argues that, unlike other historical forms of
revealing of being (the Greeks for him or the Mayan cosmology alluded to in the
film), modern technology posits a “challenge” or a “demand” to nature to always
be at our disposal. What lies at the heart of modern technology for Heidegger is
a relation to beings in the world that he refers to as Gestell, often translated as
enframing. The relationship of enframing is the particular way of bringing forth
that secures and allows for beings to be always accessible or at hand for humans
to use them as we please, whenever we please. When Heidegger claims that beings
in modernity are expected to be “on call” or “on duty” (15), he is referring to the
fact that everything, from animals and minerals to ourselves, is already disposed
of, ordered, or better said, “pre-ordered.” Therefore, every being is always waiting
to be potentially exploited, transported, and ultimately stored “safeguarded” for
further use, which Heidegger refers to as a “standing reserve.”
For beings to be called forth whenever they are required, enframed, at
our disposition, humans must assume that every being is fully graspable for our
cognition, that is, fully quantifiable and measurable. This homogenization of
beings, which denies any singularity to present it as a fully graspable totality, is
portrayed by Heidegger as being re-presented in a picture. This metaphor illustrates
how humans, instead of experiencing themselves within the world, pretend to be
posited sovereignly outside the world, just like we do when we watch an image
and get to analyze every object in it. Cinema as an industrial art partakes in what
Heidegger believes is the rendering of the world as a readable image. At the same
time, much like the fulfillment of the technological enframent of the world, cinema
allows us to witness technology’s true essence.
The proliferation of ideas such as “human resources” in our lexicon
makes evident the flattening of all differences has encompassed humans like
every other being. However, the juncture of illegality, market forces, ethnic
differences, and migration in places like Central America raises the question of
how homogenization makes its way through different political and social contexts
deemed as underdeveloped. Unlike a North-South distinction present even in
La jaula de oro, which portrays the Latin American periphery as the originary
space of a natural community, as opposed to places like the United States, the
film emphasizes the Latin American natural sceneries, pointing to something
different. In La jaula de oro, the productive spaces of North America are most
notably the location where the aesthetics of entrapment consolidate. However,
José Luis Suárez Morales 151

from the beginning of the film, the camera leads the viewer to a variety of enclosed
and narrowed shots, from domestic spaces and narrow alleys of the shantytown
in Guatemala City’s Zona 3.
Likewise, the various shots of the migrants on the freight trains, Sara’s
abduction, and the teenagers’ detention by criminals and immigration officers
iterate the image of ensnarement, confinement, and the caging of bodies embedded
into a larger structure of circulation. Even if the film demands from its audience
a revalorization of local cultures and natural elements as a challenge to the
idealization of development and the American Dream, the circulation processes,
legal or illegal, have already enframed the Latin American periphery and the
natural world. The shots of the migrants on the trains, which do not show them
as singular beings but as a faceless mass that remains unaltered through different
natural sceneries, show that once a “standing reserve,” the value of humans is
reduced to a commodity that circulates amongst others (Fig. 5).
The notion of migrants turning into a Heideggerian standing reserve for
a regional economy still needs to account for criminality’s role in this regional
economy and the production of borders. As Abraham Acosta has pointed out, the
underlying intention of border policy in the United States is to turn the Mexican
territory, with various zones controlled by cartels, into the border itself. As the
various exception zones in Mexico show, the regulation of migration has become
a shared task between legal enforcement and drug cartels. This anomic system
is not only a local phenomenon but part and parcel of a transnational migratory
order. In the film, the suspense of the trip is constantly built upon the expectation
that the protagonists will be stopped at any time by state forces or criminals.
The sense that the enforcement of the border or local powers could appear at any
moment is an accurate portrayal of the new logic of migratory exceptionality in
which irregular law enforcement has become the rule.
Acosta also notes that not only government and criminals partake in what
he considers a new cycle of primitive accumulation by which Central Americans
are “liberated” from their national communities through regional migration and are
now “free” to sell their labor in a transnational job market. The different forces that
collide at the southern border produce a workforce freed from any legal constraint
to participate in the market. Migrants face the most radical experience, if not the
collapse, of the concept of freedom that the market has to offer, which renders
bodies always ready for consumption. This hollowing out of freedom present at
the heart of the economics of migration is present in La jaula de oro. In this film,
migrants are simultaneously consumers that pay human traffickers to take them
across the border, the product of consumption by larger criminal networks and
industry, and the means of transportation for drugs by forcefully bringing these
with them.
This collapse of the categories of workforce and commodities sheds light
on Marx’s primitive accumulation by which capitalism “freed” individuals from
their attachments to a traditional community and means of production. When,
per Marx’s account, peasants became detached from communal land, they were
152 Broken Topographies

forced to be “free” to sell their labor on the market to survive. The process of
primitive accumulation points to the process in which labor (which is the use of
the body for a determined amount of time) is turned into a commodity. Acosta
claims that contemporary migration is part of a cycle of post-hegemonic primitive
accumulation. We are witnessing a shift from the proletariat to something else.
Central Americans are produced as exploitable labor by being “excluded,” “freed,”
or “rightless” from the perspective of state and legal apparatuses. By being
transported by drug cartels and falling under the “unlawful status,” sovereignty
denies migrants from legal protections while at the same time enforcing the
law against them. This is a paradoxical form of freedom shaped by the state in
globalization. On the one hand, transnational migration shapes a workforce released
from legal constraints (in the form of regulations). On the other hand, the law is
never completely absent in the permanent threat of deportation.
With the expansion of Mexico as a site for illegal trafficking, migrants have
become a commodity and an alternative source of income for drug cartels. As the
movie reminds us, many migrants have been kidnapped and forced to either pay
a ransom or have a relative in the United States pay for it. The flux of migrants, in
tandem with the drug wars, has turned the migrants into a sacrificial commodity.
As the San Fernando Massacres show, drug cartels are willing to kill migrants,
much like certain commodities can be “dumped” in economic terms when they
are no longer profitable or when it is necessary due to the nature of economic
competition. The notion of enframing, understood as the revealing of every being
as fully quantifiable and ready for consumption, allows us to understand that illegal
means of accumulation, what I call criminal enframing, are not at the margins
but are part and parcel of contemporary capitalism. In other words, expanding
Heidegger’s notion that enframing renders every being fully quantifiable and
hence accessible for consumption, we could say that the contemporary structure
of capitalism increasingly depends on criminal groups for extracting resources,
whether these are raw materials or unregulated labor.

National Allegories, Silenced Geometries

Against the ubiquitous aesthetics of entrapment and enframing in La jaula

de oro, this film also engages with the idea of an outside to capitalist production
through the contrast between the characters of Chauk and Juan. As Quemada-Díez
explains in an interview for En Filme:

Tenemos un mestizo tremendamente individualista, materialista egoísta

y un indígena que tiene una visión más poética del mundo, tampoco sin
idealizarlo, más arraigado en la tierra, más conectado con la naturaleza,
más humano, con valores más espirituales. Y contar una historia del
conflicto de estas dos formas de ver el mundo y provocar la transformación
del protagonista que, a través del encuentro con este indígena, su
José Luis Suárez Morales 153

experiencia de la vida y su visión del mundo se transforma. Y a la vez

que se vaya desmoronando este ideal del sueño americano; empezar
a desmitificar lo que es Estados Unidos, empezar a aumentar nuestra
autoestima. (Transcription is mine.)

The film’s attempt to demystify the American Dream and Mexican

hospitality is hindered by various representational tendencies, from the
romanticization of so-called natural life to the figure of Chauk and even Sara as
extensions of nature and a cosmology outside Western rationalism.9 Despite this,
the film oscillates between a critique of the transnational topography of capitalist
accumulation, one of the leading causes of mass migration, and a longing for culture
to compensate for the waning of the national community. In what follows, I will look
at how the film problematizes the relationship of nature vis-à-vis technology and
how the film uses this conflict to refurbish the foundational narratives of the nation.
While Juan appears driven by a desire for wealth, Chauk remains a
mystery to the viewer, partly because of the linguistic barrier and his inclination
towards other values, such as uninterested friendship and closeness to nature.
This relation to nature and whole-heartedness intensifies in the scene where the
teenagers steal a chicken from a small farm to eat it. Juan, who often plays the role
of the leader of the group, attempts to kill the chicken without success. Chauk,
after being mocked by Juan for saying to the chicken: “Jmet’ik banamil Kolabal”
or “Thank you, mother earth” in Tzotzil, leaves his friend stunned after breaking
the animal’s neck.
On the one hand, this scene anticipates Juan’s future in the United States,
where he will work in a slaughterhouse. On the other, it problematizes the purported
relationship that the indigenous and the mestizo have with nature. At first glance, the
relative ease with which Chauk kills the chicken while at the same time honoring
the bird alludes to the purported closeness that the indigenous have to nature and
that urban mestizos lack. However, upon closer inspection, it is not that Chauk is
outside of technics—it is evident that the Mayan boy understands well what he is
doing and his relationship of exploitation regarding nature. This is not to say that
communal forms of land exploitation are the same as the technified slaughterhouse
at the end of the film. Instead, this means that the purportedly non-modern forms
engaging with nature are only different ways of revealing nature and beings, thus,
distinct technological regimes.
The difference in the abovementioned scene is not an equilibrium with
nature. On the contrary, while Juan cannot confront the ultimate truth about meat
consumption, to kill another living being, Chauk has a higher degree of awareness
regarding the exploitation of nature. In other words, while Chauk is never outside
technics, unlike Juan, he has not forgotten how technics allow him to have an
extractive relation with nature. So, if the indigenous, the purported rejector of
modern technics, is not in harmony with nature but only aware of its relation
of estrangement, in which terms can we speak of a crisis brought to politics by
technology? This leads us to ask whether positing an outside to the caged space
154 Broken Topographies

of the modern state and economic rationalization is still useful to grasp the
topology of contemporary capitalism. Even if we, as the spectator, sympathize with
Chauk, it is very likely that sovereign exclusion and the production of exploitable
and expendable labor already encompasses what we deem as non-capitalist
subjectivities and spaces.
While an outside to technics and capitalism may be hard to sustain, the
film attempts a compensatory gesture against the enframing of the world. Along
with a direct commentary on the production of unregulated labor and migration, Lie
points out that the film’s movement and dynamism, as well as the companionship
and friendship developed by Chauk and Juan throughout the plot, which is referred
to in cinema as the “buddy structure,” bring this movie close to the road trip genre.10
The film presents the viewer with a group of young migrants in which ethnic and
gender differences stand out as opposed to the undifferentiated mass of migrants.
I believe this points to the film’s attempt to bring forth a counter-narrative to the
perils of the regional migration circuits by exploiting tropes of individual freedom
and internal change, that is, of a “coming of age” that the experience of traveling
provokes in the characters.
Juan’s journey, which allows him to gradually overcome or deweaponize
his racism towards Chauk and build a friendship with him, largely in part thanks
to the mediation of Sara, confronts a Mexican audience with its own prejudices.11
This representation of race and gender inscribes this movie in a larger tradition
of modernization narratives that seek, without a dose of violence, to integrate
difference into the construction of national identity in Latin America. This
problematic synthesis of differences is portrayed through Juan’s rejection of
Chauk. However, behind his dislike also lies a competition for access to resources,
including women.
This struggle is evident in the teenagers’ love triangle with Sara, who
simultaneously plays the role of the desired object and mediator of the friendship
and alliance of the kids even after being abducted, as her spectral presence in
Father Solalinde’s shelter suggests (Fig. 6). The bond between Chauk and Juan,
strengthened by Sara’s abduction as well as the hardships of the road, reaches
its climax as they are crossing the border to the United States. When waiting
in a sewer pipe for the border to clear, we are faced with two short monologues
without any background noise or musical score in which both characters express,
in Spanish and Tzotzil, their excitement for their future lives in the United States.
For a moment, we experience a glimpse of a communicative utopia of tolerance,
a dialogical moment without hierarchies or translation in which the differences
between the mestizo and the indigenous share a common goal of progress. Chauk’s
death at the hands of a Minuteman dispels this moment of alliance between the
characters. In this regard, Estrada argues that “In many ways, the film implies
that it is also Chauk’s failure to cross Westernized cultural and social borders,
which impedes him from ultimately reaching the USA” (195). While this critic
argues that because Chauk was never modern enough—he is always mute or in
need of interpreters, as well as presented as wise and pre-modern—he, unlike
José Luis Suárez Morales 155

Juan, is unable to cross to the modern American space. Instead, I argue that this
pre-modernness is actually the condition of possibility—a necessary supplement—
for Juan to become fully modern. The assassination of the indigenous boy and
the sacrificial role of the feminine seem to resemble one of the tragic gestures of
modernity. Once the mestizo, through his exposure to the racialized and feminized
others, embraces values like fraternity and tolerance, his travel companions are
engulfed by the relentless movement of history. Put differently, only after pre-
modern forms of life and the feminine are consumed that the new mestizo subject
can become retrospectively hospitable to difference.
In this regard, the long tradition of national allegories shows that although
the indigenous and the feminine are not suited for becoming the template for a
modern national subject, paradoxically, they are needed as underpinnings of the
nation as long as they are expelled to an idealized past or the domestic realm.
Like Rita Segato has pointed out, this tragic narrative conceals one of the most
totalitarian gestures of nation-building:

El concepto de nosotros se vuelve defensivo, atrincherado, patriótico, y

quien lo infringe es acusado de traición. En este tipo de patriotismo, la
primera víctima son los otros interiores de la nación, de la región, de la
localidad–siempre las mujeres, los negros, los pueblos originarios, los
disidentes. Estos otros interiores son coaccionados para que sacrifiquen,
callen y posterguen su queja y el argumento de su diferencia en nombre
de la unidad sacralizada y esencializada de la colectividad. (49)

As this passage suggests, the construction of a national subject, the

Mexican mestizo or the Guatemalan ladino, and the modern state acceptance
of difference always hide in their interior a consumed other who, in the name of
unity, is forced to assimilate and bear its subaltern position. If, at its height, the
nation-state cast a shadow over the demands of others, what does the demise of
the state mean to this logic of subjugation to the masculine/paternal sovereign
figure? Even if the heinous inside of the state becomes evident and opens a space
for criticism and other voices, this does not seem to threaten its patriarchal logic.
In other words, if masculine, ethnic, and sovereign hierarchies have been
put into question, this has not resulted in the dissolution of the sovereign power
for giving death but rather its reorganization. As Segato argues, the epidemic of
feminicides that continues to ravage Ciudad Juárez is a premonition of the effects of
the decentering of sovereignty in Latin America. According to her, the performance
of violence of feminicide, and we could add against racialized bodies, is a shared
language that binds together the paralegal or “second economy.” For Segato, the
spread of neoliberalism came with a full expansion of the second economy, that
is, of illegal forms of trafficking that nonetheless have become indistinguishable
from the formal economy.
Therefore, another consequence of the current demise of sovereignty is that
instead of having a state-sanctioned market, we now encounter a space of fetterless
156 Broken Topographies

competition between different actors. In the case of Mexico, this is manifested

in the relentless competition for plazas for all sorts of trafficking. These plazas,
as it seems for geopolitical discourse, should not be taken for granted as strategic
economic enclaves in which deaths are only collateral damage of a struggle for
economic power. This is not to say that the economic and the specifics of certain
regions, like Mexico’s border with the US, are not an integral part of determining
which places will be epicenters for trafficking. However, this economic account
of violence does not exhaust how the broken political spatiality of plazas comes
into existence.
This geopolitical approach, advanced by authors like Zavala, forgets that
common ground is needed for antagonism or competition. For a post-national
economy, this common ground is produced by a shared object of consumption,
“nature,” embodied first and foremost in women and the dispensable bodies who
are no longer an ancillary element to war but what binds conflict together. The
grammar of violence towards different bodies becomes the language through
which the dispute over resources is decided, bounds together competitors that
range from state actors to transnational criminal bands. Segato illustrates this
violent competition for bodies and resources as a gendered brotherhood or guild
“una cofradía masculina” (155). While the love triangle between the protagonists
remains only at the symbolic level, we can see how this competition for bodies
looms large over female migrants as Sara tries to pass as a boy and is ultimately
abducted by criminals.
The rise of criminal enframing has contributed to the continuing erosion
of the state’s control over the economy, the sovereign patriarchal order, and what
was left of the nation’s hospitality. These processes have shed light on the fact that
the political does not stand in opposition to technological forces. Contrary to the
narratives that see the state as a restraining force to the technological and market-
driven deterritorialization, it is necessary to begin thinking of patriarchal state
politics as yet another—though in decay—form of technological enframing.12 As
Segato shows, nation-states in Latin America have historically organized around
patriarchal figures the extraction of natural resources and bodies. However, unlike
the openly extractivist language of the market and criminal enterprises, political
language presents itself as the other—depending on the context, the democratic,
communitarian, or legitimate force—that can keep technics in check. The shift
from the nation-state as the main operator of extractivism into a topography of
exploitation of nature and bodies that is also populated by global capital and
criminals is not the erosion of the “political” by technics. It is the historical transit
of state-led enframing, comprised of politics and sovereignty, to another, led by
globalization and crime.
On the contrary, the degradation of the state seems to atomize patriarchy
and turn its repressive apparatuses astray. In other words, instead of the state’s total
control over the others of the masculine subject, like women, nature, and racialized
others, we now have a world akin to an unregulated market, with no ultimate
sovereign to refer to, in which different competitors fight relentlessly for access to
José Luis Suárez Morales 157

these resources. In the film, even if the dispute between Juan and Chauk remains
at the level of the symbolic and even of the innocence of teenagers, this struggle
anticipates the targeted selection of women by competing local sovereignties.
Much like Sara is desired by the two adolescents, women and racialized bodies
are consumed by local authorities, criminal groups, and economic actors (such as
the meat factory that hires undocumented migrants).
Even if it seems for a moment that the sacrificial logic of modernity will
allow the mestizo to embrace modernity and reinstate political unity, perhaps
inadvertently, La jaula de oro shows us that technological enframing has rendered
impossible a return to the old concepts of nation and sovereignty. The protagonists’
moral experiences, triggered by their exposure to natural and cultural diversity
and the binding power of femininity, are continuously coupled with images
of consumption, specifically those associated with meat ingestion and waste
production. From the beginning of the movie, the forces of production are already
at the backdrop of the plot. For instance, when Juan meets Samuel in a landfill
where the latter works as a scavenger––along with an augury of Juan’s future in
the United States––we see that the supposed beginning of the journey is already
the final stage of the productive chain and their personal trip (Fig. 7). Instead of
an outside to capitalist production, the wasteland of Zona 3 is already the place
where the discarded elements of production and consumption end their circulation.
The portrayal of these economic forces undermines the hopes that Juan
could posit as a new national figure that synthesizes differences in the name of
political unity. Unlike this hopeful reading, the film follows its dialogical moment
not only with Chauk’s sacrifice but also with a tragic allegory for migration. The
images of the American slaughterhouse that employs Juan remind us that migrants
who traverse the region like a commodity in freight trains, much like the residues
of production at the slaughterhouse, are expendable by contemporary criminal
enframing. The final scenes show that Juan, who could not kill a chicken, is now
destined to scrape guts off the floor, which evidences the annihilation of any other
possible dialogical instance. The remaining four minutes of the film present us
with the mechanical and repetitive sound of a highway and the machines churning
meat before the music starts and accompanies the image of the snow falling
and the protagonist looking at the night sky (Fig. 8). Opposite to the idea of the
recomposition of a sovereign order, we are presented with a technified geometry
in which language, and by the same token politics, is progressively silenced by the
mechanical rhythm of production. The humming of the machinery is a reminder
that technological language at the end of modernity, whether in its spectacular or
criminal iterations, attempts to silence any possible opening through the testimonies
of migrants while, at the same time, it feeds on the horror of the new forms of
primitive accumulation.
158 Broken Topographies

Beyond Crisis

Recognizing a crisis at the border has not meant a turning point for a
solution to this problem. On the contrary, the failure to solve immigration casts
doubt on the efficiency behind the sovereign act that is the nomenclature of a
crisis for certain events. For Janet Roitman, a crisis never describes an objective
condition, e.g., the arrival of minors at the border or an economic collapse, but
a demand directed at changing the course of historical events. Instead, a crisis
posits a historical question, a look backward that challenges the circumstances
that have led us to a given point, but most importantly, the call for a resolution,
a break apart from the past and the present. Conversely, a crisis is a linguistic
construction through which a certain situation is addressed. Identifying a crisis is
not an objective event but always a second-degree observation; that is, it is not a
transparent appraisal of the world external of the subject but the language through
which a speaker approaches the outer world. In North America, punitive policies
have not attacked the causes of immigration that, combined with a myriad of local
factors, make migration unlikely to stop. Their failure also casts doubt on the
efficiency of the state’s power to name and act upon a crisis. By the same token,
migration can help us problematize what we mean when we say that there is a
crisis at the US-Mexico border or, more generally, that globalization has thrown
the political into crisis.
As we unpack what is at stake in migration and narco-violence, the
rise of criminal and technological enframing calls into question what is left of
politics. If politics can no longer forge mythologies that halt the relentless spread
of technological and criminal enframing, it might not be worth using the concept
of crisis to refer to its current state. For the notion of crisis to properly work,
an end to this crucial period—a resolution to this crisis—is necessary. As we
have seen in La jaula de oro, a common solution to the crisis of politics is the
recomposition of a sovereign subject of history as a force that can contain the most
destructive tendencies of technological development. However, if modern politics
and contemporary capital are only different forms of organizing extraction and
“unconcealing” of beings in Heidegger’s terms, what is really in “crisis” that is
not the political as an ontological dimension. While there is no denying that we
are experiencing the increasing rationalization and technification of the world, we
would make a mistake by arguing that politics has fallen from a state of nature
into one of technification. La jaula de oro depicts globalization and technology’s
erasure of mestizaje narratives, by which the Mexican body politic harmonized
ethnic and gender differences under the pretense of a harmonious synthesis, as
devastating. What remains interesting is that many criticisms (rightfully) directed
towards neoliberalism often unintendedly naturalize the state-led organization of
Mexican society and become oblivious to the fact that this was another form of
enframing of beings.
La jaula de oro is an allegory that problematizes the belief that technology
and globalization are the culprits of the perpetual crisis and dissolution of politics.
José Luis Suárez Morales 159

The film portrays the region as simultaneously homogenized and fragmented by

a transnational capitalism that produces a workforce outside the state’s purview.
The film’s temporality, the progressive friendship between the protagonists that
allows tolerance to grow but is also the ground for the struggle over Sara, points
to the longing for the return of the state’s order. However, even if Juan as a figure
of a new mestizo is transformed by natural sceneries and racial and gendered
differences, the exploitation of human and natural resources sheds light on the
fact that modern politics, although presented as the other of technology, is another
historically determined technological regime and, therefore, enframing. As such,
it is possible to think of the “crisis of politics” as something other than its crisis
or its destitution but as the rupture of one technological epoch and its replacement
by another.

Notes

1
Along with the San Fernando Massacres, attacks on Cadereyta (2012),
Güemez (2014), and Camargo (2021) have also been registered.
2
The Mexican military had, for the most, stayed away from fighting drug
traffickers. The army’s involvement since the 1990s mainly came from pressure
from the United States and the belief that the military was less corrupt than police
forces. As it turns out, deserters joined drug cartels (like the Zetas, formed by elite
soldiers), increasing criminals’ fire and tactical power. As Luis Astorga notes, while
Calderón’s government continued this trend, the failure of his Guerra contra las
drogas—violence increased starkly during his term under every metric—came
from an incorrect belief that the presidency still held an immense amount of power,
increasing military activity and his unwillingness to change this strategy. Astorga
argues that the collapse of the PRI and electoral democracy—local governments
were held by different parties from that of the president—created a weak presidency
and disjointed the Mexican state, which could not subjugate drug trafficking to
political power as it did during the 20th century. As Óscar Martínez shows, this
expansion of criminal activities gave drug traffickers the opportunity to forcefully
take immigration routes and occupy them to smuggle drugs but also to profit from
immigration. Although Astorga argues that the loss of control from the Mexican
state is an unintended consequence of a weak democratic transition, the state’s
lack of grip over criminal forces points to a larger trend in globalization. Although
the state remains the strongest actor in the topography of criminal accumulation,
it is not the only one in an increasingly complex global space.
3
As immigration from neighboring countries increased during the last
years, Mexico has been pressured by its northern neighbor to turn its territory on
the border wall protecting the United States—through policies such as Remain in
Mexico, Trump’s threat of imposing tariffs, or by becoming a de-facto third safe
country. This hemispheric policy change, which in turn, stems from a change
in migratory and drug trafficking patterns and the economic integration of the
160 Broken Topographies

region, has profoundly altered Mexico’s role within the concert of nations. This
situation, however, should not undermine Mexico’s self-representation vis-à-vis the
region and the diminishing role of the state during globalization. The erasure of
the Estrada Doctrine of non-intervention during the conservative Partido Acción
Nacional governments, the deployment of the military at its southern border, and
countless acts of negligence and unwillingness to protect migrants from criminals
and the infamous Instituto Nacional de Migración make evident that Mexico has
taken into its own hands the exclusion of immigrants. Exclusion is not only aimed
at foreigners. As the discrimination that the character of the Mayan Chauk in La
jaula de oro experiences, the production of difference is also internal: Central
Americans’ exclusion is, in turn, dependent on the racialization and exclusion of
the Mexican popular classes.
4
Thomas Deveny shows that the extensive cinematic production about
migration to the United States (over a hundred commercial films produced in Mexico
by the 1990s, most of them released in the second half of the twentieth century) has
largely ignored the Central American plight. Themes such as the mistreatment of
Central Americans or solidarity by Mexicans have been overshadowed by others
as the criticism of “assimilation” by Mexican Americans, the maltreatment of
Mexicans in the United States, and the defense of Latinos’ civil rights.
5
The film’s realism is reinforced by shooting the film chronologically,
following the geographical and temporal order of the trip from Guatemala to the
United States.
6
As Nadia Lie points out, in the scene in which the protagonists have
pictures of them taken with North American motifs, such as a hand-painted
background of New York City, Juan and Chauk disguise themselves as a cowboy
and an American Indian, respectively. This sequence triggers associations between
Chauk’s murder and the histories of genocide of indigenous populations. Quemada-
Díez has expanded his commentaries about the American Dream to mention that
this piece is also a critique of the still underlying Manifest Destiny of American
modernity (“La jaula de oro,” 196-99).
7
The long success of this song’s imagery is proof of the identification
of many migrants with these experiences. So much so that the title and theme of
La jaula de oro were reproduced in the 1987 film directed by Sergio Vejar and a
Televisa soap opera. Conversely, the election of the title Golden Dreams for the
US market, apart from referencing a dialogue in which Juan lies to the Mexican
police officers about being from “Sueños Dorados, Tabasco,” echoes the promise
of the American Dream. In addition to referencing other cultural products, the
word jaula triggers an immunological reading. A cage could be interpreted as an
instrument that serves as a safeguard for a living being. At the same time, it is a
device that sets strict limits and could even harm that which it is supposed to protect.
8
In 2019, the Mexican government apologized to four indigenous from
Chiapas who were deported and tortured in 2015. This event, in turn, shows how
the othering of Central Americans deeply resonates with the exclusions of Mexico’s
nation-building process.
José Luis Suárez Morales 161

9
In an article in Cine político en México (1968-2017), the film’s director
hovers around some of the same ideas, when describing how he explained actor
Rodolfo Domínguez the death of his character Chauk: “porque eres el personaje
que todos van a amar y para expresar con contundencia lo que queremos expresar
debes morir en esta ficción que es la película, porque tu muerte permitirá el
renacimiento de Juan y quizá de otros al vivir este momento” (203-04). The topic
of sacrifice, even a metaphorical one, keeps hunting this film.
10
Lie points out that the buddy structure is a common trope in road trip
movies that allows for classical framing and ongoing dialogues. Buddies in these
films are a way to explore human relationships, and when it comes to its typical
configuration, two male adolescents, it is a way to explore friendships as much as
rivalries that emerge within them. For Lie, this movie exploits the buddy structure
to explore loss, which is all too common in migration stories (Chauk’s death triggers
feelings of loss after the spectator has become familiar with the dynamic between
protagonists.) In addition to this, this piece points out that this movie also highlights
the rivalries that emerge within road trip friendships, particularly as an allegory
for the (male) competition for (feminized) resources, which, in turn, allegorizes the
ongoing struggle amongst different actors, such as the state, meat factories, and
criminals, for natural and human resources.
11
Gareth Williams argues that the last scene shows us the void at the
heart of our social institutions: “the groundlessness—to the ex-nihilo—of world
and of world as the incommensurable withdrawal into the ex-scription of home,
subjectivity, dwelling, abode, origin, nation, identity, etc.” (156). Williams argues
that this different understanding of being deweaponizes and transfers (although
we don’t know exactly where) Juan’s anxiety about so-called progress. Though I
agree with Williams’s critique of the representational tendencies in narco-fiction,
we must think about how the modern political narratives surreptitiously reintroduce
themselves even as they are seemingly denarrativized. The demobilization of
Juan’s anxiety is ultimately built on the repetition of a nationalist narrative, that of
mestizaje and nationalism that marked much of the 20th-century Latin American
state-building.
12
For Carl Schmitt, the state is in charge of preventing all-out violence
within a specific community through the monopoly of violence. During modernity,
technology and commerce progressively eroded the state’s capacity to produce
a homogeneous political space. Once these forces are unleashed, the state goes
from a monopoly of public life to resisting––a katechon or restrainer—the all-
encompassing power of technology and commerce.

Works Cited

Acosta, Abraham, “Crisis and Migration in Posthegemonic Times: Primitive

Accumulation and Labor in La Bestia.” Dialectical Imaginaries:
Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of
162 Broken Topographies

Neoliberalism. Ed. Marcial González and Carlos Gallego. Ann Arbor:

U of Michigan P, 2018. 241-62.
Astorga, Luis. ¿Qué querían que hiciera?: Inseguridad y delincuencia organizada
en el gobierno de Felipe Calderón. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2015.
Curry, Richard. “The Migration Genre in La jaula de oro: Voids and Virtues.”
Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 36 (2018): 47-68.
Deveny, Thomas. Migration in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema. Lanham:
Scarecrow Press, 2012.
Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Trans. Zakiya
Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
Estrada, Alicia. “Decolonizing Maya Border Crossing in El Norte and La Jaula
de Oro.” The Latin American Road Movie. Ed. Verónica Garibotto and
Jorge Pérez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 175-93.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New
York: Harper Perennial, 2013. 3-35.
Lie, Nadia. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis:
Harper Collins, 2017.
“Ofrece comisionado del INM disculpa pública a cuatro indígenas del estado de
Chiapas” Instituto Nacional de Migración, 7 Nov. 2019, https://www.gob.
mx/inm/prensa/ofrece-comisionado-del-inm-disculpa-publica-a-cuatro-
indigenas-del-estado-de-chiapas-226590. Accessed 5 Jan. 2020.
Quemada-Díez, Diego. La jaula de oro. Sol y Luna Films, 2013.
—. “La jaula de oro.” Cine político en México (1968-2017). Ed. Adriana Estada,
et. al. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. 195-216.
—, et al. La jaula de oro-Guion. Mexico City: Los cuadernos de cinema, 2015.
Revista En Filme. “Entrevista con Diego Quemada-Díez (La Jaula de Oro).”
YouTube, uploaded by EnFilme, 8 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fbZLwaT5rNQ.
Roitman, Janet. Anticrisis. Durham: Duke UP, 2013.
Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum
Europaeum. Trans. G. L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006.
Segato, Rita. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2016.
Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E.
Smith. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.
Williams, Gareth Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation,
and the Post-Sovereign State. New York: Fordham UP, 2021.
Zavala, Oswaldo. Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México.
Barcelona: Malpaso, 2018.
José Luis Suárez Morales 163

Figure 1. Juan walking next to soldiers.

Figure 2. Children playing with toy guns.

Figure 3. A wall with pictures of desaparecidos.

164 Broken Topographies

Figure 4. Juan staring at an industrial park.

Figure 5. A group of migrants on a freight wagon.

Figure 6. Juan and Chauk mistake another migrant for Sara.

José Luis Suárez Morales 165

Figure 7. Juan meeting Samuel at a landfill.

Figure 8. Juan working at a slaughterhouse.

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