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    of 21
    and the Racial Problem in La Llorona (1933) by Ramén Peon Sabino Luévano-Ortega In his remarkable study on nationalism, Benedict Anderson rejects the .. assumption that modern nations have a unique and immutable essence. Instead, Anderson argues that nations are imagined communities, a socio-cultural construct articulated by different groups of power based ‘on political needs, economic interests and specific historical circum- stances.' Following this premise, one would infer that societies as het- erogencous as the Mexican society: are markedly imagined. Unlike the European national formation’ processes,” as Agustin Basave rightly claims, in Latin America, the State was formed first and then the Nation, since most countries lacked linguistic, racial, ethnic and cultural uni- formity, which are fundamental elements in the construction of modern ‘states and nations.? Building a national identity in a country such as Mexico, full of racial, ethnic, regional and linguistic contrasts, was one of the main cultural programs of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Which conceived itself as an epic utopia that would create a more egalitarian Mexico after the more than 30-year regime of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911). Although the Porfiriato brought unprecedented economic develop- ment to Mexico, a small elite monopolized the country’s material re~ sources. Most Mexicans, who at that time.were rural peasants, laborers and’ ranchers, did not improve their economic ‘worsened when the hacendados—primarily white and mestizas—began to invade and seize communal land belonging to indigenous aid mestizo. communities. Economic inequality, predatory capitalism and the re- ‘gime’s. political mistakes were the main factors that triggered the first social and massive Revolution ‘of she 20th century. After ten years of war, the revolutionary victors founded an idcologically eclectic corpo- rate state under a single-party rule. Through a combination of varied Political strategies such as social reforms that benefited the masses. cooptation of intellectuals and the middle.class, and intimidation and fepression of political opponents, the new ruling elite governed Mexico for 70 years." During the first 40 years of post-revolut country experienced an economic, intellectual and artistic renaissan DOL: 10.4324/978 1003 174134-7 Ce ee mm eet a ae 80 Sabino Ludvanc» One of the post-rev regime's main political ambitions was - ereating a national identiry:thac included the masses, hitherto expelled from’ the national ethos. This intense social process had a vertical character that worked from the top-down and the bottom-up. From the bottom-up, indigenous peoples, unionized workers and the new. re- volutionary armiy participated intensely i creating a new national ethos; and from the top-down, artists and intellectuals assumed the position of educators of the masses. Cinema became one of the main tools of na- tional education. Its privileged position stems from the fact that, as Julia ‘Tuiién argues, cinema “muestra el orden de lo cotidiano de una mahera privilegiada: los objetos, tos decires, las modas, pero también expresa el imaginario. Alude al mundo piblico, y también a lo més privado, que son los anhelos” (shows the order of everyday life in a privileged way: ‘objects, sayings, fashions, but also expresses the imaginary, I alludes to the public world, and also to the most private yearnings).'* While the * expression of the imaginary is not unique to cinema, its social reach, > being a mass phenomenon, makes it an effective vehicle for dis- seminating ideas, valucs, customs and idiosyncrasies. But despite cinema's virtues in narrating the nation or creating its ima- gery, it is also a site of conflictual ideas, where cultural anxieties or con- tradictions are exposed. On the one hand,-Mexican cinema created and recreated images and ideas about the imagined national essence, from natural landscapes to popular customs, which seduced both national and Latin American viewers, But on the other hand, its main ideological foundation, composed of discourses on cquality, mestizaje and social jus- tice, unconsciously exhibited the contradictions of the post-revolutionary Project. By embracing the myth of mestizaje, the regime masked the ex- ploitation and marginalization of indigenous communities. By creating massive state-affiliated labor unions, the regime also promoted clientelism and a corrupt clite of leaders that amassed immense forrunes at the expense of the workérs. The post-revolutionary state's promotion of equality gen- crated benefirs in many regiorts of the country, but at the same time pi- geonhole women in traditional roles."It appears that the aim to build and seal: immutable national identities has always left unclosed spaces and hidden fissures that strain the relationship between ideals and. reality. This essay explores these discursive contradictions of -the .post- revolutionary national project as represented in,a film that has not at- tracted enough critical aention, La Llorona, one. of the first Mexican horror feature films, which was digected by Ramén Pedn. My thesis is twofold: it seeks to demonstrate that La Llorona could be read as a fundamental issues: the insertion of women in public life and mestitaj.~ ‘These two topics were of utmost importance in the construction of na- tional identity during the post-revolutionary period. Regarding the first Conte id The Representation of Women 81 ‘one, on its surface, La Llorona seems to pigconhole women in the dualistic archetypes of the virgin-prostitute, which became prevalent in Mexican Golden Age Cinema. , the character of La Llorona does not fully stay in that space, and she escapes to a polysemic critical territory that deconstructs.the symbolic structures of Mexican patriarchy as represented in other films from the same period. Concerning the racial modern Mexico that attempts to distance itself past by accepting and elevating mestizaje, reason and science. But at the same time, it shows that being white—or aspiring to be white—continues to be the best strategy for climbing the ‘social ladder in a society where, allegedly, racism no longer exists. The Problem of Women in La Llorona: Beyond the ” “Chingaguadalupe” La Llorona’s sory is one of the oldest and most famous legends in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Its origin dates back to colonial times. The Icgend’s core is about a woman who, after being betrayed and deserted by her lover, in a fit of sadness and rage, murders her child, only to repent later and take her own life. As generally happens in legends, the woman's and man’s origin, their race and social status, « the method she uses to commit the murder—or murders—change de- pending on many factors such as region, country, historical time, among other elements. The film privileges two versions of the legend. In tht first version, the characier is a Tlaxcaltecan princess, Dofia Ana Jicotencal, who, after being betrayed by a powerful Spanish man, decides to kill theie child, Following the deed, she, commits suicide by plunging’an in- digenous dagger into her heart. The second version describes La Llorcna as La Malinche. According to the film: “la raza vencida, considerindola culpable de la derrota, concentré todo su odio en ella y 3u hifo. Entonces 1 éonquistador, viendo en: peligro la vida-del hijo fruto de sus amores con La Malinche, se vio obligado a quitirsclo” (The defeated race, finding her guilty of their defeat, focused all its hatred on her and her son. Then the conquistador, seeing his son's life, fruit of his love affair with La Malinche, in danger, was forced to take him away). When La Lorona-Matinche realizes thar she-mnay not recover her aot, ahe curses the descendants of Hemdn Cortés, and then commits suicide with the same method as the first L Since shen, according to the legend, the ghost of La orona, searching for her dead child, haunts Mexico. The film is structured in two narrative times, the colonial past and the present (1930s in Mexico), The protagonists of the story from the \Acuila-Cortes family are Dr. Acutia, his wife—supposedly a descendant of Herndn young chi his elderly father-in-law and art perotl TT pair Hod and receaved through the iesdicg a |two ancient books belonging to Di, Acufa's father-in-law, who wants to 4 #2 Sabino Luévano-Ontega -eomvince the doctor of an old curse that haunts the Cortés farnily, where the first-born children mysteriously disappear, once they reach the age of fout."As Dr. Acuiia’s son has just turned four years old, the grandfather warns him about the imminent threat. Dr. Acuia considers the legend to hhe mere superstition, but the house gradually becomes the scené of 2 struggle between the past”and the presegt, where supposed descendants of La Malinche continue to sacrifice the offepring of Hernin Cortés in revenge fo having snatched her son during the conquest. During the opening credits, the background image shows a sculpeure of an indigenous goddess in the form of a skull. Although mostly be- Jonging to the European tradition, the musical hackground is interrupted from time to time by indigenous drums. The first scene of the Film fea- tures a middle-aged man walking down a deserted street in Mexico City. "The man appears to be intoxicated and tries to light a cigarette. When he arrives at the front gate of a colonial house, he hears a high-pitched wail that seems to descend from the sky, The man panics and, victim of a heart attack, falls dead to the ground. References to the indigenous universe, wuch a8 the viwual archive of Ane deities, the Indian drums and the character of La Llorona, an- ticipated what Charles Ramirer Berg calls the aesthetics of classical Mexican cinema, which emenped in the-tmid-1930s and reached its apogee in the mid-19$0s.” Among, the various elements that Ramirez erg mentions as characteristic of this aesthetic style, three are funda- mental: its opposition 10 Hollywood aesthetics, the search for cinematic ‘images in the Mexican pictorial tradition and a nationalist aesthetic * impulse." According to Ramirez Berge ’ In large measure, the CMC's (Mexican Classical Cinema) opposition stemmed from a nationalistic impulse that was rooted in the 1910-20 fevolution and that led to a corresponding revolution in the arts, Turning’ their backs on European and North American influences, Menican artists sought to discover, define, and promote a native aesthetic.” ey ‘This nationalist impulse to create a native aesthetic led to a tendency to romanticize national landscapes and to the uncritical exaltation’ of popular archetypes, namely the charrés, the northern cowboys, the teas especially the ancient Indian civilizations), the urban rogue, etc. ‘All these elements constituted the core of what Alicia Azuela calls “las premisas identitarias sustantivas del nacionalismo [cultural]” (the sub- filmmakers of this period relied on these “identity premises” to narrate the- nation and the supposed essence of Mexican identity. Largely influenced Wy einai a i murat fen Gomsone, rose beh . The Representsnon of Women 83 Mexican muralism and classic cinema cemented an incredible public risual archive that would have a profound impact on Mexican imaginary. In this < : cultural junction between the regime's pBlitical needs and the arts aiming to narrate the nation, La Llorona’s visual aesthetic can be located. The reference to the indigenous past or the preference for national themes, such as folk legends or archetypes, was one of the most salient aesthetic strategies of later Mexican cinema to connect with the public. In this sense, as Joanne Hershfield mentions, “filrhs function’ much as his- torical myths do: to provide singular, linear, unbroken chains of meaning. to historical subjects divided by material relations of class, ethnicity, and gender™.'? Cinema aimed to create an imaginary space where the nation’s different and contrasting clements could be self-recognized as a commu- nity. Those “unbroken chains of meaning” also functioned as a political | strategy to bind the nation after the traumatic and violent event of the | Revolution, which left around one million dead. A wounded and frag- mented nation urgently needed foundational narratives to restructure itself | into an imagined community, Unlike the Parfiriato (1876-1911), which attempted to develop a nation constructed upon almost insurmountable * social and racial hierarchies, with ‘the Mexican Revolution, especially ¥ during the presidency of Lizaro Cardenas (1934-1940), the development project became more dynamic. Since the masses were organized and - ‘duded in the State-project, the Revolution’s social objectives obtained Varying degrees of success depending on. regional contexts.'? Through a a tionalization and tlic creation of robust public institutions, Cardenismo laid the foundations for developing a close relationship berween the masses and the government. Unfortunately, later on this relationship would be- ‘come clientelist and corrupt. However, despite the Mexican, Revolution’s undoubted benefits i * brought to the popular classes, the project was founded on contradictory discursive principles. Discourses on mestizaje and radical equality. be- came the founding myths of the new siation, These ideas were not j ‘empty ideologies. As Pecer Wade argues, in post-colonial Latin American societies, especially where miscegenation has been massive and became a State-sponsored ideology—such as in Mexico and Brazil—racism and i : ‘mesticaje gs hand in hand: : ‘The existence of mestizos, of racial ambiguity, of interracial marriages, of the absence of clearly defined racialized groups in_ ‘many contexts-all these things are real aspects of people's lived experience, alongaide the experience of both practicing and being the target of racisin,'* This is precisely one of the contradictions of mestizaje as a political ideology that has) been studied and denounced by contemporary S impensé ot non-dit, in short, 84 Sabino Luévano-Ortega + Mexicah intellectuals such as Roger Batra and Pedro Ange! Palou.'* Asa lived experience and social discourse, mestizaje has clear and positive repertussions On a better social coexistence. However, on the other hand, it does not fully challenge the Mexican colorist and racist struc- ture. The revolutionary ideology of radical equality was also victim of the same coritradiction; ft created bettgr economic: conditions for the masses—although this varied dramatically from region to region—but at the'same time it did not escape from a patriarchal and macho logic that excluded women from full citizenship and pigeonholed them into tra- ditional roles. : In La Elorona, these. contradictions underlie the ‘text's immediate surface, where the political unconscious resides. This concept, although it was conceived originally by Frederic Jameson ¢o analyze literary texts, also has’ great potential to ‘dialogue with cinematographic. texts. According to Jameson, “the literary structure, far from being completely realized on any one of its levels tilts powerfully into the underside or 0 the very political unconscious of the text”.' A text, whether literary or cinematographic, is a palimpsest of multi-layered subtexts. In principle, itis part of an artistic tradition with a specific history and, aesthetics, Additionally, all texts possess non- artistic elements, such as political discourses, mentalities and ideologies that filter and cut through their aesthetic layers affecting intended meanings. Language in any case, written or spoken, always “means more than what one wants ito mean”, as Teresa de Lauretis argued; language is like as 2 tapestry with different layers of fabric, all interwoven, in ~ which it is always possible to find new and hidden connections and meanings independent from authorial intentions."” < ‘ La Hlorona intends to be a horror film about the famous Mexican legend. As is usually the case with the horror genre, it seeks to generate an. aesthetic experience of vicarious fear, danger and mystery in the viewer by staging the ancient archetype of the struggle of good against ‘vil This would be the hegemonic surface of the text. However, there are fissures in its apparent sealed exterior, forces of contradictign, the non- di chat refers to its political unconscious marked by the film's historical ‘context. Among the many fissures, the problem of women and mestizaje ‘occupy an essential place. To this end, one could argue that even though women occupied active and decisive spaces in the wartime stage df the Mexican Revolution, once the fray was aver, those. spaces were closed—although others would open up later, The soldaderas, for ox- ample, as Christine Arce notes, “were not just pathetic, dutiful camp | followers; they rescripted traditional gender roles, and in their perfor- mative language created a radical space where women and men often fought side by side and maintained fluid sexual relations”,'* The war- herd the ender onder by creating conditions that momentarily opened up spaces previously unthinkable for women. However, Mexican cinema Conteuc ‘ The Representation of Women 85 of the 1930s, imbued with the masculinist logic of the post-revolutionary regime, rarely showed intgrest in the stories of the soldaderas or other women who acquired for themselves active positions during the Revolution and challenged traditional gender roles.'” Later’ cinematic representations generally pigconholed women into the dualistic archetype that Roger Bartra called the “Chingaguadalupe”.”? “The neologism is composed of two nouns. The first, of popular origin, was raised by Octavio Paz in his famous essay El aberinto de la soledad.”' Pax makes a semantic and cultural reflection of the terms “la chingada™ and “chingar™. The former refers to the raped indigenous women during the conquest and the latter to the act of rape. Paz locates the origin of both terms in the figure of La Malinche, who played an ewsential role as a translator in the conquest, according to the Spanish chronicler and con- quistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. The chronicler mentions La Malinche, whom he calls Dofa Marina after being baptized and turned into Catholicism, more than 60 times in his opus magnum, Historia verdaders de la conquista de la Nueva Espana, His constant references to her are, testimony to the great impression that this Indigenous woman caused on the Spanish conquistadors, and especially on Hemin Cortés, of whom she was a counselor, translator and lover. Apparently, Dofia Marina, with another 20 women, was given to Cortés as a gift from a local indigenous . chief or cacique. Diaz del Castillo describes Dofia Marina as a “gran ca- cica” (lady of great distinction), “de buen parecer y entremetida y de- senvuelta” (good looking, 4 confident).* La Matinche was a slave, but as soon as she realized that her beauty, intelligence and skills, were held in high regard by the conquistadors, she turned the situation to her advantage. Despite the fact that she was trapped into two forms of oppressive patriarchy beyond her power, La Malinche, who: procreated one of the first mestizos in New Spain with Hemdn Cortés, has ‘passed into'the Mexican imaginary as the treacherous woman who sells herself to the foreign invader. This is the archetype of betrayal and the bad woman thar Mexican women must reject ar all costs, The other noun, Guadalupe, is the opposite archetype of La Chingada. Ir refers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, considered.the Patron Saint of co- Jonial and independent Mexico. If the first woman is the symbol of impurity and feminine contamination, the second is the symbol of purity, of the motherly, a-sexual, self-sacrificing woman who intercedes and sacrifices herself for her children. Julia ‘Tufién summarizes this dualistic archetype étressing the central role ir plays in Mexican culture: Eva y Maria han sido los paradigmas en la construcci6n de género en México. Estas figuras han conformado un modelo que se impone y desde ef que se mide la conducta de las mujeres de carne y hueso. En ‘nuestro pais han tomado a menudo el nombre de Guadalupe y de Malinche. (Eve and Mary have been the’ main paradigms in the 86 Sabino Luévano-Ortega coristruction of gender in Mexico. These figures have shaped a model that is imposed on real-life women and from which their behavior is jndged. In our country they have often taken the name of Guadalupe and Malinche.?? This trope has been exaggtrated and alsg deconstructed, and today ithas © little or no impact on contemporary Mexican cinema. Nonetheless, during the:Golden Age period, it did have’ significant importance, as is well 'demonstrated by the works of Sergio de la Mora (2006), Carlos Bonfil (1994), Charles Ramfrez Berg (1992) and Joanne Hershfield (1996), among many others?* . Eva and Maria, Guadalupe and Malinche, are, therefore, the proto- types of proper and improper feminine conduct in which Mexican pa- triarchy, closely linked to Mediterranean and Catholic patriarchy, seeks to regulate, monitor and punish women’s behavior through the di- © chotomy of extreme impurity, which is rejected, and extreme purity, :: which is venerated. As one of the earliest antecedents of Golden Age Me Cinema, PeGn’s.film explores this dichotomy through the horror genre, which soime researchers have referred to as a visceral or “body genre”! ‘This anatomic corporealicy plays a significant role in La Llorona, since it ascribes further layers of signification to the action. Contrary to other genres, such as comedy or drama entirely accepted by the ciudad letrada (Angel Rama), horror remains relatively marginal, Its status as a pariah genre, on the other hand, allows for greater creative freedom and for the exploration of themes that conventional genres rarely analyze in depth, ~ namely extreme violence, deviant sexual relations, disease, incest, racial taboos, among athers. In other words, several horror cinema subgenres explore the universe of the abject. For Julia Kristeva the category of the abject is that which is opposed to the self and tothe cultural categories that make it possible. The abject is, says Kristeva, “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite””* The abject is the excluded, the radical other that, in his ‘otherness, defines and delimits the ego. In that sense, the abject functions a8 a safeguard of hegemonic culture, That is to say, conceiving the other as radically different from the self isa strategy of individual and cultural © reaffirmation. The abject resembles a dialectic without synthesis, Where the self and the other, where cleanliness and filth, where the proper and the improper, the pure and the impure, reject each other ad infinitum and are defined-by exclusionary opposition. For Kristeva, the mother is one of the central figures of abjection, since the child, born and nurtured in a patriarchal order that seeks the nce of the masculine, has to ‘eject her in order to enter the world of culture.”” Rejecting the mother, . ‘especially for the male subject, implies rejecting—or at least keeping in line—all the elements codified by patriarchy as feminine, . The Representation of Women 87 L In most popular horror films, the figure of abjection would be the seorslty, sod ail thec civihenon mum becp andar Comrel sarcerd . disintegration. When thefe monsters arg women, they fully occupy the abject dve to the fascination and leer that the ferasle figure hes his. torically efigendered in the male’s psyche. In one of the first works on hs tela foal of srtmcn lo net sodeced on Ped Geuee soir ts ie fear of castration, but also to the power of women to generate hfe and | death by embodying vital cyclical proceses that involve the production of various bodily fluids, which are considered taboo in Western culture | ~ and must be kept in the private sphere. Such is the case of menstruation | or milk. For Linda Williams, in horror films there is always a certain identifi- cation between the monster and women, since both are marked by the | sign of otherness and, one could add, the abject. According to Wilhams, “the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male: In this difference, he is remarkably ike the woman inthe eyes ofthe traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency”.2” Monsters and women in horror cinema have in common being constructed as excess from: the ~ wpasculine gaze, that is, excess of fish, excess of sensations, emotions, and excess of biological functions that imply complex physical grans- formations. This is one of the reasons that explains the celebration and warning of several myths regarding women's transformative capacity, ed in the figure of the witch, who can take animal forms. In La Llorona’s case, she is capable of transforming hersélf into a spirit. and constantly returns to the world of the living. Her weeping, her story, and her body are constructed a8 monstrous due to her excesses. The adjective Llorona (weeping) implies precisely the excess. Not only docs she cry, but she cries intensely, ceaselessly, in a particular chilling manner that could cause the death of those who stumble upon her, such as the anonymous character that dies in the first sequence of the film. In all the scenes. and sequences in which La Llorona appears, either through i analepsis or,in the present, she is Uepicted as a character of overflowing 1 emotions; a marginal inhabitant between the limits of reason and mad- ness, As argued by some masculinity researchers such as historians Peter N. Stearns and George L. Mosse, the excessive expression of emotions has been codified in the West, at least since the 19th century, as feminine- or proper to the lower social classes: According to these authors, after the Industrial Revolution, new gender configurations emerged, and men belonging to the privileged classes were required to contain and control “88 Sabino Luévano-Ontega ‘excestive emotions, including sexual passion and anger.” As a social construct heavily informed by masculine subjectivity, the character of La Llorona would be the feminine opposite to this gender configuration— the unrestrained: emotior’, which overQows in uncontrolled: crying oF violent and irrational actions. In the ike sequence where La Llorona appears full-length, the camera captures her in a colonial house in Mexico City, kneeling beside her sleeping infant son's bed. She is crying discreetly, and she wipes her rears with a white handkerchief, After Don Rodrigo offers her bis arm, Daiia ‘Ana stands up, and together they walk to the center of the room, where they begin to talk abour a trip Don Rodrigo will have to make and the fact that he has not yet fulfilled his promise to give his last name to their son: DORA ANA: ‘Otra vez 0s vais, Don Rodrigo. Creo que ya no me e amas como antaio. DON RODRIGO: No Digas eso, por Dios, Dofia Ana; bien sabéis que este viaje no depende de mi voluntad. Mi mayordomno requicre Ini presencia, es cuestion de DONA ANA: Lo pero marchdis, quién sabe por cudnto’ tiempo, y aun no me habéis cumplido Ia promesa de reconocer a nuestro hijo y darle el nombre al Pz que tiene derecho. DONA ANA: - _ You arc leaving again, Don Rodrigo. I don'tghink - you love me as you used DON RODRIGO: Don't say that, for God's sake, Dofa Ana; you A well know that this trip docs not depend on my will. My administrator requires my presence; it’s a question of money. DONA ANA: I know, but you are leaving, wha, knows for how long, and you have fot yet fulfilled your promise to recognize our son and give him the name to which he is entitled to, Don Rodrigo replies that his “position and ancestry" prevents him from, ‘acting hastily, ro. which Dofa Ania, answers that she is ‘of Tlaxcalrecan nobility and thar her son has a double right to bear a clean name, After a sequence of closed-up shors typical of the Golden Age Mexican melo- drama, where the lovers faces, filed with emotion, are exalted, Don Rodrigo leaves the house. : ‘The climax erupts when Don Rodrigo fails to keep his promise to give his son a name and marrics a woman of his social and racial starus, thus betraying Dofia Ana. Believing that her son will be taken away from her, she says t0 herself that she would rather have her child dead than give The Representation of Women 89 to Don Rodrigo. The camera captures the infanticide through the ‘of Dota Ana scibbing her sog to death with an indigenous dagger. After the murder, she walks out onto the balcony to confront and mack Don Rodrigo with a sinister laugh. Then, she commits suicide by stabbing herclf inthe heart withthe same dagsr de used ro bil hee Subsequently, her spirit leaves her body, thereby beginning the long and ghostly journey of grief throughout Mexico, characterized by a high- itched and piercing lament. The story of Doda Ana is told in about 25 minutes. In practically all the scenes and sequences, she appears as a woman of excessive passions and emotions, an element that has not only been exploited by melodrama but also by horror films. i constructed through extreme emotions of anger and a desire for revenge after they suffer a traumatic experience of violence and humiliation. In a certain way, these films reflect on unjustified and justified violent mon? strosity. They tend to represent male violence as irrational while de- scribing female violence as a reaction and response to it. There is no ambiguity in the representation of the first violence, coded as salvage and animalistic, Still, the second one is presented more ambiguously. On the ~ one hand, female violence is codified as violence or resistance and sur- vival but on the other hand it sometimes replicates the detract of the first violence, such as in the rape and revenge horror film I Spit on Your Grave, For Carol Clover, in slasher movies, the female hero is first a victim of salvage male violence, but then goes across a narrative arc, tums the tables and “she herself becomes-a kind of monstrous hero—hero in- sofar as she has risen against and defeated the forces of monstrosity, monster insofar as she has herself become excessive, demonic”! It would appear that, for feriale characters such as La Llorona, being victims of a patriarchal order in which ‘they lack fundamental human rights, forces Hep epee: ole sa rs an tg lod only viable option to demand a minimum gesture of Under this Scheme, La Llorona would be a Kind of “final gel, This term was cojned by Clover to refer to the female character who generally survives and exterminates the moniter, often coded as male, in slasher horror films,’? There is a clear historical and cultural distance berween La Llorona’s character and the characters thar Clover analyzes. However, there are also several points in common. In the first place, they - share the dichotomy between woman-victim and male-abuser, Second, there is a preference for sharp objects to cause physical damage, such as knives. Third, female sexual curiosity is punished. And finally, the female victim becomes violent in her struggle for survival. Both La Llorona and the “final girl” react to the persecution of a male monster and, in order “ The Representation of Women 91 history when women were marginalized from the job market, the ab- sence of a caretaker could cause a severe family crisis. Conventional versions of La Lloroma pegcrally sek to erase male responsibilty andthe patriarchal order in the legend anfolds. In a way, La Llorona’s actions can be interpreted as an act of protest against male privilege, which allowed males to use women as they pleased and then abandon them with their children without facing any legal consequences. According to Jocelyn Olcort, the stereotype of the self-sacrificing woman became orie of the dominant axes of pender ideology after the Mexican Revolution, when women were expected to self-sacrifice and renounce Public life and the self for the sake of their families and the nation." By contrast, La Llorona refuses to occupy that position, preferring to sa- _. Grifice her child and commit suicide rather than facing an economic “scenario in which she would probably be forced to resort to prostitution to survive. Her actions should not be understood solely as an act of individual evil but as the plausible consequence of a social order that exploited women with impunity. In the end, the police and Dr. Acuiia discover and bring down the murderer the moment she was about to sacrifice the first-born in the house's secret basement. When they remove the black hood, they realize it was the nanny, Nana Goya. Dr. Acuiia’s wile, dressed in white, im- mediately takes her son into her arms and cries with joy when she rea- __ lizes that nothing has happened to him. If Nana Goya is represented as the evil Malinche, the bad mother that sacrifices children, then Dr. Acuia's wife would be the other extreme of the dualistic Chinga- Guadalupe archetype; the self-sacrificing mother whose only raison d'étre is to be a wile and raise children. If Nana Goya has the power and ability to go through the hidden and visible spaces of the house, the mother’s spatial inhabitance is rediiced to the conventional and tradi- tional spaces for women, suchias the bedrooms and the kitchen, Her role has no dynamism or agency; she only functions in relation.to her hus- band and children. La Llorona, on the other hand, has more complex: metaphorical possibilities. Her character could be read as the embodi- ment of the conquest’s historical traumas. At that time unequal and exploitative relationships developed between the different ethnicities and races that emerged in New Spain, with the Spaniards and criollos at the top of the social pyramid, mestizos in the middle and Indians and blacks at the bottom. The fact that Nana Goya inhabits the house's hidden and subrerranean spaces could indicate an attempt to understand the nation from geological levels of consciousness and history. Ifthe visible house is the present and the new post-revolutionary Mexican nation, the lower~ parts of the house would be both the past and the unconscious of a nation haunted by ghosts, which always return because, in reality, the country has not been able to fully solve the racial issue and the unequal 92 Sabino Luévano-Ortega relationship between whites, mestizos and indigenous peoples. The fol- lowitlg section explores this theme in greater detail. As it was*argued at the begmnmg of this essay, once the Mexican Revolution war period ended in the 1920s, the State produced a series of foundational myths, narratives and discourses with the intention, on the one hand, of uniting the national body, and on the other hand, of masking evident social inequalines that survived almost unchanged, such as the historical marginalizanon of indigenous communities. Despite the country’s profound regional and ethnic differences, the Mexican State took to its ultimate consequences the myth of the mestizo nation that an elite of criollo and euro-mestizo liberal intellectuals—such as José Luis Vicente Riva Palaco—had arnculated after independence from This ideology, taken up and perfected by organic in- tellectuals of the post-revolutionary regime, such as Andrés Molina Enriquez and José Vasconcelos, conceived the Nation as a blending of indigenous and Spanish peoples, disregarding black, Asian and Jewish’ minorities, among others. This ideology obscured the fact that whites, and then mestizos, occupicd—and still occupy—the highest strata of the economy and public service. » Pedro Angel Palou summarizes with remarkable accuracy the re- * lationship between Revolution, State and mestizaje when he affirms: . En el orden simbilico creado a partir de su cardcter de evento, la Revolucién mexicana’ (1910-1921) es el acto fundacional de la nacionalidad. El pais no era, y el mexicano no pertenecia, y de como ciudadano de un proyecto estatal en tanto sujeto politico. Mas atin, ‘en tanto que mestizo, cuerpo politico del proyecto ideolégico que unifica-y sostiene el proyesto estatal, es la encarnacién de la mexicanidad. (In the symbolic order created from its narure as an event, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) is the foundational act of nationality. The country did not exist, and the Mexican did not belong within, Sudilenly, he/she existed as a citizen and as a political subject of a state project. Moreover, as a mestizo, he/she represents the political body of the ideological project that _ unifies and sustains the state project; he/she is the embodiment of mexicanidad,)"*® " Palov’s assertion that the Mexican people “did not belong” is not entirely~ accurate, since there was already a sense of national belonging before the Revolution, but it is true that the figure of the mestizo indeed becomes central to the official cihnic conception of the post-revolutionary regime. The Representation of Women 93 Mexico, in theory, had left behind the indigenous past, as well as the 19th century criollismo, to become a moder mestizn nation. This myth in- tended so glve the ethnic snd racial problem of the pos eevolusonary Mexican nation. In an international context marked by racist regimes, such as Nazi Germany, the segregated United States, or the South African apartheid, the Mexican offical stare position embraced the mixture and equality of races in its political ideology. ‘The myth of mestizaje had such a wide reach that it became a national habitus, since it was adopted by cultural institutions and society at large. ‘The official history taught in public schools conceived the ethnic body of the Mexican nation as a relatively harmonious mixture of indigenous and Spanish peoples. This racial paradigm worked relatively well for decades until it began to be re-evaluated after the 1980s. In 1994, the year of the indigenous uprising of the EZLN in Chiapas, the ideology of ‘mestizaje did not disappear from public discourse of from millions of Mexicans’ self-identity ideas, but it experienced one of its most profound intellectual crises. As Ignacio Sanchez Prado rightly points out, the ideology of mestizaje has been deconstructed throughout Latin America in the last 40 years, and there is currently a critical consensus on its operational and conceptual limitations.” One of its main problems, in ‘countries where it became the official state discourse, such as Brazil and Mexico, is the masking of clear racial inequalities and a racial hierarchy inherited from the colonial past that, despite its porosity, still mirgin- alizes black and indigenous communities. Richard Graham stresses this contradiction when he points out that “simulation, dissimulation, and pretense” of the myth of mestizaje is al- ready present in the early canonical texts of mestizophilia, such as La Raza Césmica, by José ‘Vasconcelos.*” In this utopian essay, Vasconcelos envi- sions a future nation located in Brazil, where all races from: around the globe will mix. However, Vasconcelos’ mestizaje secms,to be a whitening and Europeanizing strategy of the indigenous Latin American population rather than a harmonious multi-ethnic blending. Vasconcelos docs not Propose an organic and egalitarian relationship berween the indigenous and Spanish components of the furure mestizo nation, bur rather the ab- of the indigenous element-by a Spanish-speaking curo-mestizo culture that emulates various crucial political and cultural aspects of ‘Western civilization, Something similar happened with the official political discourse of the post-revolurionary Mexican State when addressing. the racial issue, as Graham rightly indicates, In theory, there was a celebration ~ Of the indigenous pee, ad, undoubredly, some political measures such as the agrarian reform benefited the most disadvantaged sectors of the po- pulation. However, the paradigm of mestizaje also hid the hicrarchical ‘racial structure inherited from colonial times. Ar the representational and institutional Kevels, the cit period is a prime example of the clash between ideals and reality. The ish : i ma of the | 94 Sabino Lutvano-Oriega top film stars of Mexican Golden Age Cinema were cither white or white-passing, such a5 gctors Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendériz, Maria Félix, Sylvia Final, Marga Lépez, Dolores dei Rio, that he became famous as a comedian. White or light-skin actors were hired a8 protagonists for dramas and melodramas, while comedy, a less prestigious penre in la ciudad Ietrada, was reserved for darker actors, ‘There were always mestiro charscters amd actors im Golden Age Mexican cinema, and the imeraction berween ethnic growps and races was More fluid and porous then in Hollywood, but there was a clear colorist hierarchy between white and darker actors. The presence of indigenoas | actors was even rarer, though Mexico hae one of the largest and most diverse native populations in the Americas. One of the promises of the Revolution was to bring social justice and equality to indigenous com- munities, but in the few films that somchow dealt with the universe of indigenous peoples, such as Maria Candelaris of Tizoe, no native actors were hired as protaponists, and it was white or white-passing actors who portrayed indigenous characters, In La Lorona one can clearly witness the racial dynamics of Mexican cinema both in its instirurional and diegetic levels, The actor portraying Dr. Acuia, Ramén Pereda, was one of many Spanish actors—or of Spanish origin—who became famous during the boom of Mexican

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