González Iñárritu’s Carne y arena/Virtually Present, Physically Invisible (González Iñárritu 2017) is a multilayered virtual-reality installation that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and later won a Special Achievement Oscar. This work is a notable departure from the director’s previous output, both in its use of virtual reality and in its focus on the divisive subject of migration. Carne y arena has been praised for its technological innovation, but it has also been criticized for tackling such a political subject through the medium of virtual reality. For some critics, virtual reality is an entirely inappropriate medium for exploring such a serious issue, privileging, in their view, spectacle over reflection. González Iñárritu has countered such critiques by asserting that the use of virtual reality makes the experience of visiting Carne y arena intensely personal and immersive. This article will situate the installation in relation to González Iñárritu’s previous work and examine the debates surrounding the relationship between virtual reality and empathy with reference to Carne y arena.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who has been described as "without question the best-known Latino, Chicano, Mexican performance artist in the United States, Latin America, and the art world of the North Atlantic corridor," is a transnational figure in terms of both his biography and his work (Mendieta 2003, 539). Gómez-Peña has forged a composite identity as a Mexican-born artist who resides mainly in the United States and who describes himself as a "Mexican in the process of Chicanoization" (Gómez-Peña 2000, 21). His writings, performances, and filmic works, especially The Great Mojado Invasion (The 2nd US-Mexico War [2001]), which will be the focus of this chapter, seamlessly blend high and pop culture as he interrogates notions of cultural belonging and exclusion. Together with his long-term collaborators, Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña joins forces with performance artists and activists across the globe, producing works that create new spaces and communities through performances and Internet projects that transcend easy categorization in terms of race, gender, and even species. Given the fact that his own life has involved movements across borders of different kinds that are mirrored in his artistic practice, transnationalism provides a useful framework for the analysis of his work. The use of the term transnationalism in close conjunction with globalization and internationalism means that it can be difficult to pinpoint its meaning. Paul Hopper notes that although religious beliefs, trade links, and diaspora communities predate globalization, transnationalism can be seen as both a consequence of globalization and a tool that can be used to study it, as it addresses "the formation of new social spaces and new types of community and 310 forms of human interaction, as well as the adaptations to these developments that are taking place within specific contexts" (2007, 52). Conversely, Saskia Sassen sees "economic, political, and cultural globalization as transnational processes" (2007, 1). Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc have defined transnationalism as "the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders" (qtd. in Kelly 2003, 210). The definition of transnationalism is taken further by Wuthnow and Offutt, who argue that border crossings are not a prerequisite for experiencing transnationalism: People who are not themselves recent immigrants or located in diasporic border towns are also influenced by globalization. They watch CNN, travel, visit friends and relatives in other countries, work for multinational corporations, and purchase goods from abroad.
As a national film industry emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in Mexico, filmmakers were quick to capitalise on the huge popularity of traditional music. 1 Decades later, the soundtrack to the tumultuous events in Mexico in the late 1960s and 1970s continued to reference traditional music, but it also increasingly looked to global youth culture. Songs by U.S. or local rock musicians became a notable feature of films produced in Mexico at this time, with rock music often functioning as a shorthand that differentiated a hip, younger generation from their conservative elders. This article is concerned with Felipe Cazals' Canoa (1975), which centres on the clash between the youth of the 1960s and an older, repressive, generation, yet it uses traditional Mexican music, particularly the ballad known as the corrido, rather than a more contemporary rock or pop soundtrack. Cazals' formal experiments in this film have attracted much critical commentary, as will be discussed later, but his use of music to critique a repressive government and call into question an idyllic representation of the nation has received little attention. This article will consider Cazals' unconventional use of music in this and other films to provide a radical alternative to the formulaic use of music in earlier Mexican films and to suggest how music can be much more than an accompaniment to images and dialogue.
Dulce Pinzón’s photographic series ‘The Real Story of the Superheroes’, celebrates Mexican and Latina/o/x immigrant workers in the United States by radically re-imagining the figure of the super hero. The 2012 book which compiles the images features 20 photographs of immigrant workers living in New York, 18 of whom are from Mexico, while the other two are from Puerto Rico and Ecuador. Pinzón’s work is a striking combination of documentary photography and fantasy, as her subjects go about their everyday jobs dressed as superheroes. She was inspired to take the photographs in the wake of 9/11, when the increased hostility towards migrants in the United States was coupled with an intense celebration of the heroes who attempted to cope with the terrorist attacks and the subsequent resurgence of the superhero genre. Pinzón’s choice of the visual motif of the superhero raises the paradox that these popular cultural icons are frequently engaged in defending the United States from alien invasions, which are often thinly veiled references to fear of immigrants. This chapter contends, however, that Pinzón employs the hybridity inherent in these characters, and which has marked photography in Mexico from its inception, to present alternative heroes using a language that is normally associated with U.S. hegemony and oppression
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