Telling Identities: Crime Narratives for Local and International Markets in María, Full of Grace (Marston, 2004) and Rosario Tijeras (Maillé, 2005)

International audiences see María, Full of Grace and the "narco-drama" Rosario Tijeras as Colombia products. The first movie, written and directed by Joshua Marston with a US audience in mind, was backed financially by HBO. The director of the second one, Maillé, a Mexican living in France, had European, Mexican and Colombian funding. Unlike Gaviria's Rodrigo D, no futuro or The Rose Seller, neither of the above-mentioned movies can claim to be "absolutely" Colombian, however, the differences in their narrative structure show how LA and US cinematic production have a creative history and a cultural experience that make for very different understanding of how to represent and understand the margins of society. María, Full of Grace seeks empathy for María who due to economic hardship becomes a mule. Rosario, an assassin, is a tragic figure who given the system in which she is inserted has no way out except death. While Marston's María, Full of Grace has an integrative function reaffirming the American Dream within the US value system (Mandel 120–28), Maillé's Rosario Tijeras is disintegrative, questioning bourgeois social values, but unable to offer an alternative.