Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil

Chapter Three Reimagining Guadalupe in Nuevo mundo (1976) and La otra conquista (1998

79 Chapter Three Reimagining Guadalupe in Nuevo mundo (1976) and La otra conquista (1998) For Hidalgo and his ragtag army of Indians bent on revenge for centuries of oppression, as for Emiliano Zapata’s sureños fighting for land and liberty, Guadalupe symbolized liberation and native rights. For others Guadalupe has had various meanings: indigenism, religious syncretism, respect for cultural autonomy, the struggle for human dignity, or, conversely, submission and subjugation, whether of Indians or women. Most frequently Guadalupe is associated with mexicanidad. Stafford Poole Our Lady of Guadalupe Nicolás Echevarría’s well-known Cabeza de Vaca is not alone among recent Mexican films in reformulating national identity through a return to the colonial period. Two other Mexican films that bracket the decade of the 1990s have carved out a corner of this cinematic zeitgeist. Juan Mora Catlett’s Retorno a Aztlán (1990) and Salvador Carrasco’s La otra conquista (1998) address the suppression of indigenous memory and recuperate pre-Columbian and early colonial indigenous history . If Echevarría’s commentary capitalizes on “the other side of the conquest” in order to combat the residue of colonialism in Mexican society, La otra conquista confronts, consumes, and reconfigures a still-powerful icon of Mexican hybrid identity rooted in colonial culture, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who represents a symbolic fusion of the Virgin Mary with the Aztec goddess Tonantzin.1 Like several other contemporary Mexican films that treat the colonial period, such as Eduardo Rossoff’s Ave María (1999)—which enters into an intertextual 80 Chapter Three conversation with seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—La otra conquista dialogues with literature written by people of European descent. In so doing, these films tackle and transform a part of the colonial period’s discursive legacy in Latin America. This chapter examines how La otra conquista and a much earlier film, Gabriel Retes’s Nuevo mundo (1976)—which was released briefly in 1976 and then banned by the Mexican government until 19922—transform the story of Guadalupe and intervene on deeply ingrained understandings of Mexicanness. When Nuevo mundo was re-released in 1992, one of the reviews was careful to point out that this film was not, like many, produced in conjunction with the quintocentenario (A.F.P. 3). The same can be said for La otra conquista, which arrived in theaters in 1998. As director Carrasco has said: Deseamos subrayar la actualidad de estos temas, la continuidad de los problemas abordados en la película, ya que el proceso de mestizaje y el sincretismo—y la violencia implícita en dichos procesos—no pertenecen sólo al pasado o a un momento ya superado de la historia de México. Espero que La otra conquista contribuya al diálogo sobre una realidad vigente de la que somos parte todos los mexicanos. (“Entrevista ” n. pag.)3 [44] Such is the perennial preoccupation over Guadalupe, and what she represents in Mexican society. By engaging Guadalupe the filmmakers are addressing one of the primary symbolic sources of mestizo identity not only in Mexico, but in many areas of Latin America.4 Despite their disparate dates of release, these two films offer a particularly felicitous opportunity for comparison, and not merely because both films reconstruct Guadalupe. They also consciously reflect on the very process through which icons of identity are constructed . Through their versions of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Nuevo mundo and La otra conquista envisage two distinct ways in which a figure may begin to reside in a nation’s imaginary. The literary intertext that I will take into consideration in my analysis of both of these films—one of the chief sources through which the tale of Guadalupe was promulgated—is the 81 Reimagining Guadalupe document known as the Nican mopohua [Here Is Recounted], a Nahuatl text most likely written in the mid-seventeenth century by the vicar of Guadalupe, Luis Laso de la Vega.5 The text recounts the apparition of the Virgin to the indigenous man, Juan Diego, in 1531, on Tepeyac Hill (in present-day Mexico City), the place in which some scholars believe there was a temple dedicated to Tonantzin. The impact that this version of Juan Diego’s story has had on conceptions of Guadalupe in Mexico is evident in the films’ allusions to it. In fact, I would argue that any return to the emergence of...