The Passion of Maria Elena (review)

The Passion of María Elena opens with the story of María Elena Durán Morales's three-year-old son Jorge being run over by a pickup truck in a hit-and-run accident in Creel, a city about an hour away from her hometown of Rojogochi in the Sierra Tarahumara. Francisco Cardenal, a man who moved to Rojogochi to work in the school where María Elena's father teaches and her mother is the laundress, relates the story. The Passion of María Elena takes the audience through a tour of ethnic conflicts, rural-urban tensions, and bureaucratic frustrations as it follows María Elena's efforts to secure the driver's admission of guilt.

Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez, a sociologist turned filmmaker, skillfully captures the quotidian and extraordinary sorrows and joys of the Rarámuri (the correct name, we are told, for the indigenous Tarahumara). The film includes captivating footage of villagers making and consuming tesgüino, a fermented-corn beverage; women grinding corn on stone metates; and the gender dynamics of village life. In one interview, María Elena's mother tells Moncada that five of her twelve children died, but both her demeanor and the film's storyline remind us how acutely each death is felt. Moncada uses deft camerawork to capture the differences in pacing, sounds, and social geography of urban and rural life, moving among Rojogochi, Creel, Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua City, and Mexico City.

As the film unfolds around a central analytic of ethnic identity (including both Rarámuri and Spanish section titles), Cardenal—a "white" man who speaks Rarámuri and works in the fields alongside locals during harvest—becomes a pivotal figure. The Rarámuri elders make persistent references to betrayals by "white" people, but Moncada leaves to Cardenal the task of explaining the meaning of Rarámuri culture. Although several subjects reference women's dress as the marker of authentic ethnic identity, competing epistemologies seem to serve as the main source of tension. As one village leader explains, "The Rarámuri way of thinking is not valid under the white man's law." To pursue justice in the case of Jorge's death, the village organizes a Rarámuri trial (apparently at the Cardenal's suggestion), which precedes a "Western" trial that takes place in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc. María Elena repeatedly insists that she does not seek compensation but only that the accused, a mestiza named Marisela, "tell the truth." Facing bureaucratic runarounds, apparent corruption, and blatant indifference, María Elena seeks out a human-rights lawyer, who tells her that the police and judges have violated her "right to the truth." Viewers are left to wrestle with the tensions among truths and ways of knowing them.

The Passion of María Elena is a bit long for classroom use, and viewers might find themselves occasionally frustrated by the absence of subtitles, especially for the segments in Rarámuri. The subtitles themselves are occasionally misleading, as with the translation of ejidatario as "landowner," and the melodramatic music often seems heavy-handed, particularly alongside more expert camerawork. Still, the film offers an engaging starting point for a discussion about racism and sexism as well as the meanings of ethnic and gender identities.