Introduction: Reconfiguring Precarious Landscapes: the Road Movie in Latin America Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez.- Section I: Latin American Modernity on the Road and in the Spotlight.- 1 Revisiting Modernity through the Latin American Road Movie Nadia Lie.- 2 Journey to the Ruins of Modernity: Euforia and 40 días Ignacio Sánchez Prado.- 3 The Power of Running on Empty: On the Road in Post-Soviet Cuba Vicky Unruh.- Section II: The Latin American Road Movie: Readings and Genealogies.- 4 Recorriendo las Américas: Cars, Roads, and Latin American Cinema Gilberto Blasini.- 5 Lonely Souls in Sólo Dios sabe by Carlos Bolado: Pastoralism and Syncretic Spirituality in Times of Crisis Salvador Oropesa.- 6 Tania Hermida’s Qué tan lejos: Bending Conventions on the Road to Cuenca Carolina Rueda Section III: Heterogeneous Territories: Mapping Class, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.- 7 Central American Non-belonging: Reading “El norte” in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin nombre Yajaira Padilla.- 8 Decolonizing Maya Border Crossings in El Norte and La Jaula de Oro Alicia Estrada.- 9 Configuring Desire and Social Order in the Contemporary Mexican Youth Road Film Olivia Cosentino.- Section IV: Regional Techniques and Local Iconographies.- 10 The Contemporary Documentary Road Movie in Latin America: Issues on Mobility, Displacement, and Autobiography Pablo Piedras.- 11 The Contemporary Brazilian Road Movie: Remapping National Journeys on Screen in Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo Sara Brandellero.- 12 Inscription and Subversion of the Road Movie in Inés de Oliveira Cézar’s Cassandra (2012) Cynthia Tompkins.
Verónica Garibotto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, USA. Her book Crisis y reemergencia examines the crisis of the nineteenth century as a discursive formation after the 1990s. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Studies in Hispanic Cinemas.
Jorge Pérez is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author of Cultural Roundabouts, a study of Spanish road movies and novels, and has published articles in ALEC, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, España Contemporánea, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Studies in Hispanic Cinemas.
This book explores the ways films made by Latin American directors and/ or co-produced in Latin American countries have employed the road movie genre to address the reconfiguration of the geographical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape of the region. With a corpus of more than two hundred films, Latin American road movies have achieved a high profile in the last two decades at major film festivals and profitable results at the box office. The Latin American Road Movie’s twelve essays traverse diverse cinematic routes and cover extensive geographical landscapes from a common point of departure: The traveling narrative of the road movie and its focus on crossing borders—physical, metaphorical, theoretical—make the genre ideal for reexamining the ideological grounds of national and regional discourses.