The Latinx Gaze and Other Hegemonic Technologies: Seeing/Being Beyond Settler Colonial Identities

Questions of representation are currently at the forefront of film discourse; however, such discussions often elide a meaningful analysis of racial categories and their epistemological roots. This dissertation traces the technologies at work within the innocuous calls for representation. I redefine the gaze as a technology that can be rewired for our decolonial desires and interrogate how Latinidad functions as a technology of white supremacy.

I refer to this theorization as the latinx gaze; its primary function is to elucidate how Latinidad functions as technology constantly reformulating, hailing us, and how we contest its gravitational pull. Moreover, haunting and affect animate the latinx gaze, revealing how invisibilized histories tear at the flesh of Latinidad; the latinx gaze endeavors to question settler colonial legibility to expose who remains beyond its line of vision. Affect questions how intensities reconstruct and transform identities and dictate movement destabilizing latinx as a stable and concrete identity. Lastly, futurity weaves these strands together, forcing us to question the futures promised by Latinidad.

Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona is the principal example in this dissertation; testimonio guides my analysis, as I contrast Víctor Montejo’s Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village and Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala to consider how an alternative gaze contests Latinidad. Bustamante implements techniques traditionally associated with testimonio to enact an Indigenous gaze that ruptures reality and acts as a didactic gaze throughout the film, distorting a sense of linearity and Latinidad. This analysis is expanded to consider how La Llorona's streaming distributor in the United States, Shudder, utilizes horror to disrupt genre hierarchies yet reinforces a global north and south binary. To conclude, I incorporate Alternative Family Archives to reorient questions regarding representation towards the classroom.