(DOWNLOAD) "Transatlantic Visions: Imagining Mexico in Juan Rejano's La Esfinge Mestiza and Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (Critical Essay)" by Romance Notes " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Transatlantic Visions: Imagining Mexico in Juan Rejano's La Esfinge Mestiza and Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (Critical Essay)
- Author : Romance Notes
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 208 KB
Description
THE role of Mexico in support of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is well known. The government of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) provided military equipment to the Republican Army and subsequently, when the war was over, offered assistance to many Spanish Republican intellectuals. (1) This article examines the constructions of Mexico in the work of two such Spanish exiles taking as a point of departure Juan Rejano's La esfinge mestiza: cronica menor de Mexico which is then juxtaposed with Luis Bunuel's film Los olvidados. In Mexico exiled Spanish artists hoped to pursue the intellectual work that had become impossible in Franco's fascist dictatorship. In these works, one finds differing images of mother figures in an effort to rethink the very notion of origin, apparently reversing the traditional colonial discourse of "the motherland." To describe the experience of exiled Spaniards the philosopher Jose Gaos, who also sought refuge in Mexico, forged the neologism transterrados, as a way of avoiding the negative connotations of the word desterrados (or "the uprooted"), suggesting a transfer rather than an upheaval. However, the solitude and nostalgia that many of these artists explore in their work would seem to undermine the appropriateness of Gaos' neologism. Transterrados suggests a unidirectional movement forward across lands, whereas what one sees in exile writing is more of a circular or zig-zagging movement between imagined spaces on both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, the dynamic of recognition many Spanish exiles express in their writings presents its own risks whereas Mexico functioned as a "virtual Spain" fulfilling the promise of what Spain might have been if Franco had never come to power. This unfulfilled promise appears often as a space of virginal purity and freedom. In other words, Mexico is treated as a blank slate on which to project a lost, idealized Spain. Yet, paradoxically, as I will suggest, this image of a virginal paradise is not far from that which the conquistadores saw in the New World. (2)