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Transnational Mobility , Authenticity and the Child: Alamar

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The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Part of the book series: Global Cinema ((GLOBALCINE))

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Abstract

The final chapter turns again to journey narratives—but here to those narratives in which child characters traverse national borders, in particular an unusual Mexican film released in 2009, Pedro González Rubio’s Alamar. Many of the ways of understanding the child journey narrative which Chapter 3 revealed in relation to Central do Brasil and Viva Cuba can also be applied to Alamar and condition my reading of it. However, I am also particularly interested in my discussion of Alamar in placing it within a Mexican and Central American context of films about border-crossing children, as well as in arguing that in Alamar, we can understand the child as a figure for a form of mobile, oscillating spectatorship which is not evident in films such as Central do Brasil and Viva Cuba, concerned as they are with a linear trajectory. Lastly, I argue that the child in Alamar is used to validate the cinematic image, to assure us of its veracity, in a film which exists in a complex relationship to fiction and documentary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College London, London, UK

    Deborah Martin

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  1. Deborah Martin
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Martin, D. (2019). Transnational Mobility , Authenticity and the Child: Alamar. In: The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52822-3_7

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