Humanizingthe Beast: deterritorialized Citizenship in Arturo González Villaseñor's Llévate mis amores

• Ivett López Malagamba ^[1]
  1. [1] Kalamazoo College

     Kalamazoo College

     City of Kalamazoo, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, ISSN-e 1548-7083, Vol. 21, Nº. 3, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Spring 2024), págs. 1-24
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article analyzes Llévate mis amores (2014, Arturo González Villaseñor), a documentary about the women who lead and run Las Patronas, an organization that provides food, shelter, and other services to migrants passing through southern Mexico as they make their way to the U.S. southern border. In the film, the powerful bond forged between the anonymous migrants and las patronas, as the women are known, embodies the configuration of a contract among civilians as an understanding of responsibility towards others and illustrates the possibilities for political interventions at the margins of the neoliberal state. The encounter between patronas and migrants proposes a more inclusive form of affiliation among vulnerable and dispossessed subjects acting within patriarchal and racialized structures. The film’s depiction of the affiliation between patronas and migrants, which also engages the participation of the spectator, restores the social pact that the contemporary neoliberal state is no longer able or willing to guarantee. I argue that Llévate mis amores successfully calls for a redefinition of citizenship as an ethical practice of solidarity that sets forth a contract of and for community. Ultimately, the documentary envisions a pact that delivers a sense of justice for those whom the state’s territorialized citizenship has dispossessed of humanity and dignity