Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009) figures in a polemic over magical realism and the colonial overdeterminations of spectatorship ranging from Jean Franco to Dolores Tierney and beyond. Denounced for its complicity in the Western gaze, magical realism plays into the reality that Latin American acclaim often follows favorable reception in the Global North. The debate has yet to reckon with the ensuing tensions. Indeed, Llosa’s film highlights the contradictions of its Berlinale poster, which sells the narrative of an Indigenous woman who overcomes trauma and becomes modern. Though peddling exoticism, the poster questions a transcultural reconciliation of indigeneity and modern nationhood by oscillating between Peru’s birthing and burying alive of Quechua protagonist Fausta. The film explores these incongruities. It shakes off the modernity–Andean village binary by construing Fausta as a decolonial aesthetic agent who creates her home in her informal settlement, her pueblo joven. Born into Indigenous traditions, she reads the world through them, reconceiving her cultural inheritance as she fulfills her responsibilities and learns. Upending aesthetically inflected racial and gender dynamics and magical realist and transcultural paradigms from the inside, the film self-reflexively investigates the status of aesthetic forms and images and the way we read them. Intricate aesthetic strategies shape its politics at the intersection of violence, religion, poverty, and artistic invention. Uncovering these overlooked aesthetic registers, this essay demonstrates the significance of the aesthetic to the controversy over magical realism and transculturation and to the project of decolonial cultural critique more broadly.

La película de Claudia Llosa La teta asustada (2009) se inscribe en una polémica sobre el realismo mágico y las sobredeterminaciones coloniales de los espectadores, que va de Jean Franco a Dolores Tierney y más allá. Denunciado por su complicidad con la mirada Occidental, el realismo mágico le hace el juego a esta denuncia porque la aclamación latinoamericana suele darse tras una recepción favorable en el Norte Global. Dicho debate aún no ha tenido en cuenta las tensiones resultantes. De hecho, la película de Llosa pone de manifiesto las contradicciones de su cartel de la Berlinale, que vende la narración de una mujer indígena que supera el trauma y se convierte en moderna. A pesar de su exotismo, el cartel cuestiona la reconciliación transcultural entre el indigenismo y la nación moderna, oscilando entre el nacimiento y el entierro en vida de Fausta, la protagonista quechua, en Perú. La película explora estas incongruencias. Y se libera del binarismo modernidad-pueblo andino al presentar a Fausta como un agente estético decolonial que crea su hogar en su asentamiento informal, su “pueblo joven”. Nacida en el seno de las tradiciones indígenas, ella lee el mundo a través de estas y reconcibe su herencia cultural a medida que cumple sus responsabilidades y aprende. Trastocando desde dentro las dinámicas raciales y de género con influencias estéticas y los paradigmas transculturales y del realismo mágico, la película investiga de forma autorreflexiva el estatus de las formas e imágenes estéticas y el modo en que las leemos. Su política está conformada por intrincadas estrategias estéticas en la intersección de la violencia, la religión, la pobreza y la invención artística. Al descubrir estos registros estéticos pasados por alto, este ensayo muestra la importancia de la estética para la controversia sobre el realismo mágico y la transculturación, y para el proyecto de la crítica cultural decolonial en general.

O filme de Claudia Llosa The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009) figura em uma polêmica sobre o realismo mágico e as sobredeterminações coloniais do espectador que vão de Jean Franco a Dolores Tierney e além. Denunciado por sua cumplicidade com o olhar Ocidental, o realismo mágico joga com a realidade de que a aclamação latino-americana frequentemente segue uma recepção favorável no Norte Global. O debate ainda precisa considerar as tensões resultantes. De fato, o filme de Llosa destaca as contradições de seu pôster da Berlinale, que vende a narrativa de uma mulher indígena que supera seu trauma e se torna moderna. Embora vendendo exotismo, o pôster questiona uma reconciliação transcultural da indigeneidade e da nacionalidade moderna ao oscilar entre o nascimento e o enterro vivo da protagonista quéchua Fausta no Peru. O filme explora essas incongruências. Ele se livra do binário modernidade-vila andina ao construir Fausta como uma agente estética decolonial que estabelece seu lar em seu assentamento provisório, seu pueblo joven. Nascida em tradições indígenas, ela lê o mundo por meio delas, reconcebendo sua herança cultural à medida que cumpre suas responsabilidades e aprende. Subvertendo dinâmicas raciais e de gênero esteticamente sugeridas e paradigmas mágico-realistas e transculturais de dentro, o filme investiga autorreflexivamente o status de formas e imagens estéticas e a maneira como as lemos. Estratégias estéticas intrincadas moldam sua política na intersecção de violência, religião, pobreza e invenção artística. Descobrindo esses registros estéticos negligenciados, este ensaio demonstra a importância da estética para a controvérsia sobre realismo mágico e transculturação e para o projeto de crítica cultural decolonial de forma mais ampla.

Upon the recent passing of the eminent Latin American film scholar Ana M. López, Dolores Tierney pays tribute to López’s scholarship by taking issue with the coloniality many Global North critics display towards Latin American films. Tierney’s rebuttal of colonialist frameworks centers on the stereotypical aesthetic notions that the 2022 Mexican film Bardo by Alejandro González Iñárritu garnered from Anglophone commentators on its release, mainly the “worn-out” concept of magical realism.1 Tierney cites several other scholarly challenges of colonialist perspectives deployed by Global North filmmakers and critics. Among these critiques is the videographic essay Jeffrey Romero Middents produced about the reception of the film Aloft/No llores, vuela (2014) by Peruvian director Claudia Llosa. In the video, colonial concepts distilled from discussions of Aloft are voiced over Llosa’s trailer, exposing their distance from the goings-on in the film.2 Ironically, a discourse of magical sensualism, hypnotic strangeness, and a mysticism that capitulates to Western yearnings assumes the magnetism and art-house self-importance that this discourse itself deplores. A good many of the aesthetic notions featured in Middents’s video reference the alleged shortcomings of Llosa’s earlier full-length film, The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009).3 In this essay, we return to that film to examine how Llosa stages a critical confrontation between coloniality and an Indigenous magical reality and undercuts the dichotomy between these two constellations to elaborate a decolonial aesthetics. The film self-reflexively investigates the status of aesthetic forms and images and the way we read them.

Magical realism is among the tropes Llosa employs, opening up the work to critique by Tierney and others. But the role of magical realist gestures is fraught in a global aesthetic context where market demands encourage it, as literary historian Jean Franco has observed, and spectatorial acclaim in the Global South all too often is conditional on a flow of accolades conferred by Global North institutions.4 In a sister piece, we discuss how the film dismisses the magical realist register alongside the modalities of transculturation and syncretism it is entangled with.5 What requires further attention, however, is the way the film dips into these forms as an aspect of its address to the spectator, thus dovetailing with the global marketplace, to rapidly cast them off in favor of a strikingly different set of visual, narrative, and cultural strategies. Moreover, the collusion with market principles is riddled with ambivalence and problematized throughout. These complexities, we will show, inhere in the film’s aesthetics. In our companion piece, we tease out the experiential structure of the decolonial aesthetics with which the film supplants the magical realist template along with its ally of transculturation. We distill the philosophical implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator and culture maker. In the present essay, we foreground the way the film implodes the magical realist and transcultural paradigms from the inside, thus unlocking a further turn in these paradigms, as they meet a spectator primed to reject a straightforwardly colonialist aesthetic.

Following López, to whose “mapping” of the field of Latin American film studies she pays homage, Tierney touches on the metacritical implications of her theme. These dimensions concern not only the conceptual apparatus shaping filmmaking and criticism but also the critic’s and maker’s positionality, even identity. Tierney ends her polemic with a plea for “more informed critics and editors and a more diverse pool of film critics.” We are on board with this agenda, yet we want to propose an additional point. Our theoretical intervention, written in the joint voice of a Global South cultural critic and a Global North philosopher, working from privileged positions at universities in Massachusetts and Amsterdam, respectively, is to insist on the significance of the aesthetic and readerly/spectatorial dimensions of the debate.

We take a focus on the level of materialist figuration in, around, and by films to be an influential aspect of the force and legacy of López’s cultural analyses. From a philosophical perspective, however, a further observation is in order, precipitated by the specter and reality of coloniality. We want to draw attention to the importance of aesthetics as a site of interpretation and criticism. A decolonial material culture is not fostered by critiques of colonial frameworks in film practice and criticism that sidestep aesthetics. Llosa’s film needs to be read for more than its primarily colonialist or decolonial dimensions: it demands aesthetic readings. This means that the work must be interpreted in aesthetic terms, which are likely to link up with patterns of colonial/decolonial conceptualization and power in ways that as of yet remain opaque. Stopping short of aesthetic readings in a political critique surrenders too much power to coloniality and plays into racism. It entails treating films made in the Global South as less deserving of aesthetic attention than their analogues from the Global North. This skewed approach diminishes them as aesthetic objects. Part of their workings are downplayed, namely their specific functioning as films rather than, say, instrumental devices or theoretical statements. Of course, this they also often happen to be, but when they are, films ineluctably perform these roles as the very aesthetic objects that they are. To read them otherwise, as we shall see in Llosa’s case, is to elide part of what artistically ambitious cinema commonly takes itself to be doing: engaging in culturally situated aesthetic practices and exploring, even offering insight into, aesthetic possibilities. Denouncements of The Milk of Sorrow as magical realist, exoticist, or catering to the Western gaze, indeed, have often bypassed fundamental aesthetic dimensions of the film. In response to this critical lacuna and with the aim of advancing the polemic ranging from Franco to Tierney and beyond, the analysis that follows zeroes in on the film’s uptake of questions of aesthetic form and figuration and the readings these modalities invite.

The Milk of Sorrow premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009, where it won Best Picture. The festival poster promotes conventional interpretations of the film and foreshadows their unraveling (fig. 1). Although cinematic promotional materials tend to be formulaic and unoriginal, they speak volumes about the film in their first look. Posters tell their own mini-narratives, awakening moviegoers’ expectations of the film. Conscious of its commercial aims, the festival poster announces a familiar Western tale of the passing from tradition to modernity while serving an exotic female image. On the very top, the film’s title looms large, followed in subscript by a brief plot summary: “un viaje del miedo a la libertad” (a journey from fear to freedom). The film will detail how the hero overcomes trauma and finds freedom. Below we see the face of an Indigenous woman, shoulders bare, emerging out of a mound of potatoes, harking back to Botticelli’s Venus. The poster invites the spectator to view, to learn, how this woman overcomes her trauma and becomes modern. Despite the presence of exotic and erotic elements, the poster sells a Western story of modernity. As we will argue, Llosa’s film inverts and dismisses this narrative. Rather than staying with the logic of a predictably modernist story, The Milk of Sorrow marks a distinctive role for aesthetic creation as a reflective, life-sustaining form of corporeal agency in a cultural field that pits Indigenous communities against elite populations while also fostering exchanges and cross-fertilizations among these groups. The protagonist does not soar up from the potatoes; she very much remains at home in them. She is born into Indigenous traditions, and it becomes her duty to read the world through them, challenging and modifying her cultural inheritance as she carries out her responsibilities and learns. In the end, she rescues the potato from its limited global role as nourishment and redefines and celebrates its aesthetic possibilities. She makes room for the potato plant. Its fledgling sprigs bloom in the community where she lives.

Figure 1.

La teta asustada: un viaje del miedo a la libertad, 59th Berlinale poster for Claudia Llosa, dir., The Milk of Sorrow, 2009 (artwork in the public domain)

Figure 1.

La teta asustada: un viaje del miedo a la libertad, 59th Berlinale poster for Claudia Llosa, dir., The Milk of Sorrow, 2009 (artwork in the public domain)

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The film structurally highlights its poster’s incongruities. Interpellating the spectator alternately as a modern individual and as the other of modernity, and marking these subjectivities as entwined through strategies of transculturation, the film counters both positions with a hard-won decolonial stance that its central character, Fausta Isidora Janampa Chauca (played by Magaly Solier), wrestles away from victimhood. While the poster uses the tension between an exoticism reminiscent of Carmen Miranda and Fausta’s piercing gaze to advertise a transculturation process that brings together indigeneity and modern nationhood, it also calls into question this reconciliation by oscillating between Peru’s birthing of Fausta and its burying her alive. The prospective spectator wonders whether Fausta is arising from the pile of potatos or sinking into it. The film shakes off these alternatives through an extended figuration of air and fluids. More than a locus of birth or interment, the earth, as we shall see, offers a ground for Indigenous aesthetic creativity. Adjacent to sky and water and splattered by milk and blood, the earth is reworked into a site where disjunctive, racially and colonially inflected aesthetic histories take form that belong neither to elite, popular, nor Andean cultures exclusively. Aesthetic needs, possibilities, and shifts arise that cannot be adequately captured in a transcultural frame that envisions encounters and confluences between modernity and its antitheses. Such encounters and confluences certainly exist and are important, but the aesthetics of the matter unfolds in ways that elude this paradigm. To lay the grounds for our analysis, we now turn to several contemporary cultural phenomena making up the broader artistic, social, and economic context for Llosa’s film.

Throughout Latin America from the 1990s onward, new cinematic tendencies have focused sharply on the violence and neoliberal economic adjustments the region witnesses, as geopolitical inequality persists within an increasingly homogenizing global marketplace. Llosa’s second feature is no exception. The Milk of Sorrow stands out for its investigation of female corporeality. Giving prominence to a Quechua woman, the film not only tackles the rise of slum cities and the neoliberal capture of the imagination, but also zeroes in on the everyday materiality of social codings such as race. Seen through these lenses, the film wins a place side by side with the work of the renowned Argentine director Lucretia Martel, even if this achievement has yet to be recognized in the critical discourse, which has elided significant aspects of the film’s aesthetic interventions.6

The Milk of Sorrow crosscuts between informal settlement and city center, between colonialist and subaltern visual and sonic idioms, and between forms of address centered on milk, blood, water, air, and earth.7 Connoting an Indigenous corporeality understood in its expansive cosmological and ethical implications, Llosa’s pivotal image of the shocked, milk-giving breast or the milk of sorrow resonates simultaneously with an icon of the Madonna Lactans to become a figure through which we can conceptualize the aesthetic creativity of a decolonial Indigenous actor. Llosa deviates from films such as La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, dir. Barbet Schroeder, 2000) and Cidade de Deus (City of God, dir. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002), which organize the intersection of violence, religion, and poverty around male leads, by emphasizing the imagination, affects, desires, and bodily needs of a female character. Our reading tracks the notion of aesthetic experience and agency that Fausta enacts and that the film extends to the spectator.

An inhabitant of a sprawling, informal hillside district bordering Lima, Llosa’s protagonist Fausta occupies a complex cultural and historical location. Slums are today’s cities. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis traces these new urban formations to shifts in national policies designed to reckon with economic changes brought about by late capitalism, globalization, technological innovation, and colonial legacies.8 Yet local factors contextualize and color each slum city. While many poor throughout the world are driven out of the rural countryside in search of better lives, only to find themselves living in temporary, haphazardly built, unhygienic housing, each slum they inhabit is different. Everywhere, slum dwellers negotiate poverty in novel and distinctive ways. Facing unequal access to public services, they must navigate a marketplace that promotes unending consumption through popular platforms and simultaneously causes unemployment or underemployment. There have been few attempts to explore the cultural innovations and aesthetic strategies with which informal communities respond to these precarious living conditions.9 Llosa’s film rehearses these issues, presenting experiments at the edge of life that invite an aesthetic framework on their own terms. Toward the end of the film, the urban elite’s cultural practices are dismissed in favor of a Quechua actor, her values and creativity. A decolonial aesthetics supplants the vision of the slum or, as the majority of Peruvians call it, the pueblo joven, as a lost cause.10

In his magistral posthumously published work The Lettered City, literary critic Ángel Rama considers the emergence of Latin American cities and the role of the educated, or, in other words, the lettered elites, that gave rise to them.11 With the notion of the lettered city, he refers to the manifold ways in which reading and writing are entwined with the colonial enterprise. He traces the lettered city’s historical formation and importance from the conquest to the twentieth century, marking the ties between literature and neocolonial power structures. Franco picks up where Rama leaves off, in her book The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City.12 She argues that the demise of the modern lettered city is due to the negative effects of the Cold War on Latin America. Despite her pessimistic metanarrative, she consistently turns to cultural texts to demonstrate how aesthetic practices preserve and celebrate a Latin American originality in the face of homogenizing forces. The Milk of Sorrow continues in this vein and affirms the place of the aesthetic. But it pictures the lettered city as a diminished counterpart to the current marketplace.13 The film revolves around the lives of the Andean migrants who built and settled in the pueblos jóvenes that encircle Lima due to the conflict, dating from the 1980s and still ongoing, between the Peruvian government and the Shining Path. Both sides committed atrocious crimes against Indigenous communities, especially against women. This racially inflected sexual violence is not new but deeply rooted in the vicissitudes of power since the conquest, well through the establishment of the state and on to the present. The opening scene vividly recalls this history, which Fausta absorbs while still in the womb.

Fausta’s mother Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón) introduces her to the spectator. She bestows on her daughter the responsibility of caring for the memory of the violation inflicted on herself during the conflict. Through the act of breastfeeding, which passes on the milk of sorrow, Perpetua hopes to protect her newborn from future violence: with the shocked body fluids, the infant drinks her anguish. While being given sustenance, Fausta is also put on guard against what may befall. The mother’s violated body marks the milk of sorrow with the duality of nourishment and trauma.14 Dying Perpetua’s association with breastfeeding imagery bewilders the spectator. An actual painting of a Madonna Lactans decorates the living space of our female protagonist’s employer, Aída (Susi Sánchez).15 The reclusive Aída turns out to be very different from the caring, compassionate mother that the painting depicts. She is her father’s daughter, ruthless. Putting into motion evolving forms of relationality, the figure of the milk of sorrow inaugurates a critical mode of corporeal address that supplants a model of transculturation by one of interlacing cultural promises and threats, where various attachments and desires remain at odds with each other, yielding a web of shifting aesthetic identifications and differentiations. This kind of web, arguably, lies at the heart of the notion of the aesthetic. As Monique Roelofs notes, “We organize our aesthetic relationships, in part, around promises and threats that we discern and lend multisensory, intercorporeal forms of articulation.”16 Llosa’s film locates its aesthetic center in these historically and materially based relationships, which become incitements for Fausta’s decolonial cultural agency.

In the writings of theorists such as Fernando Ortiz, Mary Louise Pratt, and Frances Aparicio, as well as Rama, the notion of transculturation denotes processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and create new forms from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture.17 It underscores how different cultures develop in interaction with each other, leading them to jointly shift and engender wholes that are often more than the sum of their parts. The concept prominently informs present-day cultural discourses, where it is used with a certain looseness and flexibility. Stripped of the rich historical, geographical, and material resonances it assumes in various scholarly discourses, the idea of transculturation is attractive to marketers (of films and other commodities) eager to multiply audiences and increase profit at a time of interconnectedness. Taking part in the global flow, interactivity seduces and sells. Yet this model downplays aesthetic experiences, forms, and meanings. While signaling the model of transculturation, Llosa’s film disrupts it and makes room for a wider range of aesthetic possibilities.

Via images of milk and blood, the film exploits an abundant semiotic fecundity. Given their quotidian materiality and connection to sustaining life, these figures encourage metaphorical excess. Scholars have linked the two fluids to the establishment and continuation of class, racial, and gender hierarchies. They trace modern conceptions of race to historical policies of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) that resonate in the register of milk.18 In the Spanish colonies, these policies marked breastfeeding as a contentious arena. Disapproval of the use of Indigenous wet nurses by creole populations was common under coloniality; it was thought that infants could inherit negative qualities.19

The film maps the life of milk and blood as carriers of power, affect, and relationality. Both bodily substances are liquid, and we often speak of money in terms of fluidity.20 Llosa’s plot keeps account of various exchanges, marking who profits and who loses as these materials move in and out of the marketplace. By tracing the milk of sorrow in its different permutations alongside the ocean and a potato, two adjacent figures of transition and sustenance, this essay probes Fausta’s reworking of a racially hierarchical aesthetic cosmology. As we will show, a constellation of fluids and materials that historically has encoded distinctive societal orders acquires a new organization, one that also offers revised points of identification and address to the spectator.

The film opens with a blank screen. A voice is singing. The lyrics in Quechua recount the cruelty against women: women are used as a weapon of war. The singer is the victim of rape. To find out this information, any spectator not proficient in Quechua must read the translation of the song: white words projected against a black screen. The metamorphosis of song and word into cinematic image confounds and enlightens the viewer.21 The song does not solicit vengeance, rather remembrance. Before the audience can process these different demands, the singer’s face confronts us. It is deeply wrinkled. It is aged. And yet, the appearance is one of agelessness at the same time. Written on the face is an old story. And yet, this story is of recent origin. The body’s history, recorded on the wrinkles and creases in the face, attests to the public violence the woman sings about. She chants of colonialism and its legacy, of how she was raped while pregnant and forced to eat her husband’s penis. Her newborn baby breastfeeds on this trauma. Although both mother and child survived the brutality, the singing provokes memories. Her sharing of having been raped and tortured while pregnant with her daughter is killing her. Before Perpetua dies, she asks her daughter Fausta to sing: “Comeré si me cantas,…/ y riegas esta memoria que se seca” (I will eat if you sing …/ and water this memory that is drying up). Notably, she never mentions the Virgin Mary. With her mother’s death, Fausta inherits a vital responsibility. She incurs a new debt. In addition to keeping the song, the memories, alive, she must comply with her mother’s wishes to be buried in their Andean homeland.

Encoded in Perpetua’s desire might be a syncretization of representations of the Andean divine feminine Pachamama, often translated as Mother Earth, with Nursing Virgin imagery.22 Profit principles mediate any such transculturation, as the camera’s framing makes clear. Near the bed is a calendar that features an image of a Sacred Heart Christ, obliquely placed off center. Above the image, the name of the sponsor is legible. Indeed, economic considerations imprint corporeal address in the film from the get-go. The bleeding-heart calendar is a promotional tool, an advertisement, not a sign of religious devotion. Nor is the corpse subjected to Christian rites of the dead. Female family members and close friends join Fausta in cleaning and preserving the corpse according to Indigenous customs. Afraid of being contaminated by the dead woman’s breasts, one of the women asks Fausta to wipe them. She fears catching the illness, the trauma that the film’s Spanish title announces. Fausta does not hesitate. The survivors’ dealings with the milk of sorrow, panacea or toxin, along with the film’s distancing nod toward Christion notions of blood, attest to the limits of notions of transculturation.23

To procure the necessary funds for travel and her mother’s burial, Fausta seeks employment with the wealthy, white composer Aída. First, she is given a physical inspection by her predecessor, an Afro-Peruvian domestic servant who, charged with the task to see if Fausta is fit for work, examines her teeth and nails. The patrona’s economic privilege allows her to play out Black and Indigenous characters against each other in enforcing an aesthetic order consonant with her hygiene standards. Upon passing muster, Fausta spends the day waiting in front of a TV in the kitchen. That evening, the patrona calls out for her previous servant. Fausta answers the call. The camera follows her as she walks towards her employer’s bedroom. It lingers on several objects, including, for the longest time, a colonial-style sofa. Although the sofa invites Fausta to sit on it, she knows better. She doesn’t even look at it. The image is meant for the viewer: we witness a relic embodying the values reigning at the time when the house was built. As frequently happens, the camera gets ahead of Fausta, to pan to a painting of the Nursing Virgin placed on an antechamber’s dark interior wall (fig. 2). The Virgin’s gaze is on the infant who, in turn, looks at the viewer, linking together various bodily modes of address such as holding, feeding, caretaking, touching, gazing, and drinking. The camera spotlights the Virgin’s breast, held out to the child. As commentators have noted, the Virgin’s breast is at the level of Fausta’s mouth.24 This momentarily suggests that Fausta might find nourishment in this household. She walks past the painting without glancing at it, as with the sofa. The film, throughout, deploys a strategy of signaling images and objects and then cutting to others, keeping reading in motion.

Figure 2.

Film still from Claudia Llosa, The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009). A painting of the Madonna Lactans adorns Aída’s antechamber

Figure 2.

Film still from Claudia Llosa, The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009). A painting of the Madonna Lactans adorns Aída’s antechamber

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In filming Fausta’s walk through the different rooms, Llosa activates this strategy even further. As Fausta walks past the painting, her shadow covers part of it (fig. 3). At the same time, the painting’s subject matter turns her into a shadow, a ghost. The viewer is reminded of the milk of sorrow. The painting declares the role of the Catholic church in threatening Fausta with the fate of what the Indigenous cosmology considers a “lost soul,” as she is often called by members of her community in the film, with a reference to the risk posed for the living by the death of a person who has not been buried in accordance with ancestral protocols. In the context of Aída’s house, art, architecture, interior design, literature, and religion conspire to place Fausta outside official culture. While the spectator is coaxed to associate the painting’s Madonna with the owner, the film establishes countervailing connotations: the house, its furnishings, and decorative items, pronounce the patrona, already dreaded by Fausta owing to the biomedical inspection, a representative of a dated cultural, political, and economic system: the lettered city. These allusions will be amplified in the next scene when they meet. The painting, it should be noted, never resurfaces, and no one ever sits on the sofa.

Figure 3.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta walks past the Madonna Lactans painting, covering it partially with her shadow

Figure 3.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta walks past the Madonna Lactans painting, covering it partially with her shadow

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Filled with trepidation, Fausta enters her employer’s bedroom. Aída is in the process of drilling a hole to hang a photograph of one of her relatives (her father? grandfather?) in uniform, standing very erect and looking severe. Fausta suddenly sees an overblown military figure superimposed on her own reflection in the photo (fig. 4). Aída intensifies this hallucinatory vision when she commands Fausta to hold her electric screwdriver, as imposing as a handgun. Fausta flees, trying to stem her nosebleed. Her nose bled previously when she told her immediate family of her mother’s death. The linkages of the photograph with blood and death dispel any identification of Aída with the Madonna.

Figure 4.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta sees herself reflected in the photo of a military officer in Aída’s bedroom

Figure 4.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta sees herself reflected in the photo of a military officer in Aída’s bedroom

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Despite having run out of her boss’s bedroom, Fausta keeps her job. To appease her nerves, she sings while she works. Impressed with her songs, Aída approaches her and asks her to sing for her. Fausta is in the kitchen watching a cartoon on TV. The fact that Aída seeks out Fausta, that she enters her employee’s space, suggests a certain compassion and a possible equality between employer and employee, reversing their first encounter. The cartoon’s content disrupts this suggestion. Not only does the cartoon call attention to the image of milk, it also mocks Aída’s behavior.

Fausta is viewing a Disney cartoon based on “The Ugly Duckling,” the story of an abandoned duck who hopes to be accepted by his flock.25 In the episode on Fausta’s screen, the duck takes the milk out of the refrigerator to pour himself a glass. He exuberantly splashes the milk onto the floor (fig. 5). He refuses the biomedical lesson that drinking milk will turn one into a gorgeous swan. His refusal reminds the viewer of an earlier moment in the film when Fausta splashes a crane folded from a medical prescription into a basin of water. The medicine was supposed to cure her nosebleeds. Fausta chances on a fellow rebel and social outsider. Strikingly, after the splashing of the milk, the duck vigorously splashes around tomato ketchup.26 In the process, the cartoon debunks any identitarian association of milk and blood. The duck repositions these utilitarian materials as vehicles of comedy and protest. Aesthetic agency displays its boundary-breaking, community-building potentialities. Fausta learns a valuable lesson. Aesthetic promises in the biomedical field (if you drink milk, you will become a beautiful swan) are open to being rewritten. Aesthetic action can divert the circulation of fluids away from a system of hierarchy and injustice to more egalitarian designs. Aída, meanwhile, has stationed herself next to our protagonist in her ostensible gesture of companionship. She takes over from the cartoon, soliciting a song from Fausta out of self-interest. Eyeing opportunity for renewal, lettered authority competes with popular culture over the subaltern imagination. Fausta demurs. Aída does not give up.

Figure 5.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. The ugly duckling splashes milk onto the floor

Figure 5.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. The ugly duckling splashes milk onto the floor

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While she is getting dressed, Aída’s pearl necklace falls apart, introducing a further kind of liquidity. The pearls scatter all over the floor. Fausta kneels down to help pick them up (fig. 6). Aída seizes the moment and proposes a deal. Every time Fausta sings a song, she will pay her with a pearl from the broken necklace. Once again, Fausta declines. Singing points to the importance of desire, community, and agency in her life. Her singing juggles the tensions between the threats of eradication and the promises of life that suffuse her daily encounters. Out of familial obligation and aesthetic yearning, Fausta succumbs later on. She sings. Complying with their agreement, Aída moves a pearl from one bowl to another. Despite her various attempts to count the pearls, Fausta fails. The pearls institute an economic calculus and simultaneously exceed market structures.

Figure 6.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta and Aída pick up the pearls

Figure 6.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta and Aída pick up the pearls

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An accomplished composer and pianist, Aída is struggling with writer’s block when she proposes the exchange of pearl for song. Her frustration is so intense that she throws her piano out of the second-floor window. Soon afterwards, she orders a new piano. She haggles over the cost of the delivery with the overseer. The young men who will toil under the weight of the new piano have no say. They have no bargaining power. This sequence emphasizes competing timelines: the time of the house and its occupants’ colonial past, and that of the current marketplace and worker abuse. It prepares the spectator for Aída’s final erasure of Fausta, foreshadowed by her continually calling Fausta by another name, Isidra. No matter how many times Fausta corrects her, she persists. Servants are all the same.

For a brief moment, childhood grief appears to break down the class, race, and ethnic barriers between them. While working in the garden one day, Aída unearths a doll. She confesses to Fausta that when she reached a certain age, her father forbade her to play with dolls, but she never explains his reasoning to Fausta. The young Aída obeyed him and buried her doll. We can imagine that dolls reinforce the image of the Nursing Virgin adorning the vestibule: an idealized caring woman cloaked in modesty and humility, not the assertive, haughty, feared employer that Fausta actually encounters. When adult Aída finds the doll, an unspoken pain seems to unite employer and servant. This humane scene—a bonding between two victims of patriarchy—is cut short when Aída’s son inquires about the preparations for the concert. Aída coldly avoids answering him, her coldness suggesting a misplaced, even sentimental, concern on his part. She is certainly not the loving Virgin portrayed in the painting she owns. The artwork is just another piece of colonial furniture, dead weight.

Behind Fausta’s back, Aída turns her employee’s songs into her own piano pieces to be showcased at her annual concert in the center of the city. Standing to the side of the stage, Fausta listens with delight and horror. She has aided in her employer’s success. Her songs are being heard. Absent the lyrics, Aída’s pieces erase the songs’ history: the violence against Indigenous women and their call for resistance and ultimately the possibility of an alternative. The songs become pleasing artifacts. Aída triumphs. “All of Lima” is there to celebrate her. On the way home Fausta observes, “They liked it, didn’t they?” Her facial expression intimates that she contributed to her patrona’s success. Her question solicits this recognition. The statement also suggests a somewhat ambiguous motivation on Fausta’s part. While need may have impelled her to exchange pearls for songs, she is not a neutral onlooker. Her remark disrupts Aída’s self-image as a Western artist. For the composer, her success rests on her natural creative talent, above all else. Furious Aída’s ruthlessness emerges, revealing her colonial/military patrilineage. She orders “Isidra” out of the car.

Aída does not want to acknowledge to herself that her “original” composition is an arrangement of “popular” songs. She disavows the knowledge that her arrangement depends on the appropriation of the other’s voice and the denial of their history. With the songs’ original violence wiped clean, the composition can be heard and celebrated as pleasing, as Fausta observes. “Lima” enjoys another example of the commodification of Andean music so popular in the West in the late seventies. Fausta’s expulsion signals the failure of the ruling elite to come to grips with Peru’s reality and points up the elisions and limitations of a transcultural aesthetics.27 The civilizing project of the lettered city displays its brutal side, which calls into doubt the city’s legitimacy.28 A vicious ideology carries the day.

The most abominable aspect is not Aída’s cruelty but the way in which the system erases consequences from the powerful. The cultural system portrayed in the film is rigged in Aída’s favor. She will not be held accountable for the violence; she will get away with it. The film is unflinching in its depiction of class and institutional injustice. The limits of the lettered city stand out. The film could end on this note of disclosure, revealing how the ruling class keeps the hierarchical symbolic order from recognizing that guilt and deformation are of their own making. Llosa’s film aims further. It continues, deploying at the level of possible endings the same close-and-open strategy activated at the level of the image.

The “milk of sorrow,” so far, has held Fausta in terror, enthralled to death. She is too mortified to brave outside the home unaccompanied, and she suffers from fainting spells and nosebleeds. One way or another, she makes her way to her uncle Lúcido’s (Marino Ballón) house, where she has lived since she and her mother left their homeland. Her cousin Máxima (María del Pilar Guerrero), who is getting married that day, tells her to come in and get ready for the wedding, the preparations for which are in full swing. Fausta attends the festivities but doesn’t socialize, observing the events with a detached numbness. When the party dwindles and she has gone to sleep, the uncle, at his wits’ end, tries to shock her out of her fear of life by almost suffocating her. “¡Tú quieres vivir, pero no te atreves! ¡Respira, respira!” Somehow liberated from her death wish, Fausta finds the wherewithal to question her tolerance for suffering. Her actions acquire a new urgency.

Early in the morning, she returns to Aída’s house to collect the pearls she is owed. On her way out, she faints. Aída’s fulltime gardener Noé (Efraín Solis) finds her. She begs him to take her to the nearby hospital. She has a history there. Immediately after her mother’s death, her uncle, worried about his niece’s recurrent nosebleeds, had taken her to the clinic. A potato tuber was found growing in her vagina, as Fausta explained, to protect herself against rape.29 Now she finally has the recommended surgery. The potato implant is removed. Throughout the procedure, the doctor informs her uncle, she clenched her fist. It contains the pearls, of course. With this defiant act, she secures the traveling and burial funds. The operation must be read as a first step in regaining her physical health, not necessarily as overcoming her trauma.30

The camera continually travels between different spaces, alternating between city center, pueblo joven, and Indigenous world. In its depiction of the informal settlement, the film reflects on the social and economic solidification and expansion of a neoliberal marketplace, in which the local heterogeneous moves toward the global homogeneous. Despite the signs of modernization that abound, the Indigenous community is not solely invested in becoming or appearing more Western. As we shall discuss, the community looks back to its history and recuperates alternative patterns of consumption and enjoyment, experiences that often take a collective form. In the process, the notion of transculturation at play in the relation between the global and the marginalized local loses explanatory value. In his books Consumers and Citizens and Imagined Globalization, Néstor García Canclini argues that Latin American men and women increasingly feel that many questions proper to citizenship, such as, “Who represents my interests?” or “Where do I belong?” are being answered in the private realm of commodity consumption and the mass media, more than in the abstract processes of democracy or through trajectories of collective participation in the unified nation, as promulgated by Aída’s notion of “all of Lima.”31 Except for the opening scenes of the film when the military is invoked as a killing machine, civic institutions are completely absent from the pueblo joven. Absent state and civic institutions, slum dwellers turn to the market as an answer to their current problems. García Canclini proposes that processes of consumption should be considered an expansion of political notions of citizenship and identity.32 Through the consumption of goods and the media, individuals not only adapt their desires to capitalist demands but also express their needs and aspirations.

Fausta’s cousin Máxima exemplifies the enticements and controls represented by the marketplace. Early in the film, upon the mother’s death, the camera cuts to an outside scene in which Máxima is parading around in her wedding dress while complaining to her parents about the length of her veil. It is too short. Fausta suddenly appears and announces her mother’s death to her immediate family, interrupting the young woman’s whining. Through this stark contrast between the cousins’ behaviors, the film laces the dilemmas of consumption with the question of life and death.

In a later scene, we discover the reason for Máxima’s complaint about her train. Being too short, it will not fly. She wishes to soar on her wedding day. As a solution, pink balloons are attached to the veil. Of course, there is no lift-off.33 Máxima briefly threatens to abort her marriage. Her desire for a longer train is a kind of self-intoxication, a form of excessive consumption. It counterbalances Fausta’s vulnerability and grief with excitement. The cousins’ dual strategies are not aberrations but the daily norm that the neoliberal market at once incites and laughs away as bad taste in Máxima’s case and morbidity in Fausta’s. The two are unacceptable women, or what Mike Davis terms a “surplus humanity.”34 Popular culture seeks and enthralls them as consumers. Fausta, we have seen, spends her downtime at work watching TV. Máxima plans her wedding according to TV dictum, and yet she also follows tradition: she peels a potato to divine her marriage’s longevity. In her cousin, Fausta encounters her double. Both have a surplus status, whether of the disconsolate or exuberant variety, life-denying or life-affirming. On top of that, on our first encounter of the pair, they each in their own way pronounce the other’s excess.

Fausta’s family earns a living by catering weddings. Her uncle Lúcido functions as the official photographer. He memorializes the newly married couples and their extended families standing in front of global locations as if the couples had had a destination marriage. These photographic moments take their participants’ aspirations seriously. The subjects’ investments in their performances recall García Canclini’s sustained argument in the chapter “Capitals of Culture and Global Cities” about how people are imagining their geographic and geocultural locations differently.35 The couples and families do not identify with a bounded space. Rather, their identities are formed with and against local, Indigenous, national, and transnational materials. Their postgeographical reality brackets whatever disdain some viewers might feel for them. Through its staging of these photographic instances, the film juxtaposes glimpses of poverty (makeshift housing, lack of paved streets, no services) with a transnational consumerism fueled mainly by television, which has replaced the store window. The viewer is offered an evocative portrait of modern-day Latin American life.

The film depicts this shifting terrain palpably when it captures Fausta standing in front of a virtual Iguazú waterfall, dressed in blue, distressed (fig. 7). External enticements are at odds with internal abjection in a way that resists comprehension. She appears lost in this virtual world. She is a ghostly presence; she belongs and does not belong to this transnational economy. Fausta lingers alone; the party is continuing elsewhere. Compassion tears through the viewer’s heart at this devastatingly sad moment in the film. Fausta’s loneliness nonetheless intimates an awareness too. Is the blue water a place of unmitigated effacement? Or can global fantasy be tweaked into something else? Llosa’s camera carries the question of aesthetic participation beyond rigorous social oppositions.

Figure 7.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta stands in front of a life-size image of the Iguazú waterfall

Figure 7.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta stands in front of a life-size image of the Iguazú waterfall

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This complication surfaces anew during a traditional parade of gifts. At the end of a communal civil marriage ceremony, relatives and guests parade with incommensurable presents. A marriage bed, for example, is followed by hens, which give way to an ironing board. How the items will be used in the future is part of the ongoing marriage narrative. These festivities are a celebration of what a couple will do in the future, unlike in a Hollywood romance, where marriage is the end. The joyous procession of things, furthermore, “break[s] up,” as Foucault writes of Jorge Luis Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continu[es] long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.”36 The parade of gifts construes the temporality of modernity in a manner that recognizes the coevality of peoples and cultures. It illustrates the social and cultural contradictions marking the disjunctive space of contemporary Lima, and it implicitly calls for a rearticulation of the city along egalitarian lines, one that is prefigured by an older female worker. She sways to the music while the wedding gifts are being announced and supplied with explanatory narratives (fig. 8). This memorable moment blocks any ironic distance. Instead, the worker’s slow dance movements bless the ceremony. They remind the viewer that weddings bring into being new histories, new presents, and new futures.

Figure 8.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. An elderly woman dances to the music during a communal wedding

Figure 8.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. An elderly woman dances to the music during a communal wedding

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Likewise, a swimming pool sequence designs a new sociality, heralding what a communal, not an entrepreneurial, variety of cultural agency might be. Without preamble, the camera cuts to Fausta’s uncle Lúcido digging. When Fausta sees him breaking up the rocky ground, she assumes that he is carrying out his threat that if she does not take her mother back to the village before Máxima’s wedding, he will bury her corpse in the backyard. The tomb turns out to be a swimming pool. As it is being built, the camera zooms in and captures the delight on the faces of a couple of children, playing in a hole apparently not much bigger than a bathtub. Nor does the pool project a sense of permanence. It comes about from a kind of random happening and is made up of whatever materials are available. When Lúcido is finished, the camera briefly shows us a group of people frolicking around the pool, laughing. This brief scene brings together the locals in a pleasurable activity rather than in mutual ignorance or suspicion. The camera invites us to frolic with them.

These spaces of social interaction, formed with symbolic resources of different origins, shape social belonging and affirm social networks. The film works with these various imaginaries to make the participants and the viewers believe we are alike. At the same time, it stresses disparities and divergences. A prime example is the unusual number of kissing scenes between grooms and brides that circulate in the film. In the West, the couple seals their commitment with a kiss. In each scene, the recently married men appear overly anxious. They kiss their brides sloppily and crudely. Given the suave conventions of Hollywood’s romantic leading men, these red-hot Latino lovers fall short. While the kisses are laughable, they have an endearing quality, too.

The wedding photographs and the gift parade, the kisses and the many feet we see going up and down steep staircases throughout the film, all exude abundance, not deficiency, as certain notions of modernity would maintain. Together these various sequences reveal how community members navigate consumerism so that it is more than a market force or profit principle. The inhabitants of the pueblo joven create a communal aesthetics out of random and diverse objects while engaging in an intricate web of interactions among themselves, in contrast to the imagined community touted by the closed lettered city. The film presents the community as a collective of fluid sociohistorical, relational subjects, capable of reflecting on and adapting to a multifaceted economic system. The community is engaged in creating narratives and images and in responding to the ones promulgated by the global media.

Not all the festivities are captured in a bright light. During Máxima’s engagement party, a young man discloses his attraction to Fausta in a flirtatious remark (a piropo) that links blood and milk in an explicit sexual configuration: “Si el rojo es el color de la pasión, báñame con tu menstruación.” Fausta immediately gets up and leaves. While his recombination of liquids might miss its intended target, his reliance on popular wisdom cannot be laughed away. Although she goes off in silence, Fausta remains vulnerable to the values embedded in her communities’ language. Language as a voice of common knowledge places a premium on conformity. It offers little to an eccentric individual like her.

As Gloria Anzaldúa notes in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” sayings, ready-made language used by well-intentioned people, keep alive conservative, if not reactionary, values most often at the expense of girls and women.37 The innocuous saying about flies, “En boca cerrada, no entran moscas” (Flies don’t enter a closed mouth), she points out, monitors and censors the behavior of young girls exclusively. Anzaldúa even remembers her own mother citing the common truism that “if she is going to get a job, she must speak English well,” that is, with no accent.38 Albeit with the best intentions, her mother reproduces institutionalized American racism normalized in popular sayings. Fausta’s leaving does not undo the sexism and violence against women embedded in the flirtatious quip. Nor does the film recount fully how she is going to cope with the risks and conventions that are part of her environment. At the end, it concentrates on the positive lessons learned.

When Fausta, following her expulsion from Aída’s car, returns to her uncle’s house and observes her cousin’s wedding festivities, she witnesses the community interacting joyfully with material and symbolic resources. Connecting with these practices, she comprehends that the actual images and materials infusing her aesthetic longings, namely splashed milk, the pool, the parade of gifts, and the staged wedding photographs, along with flowering potato plants (as we will clarify momentarily), resist the market economies of both the small screen and the concert hall. While the former may lead to a communal giddiness, as we observe when Máxima’s wedding party is being groomed in front of a TV, and the latter to individual triumph, as is the case with Aída after the recital, they suffer from a presentism, a lack of historical and cultural grounding. This presentism contrasts with the historical and future orientations Fausta embeds in the images of the ocean and the potato.

In the film’s penultimate sequence, Fausta is on her way to her village with her mother’s corpse. Her uncle is driving. For unstated reasons he is helping her now, after having let her fend for herself in the aftermath of her mother’s death. On seeing the ocean in the distance, she asks her uncle to stop the truck. A vision of the ocean had captured her before, when she tried to purchase a coffin with her male cousin. At one of the stores they visit, she notices a hand-painted coffin decorated with water and the sun. She is transfixed by it. In its fluidity, the ocean is the opposite of her barrio’s barren terrain. When Fausta finally sees the actual ocean, she is ready to transform her existential dilemmas into a problem to be solved with help of an aesthetics, not an already established identity. Throughout, Fausta has negotiated the dangers and lures water imagery presents. Tossing the paper crane into water, she toyed with death, layering the water she desires with an ominous undercurrent. Lest we forget, her journey has been an education in aesthetic idioms and readings. This journey leads her to reevaluate the diasporic or migrant experience as something that creates the homeland. She recognizes that her mother’s desire to be buried in her village is the result of the Quechua diaspora. The village, given the expanded resonance of Mother Earth (Pachamama), becomes an affective process related to other images and temporalities, rather than a place.

Alone, she carries her mother’s corpse across the sand dunes toward the sea (fig. 9). The film’s recurrent shots of people carrying persons or things stress the various characters’ Andean ethnicity. As she looks into the horizon, the ocean appears endless, unlike the earlier water imagery. Both basin and pool had contained the water’s scope. Its flow is unimpeded here, signifying a suspension of previously instituted limits. No longer compelled to follow Indigenous imperatives to the letter, Fausta starts a new song as the shot of her dragging her mother’s corpse fades. She reworks the promise to bury her mother, while still watering memory. Inventing shifting images in a rearticulation of the bond with her mother, she recasts the milk of sorrow. The traumatized, contaminating breast and its poisoned milk give way to a nourishing song (“comeré si me cantas”). A generative flow carries onward in the life-affirming figures of the ocean and the mother. Fausta fulfills the obligation to her mother in an unprecedented way. She simultaneously brings into being the space for a new song, life. The film, once again, reaches a possible ending that it declines. It goes on to revitalize the landscape. The song spreads over her neighborhood, where potatoes may eventually blossom.

Figure 9.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta carries her mother’s body across the dunes

Figure 9.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta carries her mother’s body across the dunes

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Throughout the film, the potato goes through a series of transformations. At first, it is to be rejected as strictly poisonous, analogous to the milk’s startled, perturbed aspect. When they discover the potato implanted in her vagina at the clinic, the examining doctor, albeit of Andean heritage, lectures Fausta for believing in superstitions and not practicing Western forms of medicine. The doctor conceives of himself as impersonal and purely objective, driven by scientific knowledge, while simultaneously reinforcing the exotic nature of the potato tuber. Outside the clinic, Fausta defends its usage. The potato shields her from rape. She wants the potato implant to be understood through a specific historical lens that recognizes articulations of race, class, and gender. Her explanation disrupts the doctor’s self-presentation.39 She resists succumbing to a dichotomous medical logic that separates and homogenizes bodies into healthy and sick. Instead, she locates the potato tuber within the social patterns, gender relations, and cosmological conceptions of her community. The potato becomes a primordial support of her Andean identity. Tending to the potato, she prunes the sprouts extending from the tuber in her vagina and advocates on behalf of the potato by challenging the gardening ventures of Noé, Aída’s gardener.

Their relationship is complicated. Fausta slowly learns to trust Noé. As she becomes more comfortable in his presence, she brings up the subject of the plants he cultivates. She wonders why the potato plant is excluded from the garden. For Noé, the garden is a refuge, a self-enclosed world. At first, he is reticent. Then he divulges that potatoes are abundant, cheap, and flower for a very short time. She rejoins that the flowers he prizes are not native, they speak of a colonial past. They are the result of a hierarchical system that differentiates among flowers and ranks them as part of the construction of a social order. She appreciates the potato as a flower, not a mere food substance. The potato evolves beyond its everyday meaning. As such, the potato is agential and responsible for a shift in the aesthetic values of the garden’s keeper.

The last sequence involving the potato takes place in the pueblo joven, now situated between a ruinous modernity (the city as civilizing project) and a confining tradition (the Andean village as site of resistance), where the ability to overcome, to change, to reach for freedom is part of daily life. Noé leaves Fausta an intertwined blossoming potato plant at her doorstep (fig. 10). In the eyes of a spectator reading for character, this final image may bring closure to the romance.

Figure 10.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. The intertwined potato plant that Noé leaves for Fausta

Figure 10.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. The intertwined potato plant that Noé leaves for Fausta

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The potato plant proclaims the unstated Hollywood finale: Fausta and Noé live happily ever after. Cured of trauma, Fausta can now entertain marriage and motherhood.40 Yet Noé leaves—he does not wait for Fausta to open the door. The gift, it appears, is testimony to his rethinking of his aesthetic tenets. She has convinced him of the participation of aesthetic practices in creating and maintaining societal hierarchies as well as putting forth alternative social conceptions. The potato plant signals a decolonial aesthetic opening rather than soldering a heterosexual bond. Fausta, throughout the film, forgoes any marital interests or maternal traits. Her obligations are solely filial. During her cousin’s engagement, for example, she is pictured holding a young child at arm’s length. She neither cuddles nor entertains the child, who supposedly is hungry. As part of the wedding crew, she keeps her distance. Even when one day she greets Noé with a huge lily in her mouth, her attitude is more humorous than amorous (fig. 11). She is playing the exotic Latina, complementing the figure of the grooms’ Latin lovers.41 A Hollywood ending would require seeing Fausta as endowed with a unique profile. From the opening sequences onward, however, the film sidetracks the project of creating a coherent psychological identity. It counters this enterprise with revised understandings of intimacy and an upending of the public-private divide shaping the notion of individualist artistic creation. The Hollywood reading, the romance, must be discarded in favor of a decolonial option.

Figure 11.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta greets Noé at the gate of Aída’s house with a red lily in her mouth

Figure 11.

Film still from The Milk of Sorrow. Fausta greets Noé at the gate of Aída’s house with a red lily in her mouth

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When Noé leaves her the blooming potato, he acknowledges and accepts her resignification of the potato plant. Fausta is responsible for the shift in his aesthetic values. Gardening becomes a place for exploring the different forms beauty might take. He recognizes her as a cultural agent. While these aesthetic modalities may not yet add up to a new public space, the figure of the potato signals future openings for the young children who announce Noé’s gift. The gift encapsulates the aesthetic possibilities that traditional Andean culture enduringly maintains; a point underscored once more by the image of the children dancing. The young boy is learning a traditional dance from a slightly taller young girl. They have yet to face unspoken difficulties. Nonetheless this image hints at ways in which aesthetics holds out a decolonial promise of change, not only to the characters but also to the spectator.

The Milk of Sorrow offers two inflections that could readily serve as endings to the film, as we have indicated. These sequences fold back onto themselves to answer the circuit of modernity, exoticism, magical realism, and transculturation tagged by the film poster and picked up by the concert plot with an involved array of aesthetic possibilities. The first instance is Aída’s eviction of Fausta from the car after the concert. Being thrown out frees Fausta of her transcultural illusions, causing her to let go of any respect for Aída’s values. The film continues well beyond this point where modernity proves to be victorious and the limits of the lettered city, which seeks survival at the price of carrying on in the extractivist mode, are exposed. Máxima appears to confirm this economic reality. Throughout, she follows the enticements and dictates of the marketplace, thus amplifying corporate opportunities to draw a profit from slum dwellers like herself. Nonetheless, the market fosters ways in which inhabitants of the pueblos jóvenes can make social interventions. The cousins exemplify these ambiguities. From Máxima’s wedding and her uncle’s social and entrepreneurial labors, Fausta learns the importance of community, to breathe, and to honor her mother’s request in a manner attuned to her own aesthetic longings. These valuable lessons lead to the burial journey and its unexpected denouement.

The film could have come by its second ending at the ocean’s edge, with Fausta gazing out at the horizon in awe of all the blue that surrounds her. Memory prevails. Her bonds with her mother and the Andean village are safeguarded. Subaltern desire is regained. Closure, however, does not arrive until the potato plant blooms in Fausta’s district. Neither the ethical bankruptcy of the marketplace and the aesthetic limitations of the lettered city, nor an aesthetic perception severed from contemporary exigencies hold Llosa’s main interest. Indeed, her bet is on the pueblo joven. The three different endings, two possible, one actual, get us there. Overlayed onto each other, they each nod toward crucial aesthetic capacities and limitations, highlighting promises and threats undergirding the community’s daily existence.

Taken by the image of the ocean and the potato’s disavowed beauty, Fausta detects aesthetic possibilities unrecognized by Indigenous protocols and Western gaze alike. Learning her lessons from the duck, her uncle, and Máxima, she actualizes them as a part of her lifeworld. The spectator enjoys a parallel educational process. Film poster and concert plot alike supply a point of departure that the film exposes and dismantles. Viewers are at once primed for an exoticist imaginary of a premodern, Indigenous cosmology that animates Fausta and a moralist condemnation of a colonialist or national order that submerges her, only to be barred from dwelling in these positions. In this way, the spectator becomes alert to the aesthetic potentialities Fausta and her family realize in the pueblo joven.

The modernist story held out as a promise by the poster, revealed in its ambivalence in the medical scenes and unmasked as a threat by the appropriation ritual, comes apart. While donning the magical realist cloak to draw in the Global North viewer and bring home the West’s conflicting figurations of Indigenous musical invention, the film rejects an overall frame of transculturation where magical realism nourishes and is nourished by modern desire in a self-confirming circle.

If Noé’s gift is to survive in the pueblo joven’s arid landscape, the plant will need to be watered. No one is better suited for this task than its recipient, Fausta. Her journey to bury her mother has been an education in liquids. She learns how to read fluid images and work through the opportunities and dangers they present. At the end, Fausta can comply finally with her mother’s other wish: to water memory. Although the violent acts perpetrated on Perpetua and her husband are singular, atrocious events, they are unfortunately still common historical occurrences not only in Peru but throughout Latin America. Everyone knows this narrative. Perpetua prefers an intimate account; Fausta delivers. In its exploration of aesthetic forms and modes of bodily address, and its self-reflexivity, the film, likewise, heeds the mother’s call.

The dynamics between Aída and Fausta consume considerable screen time. We previously noted how they almost bonded over a doll that Aída disinters while watering the garden with a hose. During this watering scene, Aída keeps memory at bay. She briefly mentions her father’s prohibition against her playing with dolls and even now, as an adult, she internalizes it again. She reburies the doll, memories. For her, images and things have a fixed temporal place. Frozen in time, the sofa, the Madonna painting, and the relative’s photograph all clearly demarcate specific mnemonic boundaries. The film, by contrast, impresses on the spectator how different forms and images flow into one another. When the opportunity arises to open herself to a sonic flow and to engage in a transcultural moment, Aída evicts Fausta from the car. She slams the door on the present. And yet, she and the lettered city she represents are already riddled by economic imperatives. The Madonna in Aída’s antechamber finds its match not in Fausta’s mother but in a Christ figure adorning a mass-produced calendar on the wall above the mother’s corpse in the pueblo joven. Aída is a cultural, social, and economic anachronism, and the film rightly dismisses her.

With Aída out of the picture, Fausta’s uncle becomes our guide to the daily challenges and temptations the denizens of the pueblo joven confront. Lúcido recognizes how images work in the current market environment. Given the plasticity of the image, he takes improbable photographs that fulfill the desires of his community. Just because he traffics in transcultural devices does not turn him into an invoicer of transculturation. He harnesses technology for his community’s entertainment and benefit. The people are not disturbed by the simulacrum. The positive and vibrant nature of their activities, furthermore, counters the prevailing negative view of the slum. It is fitting that her uncle urges Fausta to breathe at the point in the film when she is most estranged and apathetic. She does breathe. She gathers the courage to bury her mother. The final resting place, the ocean, emerges from the web of fluid images that Fausta encounters and negotiates. This web becomes her and her mother’s memory. The film concludes by foreshadowing Fausta’s future aesthetic impact on the pueblo joven, which Noe stresses with his gift.

If Fausta is going to have an impact and build a life in the pueblo joven, she is going to have to engage on a daily basis with a whole array of images and forms that she inherits and that are part of her surroundings. Initially desperate to shield herself against impending violence, she almost destroys her own life. Through her singing and by joining her family’s and community’s aesthetic practices, she moves out of a state of numbness, herself inventing ritual forms that conjoin memory with futurity. Getting out from the precepts of Indigenous customs and shaking off the demands of the lettered city do not betoken the arrival of a free-flowing aesthetic creativity, however. With her protagonist, Llosa offers a view of aesthetic agency as a strategy of critical reading and bodily address that negotiates intertwined promises and threats. Eradicating the threats, both Fausta and the viewer realize, involves extinguishing the promises.42 Perils remain, as the film’s inconclusive ending intimates. The course Fausta’s life will take is undecided. At the same time, Llosa no less rejects the artistic hero of Cidade de Deus as a model for a female teen in the pueblos jóvenes than the young narco-traffickers of La virgen de los sicarios who one by one fall victim to endemic violence. The model she proposes constellates around the more complicated notion of aesthetic experience and agency we have explored in this essay.

The film maintains its technique of open-and-close throughout. Noé’s gift portends an open decolonial future. At the same time, Fausta’s living in her uncle’s house brings to the fore the recurring image of a female closed off to the world. Yet when necessary, she walks; many times next to walls, bearing out the ever-present fears of trauma. Still, what matters is her walking, not just her walking away (for instance, from her young suitor or Aída’s house). Her sinking back into fear cannot be ruled out. Her anxiety doesn’t simply vanish and must be seen not merely as an individual pathology but as a social constellation demanding a collective response, as Noé recognizes by giving his gift, not himself. Fausta has become aware of a simultaneously collective and individual set of aesthetic tasks: to continue to move; to allow images to remain fluid; to keep interpreting, revising, addressing anew. For quenching the dangers means depleting the alternatives. The film teaches Fausta and the viewer how promises and threats are entangled.

Like the viewer, she lives in a contemporary world overwhelmed by narratives about globalization, consumerism, social media, and simulation. Traditional narratives associated with Latin America are under pressure. Activating plots of magical realism and transculturation, and engaging issues of colonialism and a deformed modernity but refusing to give primacy to them, Llosa’s film brackets these known entities in favor of a more relevant story. While providing a tale of consumer desire, global photographic self-representation, and fantasy, Llosa gives it a twist to develop a relatable account, a grounded story. In so doing, the film parallels the lives of its main Quechua characters and their community. Like them, it negotiates conflictive Indigenous, local, national, and transnational mandates and forces.

Llosa’s protagonist lives the aftermath of the milk of sorrow in a parched settlement that is part of Lima, one of the many sprawling cities of the Global South. At the end, Fausta is still there in her uncle’s house. Her loneliness, which reminds the viewer of the film’s beginning, anticipates future pleasures and disappointments, possibilities and restrictions. The home is not built with the most solid materials or on the firmest economic footing. The uncle and his family depend on the community for a living. They are vulnerable to varying tastes. Swayed by ever-changing consumption patterns on television and social media, as Máxima and her wedding party are with regards to hair styles, the community may tire of their services. They may look for a different vendor and/or photographer. As the film hints, Fausta, too, is vulnerable to the community’s economic and cultural shifts. Early in the film, one of the women refused to touch her mother’s corpse in fear of being contaminated by the milk of sorrow. In burying her mother in the ocean, she goes against Indigenous practices. Her behavior might be seen as idiosyncratic. Given the community’s reliance on popular knowledge, her reaction to the suitor accentuates her marginality. Fausta’s precarity endures.

Cognizant of its viewers’ attractions, their need for current, relatable narratives, the film at once invites and inhibits facets of magical realism and transculturation at the level of form and image. The milk of sorrow is translated into a duck’s spilled milk, which is later linked to the whiteness of pearls. Whiteness underlines the racial connotations embedded in the milk and its adjoining bodily substance, blood. The pearls become the currency to purchase Fausta’s songs. Bodily fluids tie together race, class, and power. Corporeal address morphs as hitherto unfathomed promises and threats arise and become legible. This fluidity also marks how a Madonna painting connects to a wall calendar, which alludes to the fake photographs.

The film’s multiple endings are intertwined as well. Securing the pearls leads to the mother’s burial. The film continues. The infinite ocean is subsumed by the beauty of the blooming potato plant. The earth—not its alternatives, the garden or ocean as graveyards—becomes the fertile ground for cherishing fresh narratives and songs. Fausta’s stories will air the tensions and forces at the root of her pueblo joven’s predicaments and hopes. Through the aesthetic, she forges a space between a consumerist present that imposes its debts and a past that won’t let her breathe. She does not overcome her trauma and become a modern woman, nor is she the exotic, seductive Indigenous woman. She is a signpost for Latin American film—and Latin American arts in general—still at risk of reduction to magical realism.

Different parts and versions of this essay were presented at several venues. These include meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Engage! forum at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts; the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College; the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts at the University of Warwick; the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam; the German Society for Aesthetics at Leuphana University; the International Association for Aesthetics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil; and the postgraduate program at the Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, GO, Brazil. We are grateful to the organizers and audiences for their insightful comments.

1.

Dolores Tierney, “Against (Coloniality in) Anglophone Film Criticism: Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths/Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2022),” Mediático (blog), School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, July 4, 2023, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2023/07/04/against-coloniality-in-anglophone-film-criticism-bardo-false-chronicles-of-a-handful-of-truths-bardo-falsa-cronica-de-unas-cuantas-verdades-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2022/.

2.

Jeffrey Middents, “The National Auteur ‘Goes World’: Claudia Llosa and the Critical Responses to Aloft/No llores, vuela,Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays 2, no. 1 (2019), https://vimeo.com/346830647.

3.

As such they resonate with approaches in the scholarly literature. On the charge of magical realism and the film’s consequent diminishment of Indigenous agency, see, for example, Deborah Shaw, “European Co-production Funds and Latin American Cinema: Processes of Othering and Bourgeois Cinephilia in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada,” Diogenes 62, no. 1 (2018): 88–99, 93–94.

4.

Jean Franco, “Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, 65–83 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 73. Magical realism continues to have a powerful grip on the Western imagination of Latin American art and culture. In a CNN interview with Isabel Allende on the occasion of the publication of her novel The Wind Knows My Name (2023), journalist Christiane Amanpour wonders whether it was a “deliberate” choice or part of the author’s “evolution” that “the magic is cast off, there is no fairy dust being sprinkled over your latest book.” Clearly, the expectation of magical realism is so ingrained that its absence is thought to require explanation. Indeed, the cover of the North American release markets the novel under this rubric, with its image of a Latin American, possibly Indigenous woman surrounded by a pink sky and tropical plants, with a blue butterfly in her hair, although in the author’s words, “magic realism is not like salt and pepper that you can sprinkle everywhere,” and the present book “doesn’t allow it, it is a very realistic story.” Amanpour, CNN, September 27, 2023.

5.

Monique Roelofs and Norman S. Holland, “Indigeneity at the Limits of Transculturation: Decolonial Aesthetics in Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism 14 (2024): 1–30.

6.

Films such as La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), La niña santa (Holy Girl, 2004), and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008) have won Martel major critical acclaim, among other things, for their portrayal of female protagonists.

7.

The film investigates modes of address toward and by these substances, including sensory, interpretive, and linguistic modes. On the notion of address in this essay, see Monique Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Monique Roelofs, Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

8.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).

9.

On the limitations of representations of slums, notably in Global North-South cinematic coproductions, see Sudeep Dasgupta, “Permanent Transiency, Tele-visual Spectacle, and the Slum as Postcolonial Monument,” South Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (2013): 147–57, 150.

10.

Adriana Laura Massidda, “Slums, Villas Miseria, and Barriadas: Why Terms Matter,” Journal of Urban History 49, no. 3 (2023): 552–70. This article usefully traces the shifting vocabulary around low-income communities in Latin America, problematizing the usage of “slums” yet uncritically reverting to the language of shantytowns.

11.

Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. and ed. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

12.

Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

13.

Carolyn Wolfenzon insightfully reads the film as a critique of the role of the lettered city in contemporary Latin America. Carolyn Wolfenzon, “La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa y Dioses de Josué Méndez: una lectura crítica de La ciudad letrada desde el cine peruano,” Latin American Literary Review 49, no. 98 (2022): 21–32. She points out that it is the slum dwellers, conceived as el tercer anillo (following Rama), who sustain the nation and currently constitute the center of culture. The lettered class fundamentally depends on the cultural innovation of the Andean populations in Lima’s periphery (Wolfenzon, “La teta asustada,” 22). While according to Wolfenzon the lettered city is reduced to a small, arcane space ruled by racism, she regards transculturation as an inevitable and indispensable force of cultural development (22–23). In what follows, we signal the limits of a transcultural reading.

14.

The film’s portrayal of trauma has been contested; several critics dismiss what they regard as Llosa’s exoticizing depictions of the transmission of trauma via breastfeeding and of a potato’s protective effects. See, for example, Cynthia Vich, “De estetizaciones y viejos exotismos: apuntes en torno a La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 40, no. 80 (2014): 333–44. While similarly emphasizing trauma, other scholars defend the significance of the milk of sorrow by reference to medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon’s book Entre prójimos: el conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2004), on which the film is partly based. See Carolina Rueda, “Memory, Trauma, and Phantasmagoria in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada,” Hispania 98, no. 3 (2015): 452–61; and Adriana Rojas, “Mother of Pearl, Song and Potatoes: Cultivating Resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009),” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas 14, no. 3 (2017): 297–314.

15.

The painting is a version or copy of Mateo Pérez de Alesio’s Virgen de la Leche. Pérez de Alesio painted multiple variations of the Madonna Lactans, including, besides other images in Lima, a 1604 version on display in the Lima Art Museum and one dated around 1600 in the Denver Museum of Art.

16.

Roelofs, Cultural Promise, 25.

17.

Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (1940; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008); Francis R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); Francis R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds., Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1997); Rama, Lettered City, 13, 81–83.

18.

At the end of the Reconquista, the series of campaigns by Christian kingdoms to seize back Iberian territory from Muslim rule, which occurred from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, anyone living on the Iberian Peninsula had to be Christian or convert to Christianity. Many Jews and Muslims did. Nonetheless, many were accused of having falsely converted in the hope of avoiding expulsion, while secretly continuing to practice their original religions. Laws demanding proof of purity of blood were instituted. Ancestry, not religion, became a determining social factor. Within Spain’s colonies the concept of limpieza de sangre evolved to connote racial purity for both Spaniards and Indigenous peoples. For a general discussion, see Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson, eds. The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). On Spain, see Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). On Mexico, see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). On Spanish-speaking countries, see Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

19.

José-Alberto Palma and Fermin Palma, “Maternal Breastfeeding or Wet Nursing? Religion, Persecution, and Ideology in the 17th Century,” Breastfeeding Medicine 15, no. 12 (2020): 756–58, https://doi.org/10.1089/bfm.2020.0255.

20.

Kara W. Swanson, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk & Sperm in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

21.

This moment, further, is one among many indications that the film, which aspires at intelligibility by a public that is proficient in Spanish and not necessarily in Quechua, situates itself explicitly within global cinema.

22.

Since the conquest, Andean culture has absorbed but also transformed Christian symbols and imagery. Lynette Yetter, “Virgin Mary/Pachamama Syncretism: The Divine Feminine in Early-Colonial Copacabana,” Western Tributaries 4 (2017): 1–14. Possibly, the mother is following this tradition. For contemporary uses of syncretism, see Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

23.

Indigenous and Marian imagery both come together and follow their own paths as elements of manifold aesthetic trajectories fueled most notably by the potato and the songs. Some of the links between milk and blood forged by the film tie into a series of connections whose locus in the West is Mary’s body. In her cultural history, Marina Warner notes that breastfeeding appears to be Mary’s only natural biological function. A pared-down, schematic Christian narrative holds that Mary’s blood nourished the unborn child in the womb. Upon his birth, her blood changed into breast milk. Milk, in turn, became Christ’s redemptive blood, which believers drank like milk from the wound on his side when he was crucified. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 195–222. In a reading of the Virgin Mary figure, Julia Kristeva critically interrogates the enduring power of the Marian model in the West in view of its continuing influence on cultural perceptions of maternity and the possibilities of a female ethics. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–63. The film brings to this terrain a decolonial aesthetic perspective that rethinks its racial, gender, and class implications. Meanwhile, differences as well as connections between milk and blood would appear to be at issue. Llosa may be recalling a theme in colonial Spanish and Spanish American art inspired by Augustine’s apocryphal texts, in which he describes being conflicted between Mary’s milk and Christ’s blood. These substances assume variable racial connotations (owing to the contrasts between Perpetua and the Madonna and between Fausta and the Madonna/Christ pairing) that shift in the course of the film.

24.

Several critics focus on this instance. For example, Irma Vélez concludes that the Virgin nourishes Fausta throughout her journey. Irma Vélez, “Matricidio y ob-scenidad en la (est)ética de Claudia Llosa,” Lectures du genre 8 (2011): 28–52, https://lecturesdugenrefr.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/velez-2_r8.pdf. She notes that “el encuentro de la mujer con el arte es lo que le da luz a la teta, y sombra al susto” (the encounter of the woman with art is what gives light to the breast, and shadow to the fear), “Matricidio,” 48. Translation by the authors. We challenge this reading, which fails to imagine a future for Fausta outside the discourse of maternity and beyond the perimeters of colonialism/modernity. Vélez continues, “El pasillo que cruza Fausta…es un símbolo más del renacer de Fausta a la posibilidad de otro tipo de maternidad, en definitivas la suya propia por venir” (The hallway that Fausta traverses …is one more symbol of her rebirth to another type of motherhood, definitely her own to come). Adriana Rojas also relies on this moment as a part of her argument that, once cured of her trauma, Fausta envisions a future of marriage and motherhood (“Mother of Pearl,” 306; see also note 30).

25.

Llosa may be paying sly tribute to the Chilean bestseller Para leer al pato Donald (1971). The book’s authors view the comics as corporate propaganda, furthering cultural imperialism. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comics, 4th ed., trans. David Kunzle (1975; repr., New York: OR Books, 2018).

26.

Curiously, Dorfman and Mattelart begin their polemic by focusing on the sexual undercurrents of these fluids in Disney cartoons in the first chapter, aptly titled, “Uncle, Buy Me a Contraceptive …” At the start of the chapter, they note the absence of parental figures amid the proliferation of ducks that are relatives of Donald and each other. Neither Fausta nor the duck has parents.

27.

While Wolfenzon interprets the concert as an instance of transculturation (“La teta asustada,” 25–26), in our reading, Llosa’s representation of the performance and the subsequent betrayal insists on the inadequacy of notions of transculturation.

28.

Ángel Rama analyzes the functioning of the lettered city as a motor of what is seen as civilization since the conquest. He notes that writing acquired “an almost sacred aura,” on account of the lettered classes’ ability to control it in by and large illiterate societies (Rama, Lettered City, 24). For Franco, the Cold War era marks a sea change in this history. Supported by the ruling classes in its fight against communism, she indicates, the military establishment in Latin America undercut notions of art and literature “as agents of ‘salvation and redemption.’” The changes military governments wrought in the structure of civil society brought artists’ utopian visions to an end and diminished the role of the arts in the nation-building project. Franco, Decline and Fall, 12. From the angle of elite culture and its status within the nation, Aída exemplifies this moment. At the same time, the aesthetic strategies we highlight go beyond utopian visions or a nation-building project.

29.

For Deborah Shaw, the image of the potato exemplifies magical realism and as such diminishes Indigenous agency. Shaw, “European Co-production,” 93–94. The limitation of this interpretation, which usefully points to tensions in the film, is that it bypasses the aesthetic complexities of Llosa’s treatment of Fausta and the potato.

30.

Rojas argues persuasively that Fausta honors her mother’s memory by means of the songs, the potato, and the pearls, yet the critic sidesteps the ways in which Fausta needs to rewrite these metaphors to create a livable alternative to her mother’s narrative. Rojas, “Mother of Pearl.”

31.

Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflict, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 5; Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, trans. George Yúdice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 137.

32.

García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 137.

33.

The flying scene humorously alludes to the famous moment in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude when Remedios La Bella ascends to heaven. As in other instances in the film, Llosa employs a magical realist trope while simultaneously distancing it.

34.

Davis, Planet of Slums, 174–98, 201.

35.

García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 137–50.

36.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), xv.

37.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 53–64.

38.

Anzaldúa, “How to Tame,” 53–54.

39.

It is worth noting that Fausta’s fear, underlined by the film poster, cannot be read as a trauma-induced fear of men specifically, which would be in tension with her basic trust of her uncle Lúcido, her growing trust of Noé, and her dread of Aída, figures that complicate the gender issue away from binary thinking. Fausta’s fear is of (sexual) violence more broadly. It emphatically involves her aesthetic and political suspicions about systems that are biased against her: a colonial value system, the military, institutionalized medicine, and as we indicate shortly, selective botanical classifications.

40.

Rojas, among others, argues that Fausta recovers from her trauma; she reads the ending as signifying not only health but also readiness for marriage in Fausta’s resilient community. Rojas, “Mother of Pearl,” 299–300, 305, 310, 312. Gastón Lillo offers a reading that is skeptical of Fausta’s liberation in “La teta asustada (Perú, 2009) de Claudia Llosa: ¿memoria u olvido?,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 37, no. 73 (2011): 421–46. While he, too, sees the film’s trajectory as leading from trauma to cure, he draws on recent literature on memory and forgetting to argue that instead of remembering in order to overcome the trauma, Fausta wants to keep living the memory.

41.

The North American DVD cover promotes the film with this representation of an Indigenous woman in the tradition of Carmen Miranda.

42.

Roelofs, Cultural Promise, 207.