Sobre La Teta Asustada

Liverpool University Press
Chapter Title: Transitional Justice and Reconciliation through Identification: Paloma de

papel and La teta asustada
Book Title: Andean Truths

Book Subtitle: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining
Path Peru
Book Author(s): Anne Lambright
Published by: Liverpool University Press. (2015)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gpcbmx.7
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Liverpool University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Andean Truths
This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Mon, 05 Nov 2018 04:19:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
chapter 2
Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

through Identification
Paloma de papel and La teta asustada
Paloma de papel and La teta asustada change this
Highly successful commercial films, Fabricio Aguilar’s Paloma de papel (Paper

Dove, 2003) and Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (Milk of Sorrow, 2009) are
two of the few dominant cultural products that directly engage the Andean
experience of the war and its aftermath, while exploring issues of worldwide
interest: recruitment of child soldiers and violence against women.1 Paloma
de papel and La teta asustada are important works because both bring the
Andean experience of the war to the forefront of national cultural dialogue.
Unlike the novels studied in the previous chapters, or for that matter other
contemporaneous commercial films, they ask the audience to engage differ-
ence and to connect emotionally with the indigenous and indigenous-mestizo
characters portrayed. However, I would argue that Paloma de papel looks at
its subject from a vertical position within the dominant power structure,
taking a paternalistic stance much like that of the CVR’s Informe final. It aims
to bring the audience to a collective catharsis via a vicarious experience of
trauma that uses, rather than involves, indigenous subjects. La teta asustada,
on the other hand, through both its circumstances of production and its
treatment of its subject matter, assumes a more horizontal position with
respect to indigenous communities. In considering the question of national
culture and the citizen-subject in post-Shining Path Peru, La teta asustada is
unique in that re-locates national culture and redefines the national subject,
suggesting that the future of Peru lies greatly in urban indigenous culture.
1 In Ayacucho, filmmakers such as Palito Ortega and Jesús Contreras have produced
low-budget, local distribution films about the Shining Path era. While those films
merit greater critical attention, especially given their popularity in the Andes, my
interest here is in more commercial films meant for international audiences. I see
these as working in tandem with the Truth Commission (not always deliberately and
not necessarily harmoniously), providing important insights into the place of Andean
culture in dominant national discourse and the role of contemporary indigenous-
mestizo subjects in post-conflict national reality. For an introduction to sociocultural
aspects of filmmaking in Ayacucho, see Alonso Quinteros, ‘Entretejidos de imágenes’
and Ponciano del Pino, ‘Ayacuchano Cinema and the Filming of Violence.’
pa l om a de pa pe l an d l a t eta a su sta da 61
Furthermore, the film demands a new ethical stance on the part of the larger
audience, obliging the public to take a position less of a far-away empathizer
and more of solidarity.
Commercial films about the Shining Path era have been around since
the 1980s; some of the most notable are Francisco Lombardi’s La boca del
lobo (The Lion’s Den, 1988) and La vida es una sola (You Only Live Once,
1993), by Marianne Eyde, both of which are set in rural communities in the
highlands.2 Of those released after 2003, three popular films, Josué Méndez’s
Días de Santiago (Days of Santiago, 2004), Lombardi’s Mariposa negra (Black
Butterfly, 2006), and Rosario García-Montero’s Las malas intenciones (The
Bad Intentions, 2011) are not set in the sierra, and indeed Mariposa negra
makes no reference at all to indigenous peoples. Días de Santiago explores the
psychological and social trauma experienced by a young veteran as he tries
to readjust to civilian life in Lima. Mariposa negra deals with the corruption
of the Fujimori regime, specifically the maniacal workings of his right-hand
man, Vladimiro Montesinos, and the complicity of the state-controlled press.
Las malas intenciones explores the life of an eight-year-old girl in a wealthy
limeño family at the beginning of the conflict; the indigenous characters are
marginalized servants. These films highlight the violence, corruption, and
social devastation provoked by the internal conflict, but their readings of
the Shining Path era and its aftermath do what dominant cultural products
have for so long in Peru: show the audience a Westernized, urbanized Peru,
virtually untouched by the country’s indigenous cultures.
In processing a situation of gross human rights abuses, one of the things
that literary fiction can do is fill in the blanks, allow the reader to delve
deeper into the minds and lives of those affected by war, and provide relevant
background information and psychological revelations. In contrast, what film
can do is provide a more complete sensorial experience. The indigenous
peoples so sketchily referred to in the novels studied in Chapter 1 are given in
film a corporeal reality. That is, the viewer sees them moving, interacting with
their space and with others, and can appreciate their facial expressions, their
dress, their surroundings. The viewing eye moves in to close-ups on dirty
fingernails and pans out to a solitary figure engulfed by a majestic, perhaps
threatening, Andean landscape. In addition to the visual, the audience also
hears: the Quechua that was described as ‘incomprehensible mumbling’ in
Roncagliolo’s novel Abril rojo, for example, becomes distinguishable sounds,
decipherable to most only through subtitles, but, nonetheless, recognizable
as language, a key marker of humanity and culture. Andean music can add
drama or can shape our emotional reception of a certain event in the plotline.
Nature’s sounds—birds singing, rivers flowing, wind rushing—are violated
by gunshots and grenade explosions.
2 For an excellent analysis of these two films and the representation of Andean culture
in Sendero-era Peruvian nationalism, see Francisca Da Gama, ‘Filming the War with
Sendero.’
62 an dean truths
We combine these and other technical elements with the fact that film
is clearly a more accessible medium for many reasons. Books in Peru are
much more expensive than movies, which can be seen cheaply, often through
the abundant pirated versions. Furthermore, literacy rates in certain areas
of Peru can be quite low, especially among indigenous rural populations
and urban poor, so we see how film can be an essential agent in assessing
the transitional justice process in Peru. An examination of the two most
important films dealing with the Andean experience of the conflict and
aftermath is therefore essential for moving towards a greater understanding
of the articulation of ethnicity and national culture in truth and reconcilia-
tion efforts, as well as the role of creative cultural production in contesting
and shaping the same.
Paloma de papel: Reifying Dominant Views of Indigeneity

Paloma de papel was the debut film for soap-opera actor Fabrizio Aguilar, who
had apprenticed under Lombardi, broadly considered Peru’s most important
filmmaker to date.3 In 2000, the screenplay won a national competition, El
primer concurso especial de proyectos de películas (First Special Competition for
Film Projects), and third prize in the IV Edición del Concurso de Largometrajes
(Fourth Competition for Feature-length Films, run by Peru’s National
Cinematography Council, CONACINE, a branch of the National Institute
of Culture). In 2001, Paloma de papel also received the Ibermedia prize for
the development of feature-length screenplays. These awards gave Aguilar
the money to develop the project, which was filmed and edited simultane-
ously with the Truth Commission endeavors and released in 2003, the same
year as the Final Report. Paloma de papel was featured in many international
film festivals and won prizes in several, including Best Film in LaCinemaFe
Latino Film Festival in New York City, Best Film in Brazil’s Cinesul
Festival, and the Grand Prize in the II Festival del Cine Pobre in Cuba. The
film was also Peru’s entry for the 2003 Academy Award for Best Foreign
Film.4 Critical reception for Paloma de papel has been surprisingly acritical,
praising the director for the story line, the ‘realistic’ portrayal of indigenous
culture, and the beautiful panoramas of the majestic Andean countryside.5
3 In 2009, Aguilar directed another film about the Shining Path era, Tarata, examining
the effects of the 1992 bombing by Shining Path of the Banco de Crédito del Perú
in the Calle Tarata in the upper middle-class Miraflores district in Lima. For many
coastal Peruvians, this event forced them to examine for the first time the horrific
events that had been occurring in other parts of the country for over a decade.
4 Unlike La teta asustada, Paloma de papel did not make the cut to the final nominees.
5 See, for example, Jorge Esponda, ‘Paloma de papel.’ In fact, critical reception of the
film is surprisingly sparse. Most reviews are mere synopses. A chapter of a doctoral
dissertation by Sarah Barrow offers one of the few academic analyses of the film
and mentions certain criticisms, but ultimately adopts a favorable reading of the
One notable exception is Pablo Rojas’s assessment, with which I thoroughly

agree, that ‘in Aguilar reigns an ignorance and absolute exteriority with
respect to the world represented in his film.’6 Indeed, a close examination
of the film reveals that Aguilar takes a top-down view of Andean culture
that, rather than enhancing the viewer’s understanding of the region, simply
reinforces pre-existing notions of indigeneity in Peru and solidifies the
distance between the viewing public and the film’s subject.
Paloma de papel tells the story of Juan (played by neophyte Antonio
Callirgos), a twelve-year-old indigenous boy in an unidentified Andean town,
who is kidnapped and conscripted by a group of Shining Path members.
Unlike the novels examined in Chapter 1, here indigenous culture is not
shown as remote and unintelligible. Rather, in this film, the Andean world
and its people are presented as essentially and absolutely comprehensible.
Nothing about indigenous culture is beyond the understanding or expecta-
tions of a Western viewing public. The first half of the film, which focuses
on Juan’s childhood in the days leading up to his capture, shows predict-
ably idyllic images of a small Andean village. Poor but happy and caring
peasants live in comfortable proximity with nature, care for animals and for
each other, weave, sew, cook, and play. The knowledge of indigenous culture
portrayed in the film seems to come straight from a Peruvian elementary
school textbook—indigenous men engage in a faena—a community house
raising effort—women wash clothes in the local river, and send their children
to serve chicha—a fermented corn beverage—to the men who toil pushing
old wooden plows pulled by oxen. These people are decidedly pre-modern,
even ahistorical; the only modernity is brought from the outside, as military
men occasionally arrive in trucks, and guns are distributed either by soldiers
or by Shining Path.
Beyond these predictable images, the indigenous characters speak only
Spanish, such that there is no sense that they might have a language or culture
beyond comprehension of the Western viewer.7 As Fatimah Tobing Rony
notes in her study of representations of native peoples in North American
films, ‘It is as if the distance between the signifier and the referent in the
construction of native peoples collapses.’8 We never see the native afresh,
film’s contribution to understanding the national conflict. In 2009, there was a

small conflict when the film was shown on national television, on Canal 7, a state-
owned channel, as part of a series of Peruvian film. Aldo Mariátegui, editor of the
newspaper Correo, called the film pro-Shining Path and anti-military. Aguilar and
Rosa María Oliart Velarde, then president of CONACINE, responded defending the
film (see Gabriel Quispe, ‘Aldo Mariátegui tilde de “película senderoide” a “Paloma
de papel”,’ and Aldo Mariátegui, ‘Una palomillada’).
6 Pablo Rojas, ‘Urpillay: Paloma de Papel.’
7 Rojas notes that even the Spanish spoken is closer to a Lima variety than to the
Quechua-inflected Spanish spoken in the rural highlands.
8 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle, 5.
64 an dean truths
but rather, ‘the exotic is always already known.’9 Indeed, these indigenous
peoples are the same ones we, the Western international viewing audience,
have seen many times—they are our idealized image of native peoples. In
this occasion, they have simply donned their Andean costume.
Among the more notable characters are Juan and his two friends, Pacho
and Rosita. The beginning of the movie is devoted to presenting their
innocent games, their care for animals, and their relatively carefree lifestyle.
The children either run about the countryside laughing and playing or they
tend to farm chores; they do not appear to attend school. The film shows
the children occasionally feeding ‘Tata,’ presumably Rosita’s grandmother,
an elderly blind and mute indigenous woman who spends her day sitting
under a tree outside a small hut (see Figure 2.1). Tata projects an especially
troublesome view of indigenous people. She is unable to care for herself—the
children spoon-feed her a soft porridge—and her only communications are
animal-like sounds she emits to scare Juan. Intentionally or not, she becomes
emblematic of a dependent, vulnerable, and voiceless culture. The last we see
of her, she has rung bells to warn the town of coming terrorists, and is shown
walking on a hillside, flailing her arms to find her way, it is not clear to where.
While perhaps this scene might be interpreted as a political commentary on
the directionlessness or precariousness of the national situation, embodied
in an aging, blind indigenous woman, the overall logic of the film does not
point us in that direction.10 Rather, the scene is pathetic and almost comical,
and appears to point to a fundamental helplessness and vulnerability on the
part of an indigenous people removed from the nation whose geographical
territory they inhabit.
Another important character is a good-natured blacksmith, not indigenous
according to his physical features, who acts as a father figure for Juan and
as the village wise man. He makes the first paper dove to which the film’s
title refers, and forges a collection of iron bells to serve as alarms against
the terrorists.11 A particularly strange and unrealistic scene shows the
townspeople ringing the warning bells. Everyone seems to marvel at the
sound, as the camera focuses in on faces with expressions of joyful surprise.
9 Ibid. 6.
10 That is, Aguilar does not seem to turn to indigenous characters to embody a political
critique in the same way as other artists, such as Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, the
theater group studied in Chapter 3, or novelist Oscar Colchado Lucio, examined in
Chapter 4.
11 The motif of the paper doves seems forced and unnecessary. The film begins with
young Juan in a juvenile detention center, making a paper dove, and shortly after we
see an adult Juan surrounded by paper doves he has presumably made during his
years in prison. The theme is introduced when the blacksmith tells Juan a story of a
young girl who dies and is reborn as a dove. Other than perhaps to emphasize the
innocence of the serrano villagers, there seems to be no real connection between the
paper doves and the rest of the story line.
2.1 Juan and Rosita feed Tata in Paloma de papel.
All of the villagers seem absolutely childlike in their innocent enjoyment

of sounds they had certainly heard before (one of the opening scenes has
the children ringing similar bells in the town church).12 The blacksmith
represents the most cultured figure in the town. He is a creator who works
with important signs of Western modernity: iron and paper. And it seems the
film wants to use his creations—the bells and the paper dove—as symbols
that point to the struggle between war and peace. However, the inordinate
surprise with which the villagers confront these cultural products simply
serves to confirm their innocence and backwardness.
Furthermore, the indigenous peoples are shown as mere pawns in a
war between Shining Path and the state. That is, they are subjects without
agency. For example, Juan’s stepfather, Fermín, works secretly for the terror-
ists, but he seems to do so against his will, and certainly due to no political
convictions (most likely, he does so out of fear for his life). Ultimately, he
is killed by Shining Path when the group tries to take over the village. Juan
is involuntarily drafted by the terrorists, and his attempts at becoming a
soldier are comical, as are the ideological regurgitations of Modesto, another
indigenous child soldier, who spouts truisms such as ‘nosotros no queremos
capitalismo como en los Estados Unidos, donde todos son malos’ (We don’t
want capitalism like in the United States, where everyone is bad). Even the
one potential source of action by the villagers, the ronda campesina—rural
paramilitary efforts that were often quite successful in staving off Shining
12 These bells actually came to hold a sinister significance during the civil war. Similar
bells were rung in military-occupied towns to call women to serve military officers
with sexual favors.
66 an dean truths
Path—is shown to have been created when the military thrusts rifles into the
hands of reluctant townsmen and to be entirely ineffective at protecting the
town.13 In these and other examples of potential political action, indigenous
peoples are portrayed as incapable of understanding and acting politically;
rather, they appear much like the old blind woman, arms flailing about, ready
to be moved in the direction of the next forceful wind.
In certain ways, this film appears as but one more testimony before the
CVR by survivors of the Shining Path period. Fleshed out, it gives visual
images to the oft-repeated account of the horrors experienced by the child
soldier. It provides an event (the visual images, background music, engaging
characters) through which it encourages the viewing public to empathize, to
feel like they have shared an experience. In this sense, it is not really unlike the
televised tribunals that so fascinated the main character in Thays’s Un lugar
llamado Oreja de Perro (see Chapter 1). We learn of the cruelty and treachery
of Shining Path, as its members steal, lie, and betray indigenous peoples. We
witness the brutality of the military that rounds up and ‘disappears’ innocent
villagers. We mourn the loss of happiness and innocence in the face of a
national tragedy. We reaffirm the black and white of our view of the conflict.
Whether we turn off the television set or walk out of the movie theater, we
have been given a compact, digestible story with which we can feel satisfied.
We have empathized, been appalled, experienced what Ann Kaplan calls
‘vicarious trauma.’14 And we can move on.15
Paloma de papel begins and ends with the release of Juan from prison,
where he has served about ten years for his participation with Shining
Path. At the end we see him, now a young man, return home on a day in
which the villagers have gathered to mourn those lost during the conflict.
Many parts of the village are in ruins; the entire community has gathered
before a crumbling church plastered with photos of the dead. Juan sees his
childhood friends through the crowd and rushes to embrace them. The
final scene is static, almost a still life (see Figure 2.2). If, as Richard Wilson
argues, transitional justice efforts rely on a ‘discontinuous historicity,’ where
a dysfunctional and unsustainable national situation gives way to a (state-
sponsored) hopeful, radically different, future,16 in Paloma de papel, there
hardly seems to be any discontinuity in Andean history—the present will
not be all that different from the past or from the future. Again, indigenous
peoples are removed from history and trapped in a mythic time where all that
is left for them is to mourn the dead. As depicted in this film, they remain
outside the nation; there is no contemplation of how they fit in post-conflict
13 See the Introduction for a more detailed explanation of the rondas and their
importance.
14 This concept was discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 1.
15 Rojas notes that the film ‘is perfect for cleansing a bad conscience and feeling solidarity
with that other Peru that is seen in postcards and tourism’ (Rojas, ‘Urpillay,’ 9).
16 Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, 16.
2.2 Juan returns to villagers mourning the deceased in

Paloma de papel.
efforts to move forward, no recognition of their role as citizens of a ‘new

Peru.’ In this regard, we turn to Llosa’s film for a radically different view of
the place of lo andino in post-Shining Path Peru.
La teta asustada: Towards a New (Modern) Andean Subject

La teta asustada is the second film by Claudia Llosa.17 Born and educated in
Lima, Llosa moved to Spain in 1998 to study film and eventually settled in
Barcelona, where she currently lives. Her films, nonetheless, have dealt almost
exclusively with Peru, and show a great interest in indigenous cultures.18
Her debut film, Madeinusa (2006), garnered immediately both acclaim and
17 Llosa is the niece of the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mario Vargas
Llosa, former presidential candidate (he lost in a shocking upset to Fujimori in 1990)
whose comments on indigenous peoples have included this gem from a 1990 article
in Harper’s Magazine: ‘The price that they, the Indians of the countryside, must pay
for integration is high—renounce their culture, their language, their beliefs, their
traditions and customs, and adopt the culture of their former bosses … Perhaps there
is no realistic formula for integrating our societies without asking the Indian to pay
this price … If I had to choose between the preservation of Indian cultures and their
assimilation, with great sadness I would choose modernization … modernization is
only possible through the sacrifice of the Indian cultures’ (Vargas Llosa, ‘Questions
of Conquest,’ 52–53). However, Claudia Llosa seems to have taken a different view
of the value of indigenous cultures in Peruvian national culture.
18 Other films include the shorts El niño pepita (2010) and Loxoro (2012), as well as a
film in English, Aloft (2015), set in Canada and starring Jennifer Connelly.
68 an dean truths
harsh criticism.19 Set in a fictional highland town, this film recounts the
accidental arrival of a young limeño man in an isolated community on the
eve of a bizarre pseudo-religious local tradition. While some accused Llosa
of exoticizing and negatively portraying indigenous peoples, with Madeinusa,
Llosa claimed her position as a major force in Peruvian cinema and began
her exploration of the centrality of Andean cultures to Peruvian national
identity.20
Like Madeinusa, La teta asustada is a decidedly international endeavor;
its sponsors are governmental and independent organizations from Peru,
Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and the European Union. Listed sponsors
in the opening credits include Oberón Cinematográfica/Wanda Visión/Vela
Producciones; Televisión Española, Televisió de Catalunya; the Ministry of
Culture ICAA; the Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries of the Catalan
Generalitat; the Peruvian Consejo Nacional Cinematográfico-CONACINE;
Programa Ibermedia; Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation;
World Cinema Fund; Programa Media de la Comunidad Europea. The film
has been featured in many international film festivals, was one of the final
nominees for Best Foreign Film at the 2010 Academy Awards, and won the
prestigious Golden Bear Award for Best Movie at the Berlin Film Festival
in 2009.
La teta asustada—translated as The Milk of Sorrow, but literally, ‘The
Scared Breast’—tells the story of Fausta, a young indigenous woman living in
a settlement outside of Lima. Her mother dies, and Fausta must find a way to
pay for her return to their village. We quickly learn that Fausta suffers from
the ‘teta asustada’ illness. According to Andean beliefs, her soul has escaped
her body and buried itself, because of the fear Fausta experienced, as a baby
in her mother’s womb, when her mother was raped by a soldier fighting
terrorists in her village. Llosa formed the idea for this film after reading about
the illness as documented in Entre prójimos, Harvard anthropologist Kimberly
Theidon’s rich study of the mental-health effects of the Shining Path era on
individuals and communities in the highlands.21
The film opens with an elderly woman singing in Quechua of being raped
while pregnant. The screen is black; we only hear the song and eventually see
the woman’s face—she is lying on her deathbed, and singing, as if offering
a testimony, about how soldiers brutally murdered her husband and raped
19 See, for example, among others cited here, reviews of the film by Lee Marshall,
Andrew Schenker, and Boyd Van Hoeij, as well as articles such as Sebastián Pimentel,
‘La Berlinale hizo justicia,’ and Tomasini Sinche, ‘Enferma de miedo.’
20 See, for example, Maria Chiara D’Argenio, ‘A Contemporary Andean Type’; Juli
A. Kroll, ‘Between the “Sacred” and the “Profane”’; and Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum,
‘El Glamour en los Andes,’ for scholarly articles analyzing the portrayal of indigenous
peoples in Madeinusa.
21 Theidon’s study has since been expanded and published in English under the title
Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru.
2.3 Fausta hears Perpetua’s sung testimony in La teta asustada.
her, while she was pregnant (see Figure 2.3). Her daughter, Fausta (played by
indigenous actress Magaly Solier) responds, also singing in Quechua, trying
to encourage her mother to eat. The mother, Perpetua, dies almost immedi-
ately, and Fausta appears at her uncle Lucio’s adjoining house. Her nose is
bleeding, she faints, and her uncle takes her to the hospital. There, we learn
that not only does Fausta have a problem with frequent nosebleeds, she also
has a potato in her vagina. The doctor suggests that the uncle bring Fausta
back to have the potato removed and to discuss more palatable forms of birth
control. Later, Fausta insists that the potato is not a prophylactic, but rather
that the idea was inspired by a woman in her village who had successfully
staved off rapes by stuffing a potato inside herself—the soldiers were put off
by the budding spud protruding from her vagina.
In order to earn money, Fausta goes to work as a night maid for Aída
(played by Spanish-born actress Susi Sánchez), a concert pianist who lives
isolated, behind tall walls, in an old colonial home that has been engulfed
by the highland migrant invasion. One day the woman hears Fausta sing,
and offers her a pearl from a broken necklace for each time the girl sings for
her—once Fausta has completed the necklace, it will be hers. At first, the
excruciatingly shy Fausta refuses, but eventually she acquiesces due to her
urgent financial situation. In the end, we learn the woman has stolen Fausta’s
music for a piano concert. When Fausta remarks that the audience loved her
(Fausta’s) music, Aída fires the girl, without fulfilling their agreement. Later
Fausta surreptitiously enters the Aída’s room and takes the pearls—leaving
behind the one she had not earned. On her way home she faints in the
70 an dean truths
streets and is found there by Noé, the Quechua-speaking gardener she had
befriended at her job.22 He takes her to a hospital where she has the potato
removed. The film ends with Fausta taking her mother’s body home, only to
stop along the way and deposit the body on a deserted beach by the ocean,
and then later, back in her Lima home, she receives a flowering potato plant
from the gardener—perhaps the flowers of the same potato that had been
inside her.23
Despite the fact that the film garnered prestigious international awards and
recognition for Llosa and Solier, as well as for Natasha Braier,24 director of
photography, most international English-language reviews show an appalling
lack of understanding of the film and its historical and cultural contexts. Most
praise the direction, acting, and photography, but find the story contrived
and the action slow. At odds about the ‘meaning’ of the film, approaches
range from feminist, such as New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis’s
argument that the film explores ‘the possibility of female empowerment in a
culture suffocated by superstition and poverty,’25 to post-colonial, as in Ed
González’s finding that the work is ‘an affront to the neo-colonialist forces
of imperialism that persist within—and are supported outside of—Latin
America.’26 Curiously, not one of the major film reviewers mentions the use
of Quechua in the film, while virtually all of them resort to the obligatory
mention of ‘magical realism’ to describe the movie.
Not surprisingly, Peruvian reviews make no mention of magical realism—
while the film has a sort of dream-like quality, it could hardly be placed
22 The characters’ names, of course, invite reflection on the film’s dialogue with other
(classic Western) texts. Aída, like the protagonist of Verdi’s opera, finds herself
(ironically, given she is a member of the limeña aristocracy) enslaved by her attach-
ment to an antiquated lifestyle and obsolete values. Her creativity, and thus her
livelihood, has expired in her self-imposed prison, much like Verdi’s Aida perishes,
along with her beloved, in Radamès’s prison chamber. However, Verdi’s Aida dies for
noble reasons and is a symbol of selfless love; Llosa’s Aída seems doomed because of
her selfishness and inability to love. Fausta, like the protagonist of Goethe’s tragedy
Faust, makes a pact with the ‘devil’ (Aída), but she is ultimately saved. Noé recalls
Noah, and he, like the biblical character, is central to the articulation of (at least the
promise of) a new future.
23 The potato is one of several recurring symbols in the film. One scene shows Fausta at
a clinic waiting to be examined because she has been vomiting. Fausta is surrounded
by pregnant women, and the viewer knows that she is also pregnant, with a potato—
the tuber is live, sprouting (and ripe with symbolism, as a true life-source in the
Andes), but Fausta is not expecting a new child, with the hopeful future pregnancy
may imply.
24 Argentine born and educated, Natasha Braier has won several awards for cinematog-
raphy, including the 2009 Golden Camera 300 Best Cinematography Award for La
teta asustada, at the Manaki Brothers International Cinematographers Film Festival.
25 Jeannette Catsoulis, ‘A Trauma in Peru’ (Review of The Milk of Sorrow).
26 Ed González, ‘Memory, Identity, Politics, and Lady Parts at Latinbeat 2009.’
within that genre—and all of them mention the use of Quechua, though
no critic explores the political implications of that choice. The national
reviews range from laudatory to extremely negative. The most strident claim
that Llosa portrays Peru as backwards and barbaric and find the film yet
another racist view of indigenous society by a member of the limeña elite.
In a more nuanced review, Michael Mendieta accuses Llosa of playing to an
international, not Peruvian, public, hence her use of Quechua and indigenous
characters (though, again, these elements seem to have escaped the attention
of international critics). For Juan Carlos Ubilluz, the film offers yet another
sympathetic view of the victims of the internal conflict and little more.27
More complex and worthwhile critiques include Gustavo Faverón’s and
Eduardo González Cueva’s observations on the cultural dynamics portrayed
in the film, in particular between the stale traditional Lima elite and the
vibrant serrana migrant community.28 Outside Lima, especially in Ayacucho,
many Andean peoples embraced the film and felt great pride in its success;
pre-Academy Awards celebrations in Huanta paid tribute to Magaly Solier,
‘illustrious daughter of Huanta,’ as a poster proclaimed.29
27 Michael Mendieta, ‘De tetas y vaginas;’ Willard Diáz, ‘El cine visto como arte.’
28 See Gustavo Faverón, ‘Hildebrant y Llosa,’ and ‘Otra Mirada: la compleja segunda
cinta de Claudia Llosa,’ and Eduardo González Cueva, ‘La ofrenda: una lectura de
La teta asustada, de Claudia Llosa.’
29 Critical scholarship on the film is just emerging. One article published so far in a
major academic journal is ‘A Contemporary Andean Type: The Representation of
the Indigenous World in Claudia Llosa’s Films’ by Maria Chiara D’Argenio. She
criticizes Llosa for creating a ‘new contemporary Andean type, which is ultimately
an unproblematic and accessible way of thinking of and symbolically representing
“otherness”’ (20) and argues that her films ‘articulate at a national and international
level well-established Eurocentric discourses’ (21). However, D’Argenio’s critique is
based on an apparent lack of knowledge of Andean indigenous (rural and urban)
cultures. This leads her to fall into the trap of which she accuses Llosa—linking
indigenous culture, beliefs, and values with the primitive, traditional, non-rational.
Arguably, D’Argenio can only assert that, in the film, ‘despite having moved to the
capital city, the Andean culture is still presented as the place of primitive/irrational
belief and practices’ (24), because she herself believes that the Andean beliefs and
cultural practices presented are primitive and irrational. This stance is a very
problematic perspective from which to judge the film. One overt example is her
labeling the teta asustada illness as an invention by Llosa that responds to a ‘magical
vision of the world’ (39), when indigenous belief in the condition is documented by
anthropologist Kimberly Theidon (and Llosa’s reliance on Theidon’s work much
commented in accessible sources). She sees this aspect as one example in which
Llosa recurs to a ‘magical realism’ created through a ‘Eurocentric gaze’ (39) and ‘the
actualization of a colonialist-style discourse on the difference between a developed
and progressive West and an underdeveloped and primitive non-West’ (21). She
argues that, ‘La Teta Asustada is structured around (a) dualistic narrative and
… opposition between the Andean and the western’ (24). A more culturally and
historically informed analysis of the film and its processes of production prove that
72 an dean truths
In many ways, this film is quite different from any other commercial
endeavor that deals with the after-effects of Shining Path, or with Peru in
general. It begins in Quechua, and a full 40 percent of the dialogue is in
this language. For this, writer-director Llosa, who does not speak Quechua,
had to rely on a native-speaker translator and her indigenous actors. The
Quechua-speaking indigenous actress and singer who played Fausta, Magaly
Solier, was found by Llosa in a rural Andean town near Huanta, when Llosa
cast her first film, Madeinusa. While Llosa wrote the lyrics to the Quechua-
language songs in La teta asutada, Solier translated her own lines and set the
songs to music, relying on Andean melodic forms.30 In this and other ways,
the film is a collaborative effort; the mestizo-indigenous actors that play
Fausta, her family, and Noé the gardener, bring a specific cultural knowledge
to the film which neither the writer-director, sponsors, nor the greater part
of the audience possess. Furthermore, the cultural references are not always
translated into comprehensible terms for the Western audience. That is to say,
there are things indigenous characters say, do, and believe that would only
be fully understood by an Andean audience.
It could be argued, in this sense, that La teta asustada is participating in
a tradition of indigenous and native/non-native collaborative filmmaking,
part of a larger, international ‘third cinema’ movement, dating in the Andes
from the 1960s. Freya Schwiy studies indigenous filmmaking in Bolivia,
Colombia, and Ecuador, identifying different ways in which these creative
and documentary endeavors have ‘indianized’ film. For Schwiy, ‘as social
practice, (indigenous) video makers assimilate audiovisual technology to a
complex semiotic tradition of transmitting knowledge and a pan-indigenous
set of ethical guidelines that are themselves under construction. The process
of indianizing creates continuities between complex indigenous systems of
Llosa is working against these dualisms, revealing in La teta asustada how they are
no longer adequate for explaining the national situation. Furthermore, D’Argenio
fails to recognize the political, social, and cultural agency afforded the indigenous
characters in the film. They are not simply, as D’Argenio implies, ‘victim(s) of social
abuse and economic exploitation’ (26) by the dominant classes. Rather, Llosa goes
through great lengths to show that the indigenous characters are empowered forgers
of their own destinies whose centrality to the transitional historical moment must be
recognized.
30 Llosa discusses this collaboration briefly in an interview with Adam Lee Davies
(Davies, ‘Claudia Llosa (interview)’). Music is a central element in the film and
provides much of the emotional ambience. While this is certainly true of many films,
it is nonetheless important to recognize the centrality of music to Andean culture, a
fact addressed by many anthropologists, most notably in the work (both anthropo-
logical and fictional) of José María Arguedas. For a short but useful analysis of the
acapella music in Madeinusa and La teta asustada, see Marianne Bloch-Robin, ‘De
Madeinusa a La teta asustada.’ She notes how Llosa uses music sung by the female
protagonists to provide background information as well as insights into the protago-
nists’ interior emotional states.
signifying and audiovisual aesthetics.’31 Through its thematic content, use of

Quechua, presentation of Andean cultural norms, visual and oral symbolic
language, and mode of production, La teta asustada has indigenized, to an
extent, the Peruvian cinematic conversation of the Shining Path era, but in
a different way than that studied by Schwiy in other contexts.32
While La teta asustada highlights Andean cultures, it brings to the screen
an element virtually untouched in fictional filmmaking and yet perhaps the
most important legacy of the Shining Path era: the new urban Indian and
the contemporary communities of Andean immigrants in Lima.33 Beginning
in the 1950s, for economic reasons, and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s,
as highlanders fled the violence assaulting their lands, serranos have been
migrating to the coast, particularly to Lima, taking over empty land, and
establishing shantytowns, many of which have become vibrant municipalities.
La teta asustada, unlike Paloma de papel, provides a portrait of the contem-
porary Indian—one who interacts with modernity, who is modern, bilingual,
urban, Peruvian in her/his own terms.34
Anthropologist María Elena García speaks of the ‘competing ideas about
what it means to be (or not to be) Indian, particularly the troubling distinc-
tion—all too commonly made—between modernity (defined as progress
and enlightenment) and tradition (read as backwardness and ignorance)’
in Peruvian society.35 La teta asustada takes on those competing ideas
31 Freya Schwiy, Indianizing Film, 9.

32 That is to say, La teta asustada is not an indigenous film by indigenous media activists,
like those Schwiy examines. Nonetheless, I would argue that the film in several ways
does join activist indigenous media as it ‘negotiat(es) “the openings and pitfalls for
multicultural film”’ (Schwiy, Indianizing Film, 6) and perhaps even ‘contribute(s) to a
greater understanding of decolonization at the beginning of the twenty-first century’
(6) through a focus ‘not only on the struggle over territory, legislation, and political
representation but also, perhaps more important, on epistemes’ (7).
33 There are some documentaries on serrano immigration to Lima. Some notable
examples are Dancing with the Incas (1992, directed by John Cohen) and Peces de
ciudad (2007, directed by Felipe Degregori).
34 This is not to say that there are no longer monolingual Quechua speakers living in
isolated villages with no modern comforts, like those portrayed in Paloma de papel and
earlier films—they, too, exist, but are increasingly a small, and perishing, minority
of the indigenous populations.
35 García, Making Indigenous Citizens, 2. García writes of an experience of the ‘modern
Indian’ during a trip she made to Cuzco with her brother, who had never been to
the highlands (García was born of Peruvian parents who had immigrated to the
USA; her father’s parents had immigrated to Lima from the highlands). According
to García, at a bus stop in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, her brother noticed a man
on a bicycle with a young boy dressed in a ‘Ninja Turtles T-shirt, a Chicago Bulls
jacket, and Levis jeans, though he was wearing ujutas, the traditional rubber sandals
worn by most indigenous peasant farmers in the region’ (García, Making Indigenous
Citizens, 1). Upon hearing the man speak to another man in Quechua, and the boy
74 an dean truths
directly, showing a vibrant urban indigenous community, in contrast with

the decadent, sterile remains of a colonial aristocracy. The film highlights a
modern Andean community that does not seamlessly assimilate and paints a
new national culture sustained by an inevitable heterogeneity of knowledges
and practices, thus moving its national and international audiences away
from facile interpretations of indigenous peoples (and of Peru in general) and
towards what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith call an ‘ethics of recognition,’
that ‘mobilizes at once a stabilizing construct (seeking a universal or unified
identity) and a threat to that stability (dispersing sureties of a unified self
through difference).’36 That is, La teta asustada obliges the viewing public to
recognize a new Andean subject as an inevitable part of post-conflict Peru,
to question dominant paradigms of urban, modern Peruvian identity, and to
embrace the zones of ambiguity that are replacing previous (fixed, hardened)
notions of the ‘two Perus.’
To a great extent, the film’s content, circumstances of production,
and reception give lie to this oft repeated trope of the ‘two Perus’—one
Westernized, urban, and modern; one Andean, rural, and ‘traditional.’
Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s understanding of this dualism is more
to the point:
One of the most insistent expressions of the tensile character of Latin
American subjectivity is the permanent note of dualism in our intellec-
tual manner, our sensibility, our imaginary. This dualism cannot be
simplistically explained by the opposition between the modern and the
non-modern, as apologists of ‘modernization’ continue to attempt to do.
Rather, it derives from the rich, varied, and dense condition of the elements
that nourish this subjectivity, whose open conditions also continue to fuse
together in new meanings and consistencies that articulate themselves in
a new and different structure of intersubjective relations.37
According to Quijano, in Latin America we experience a ‘simultaneity of all
historical times in the same time.’38 He argues: ‘in Latin America, the past
runs through the present in a different way than is pictured in the premodern
European imaginary: not, that is, as the nostalgia for a golden age that is, or
was, the continent of innocence. Among ourselves, the past is, or can be, a
personal experience of the present, not its nostalgic recovery.’39 He sees this
reality as ‘the basis for an alternative rationality against the instrumental
rationality that dominates our present.’40 For Quijano, this present is the
buy bread from a woman, also realizing the transaction in Quechua, García’s brother
comments, “I thought only Indians spoke Quechua”’ (1).
36 Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives, 26.
37 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America,’ 146.
38 Ibid. 150. Quijano includes mythic time in this experience.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
result of a long, uninterrupted, and ongoing history of Western domination,

material and intellectual, in Latin America.
La teta asustada makes a point of exploring the most contemporary
manifestations of this domination, and provides a glimpse of the resulting
‘alternative rationality’ to which Quijano alludes. Indeed, for Llosa, ‘It is
not enough for just the coast to look at the highlands; the opposite has
to happen as well: the highlands have to look at the coast. The approach
should be from both sides.’41 As will be shown further in this discussion,
La teta asustada takes largely the point of view of the serrano migrant,
showing at once the absurdities and the possibilities of life in the city for
the urban indigenous. Throughout the film, difference is not watered down
or necessarily explained, or over-translated for a Western viewing audience,
though certain customs are commented on or displayed. Rather, Llosa’s
presentation of the ‘two Perus’ forces a reevaluation of difference and
of one’s relationship with the other. In fact, by juxtaposing Western and
Andean society, culture, and values, Llosa seems to privilege an alternative
reality as the new Peruvian reality. In this reality, Andean subjects move
out of the margins, and the Western subject must begin to envision a new
relationship with Andean-indigenous citizens.
Llosa accomplishes this in part by juxtaposing two extremes in contempo-
rary Peruvian socio-cultural reality—one dying, and another emerging. The
references to the conflict between Lima descendants of the colonial aristoc-
racy and the serrano-influenced Lima are abundant and are represented
particularly in terms of space and of subject. Aída lives in an old colonial
house surrounded by lush gardens and a high brick wall. The house appears
in good condition, but not to have been remodeled since the 1950s. Just
outside the walls, the compound is surrounded by a bustling, noisy market
dominated by the lower classes, predominantly indigenous and mestizo
migrants. Spanish and Quechua intermingle, and there is a great energy and
vibrancy to the space.42 By contrast, inside the walls, Aída lives alone with
a few servants, and the silence is pierced only by birds singing, or by the
remnant drone of the shattered piano that Aída had pushed out a window, in
frustration over her inability to compose for her upcoming concert.
Regarding the transformation of Lima, the film is shot almost entirely in
the pueblo joven of Manchay, one of many settlements that have slowly turned
41 Cited in Edward Chauca, Rafael Ramírez, and Carolina Sitnisky-Cole, ‘No pretendo
retratar la realidad,’ 52.
42 Gustavo Faverón describes the juxtaposition with eloquent precision: ‘the wall and
the electric gate of the great house are not a sign of an elitist border, but something
more pathetic and more patent: they are the desperate last defense of the agonizing
old Lima against the Lima of popular commerce and the emergency and the new
rules; there are no dunes and highways that mediate the two worlds: what Matos Mar
called the “popular overflowing” is there, right there, at the door of the house, about
to capture it’ (Faverón, ‘Hildebrandt y Llosa’).
76 an dean truths
into vibrant neighborhoods. First established in the early 1980s by serrano

immigrants fleeing the violence and extreme poverty of the Central Andes,
by the time of the film, Manchay boasted around 70,000 inhabitants, the vast
majority living in extreme poverty and precarious conditions. The difficult of
life in Manchay is emphasized by the multiple shots of inhabitants ascending
and descending the long series of stairs that connect the hillside community
to the rest of the city, one of several ‘escaleras solidarias’ (stairs of solidarity)
built under the mayoral administration of Luis Castañeda (2003–2010).
Expansive shots of Manchay, a collection of makeshift cement-block houses
on an arid coastal hillside, dominate the film. These, along with scenes
of gatherings in the patios of homes, put together like family compounds,
evoke the ayllus of the Andes (traditional, family-based communities, the
importance of which will be explored in later chapters), and contrast with
the lush but solitary gardens of Aída’s colonial home. Several shots of the
Peruvian flag and the fifteen-foot statue of the Virgin del Rosario (Our Lady
of the Rosary) above Manchay’s tin rooftops lead us to consider how the
national-cultural and spiritual center of Peru has shifted after the Shining
Path era (see Figure 2.4).
Gustavo Faverón observes that ‘Llosa highlights the idea that it is among
the popular classes, especially among Andean migrants and their descend-
ants, where the new voices of creativity, imagination, evocation of history and
memory, are to be found; that, despite having been mistreated, displaced,
and ridiculed, these are the liveliest voices of the city, of the new city.’43
Indeed, Llosa’s vision reflects the reality famously described by José Matos
Mar, who notes by the mid-1980s ‘Lima has become the scene of a massive
popular overflowing. This overflowing wears the seal of the primarily Andean
composition of its new population, which projects its lifestyles. Lima is already
showing a new face, and it is beginning to project a new identity.’44 As Matos
Mar argues, ‘The immense gravitation in Lima towards Andean culture,
acquired through migration, affects and modifies not just the physical aspects
of the city, but also its cultural forms and its sociability.’45 Matos Mar notes
the transformations in Andean music, dance, weaving, folk art, radio, and
television due to the highland migration to the city. For Matos Mar, these are
43 Faverón, ‘Otra mirada.’

44 José Matos Mar, Desborde popular y crisis de estado, 79–80.
45 Ibid. 81. Certainly, Llosa appears to take to heart the urging by Matos Mar to
treat seriously the social transformations implied by the mass migrations from the
Andes to Lima. Matos Mar writes, ‘The city of Lima, transformed by the vertigi-
nous migratory growth … privileged in focus by the new national consciousness,
appears as a leading illustration of an ongoing structural change … The new face
that struggles to emerge from the current confusion of national life obliges us to
contemplate seriously our future destiny, to be conscious of its meaning, and to find
the strategies that history has taught us regarding what we are and what we can do
as a society with multiple legacies’ (21).
2.4 Manchay’s ‘stairs of solidarity,’ with Our Lady of the Rosary

keeping watch, in La teta asustada.
no longer ‘an exotic phenomenon’46 in the capital; the ‘popular overflowing,’

rather, has created a new national culture that is engulfing antiquated models
such as that embraced by Aída.
For Llosa, Manchay, with its exuberant popular culture, is the Peru
resulting from the internal conflict. The old, dualistic vision of Peru, symbol-
ized by Fausta’s mother on the one hand and by Aída on the other, is dead, or
dying. Manchay (and like settlements) forms the new Peru and its immigrant
inhabitants, the new Peruvians, who understand Peruvianness and citizenship
on their own terms. Thus, by the end of the film, Aída’s assertion that ‘todo
Lima’ [all of Lima] was present to see her concert (and celebrate her stolen
composition) rings false. What Llosa manages to do that others, including
the Truth Commission, have not, is bring indigeneity to the forefront in
the discussion of the ‘new’ Peru. Llosa imagines a modern and ‘reconciled’
Peru that neither marginalizes nor idealizes its indigenous past or present but
rather understands itself as a conflictive, complicated, heterogeneous society,
one of competing images where signs and their referents gain new and often
conflicting meanings. One gets the sense that lo andino has a place in a new
version of national identity that is not entirely controlled or constructed
by official discourse or dominant culture. In this regard, La teta asustada,
both as product and process, moves towards this ethic of recognition called
for by Schaffer and Smith, by mobilizing stabilizing constructs (ideas of
Peruvianess) and threats to stability (new subjects, new agencies) in moving
towards a new, pluralistic vision of the nation.
46 Ibid. 83.
78 an dean truths
This new Peru is marked not as much by cultural conflict (hierarchical

dualism) as by competing knowledges, symbolic systems, and world visions.
When Fausta’s uncle, Lucio, speaks with the doctor of Fausta’s illness, the
doctor attributes her nosebleeds to thin membranes and finds the issue of the
potato in Fausta’s vagina much more urgent. The uncle insists that Fausta’s
troubles are due to the teta asustada illness, and that he knows nothing of
a potato. In the first exchange in the movie to refer to the illness, Lucio
explains: ‘Con el terrorismo nació Fausta. Y su madre le transmitió el miedo
por la leche. “La teta asustada,” así le dicen a los que nacen como ella, sin
alma porque por el susto se escondió en la tierra. Una enfermedad como
esa no hay acá, ¿no, Doctor?’ [With the terrorism, Fausta was born. And
her mother transmitted her fear through her milk. ‘La teta asustada,’ that’s
what they call those who were born like her, without a soul, because out of
fear it hid itself in the ground. A disease like that doesn’t exist here, right
Doctor?]. The doctor, however, denies the existence of such an illness, and
gives Lucio a written prescription for Fausta to return and have her nasal
membranes cauterized and the potato extracted.47 The two are clearly unable
to communicate because of a cultural impasse. The film shows, however,
that despite dominant culture’s desire to dismiss Andean cultural values,
the migrant community is having a profound impact on the nation’s capital,
and that Peru’s (Lima’s) self-conception, in terms of nation-space, national
culture, and national subject, must be retooled.
The cultural adjustments and creativity required in the immigrant
communities find special treatment in the portrayal of the rites of marriage
and burial, two contrasting moments in life that are intricately intertwined in
the film. Fausta’s aunt and uncle have a thriving business throwing wedding
parties. The parties show a fascinating mix of Andean and Western traditions.
When announcing his engagement to Fausta’s cousin, Máxima, the fiancé
gives her a potato to peel—tradition has the man present a very gnarly potato,
which the woman must peel in one peeling. On the other hand, at the wedding,
pictures are posed in front of scenes that imagine more Western ideas of what
a wedding should be, such as a honeymoon at Niagara Falls. The importance
of the wedding business can be interpreted further; after a time marked by
death and despair, weddings point towards a hopeful future and a growing
community. The trope of the weddings is not uncomplicated, however, as
the scenes of weddings and wedding planning are constantly juxtaposed with
Perpetua’s death and Fausta’s attempts to bury her mother.
In the first scene in which we meet Fausta’s extended family, Máxima
is trying on her wedding dress and complaining that her ridiculously long
train is too short. Her frivolity appears even more capricious given the fact
that Perpetua has just died. While Máxima complains that her father is not
47 Later, Fausta folds the prescription into the form of a paper dove (an allusion,
perhaps, to Paloma de papel?) and ‘drowns’ it in the water used to wash her dead
mother’s clothes.
2.5 Perpetua’s body adorned by a wedding dress in La teta asustada.
spending enough on his only daughter’s wedding, Fausta is left orphaned

and too poor to provide a proper burial for her mother. In a later scene we
find Fausta sitting beside her mother’s corpse and folding napkins for an
upcoming wedding event.
During Máxima’s engagement party, Fausta returns home to find her
mother’s body missing; eventually, she discovers her family has hidden the
body under the bed. The film shows Fausta drawing back the bed, which
has been draped with Máxima’s extravagant wedding dress. For a moment,
what we see is a bride’s white dress with the head of a mummified indigenous
woman (See Figure 2.5). With this brief image, the film reminds us of an
entire national (and continental) history built on the bodies of raped indige-
nous women. Indeed, the mother’s name is Perpetua, perpetual; this raped
indigenous woman is in many ways eternal.48 Not only does her physical
presence seem permanent—as Fausta’s attempts to bury her are constantly
frustrated—but her spirit remains, housed in Fausta’s songs and in her fears.
A further aspect of the wedding/burial dichotomy is the financial issue.
One of the chief complaints in contexts where many have been disappeared is
that mourning, which leads to healing, cannot take place because there are no
bodies to bury. This aspect of the Peruvian conflict will be further discussed
in subsequent chapters, but one of the true ironies that La teta asustada brings
forward is the fact that in the case of this victim there is a body that is
impossible to bury. Fausta does not have the economic means to participate in
48 In this sense we are reminded of Octavio Paz’s assertion that all Mexicans are
‘hijos de la chingada’—children of a raped woman. Paz is referring to La Malinche,
symbolic mother of mestizaje, having given birth to a child of Hernán Cortés (Paz,
The Labyrinth of Solitude).
80 an dean truths
a capitalistic society that demands money to bury its dead. A series of comical
scenes at different funeral establishments shows the ‘business’ of death and
a capitalist society that interferes with, prevents, proper burial. Now there is
a corpse, but in neoliberal Peru, it cannot be buried.
These scenes are juxtaposed with ones of the wedding business, in which
Fausta’s aunt prepares elaborate cakes that release live doves housed in an
upper tier. Several weddings, in which Llosa asked real couples to recreate
their ceremonies and parties, seem extravagant and beyond the acquisitional
power of the hosts. Wedding guests are told over loudspeakers that they, too,
can have these ‘first-class’ weddings and parties at economical prices by using
the family’s company. Thus, while on one level a sign of hope and future, the
weddings are also symbolic of insertion into the Peruvian neoliberal market
economy, of entry into the working middle class.
The obstacles to Perpetua’s burial, and the problems her corpse presents
for the family as it tries to adjust to a new way of life, are further contrasted
with Andean rituals, such as the loving communal preparation of Perpetua’s
body by female family and friends. It is in intimate moments like these, when
the community recalls its Andean roots through rituals of solidarity, that we
find a core proposal of La teta asustada. Referring to representations of earlier
Andean migrations by both Mariátegui and Arguedas, Quijano summarizes:
‘in the very center of Latin American cities, the masses of the dominated
are building new social practices founded on reciprocity, on an assumption
of equality, on collective solidarity, and at the same time on the freedom of
individual choice and on a democracy of collectively made decisions, against
all external impositions.’49 Quijano continues:
What is involved in this is a way of rearticulating two cultural heritages:
from the original Andean rationality, a sense of reciprocity and solidarity;
from the original modern rationality, when rationality was still associated
with social liberation, a sense of individual liberty and of democracy as
a collective decision-making process founded on the free choice of its
constituent individuals.50
This rearticulation is dramatized above all in the figure of Fausta, especially
when contrasted with Aída.
In the end, Aída and Fausta present two polar alternatives. At the beginning
of the film, both are stuck. Aída is stuck creatively, unable to produce new
compositions for her annual concert. She is also trapped temporally and
physically. Her old colonial house evokes another time that is antiquated, out
of synch with contemporary Peru. Aída is always shown as enclosed, impris-
oned in her social circumstances. She spends the day in the dark house, only
venturing to the enclosed garden. Even when she travels through Lima, it
is in a car driven by her son. Aída’s exchange of pearls for Fausta’s songs is
49 Quijano, ‘Modernity,’ 154.

50 Ibid.
2.6 Aída steals Fausta’s song in La teta asustada.
a clear reference to the Spaniards’ exchange of beads for far more valuable
native goods, as is her appropriation of indigenous culture, in the form of
Fausta’s compositions, for her own success an allusion to the centuries-long
ravaging of native cultures by the West. This appropriation is emphasized
visually, in a scene where Aída insists that Fausta repeat a song about a
mermaid whose voice is stolen, through betrayal of contract, by a musician.
As Fausta sings, Aída begins to mouth the words, and the camera focuses
in on Aída’s profile, with Fausta’s moving lips discernible just below Aída’s.
As Llosa says, the intent was to show Aída as a monster;51 for the viewer
the effect is an uncanny sensation as the two women fuse briefly, and Aída’s
perverse intentions become clearer (See Figure 2.6). Aída’s is a traditional
dominant Peruvian understanding of the place of indigenous culture and
peoples—they are to be used for dominant culture’s benefit, their work as
servants, their culture as folkloric, nationalistic flavor—for which they are not
to be compensated. In ironic harmony with the mermaid song, Aída steals
the melody for her piano composition, then fires Fausta without paying her
month’s salary or giving her the promised pearls.52
Through the relationship between Fausta and Aída, Llosa dramatizes the
perils of the forms of testimonial-seeking that often take place in post-conflict
societies. Aída desires information that Fausta at first refuses to give because
Aída is not an ‘addressable listener’ (Laub); Fausta, recognizing certain
benefits she will gain if she does share her information, acquiesces with the
51 Cited in Michael Guillen, ‘PSIFF10: THE MILK OF SORROW (LA TETA

ASUSTADA, 2009).’
52 As well as dramatizing the mermaid myth, the dramatic situation recalls to story of
Faust. Aída steals Fausta’s music like the devil steals Faust’s soul.
82 an dean truths
expectation of compensation. In an ideal situation, Dori Laub argues, the

one who receives another’s testimony would feel an empathetic identification
with the victim of trauma and ‘comes to be a participant and co-owner of the
traumatic event … comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread,
and conflicts.’53 Aída, however, uses what she consumes for own advantage
and leaves Fausta to fend for herself. Aída has taken advantage of Fausta’s
suffering for her own benefit. In fact, this exchange can be compared with
its counterpart at the opening of the film, when Fausta hears her mother’s
testimony. Through this example, Llosa provides the viewer with a model
that points towards a different kind of relationship with the one who has
suffered. Fausta is an addressable listener who uses what is within her
capacity to provide the storyteller-victim with the sort of reparations she
needs and deserves—in this case, a dignified burial. Furthermore, Llosa hints
at how one’s reception of testimony ultimately affects the listening subject.
The last we see of Aída is her hand, hanging lifelessly from her bed, while
Fausta collects her pearls; while not technically dead, Aída does seem finally
to have expired. Fausta, on the other hand, undergoes a major transformation
through her determination to care for one who has suffered.
At the beginning of the film, like Aída, Fausta is stuck, unable to realize
herself because of her illness. Yet her resolve to bury her mother—to complete
a simple act that honors human dignity—forces her to overcome her obstacles.
The first step is her decision to work—before, she had never gone anywhere
alone. In the house, Aída calls Fausta to hold an electric drill while she hangs
a picture. The film shows us Fausta’s image as reflected in the glass pane over
a photo of a man in military uniform. Holding the drill straight up, it looks
as if Fausta is carrying arms, perhaps saluting the officer as a conscripted
child soldier, but Fausta is terrified, drops the drill, and flees. At the end of
the film, when she returns to recover her pearls, we see the image of Fausta
in the same photo—this time, she confronts her fears, and enters the room
to take what is hers.
The culminating act is of course the decision to remove the potato, which,
combined with releasing her mother’s body to the sea, finally frees Fausta
from her traumatic past. When searching for a means to bury her mother,
Fausta had visited an establishment that sold painted caskets. She was partic-
ularly attracted to one with a scene of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean.
The saleswoman comments that, ‘este es el que trae la paz. Es el mar Pacífico
donde se alivia sus cargas y lava sus penas’ [this is the one that brings peace.
It’s the Pacific ocean where her burdens are eased and her sorrows cleansed].
While Fausta has not provided her mother with a traditional Andean burial,
she has sought a final resting place that, in recognition of the great suffering
Perpetua endured during her lifetime, would provide comfort and respite in
the afterlife. Fausta’s relieving of her mother’s burden corresponds with a
53 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, 58.
lightening of her own—the elimination of the potato. The film closes with
Fausta receiving Noé’s gift of the flowering potato plant, turning the symbol
of Fausta’s trauma into a sign of a hopeful future. These last actions and
scenes highlight Fausta’s transformation from a victim of her social and
historical circumstances to a subject with agency, empowered to forge a new
future for herself, one of many similar futures that will shape the new Peru.
Towards Reconciliation through Identification

I have argued to this point that Paloma de papel and La teta asustada, the
two post-CVR commercial films that most highlight the Andean experi-
ence, present two very different views of the place of Andean culture in
post-Shining Path Peru. I have shown that Paloma de papel approaches the
indigenous experience from a vertical point of view, reinforcing the prevailing
concept of an irreconcilable gap between a modern, urban, coastal Peru and
a traditional, rural Andean region that the Informe final itself recognizes as
a dangerous trope that allowed for the extreme violence of the Shining Path
era. La teta asustada, on the other hand, takes a more horizontal view of
its subject—the evermore predominant, ever less marginal, urban Andean
culture—and points to this culture as a major force in the creation of a
post-conflict society. While these respective positions (horizontal and vertical)
are certainly apparent in the films’ contents, their impact and importance in
discussions of transitional justice and reconciliation in post-conflict Peru
can be most appreciated through an examination of the radically different
experience of viewing each film.
Contemporary film theory has contemplated the question of the viewing
subject and its relation to ideology. While Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking
1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ hypothesized a masculine
bourgeois spectator of classical cinema, later critics theorized diverse
viewing positions determined by race, class, gender, and sexuality. Certainly,
it is impossible to account for the multiple subject positions within any
actual audience, much less speculate on every individual viewing experi-
ence. However, as Linda Williams convincingly argues, it is still possible
to contemplate a ‘hypothetical spectator,’ the spectator ‘in’ the work.
Furthermore, for Williams, ‘the concept of a singular, dominating, voyeur-
istic male spectator-subject is in as much need of revision as that other
stereotype: the spectator as passive subject, as pure absorber of dominant
ideology.’54 She theorizes, rather, an (inter)active relationship between viewer
and the visual text that is useful when considering the role of film in transi-
tional democracies. By examining the hypothetical or internal spectator in
both Paloma de papel and La teta asustada, we can imagine and explore
diverse post-conflict subjects and positions with relation to national culture.
54 Linda Williams, ‘Introduction,’ 4.
84 an dean truths
In subtle and overt ways, the viewing eyes—of the internal spectator, the
director, and the camera—lead us to question dominant paradigms and roles
for all involved in creative and political processes and to imagine alternative
ways of being in a post-conflict society.
In Paloma de papel, the viewing subject remains largely at a distance from
the characters, the setting, and the action. Scenes are framed such that the
few close-ups either pan in from or out to a broader panorama in which the
characters are set against the majestic Andean countryside.55 The viewing
subject is almost always positioned as an outsider, observing from a comfort-
able distance a funeral procession as it passes through town, a military
round-up of villagers, or Juan and his family working the land. The camera
is usually static, surveying from afar. We see things largely as ‘whole’ and
are thus able to consume the object of our vision in its entirety. Our point
of view is one that sees the Andean people as removed from national reality,
timeless, innocent, and pure.
In this sense, the film promotes a problematic ethical stance vis-à-vis its
subject matter. By making the Andean foreign, by promoting an image of
its otherness in relation to its implied audience, the film releases the greater
nation from any responsibility in the trauma or towards its victims. As Susan
Sontag notes in her study of photographic images of faraway violence:
The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted
by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers—seen close-up on
the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that
is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we
feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.
Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that
extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an
inappropriate—response.56
Indeed, the emotions evoked by Paloma de papel are more likely pity and at
best a ‘passive empathy,’ such as that criticized by Megan Boler. She notes
the disparate power relations that exist in most experiences of reading the
suffering of others, especially when dealing with human rights violations.57
Reading testimony, or even fictional accounts of the traumatic experience of
others, especially distant others, sets the reader up as judge and arbiter, at best
empathizing by using personal experience to determine what the other ‘must’
be feeling and to imagine a better alternative for the other’s life. This empathy
experienced by the reader relies on a shared experience—‘I feel your pain
because I too have suffered’—but also on the underlying distinction between
55 In this sense, the film seems to build upon or echo José María Arguedas’s observa-
tions on the ‘soledad cósmica’ (cosmic solitude) of Andean people. Arguedas, ‘La
soledad cósmica en la poesía quechua,’ 1–2.
56 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 91.
57 Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy.’
reader and subject, the recognition of, and indeed emphasis on, the fact that
one is not the other. This relationship leads to an experience of reading that
ends up focusing more on the reader’s feelings (about himself or herself, about
the situation narrated), but in actuality ‘motivates no consequent reflection
or action, either about the production of meaning, or about one’s complicit
responsibility within historical and social conditions.’58 Drawing heavily on
the work of Felman and Laub, Boler encourages a ‘testimonial reading,’ which
‘inspires an empathetic response that motivates action: a “historicized ethics”
engaged across genres, that radically shifts our self-reflective understanding of
power relations.’59 Indeed, this ‘action’ that Boler advocates is less a take-to-
the-streets revolutionary response than a serious introspection on the part of
the reader. For Boler, ‘what is at stake is not the ability to empathize with the
very distant other but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces
that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront.’60
Boler is unclear about what, beyond the guidance of an informed teacher,
might motivate this sort of testimonial reading; though she hints at a
‘semiotics of empathy,’ the ultimate responsibility for responsible reading lies
with the reader. However, I would like to suggest that an artist can and does
provide certain tools, responsive opportunities perhaps, that lead the reader
or viewer either towards an ultimately disengaged and self-reflective empathy
(or pity) or towards an ethically engaged inquiry into the roots of the other’s
suffering, and the reader’s own implication in the same. That is, while the
creator of a narrative (be it autobiographical testimony or historical fiction;
written text or film) has no control over the reader’s (or viewer’s) response,
s/he can employ the creative techniques of a given genre either to hamper
or to facilitate testimonial reading (or watching). If the various aspects
mentioned above ultimately lead the viewer of Paloma de papel to what Boler
terms a ‘passive empathy,’ I would argue that Llosa’s cinematic vision could
potentially lead the viewer to an entirely different understanding of, and
relationship with, the Andean survivors of the internal conflict.
To begin with, in La teta asustada, the camera demands a close identifica-
tion with Fausta. From the start of the film, the viewing subject is positioned
at the foot of Perpetua’s deathbed, contemplating the old woman’s face as she
sings in Quechua, and from the left corner Fausta’s profile moves partially
into view, as she accompanies her mother in song (see Figure 2.3). In a later
scene, the internal spectator walks closely behind Fausta as she makes her
way through the market towards Aída’s house. Like Fausta, we are jostled
about and feel the tension and energy of the market. In another of multiple
examples, the viewing subject appears to be standing right beside Fausta as
she first glimpses her reflection in the glass of the photo of the old army
officer in Aída’s bedroom. Furthermore, there are several moments when
58 Ibid. 261.
59 Ibid. 256.
60 Ibid. 263.
86 an dean truths
Fausta returns the viewing gaze, turning the spectator into observed object.
At those instances, when Fausta looks out to someone beyond the camera, the
viewing subject is also in a subaltern position—becoming Noé the gardener,
or Fausta’s family members playing in the improvised backyard pool.
The few times when the viewing eye is abruptly torn away from that
position of identification with Fausta seem abusive and violent. For example,
after Aída expels Fausta from her car on the way home from the piano
concert, we see Fausta, left in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, running
alone in the harried streets of Lima, terrified and crying that she has not
been paid her wages. As we speed off in the car, Fausta’s body shrinks and
fades into the dark city. Knowing intimately Fausta’s fear of public spaces by
this point in the film, the viewer feels an especially acute empathy towards
the girl. Indeed, in the few times the viewer is given the visual perspective
of Aída, we feel uncomfortable, unsettled.
Through their use of various cinematographic techniques, both films
endeavor to engage an emotional response from the viewer. As Suzanne Keen
correctly points out, the level of empathy a work (Keen studies narrative
fiction) may illicit depends in no small part on the personal situation of the
individual audience member.61 Thus, a parent of small children, or young
children themselves, may experience a particular empathy (as opposed to pity)
with Juan’s situation. Victims of sexual assault, or women in general, may
feel more empathy towards Fausta and may identify with her fear. Likewise,
the urban poor may empathize with the frustrations of her daily life and the
difficulty of accomplishing important tasks related to living a dignified life,
such as burying one’s dead, or receiving just compensation for one’s work.
But, if empathy, as many argue, is supposed to lead to ‘prosocial or
altruistic action,’62 then it is important to ask what the hypothetical spectator
is supposed to identify or empathize with in each film and what action is the
(implied) appropriate response. Paloma de papel takes place in the past, in the
first decade of the conflict. The viewer is shown a tragic situation that has
lead to Juan’s loss of innocence, childhood, family, and friends. Due in part
to Callirgos’s fine acting, the viewer feels distinct sadness and compassion
in specific moments in the film, such as when Juan is forced to kill a man,
or when he is torn away from his mother’s dead body and taken to prison.
However, by the end of the film, empathy gives way to pity, as Juan returns
home to a tableau, a still-life of mourners in front of the town church. Because
there is no visible future, there is no implied call to action, no pro-active
channeling of emotion.
La teta asustada, on the other hand, takes place in the present. The
characters are, to an extent, our neighbors (if we live in Lima), and certainly
co-citizens—of the nation, of the world. It is likely that the majority of the
viewing public does not have enough shared experience truly to empathize
61 Suzanne Keen, ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy.’

62 Ibid. 208.
with Fausta’s situation, that is, to feel her sadness for more than the short
hour and a half that we spend watching the film. In this sense, perhaps the
movie demands much less an empathy-that-leads-to-action (we are not called
upon to solve any specific issue that would make Fausta’s life better) than a
gesture of solidarity. The viewer is asked to stand by Fausta, to accompany
her as she resolves her own issues and takes control of her own life. It seems
the movie suggests that rather than a hierarchical mobilization of emotion
that leads to an act of altruism, perhaps solidarity is all that we can really offer
and still respect the human dignity of the other. Using Humes’s articulation
of moral sentiment, Sharon Krause argues that there is really only one basic,
universal, human right:
the right to have one’s concerns count with others, to be recognized as
a moral equal whose interest and perspective are owed inclusion in the
generalized standpoint of moral sentiment. This right is generated in part
through empathy, which enables us to identify in others as well as ourselves
the desire to have our concerns count and the distinctive pain that comes
from not counting.63
La teta asustada, then, stands out from other post-conflict commercial
films not only because of its thematic content (its emphasis on modern, urban
Andean culture and subjects) and its circumstances of production (a more
collaborative, horizontal relationship between the artist and her subjects), but
because of the demands it makes on the viewing public. Through cinemato-
graphic techniques that maneuver the public intimately through the world
it depicts, the film promotes an ethics of recognition or identification that
leads to solidarity with the victims of violence and an acknowledgment of
their (moral, cultural, social, political) equality with other citizens of Peru.
Through La teta asustada, Llosa implies that true justice—in times of ‘transi-
tional justice’ and beyond—must include making the concerns of Peruvians
like Fausta relevant in national discourse on the future of the nation and
recognizing the centrality of Andean culture, especially its modern, urban
manifestations, in any conversation on Peruvian national identity. In this
sense, La teta asustada is one artistic manifestation of Andean-inflected
reconciliation, allipunakuy—a reciprocal making good, for everyone’s benefit.
A group that has been putting cultural and aesthetic reciprocity at the heart
of its artistic endeavors since before the beginning of the conflict is popular
theater collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, whose artistic endeavors in
tandem with the CVR public hearings will be discussed in the next chapter.
63 Krause, ‘Moral Sentiment and the Politics of Human Rights.’

Sobre La Teta Asustada

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Sobre La Teta Asustada

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Liverpool University Press

Chapter Title: Transitional Justice and Reconciliation through Identification: Paloma de

Book Title: Andean Truths

Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

Highly successful commercial films, Fabricio Aguilar’s Paloma de papel (Paper

Paloma de papel: Reifying Dominant Views of Indigeneity

One notable exception is Pablo Rojas’s assessment, with which I thoroughly

film’s contribution to understanding the national conflict. In 2009, there was a

2.1 Juan and Rosita feed Tata in Paloma de papel.

All of the villagers seem absolutely childlike in their innocent enjoyment

2.2 Juan returns to villagers mourning the deceased in

efforts to move forward, no recognition of their role as citizens of a ‘new

La teta asustada: Towards a New (Modern) Andean Subject

2.3 Fausta hears Perpetua’s sung testimony in La teta asustada.

signifying and audiovisual aesthetics.’31 Through its thematic content, use of

31 Freya Schwiy, Indianizing Film, 9.

directly, showing a vibrant urban indigenous community, in contrast with

result of a long, uninterrupted, and ongoing history of Western domination,

into vibrant neighborhoods. First established in the early 1980s by serrano

43 Faverón, ‘Otra mirada.’

2.4 Manchay’s ‘stairs of solidarity,’ with Our Lady of the Rosary

no longer ‘an exotic phenomenon’46 in the capital; the ‘popular overflowing,’

This new Peru is marked not as much by cultural conflict (hierarchical

2.5 Perpetua’s body adorned by a wedding dress in La teta asustada.

spending enough on his only daughter’s wedding, Fausta is left orphaned

49 Quijano, ‘Modernity,’ 154.

2.6 Aída steals Fausta’s song in La teta asustada.

51 Cited in Michael Guillen, ‘PSIFF10: THE MILK OF SORROW (LA TETA

expectation of compensation. In an ideal situation, Dori Laub argues, the

53 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, 58.

Towards Reconciliation through Identification

54 Linda Williams, ‘Introduction,’ 4.

61 Suzanne Keen, ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy.’

63 Krause, ‘Moral Sentiment and the Politics of Human Rights.’

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen