1970s Mexican film is less studied than cinema of other periods, and this dissertation pays it overdue attention. The sexenio of President Luis Echeverría Álvarez from 1970 to 1976 saw a shift in the way Mexicans and foreigners alike thought about and talked about national identity. During this decade, discourse shifted away from the concept of a mestizo nation and toward conversation about Mexico’s economic solvency and the direction of Mexico’s economy. Discussions about land, land resources, and territory took on new importance. Where in previous decades, one of the primary concerns of the government and intellectual circles was how to make Indigenous peoples more culturally Mexican, by the 1970s, conversation had turned to territory and resource control. They pondered, for example, how to Mexicanize Indigenous territory in order to benefit Mexico’s industries. Fundamentally, political objectives had not changed; the aim was always to make Mexico modern, which was in itself a goal without a universally accepted benchmark for success. Still, as 1970s Mexican films Ayautla (José Rovirosa, 1972), Etnocidio, notas sobre el Mezquital (Paul Leduc, 1977), and Cascabel (Raúl Araiza, 1976) each reveal, Mexican politicians and civilians alike spent the decade preoccupied with questions of land use, maximizing the profits of agricultural, mining, and energy industries, and the significance and value of labor. These three films approach the decade’s dominant questions through an aesthetic and ideological framework that leftist geographers, anthropologists, authors, and filmmakers had already been developing. Filmmakers of the New Latin American Cinema waves of the 1960s and 1970s had laid the groundwork for creating genre-bending films exploring the bounds of documentary and fiction cinemas while leveling critiques at capitalism and the State. Meanwhile, geographers thinking about the same issues developed geocritical theory, anchored in terms like territory, landscape, and space, to articulate some of the same observations New Latin American Cinema was making about social and economic inequality in the Global South. This dissertation considers Ayautla, Etnocidio, and Cascabel inheritors of both traditions, and as films that reflect—and grapple with—the implications of representing land and labor within the context of shifting conversations about territory, the Nation-State, and racialized Indigenous peoples in pre-NAFTA Mexico. This study has multiple implications: first, for the way we think about Mexican film not only of the 1970s but also of earlier and later periods, and second, for the way we think about—and perceive—film and its relationship to space.
