Abstract

ALBIZUREZ GIL, Mónica. The film La Llorona de Jayro Bustamante: Cultural Memory and Gender in the Guatemalan Transitional Justice. Cuad. CILHA [online]. 2021, vol.22, n.1, pp.237-263. ISSN 1852-9615.  http://dx.doi.org/10.48162/rev.34.015.

This paper focuses on the analysis of the film La Llorona (2019), directed by Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamente and whose title, according to the popular legend, alludes to the woman who drowned her children and, as a result of guilt, searches for them at night near rivers and villages. La Llorona is, in this film, an indigenous woman who survived the Guatemalan genocide. As a maid, she enters in the house of General Enrique Monteverde, who functions as the alter ego of General Efraín Ríos Montt (1926-2018). The film focuses on the days in which General Monteverde is accused of the crime of genocide, being fundamental in my analysis the representation of the indigenous female victims, as well as the staging of the hierarchical coexistence in the space of the house. As anthropologist Aura Cumes argues, a power of domination among the women themselves persists in this domestic space, under the hierarchical relationship “señora-muchacha”. My goal is to examine how in the film the film represents the scope and limitations of Guatemalan transitional justice in relation to the women victims of the genocide and, linked to this, the symbolic reconciliations of class and gender that are proposed.

Keywords : Representation; Genocide; Gender; Transitional justice; Cultural memory.

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