Cinema and Books as an Archive of Political Memory.
Inspired by the monumental visual language of David Alfaro Siqueiros,
this illustration imagines a library where books and analog film reels
preserve the histories, struggles, and political imagination of Latin
American cinema. This is a paid supplement to my main essay, “The Changing Face of Fascism in Latin America.”
My long-form analysis on Worldlines will always remain free and
accessible. What I am offering here, for paid subscribers, are curated
companion texts: films, books, music, and documentaries that expand the
world of the piece. These are materials that I thought of while I was
writing, but there simply was not enough room to unpack them inside the
main essay. Think of this as marginal notes turned into a guide—a way to
move from reading the analysis to building your own library of Latin
American resistance, cinema, and theory.
I
have organized these recommendations chronologically by the historical
eras they cover, mirroring the transition from the old colonial
structures to the modern cognitive war. But what you will also find in
these films and books is the rise of working-class and rural movements
in Latin America—the forces that ultimately made the old military
dictatorships untenable, and one of the key reasons why the empire’s
strategy had to adapt into the “softer,” more insidious forms we see
today.
To
understand the modern capitalist triad behind the New Right, we first
have to understand the historical extraction of Latin American wealth
and the rigid class structures that the military was built to protect.
Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Book)
José Carlos Mariátegui, 1928.
Before Gramsci’s work became widely known, Mariátegui was already
theorizing that the indigenous peasant—not the urban worker—was the
central revolutionary subject of Latin America. I highly recommend this
foundational text because it frames the modern Gramscian inversion we
discussed: why the rural periphery remains the vanguard of resistance
today in Latin America.
Dialectics of Dependency (Book)
Ruy Mauro Marini, 1973.
If you want the rigorous economic theory behind my critique of
neoliberal extraction, this is it. These authors explain how Latin
America’s underdevelopment is a structural requirement for the
prosperity of the imperial core. The most important work of Latin
American dependency theory. Marini developed the concept of
“super-exploitation of labor” as the specific form that capitalist
exploitation takes in the periphery.
The Structure of Dependence (Paper)
Theotonio dos Santos, 1970. A
classic statement of dependency theory that directly connects the
structure of the global economy to the political dynamics of Latin
American states.
Open Veins of Latin America (Book)
Eduardo Galeano, 1971.
One of the foundational text of Latin American anti-imperialist
history. Galeano traces 500 years of resource extraction from the
conquest to the 20th century. It is no coincidence that this book was
immediately banned by Pinochet, Videla, and the very military
dictatorships we analyzed in the main text. I include it because it is
the book that taught a generation to see the continent’s history as a
single, continuous process of plunder—and because it remains, for all
its critics, an indispensable entry point.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Book)
Gabriel García Márquez, 1967. Beyond its magical realism, the latifundio
(landowning class) runs throughout this entire novel as a structural
backdrop. The Buendía family’s founding of Macondo and its eventual
domination by the banana company—a direct allegory for United
Fruit—traces the full arc of Latin American agrarian capitalism from
colonial land concentration to US corporate extraction.
¡Que Viva México! (Film)
Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Filmed 1930–31, released posthumously in 1979.
One of cinema’s great unfinished works. Eisenstein arrived in Mexico in
1930 intending to make a film about the country’s revolutionary spirit.
The footage he shot is extraordinary—a Soviet filmmaker’s eye turned
toward indigenous Mexico, toward the land, toward the faces of people
who had lived through a revolution the world barely understood. The
footage was recut without his consent, and only reconstructed decades
later by his former collaborators. ...
