A Review of Other Americans: The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary

Other Americans: The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary by Matthew Bush (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022, 282 pages).

In everyday English, “American” is said of a person of the United States. The Cambridge Dictionary offers the expanded definition of  ”(a person) of or coming from the United States, or of or coming from North America or South America” (Cambridge Dictionary, s.v., my emphasis). By highlighting, in the title of his book, the difference between the mainstream acknowledged “Americans” and the “Other Americans,” Matthew Bush points at the long history of the representation of the Latin American Other in pop culture, how it is constructed and how much social anxiety it still provokes, while fulfilling a promise of glorified violence that confirms the threat coming from South of the border.

We are already familiar with the Mexican “bandito” figure as the icon of the dangerous Latin American, from the legend of Pancho Villa, the original “bandito” who crosses the border to inflict harm, to subsequent iterations, some aimed at children, like the character of the “Frito bandito” of the 1970s or “El Macho” Eduardo Pérez, evil antagonist of Gru in Despicable Me 3 (2017), to the clear, menacing language of Donald Trump in 2016: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” (Time Magazine, 2016).

Matthew Bush’s book frames those representations and analyzes them under the critical lens of affective theory, choosing fiction melodramas that portray the social realities of Latin America and that have been highly successful within a global market. Indeed, the examples chosen by Bush have posed themselves at the center of the United States’ culture industry and they give his book a cohesive look that “demonstrate […] the form in which US audiences, through their consumption of a particular set of aesthetic productions on Latin America, uphold a negatively affected mode of perceiving the region and indeed may become unable to conceive of Latin American subjects as capable of anything other than histrionic, nonintellectual activity.” (Other Americans, 8).

The works analyzed by Bush run the gamut of the exotic and the violent to construct an alterity that confirms the good versus evil, us versus them polarity that simplifies complex socio economic and geopolitical issues, transforming them into examples of indulgent consumption of biased representation. The works are carefully chosen, in part because the list includes works by Latin American authors, complicating further the matter of representation. In these cases, one of the book’s strongest features is the analysis of self-exoticism as a selling point in a successful market. 

Bush shows, in a compelling way, how movies like Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (2009), Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Daniel Alarcón’s graphic novel “City of clowns,” make the case for attracting audiences to socially complex problems while reducing, at the same time, the possibility of understanding those conflicts in the broader context of globalized capitalism. Moreover, along with inspiring compassion and empathy for the characters, they also instill fear, disgust and rejection of the Other.

In his analysis of La teta asustada and Roma in Chapter 2, Bush shows how the structure of melodrama, in the films, will confirm and uphold stereotypical, exotic versions of Latin America. The movies perpetuate a sense of self-righteousness and superiority among U.S. audiences, as they watch the drama of ethnic inequality and domestic labor in Latin America as a practice supposedly overcome in the United States. The unacknowledged work and exploitation of the protagonists (Cleo, in Roma; Fausta in La teta asustada) elicits the right indignation in the audiences, confirming the superiority of more evolved labor practices. The movies confirm that ethnic discrimination and domestic labor unjust practices happen outside of the United States, and the public can feel compassion for the protagonists without acknowledging the larger context in which inequality and ethnic marginalization exist in Latin America.

 Bush’s analysis is meticulous in its theoretical frame of affective theory, but he is also generous with examples that reiterate his point of constructing the Latin American Other as a threat and a menace, a decontextualized negative affect permeating the visual and emotional interactions of U.S. audiences with these works.

Nowhere in the book this is shown more clearly than in Chapters 1, (Roberto Bolaños’s 2666 (La parte de Fate)) and Chapter 3 (Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, analyzed along the Argentinian jail melodrama El marginal (2016-2022); the films No Country for Old Men (2007) by Joel and Ethan Cohen, and Casa de mi padre (2012) by Matt Piedmont).

The construction of the U.S.- Mexican border as a liminal place for extreme violence, a no mans’ land created by corruption on the Mexican side, and where lawlessness and Latin American cartels are the real-life bad guys, create a biased understanding of larger border geopolitics. Focusing on detailed examples of the cartels’ violence erases any understanding of the drug trade within the context of an extremely profitable legal market that benefits from the violence. If Bolaño’s description of seemingly gratuitous violence sets the landscape, it is Netflix that sets the tone for good versus bad in its rendition of Latin American cartels. The image of “Latin America as a menacing South ” (Other Americans, 98) is completed by the uttermost visual violence coming from the representation of the cartels, thus obscuring the U.S. part in the trade, while echoing familiar xenophobic perspectives typical of Fox News.

Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, argues Bush, succeed in creating a fictional alternate reality because it is presented as “real” events, “slightly” fictionalized for the purposes of narration. Those events are politically and culturally charged (for example, in Narcos: Mexico the death of Drug Enforcement Agency undercover officer Enrique, Kiki Camarena, in 1985); or the portrayal of historic events like the assault on the Palace of Justice in Colombia, also in 1985, by the left-wing group M19. In the Narcos series the left-wing group is portrayed as taking the Palace by assault for the sole purpose of setting fire to Pablo Escobar’s criminal file (in reality, the group wanted to call attention to human rights violations by the Colombian government and the military). The left-wing group appears in the series as solely responsible for the fire that consumed the Palace and the hundred people dead. In historical events, the Colombian military was found responsible for the botched retake of the Palace and the destruction of the building. Such distortions are important, as they create a flat version of Latin American lawlessness, a cartoonish version of left-wing movements and an incomprehension for the socioeconomic and political reasons for those revolutionary movements. U.S. audiences don’t know much about Latin American history, and this vision shrinks even more their understanding of the region as endemically corrupt, chaotic and prone to unexplained bursts of social violence (“Banana Republics,” generic countries without a name).

The representation of the figure of Pablo Escobar is interesting as well, starting with the choice of Wagner Moura, a Brazilian actor, in the role of Escobar. Moura, who did not speak Spanish before the series, leaves Spanish speakers with an auditive disconnect, because we can perceive Moura’s foreign accent. This might be a minor issue, but falls into a trend that Bush will delve into later: the indiscriminate casting of Latin American/Spanish actors for any Latin American role (Javier Bardem, the Spanish-born actor, has played Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban writer, in Before Night Falls, and the psychopathic assassin Anton Chigurh, of unknown national origin but suspiciously coming from the Mexican side of the border, in No Country for Old Men). This furthers the idea of the interchangeability of countries and contexts. Again, generic, all-purpose exotic Latin America, for the indulgent consumption of visual violence by U.S. audiences.

Through a process of “affective interpellation,” in which ideas are tied to feelings to promote or reinforce ideology (Other Americans, 21), Matthew Bush shows the reduced possibility of understanding complex realities through repetitive, commercially appealing images of brutal violence. The problem becomes worse when Netflix’s algorithm predicts successful revenues in global audiences, thus favoring series like Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, over shows that don’t confirm the Latin American Other as a menacing threat, like, for example, One day at a time (2017), canceled by Netflix because it did not sell as well. It is hard to imagine a message beyond the commercialization of fictionalized cruelty that obscures and distorts social realities. As Susan Sontag reminds us in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), images of violence must raise political awareness and responsibility in the public, a questioning of the authorities and a revision of international policies, not complacency and normalization.

Matthew Bush’s Other Americans is an important contribution to the understanding of the process of imagining Latin America’s otherness, and his book is a reminder that this construction has a long history of cultural biases and anxieties that are essential for the understanding and remedying of hemispheric violence.

Adriana Gutiérrez is Senior Preceptor in Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.