Abstract

OBSCURA GUTIERREZ, Siboney. La construcción del imaginario sobre la pobreza en el cine mexicano. Cultura representaciones soc [online]. 2011, vol.6, n.11, pp.159-184. ISSN 2007-8110.

The construction of the imaginary of poverty in Mexican cinema. Something distinctive about the current representations of social exclusion in Mexican cinema is its high degree of graphic violence and the de-dramatization of staging. These issues seem to mark a rupture with the tradition established in national cinema since the middle of last century, where the main resource in the representation of social inequality was the melodrama. However, a more careful analysis shows that these issues are not new and that one can actually talk about continuity with some elements of change. The continuity is evident in the use of variants of melodrama and certain areas highlighted by the former Mexican cinema, such as the suburbs and the neighborhood, which functioned as social microcosm where urban complexity was schematically articulated. At the ideological level, the originality lies in the interpretation of poverty, which is now more complex, because it avoids the manichaeism that characterized the cinema of the "golden age". From this perspective, the idea of this paper is to explore the socio-cognitive logic behind the current filmic representations of social exclusion, under the assumption that these are the result of a historical process of interaction between cinema and its ideological and cultural context. At the same time, we intend to take these representations as a "cinematic imaginary of poverty".

Keywords : social representations; imaginary; Mexican cinema; urban poverty; social marginalization.