These five films,
Cabeza de Vaca, Aguirre: the Wrath of God, The Mission, One Man’s War
, and
The Burning Season
, very different in style, about different eras, different countries, different kinds of protagonists, may seem at first to be unrelated. As we study them we discover that they are in fact linked in significant ways to political issues of Latin America. They were made with North Americans in mind. They are all intensely political. They are about heroes and villains, about evil or about sacrifices and martyrdoms suffered. They are about people who came upon injustice and couldn’t ignore it; perhaps that is the definition of the modern hero. Or about obsession which leads to evil.
In fact, many Latin American films are about unexpected political heroes. Latin American art, literature, daily conversation and film are infused with politics and religion in a way very unlike North American arts. It is an irony home out by statistics of political elections: in North America where political freedom is taken for granted, people seem disinterested; a small percentage of eligible voters go to the polls. In Latin America, where the freedom of speech has been gravely threatened in many countries many times, political opinion is a part of daily existence. The often recalled “sixties” in the USA is the closest I can come to imagining what we would be like if we were as interested in our political life as Latin Americans are. Perhaps that is why I am so intrigued.
Cabeza de Vaca
To understand the Spanish conquest and exploration of the Americas, it is important to have an understanding of the historical context from which it emerged. From the departure of the Romans until the late 14th century, the Iberian peninsula was comprised of several separate kingdoms, and several languages. In 711 A.D. Spain was invaded by Muslims from across the Straights of Gibraltar. This invasion was partly fed by the religious conviction that the spread of Islam was a the duty of true believers. Energy also derived from the Crusades, which continued for centuries in the Christian attempt to recapture their Holy Land from the Moors. Spanish armies fought over 800 years to expel the Moors from Spain, but small kingdoms were unable to organize the forces needed to succeed. In 1478 the Kingdoms of Castille and Aragon were united by the marriage of their rulers, Ferdinand and Isabela. In 1492 the Crowns of Spain put into effect three major actions which had far reaching consequences: the Moors were finally expelled from Spain, and Spain was declared a Catholic country; non-Catholics were required to convert or leave the country; and funds were provided by the thirty three year old Queen to finance a voyage to find a shorter route to the Indies.
Europe was on the verge of major change. The power and authority of Rome were coming into question. In 1483 Martin Luther was born; in 1509 Henry VIII was crowned King of England. Rumblings were beginning about the changes in church history for which Henry VIII and Martin Luther would be credited. But in Spain, the new religious fervor took another direction. Having expelled the Infidel from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain believed herself to be the last defender of the Church. She believed that it was her destiny and her glory to fill the Church with new souls and gold. The next hundred years in Spain are called the Golden Century, El Siglo do Oro. The impetus for exploration, for gold and for Christianity, was great.
The men who left Europe on Spanish expeditions brought a mix of motivations. Columbus’ vessels were filled by men who left Spain rather than convert from Judaism to Catholicism. Later expeditions such as those of Cortés and Pizarro had combinations of men of nobility, men without claim to their families’ estates, whether because of illegitimacy or because they were younger sons, and men who were escaping other unfortunate fates.
¡lvar Nu–ez Cabeza de Vaca was descended from a hero of the wars against the Moors. This ancestor soldier had marked a trail with the skull of a cow, for which he was rewarded with the name, Cabeza de Vaca, and a title. His heir and namesake was equally respectable and reliable and had distinguished himself in service to the crown several times prior to the voyage west. He was appointed Royal Treasurer to the expedition to Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez, whose ship was wrecked on the coast of Florida. Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors wandered for eight years over a thousand miles until they arrived, probably in what is now West Texas, where they were reunited with Spanish conquistadors. The journey changed him, from a Spanish soldier in helmet and breast plate whose mission was to convert souls for the church, to a naked healer who understood the lives and beliefs of tribal life, so much so that when he was found, he was not recognized as a Spaniard by Indians or Spaniards. When he returned to Spain, he applied for a grant to further explore Florida, but was passed over in favor of Hernando de Soto. Relacciónes, his recalled account of the journey, was written at this time,and published in 1555. The manuscript was dedicated to the Princess, Mary Tudor, who married Philip 11 in 1554. The adventures of Cabeza de Vaca received enough attention for Cabeza de Vaca to be awarded honor and rank. He was sent as Viceroy to the Rio de la Plata, which included most of South America east of the Andes. Here his understanding of native peoples dominated his decisions. He ordered the clergy to protect the Indians, and decreed that mistreated Indians be removed from their masters. He soon had alienated the Spanish nobility and was overthrown and returned to Spain under arrest. However the significance of his actions in Paraguay were to have long lasting consequences, and contributed to the survival and integration of the Guarani in modern Paraguayan life. The film, “Cabeza de Vaca,” covers the events from ship wreck to rescue, but his appointment to Paraguay connects him to “The Mission.”
The film,
Cabeza de Vaca
, is a visual experience, though it is filmed in Spanish and indigenous languages with some subtitles. The sets are bleak, the costumes original, the changing scenery mysterious. The entire film leaves the viewer a sense of dislocation, as the marooned Spaniards must have felt. The verbal exchanges do not inform the listener of the motives of the characters; events seem random. However the movie follows very closely selected chapters from Cabeza de Vaca’s journals. In presenting the film to a class, prereading and discussing these selections will be invaluable.
My objectives will be that students understand the motives of the Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca in particular. Second, students will recognize the change that comes over Cabeza de Vaca during his eight year journey. His growing respect and empathy with the indigenous people will be important later. We will begin our discussion of what is a hero by listing qualities of heroism, and particularly heroic qualities of Cabeza de Vaca, such as endurance, independence of thinking, strength.
Students will make connections between the film and history to Spanish painters, particularly Diego Velázquez’ dwarfs of the Spanish court, and the surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí. Dwarfs were akin to pets in the courts of Spain. Families sold their misshapen sons, who were then raised as members of the court, well treated and even educated, but not free to leave. Velázquez made several paintings of individual dwarfs, or Fantastics as they were called. His paintings are classical in the sense of composition, but his use of light, and of perspective create an powerful editorial comment. He captures the wisdom and sorrow of these unfortunate souls. Some were extremely intelligent and functioned as royal advisors; others had visible signs of mental deficiency. Velázquez’ message is a merciless indictment of this bizarre custom. In the film a character in the early scenes is a dwarf. Slowly this character grows in the eye of the viewer from a strange and cruel monster to a respectful and caring teacher.
Velázquez was the forerunner of Goya, and Goya was a precursor to Surrealism. Salvador Dalí was an important surrealist painter, and sometimes difficult to fathom. Here is a teachable moment for surrealism for non-art teachers! The last scene in
Cabeza de Vaca
is a broad desert plain with no features but desolation. Across the plain march a battalion of Spanish soldiers in armor. They are carrying a huge cross. It is a surreal scene, but in the context of the film easily understood. Dalí painted a few landscapes which are echoed by this vision. The one which resonates in me is “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” 1946. Anthony is kneeling on a vast and empty plain, holding up a cross against an oncoming column of fantastic animals, giant horses and elephants bearing palaces and naked women and towers.
The last activity will be the beginning of a personal atlas of Latin America. This first map will trace the probable route followed by the four Spaniards from west Florida to west Texas. This will be an opportunity for students to begin to understand how much of the USA was part of the Spanish Empire.
Aguirre: the Wrath of God
The novel,
Aguirre: the Wrath of God
, was written from a journal of this first European navigation of the Amazon, from the Andes to the Atlantic. The movie was made from the novel by a German film maker, Werner Herzog, as a metaphor for Hitler’s arrogant assumption of power in Germany, and perceived descent into madness.
Aguirre is an absolute contrast to Cabeza de Vaca. Like the latter, Aguirre was a Spaniard who came to the New World to further his career. He was an officer in Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the mighty Inca, lords of the Andes. However while Cabeza de Vaca was forthright and noble, and Cortés was educated, Pizarro, and his brothers including Hernando and uncle Gonzalo, and his officers were cut of rougher cloth. Pizarro was an illegitimate child, illiterate, raised as a peasant in Extremadura, the dry ranch land of western Spain so like the dry southwestern USA. He was brave, pitiless, and single minded. He had been with Balboa when the Pacific was discovered. Soon afterwards, stories of gold began to flow north to Panama. Pizarro rode south, racing Diego de Amagro to Cuzco. It took as little time for Pizarro to decimate the Inca as it had taken Cortés to conquer the Aztec Empire. Still hungry for gold, he ordered an expedition to cross the Andes and go down the Amazon in search of the mythical El Dorado, a city of gold now understood to be an invention by the Indians to divert the Spaniards. The leader of this expedition was Gonzalo Pizarro, uncle of Francisco, with orders to hunt for El Dorado east of the Andes. Factual information about this excursion is difficult to acquire. Innes1 reports the excursion in 1540 led by Francisco de Orellana down the Napa tributary, with Orellana as author of the journal from which this film is derived. Herzog claims the monk, Gaspar de Carvajat, kept the joumal of the 1560 excursion down the Huellaga tributary. Whatever the facts, in the film when Gonzalo encounters a tributary of the Amazon, he sends a group of forty ahead to find food and El Dorado, and to return in one week. The scouting party did not return, but floated down the Amazon arriving at the Caribbean island Cubagua a year later, having found no gold.
The film begins as the huge party descends into the jungle from the heights of the Andes. Don Lope de Aguirre is Deputy to Commander Don Pedro Ursua. Aguirre, played by Klaus Kinski, is a humorless man, increasingly possessed by the fever to find gold and claim land. As he gradually sinks into his obsession, he takes whatever action he believes will hasten his goal. He begins on a minor scale, undetected, but soon we hear the whispers, “If we don’t stop him, what will he do next?” The flooded jungle prevents the men from hunting or salvaging food. They catch some fish and are able to reach fruit occasionally, but salt is unavailable in the rain forest. Aguirre murders those who oppose him, and drives the survivors toward their death of malnutrition, unseen forest archers, and madness. He vows to take Mexico from Cortés, and Spain from Ferdinand II. As the film ends, they are nearing the mouth of the Amazon, and Aguirre has proclaimed himself emperor, claiming as his empire Amazonia, Peru, the New World and Spain.
Gonzalo’s troops spent the year struggling back to Cuzco, losing half of their number. Francisco Pizarro was assassinated by followers of his rival, Diego de Almagro, in 1541. The Spanish Empire continued, oblivious to Aguirre.
Aguirre’s unquenchable evil will inspire additions and deletions to our list of heroic qualities. Greed, obsession and pride are as evident in Aguirre as humility, compassion and generosity are in Cabeza de Vaca. We will compare the antagonism between Pizarro and Almagro, which was mimicked in the decades to come by the succession of bitter rivalries among the powerful
caudillos
of Peru, to the legacy of compassion left by Cabeza de Vaca in Paraguay. Students will trace on a map of South America the route Gonzalo and later Aguirre took from Lima to the Caribbean. We will begin to discuss the ecology of this great rain forest, the problem the soldiers encountered in finding food and salt.
The Mission
Throughout Latin America the Spanish confined the indigenous peoples to communities which were connected to economic production, called Encomiendas or Reducciones. Most of these provided slave labor for the mines or the fields. In what is now Paraguay, and proximate sections of Argentina, these communities were called Misiones, missions. They were different from the slave holdings throughout the rest of the Spanish dominated Americas. We see the influence of Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences with the indigenous peoples of North America. We know that he was driven out of Asunción by the Spanish who objected to his protection of the Indians. The missions in Paraguay were managed by the Jesuit Order as communal societies. Protected from European abuse, the Indians produced what they needed with surplus to trade. In most areas the process of setting up the Misiones was not confrontational.
The Mission
is about the native peoples, the Guarani, above Iguazú Falls, also called Alto Parand, deep in the rain forests on the borders of Paraguay and Brazil, where Europeans had explored very little; the Guarani who lived there were aggressively resistant. The story of the movie is the effort of the Spanish Jesuit Priest, Father Gabriel, played by Jeremy Irons, to create a mission above the falls, and to protect the forest people from the Portuguese slaver Rodrigo Mendoza, Robert DeNiro, who enters the jungle and captures by any means whomever he could, This dramatic and panoramic struggle is played against an intense political confrontation for power in Latin America between Spain, Portugal, the Jesuit Order, and the Pope. The result was the expulsion in 1767 of the Jesuits from Spain and all Spanish realms. An interesting footnote to the film was the presence of Daniel Berrigan, SJ, as advisor to Jeremy Irons and actor in the role of one of Gabriel’s priest allies. Berrigan has a personal and philosophical perspective on the power struggle between the Jesuits and Rome particularly in times when the political necessities as identified by Rome are in conflict with the moral imperative identified by individual Jesuits. His name may sound familiar; as a major activist in the anti Vietnam War movement, along with his brother Philip who forced the debate on marriage for Catholic priests by marrying a nun also active in the anti war movement, Elizabeth McCallister. Berrigan kept a journal, including photographs, of the filming.
The Mission is a beautiful and haunting dramatization of the background leading up to the treaties between 1759 and 1767 which divided Alto Parand between Spain and Portugal. At stake were the Spanish Jesuit missions, protective and collective communities of Guarani. Detailed historical information relevant to and lesson plans for “The Mission” are in a previous Curriculum Unit, “Dividing the Spoils: Portugal and Spain in South America,” by Jeannette Rogers Gaffney, YNHTI 1992, Volume 11, Number 6.
We turn again to our atlas of Latin America. We identify the boundaries of modem Brazil and Paraguay and the location of Iguazú Falls. We identify the drainage area of the Parand, and distinguish it from the great Amazon basin. We also locate the original boundaries of the Line of Demarcation, the Treaty of Torredesillas (see 92.02.06).
The second lesson returns us to our discussion of heroes. Father Gabriel is a traditional hero: he is a non violent resister, a pacifist, gives his life to others, is wise and just and has great integrity. He cannot be tempted into violence or disobedience. Rodrigo is another type of hero: a convert. His self inflicted penance for a life of violence leads him to exchange that life for a life of the cloth, but when it is time for heroism he risks eternal damnation to fight heroically the only way he knows how. Is one more of a hero that the other? Is violence or non-violence a measure of heroism? Is giving your life without a struggle to teach your belief more or less heroic that giving up your soul to save others?
One Man’s War
One Man’s War is a fair movie about the true story of Dr. Joel Filartiga, whose son was tortured to death in 1977. 1 lived in his family for six months in 1978. The story is more powerful than the screenplay describes, despite the talents of Anthony Hopkins and Norma Alejandro. For the author’s personal connection to “One Man’s War” see YNHTI 1997, Volume 1, No. 7, Rogers, “Latin American Short Fiction,” beginning p. 123.
Joel Filartiga is a real person, with qualities both laudable and regrettable, as are all heroes. In talking about the qualities of the heroes of these movies, we will have little access to their humanity except in the case of Joel, my friend. His reality makes him no less a hero. We will have defined heroic qualities as courage in the face of danger, integrity despite pressure to abandon value, fighting for the benefit to others despite personal cost. In this post Kennedy era of American politics, heroes are exposed for their lesser qualities at the cost of their effectiveness. I want my students to know that heroes are not perfect humans, but people like us who accept the burden of truth. In a sense that makes this movie as useful as the others.
Joel is not slim and elegant like Anthony Hopkins. He is very overweight, and suffers from the indignities of the body. Ms beatings have left him somewhat lame. He draws with pen on paper, but is not a great artist. Nidia is not Norma Alejandro. She is the fifty something mother of four, and her only son was tortured to death. Her heart is broken; at the bottom she blames Joel. She is fearful and unsettled. Dolly did come to New York for the trial of Amérigo Pe–a. She stayed in New Jersey for two years in a community of Paraguayans, where thick paranoia does not mean that there is no “they” out to get you. Her task was successful, but the cost was great. She became overwhelmed by the escapes of the big city, had a breakdown, and took a long time to be able to go home again. Ana Lidia and Katia have married, Ana to the nephew of the former commander of the army. I would have to describe the family as dysfunctional. But I would never belittle their courage or integrity. Through conversation and photographs I will guide my students to understand that being a hero does not require supernatural powers or beauty. Real heroes are ordinary people who do not back away from the truth.