ABSTRACT
In spite of nationalist projects promoting mestizaje, Indigenous peoples continue to be memorialized in popular culture, especially films, in Latin America. Through an analysis of Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986) and Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain (2010), this chapter examines how settler colonial narratives of discovery and Indigenous elimination are pivotal in advancing the character development of settler identities as socially progressive, even innocent. In turn, Indigenous identities are rendered sympathetic, and, at times, revolutionary, but these portrayals remain one-dimensional because they are reliant on settler colonial narratives of discovery and elimination. Encounters between settlers and Indigenous peoples become the focal point through which to understand Indigenous lives. Yet these encounters cannot account for the complexity of Indigenous lives under colonialism and neoliberalism.
