ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the role of urban architecture for the representation of political and socioeconomic divisions in contemporary Latin American film. It provides examples of the possible avenues of analysis available to Latin American film scholarship through the study of architectural symbolism. First, the chapter examines how films from across the region represent architecture during this period. It then considers the symbolic use of architecture in three films from the first decade of the 21st century that illustrate three different political contexts respectively: the Cold War, neoliberalism and neocolonialism. In the Chilean film, Machuca (Andrés Wood, 2004), architecture symbolizes the divisiveness of Cold War politics in Santiago, Chile, in the early 1970s. Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) demonstrates the debilitating results of neoliberalism through its depiction of contemporary architecture in Mexico City. Finally, in La teta asustada (Milk of Sorrow, Claudia Llosa, 2009), urban design and architecture reveal the disenfranchisement of the indigenous population in neocolonialist Lima, Peru.
