ABSTRACT

Laura Monica del Carmen is a 25-year-old immigrant from a former pueblo de indios in Oaxaca who now lives in a small rented apartment in Mexico City. Chronicling what ought to have been the last month of Laura's lonely life, the film is mainly set in one room only, with just a few speaking parts. The author reveals that Laura's impotence as a migrant is not the only way to look at the film. The idea that time poses a threat has developed into a specific Amerindian chronotope. Through Amerindian lenses, leap year can indeed be seen as an example of the tyranny of time: another cognitive schema to feed Amerindian imaginaries. The chapter discusses that the art of Maya painters like Salvador Reanda Quieju falls within the Amerindian schemas. At the end, it is clear that for Amerindian mnemonic community art, the intersection of gender and sex cannot end without intersecting also with race.