This past week I went to see a movie produced by Spain, Mexico and France in Spanish titled "También la lluvia" (Even the Rain) about a movie director Sebastián (played by Gael García Bernal) who travels with his cast and crew to Cochabamba, Bolivia, because his producer, one Spaniard by the name of Costa (Luis Tosar), somehow has figured out that his tight budget will stretch further in Bolivia where apparently he can get extras for the movie for about two dollars each a day.
The movie is set in 2000, before the the named Water Wars in Bolivia are about to start and when the population will resist and fight against the privatization of water.
Sebastián is directing a movie about the New World around 1511, movie that aspires to be faithful to historic events and attempts to portray the manner in which the Spanish Crown through the likes of Cristopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas and Agustín Montesinos dealt with the indigenous population of the new continent.
So we see the filming of Indians being burned at the stake refusing the acceptance of the Christian principles as presented by the Spaniards who immediately began demanding everything gold and total submission.
Another heartbreaking scene that is unable to be filmed for Sebastián's movie has us witness how the Spaniards follow a group of Indians, among them many women with their infants in arms, as they are being pursued by the Europeans and their hounds and when facing death, the mothers choose to drown their babies before leaving them for the dogs. The Indian "actresses" hired for this scene refuse to do it, even after Sebastián and his crew try to explain to them that the babies would not even get wet and they show the women the dolls that they would submerge in the water. It seems that historically this is what happened. The "actresses" cannot bring themselves to do it and that moment ends with one of them quite tenderly beginning to sing a lullaby to calm the crying babies.
Daniel is one of the Indians that has an important role to play in the movie as Hatuey, a rebellious Taíno Indian. But Daniel, the actor, is also a committed political activist that is an ouspoken and courageous leader against the privatization of water in Cochabamba 2000.
For me this movie hits home. As a Latin American, as a mestiza, I know that the blood that courses through my veins is Indian and European, specifically Spaniard. I don't care about which might be more dominant. It would be counternatural to deny either. I hurt for the Indians and wonder about the willingness with which they forego all their riches for some pieces of looking glass and shiny stones, how willingly we embraced another culture, language and religion. Maybe we resisted but in any manner I lost that part of who I am. I don't know much about the Indians, I don't know any of their languages. From the Spaniards I have the beautiful language I speak, the beautiful books I read, and though I've never been to their peninsula, and I know my life is forever linked to them, I would never call Spain my "Motherland," because the cost paid by the indigenous peoples from where I come was a high one indeed.
So, that made me think that this "resentment," if I can call it that, is too old to carry around without acknowledging it. I hope that by doing that, the 21st century Margarita I am now can be liberated of this opressing past, and as a civilized human being I can embrace any member of the human race and call myself their sister without worrying if they came from the east or west of the Atlantic Ocean.
I really liked Luis Tosar, the guy who plays the producer Costa, as well as Juan Carlos Aduvuri, the actor who portrays Daniel/Hatuey. They both show depth, feeling, intensity and the contradictions of the land and the ocean that divide them.
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