Los Angeles Pierce College The Life of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero Discussion

For this assignment you should view outside of class any two of the following films and then write up a 3-4 page brief on the films, focusing on how they are related to what we have been covering in the course.Your brief should not be merely a description of the films: you should analyze them in relation to the historical and analytical themes of the course.If you merely describe the films you will receive few points.You should make reference, with appropriate citations, in the brief to class lectures and readings, and specifically to the theories, terms, and concepts we cover in class and the readings.

MISSING (NOT the 2003 film by this title.This is an early 1980s film on Chile, the 1973 coup and the U.S. role in it, starring Jack Lemmon)

ROMERO (about El Salvador and Archbishop Oscar Arnolfo Romero)

EL NORTE (about the struggle of two Guatemalan refugees in the US)

THE AGRONOMIST (about the Haitian tragedy as told through the story of the murder of a famous Haitian journalist)

LA HISTORIA OFICIAL (about the “dirty war” against dissidents during Argentina’s military dictatorship, 1976-83)

BREAD AND ROSES (about the struggle of largely Latino/a immigrant and black labor force of janitors in Los Angeles to unionize)

• LA OTRA CONQUISTA (about Mexico post-conquest)

CENTRAL STATION (about a child’s quest for survival in the face of inequality, power and abuse in the “mean streets” of Brazil’s favelas)

LA ULTIMA CENA (depicts slavery in 19th century Cuba)

• LA BOCA DEL LOBO (a fictional account of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in the 1980s in Peru)

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (the noxious combination of poverty, gender oppression, and international inequality is depicted in this film about three Colombian women forced into participating in narcotics trafficking.Note: the women work in the transnational flower industry)

• CASA DE LOS ESPIRITUS (the story of a family over several generations from the landed oligarchy in Chile, through which the country’s power relations and painful history of struggle is told)

KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN (a homosexual and an underground revolutionary are placed in the same jail cell during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1982)

• FRESAS Y CHOCOLATE (strawberries and chocolate, a Cuban film on homosexuality in Cuba)

IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES (a fictional account of the real-life story of the Marabel sisters’ participation in the struggle against the U.S.-supported Trujillo dictatorship in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Dominican Republic.

• TANGO BAR, or TANGO, NO ME DEJES NUNCA (do not chose both, just one or the other) (both films explore Argentine’s historical and contemporary reality by weaving it through the lens of tango).

MEMORIAS DE SUBDESARROLLO/MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT, or CUBA, or THREE FACES OF CUBA (chose one of these only) (all three are historic films from the early years of the Cuban revolution).

• LA FIESTA DEL CHIVO (about the brutal Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, available in Spanish and maybe with English subtitles).

CAUTIVA (about the life of one girl in Argentina who learns that her real parents were detained, tortured, and killed by the military dictatorship just as she was born and that she was giving over and raised by a couple who collaborated with the dictatorship….based on a true story and a widespread phenomenon during the 1976-83 dictatorship)

• THE SAME MOON (BAJO LA MISMA LUNA) (about the struggle of a Mexican mother and a son to reunite in Los Angeles after the mother left Mexico to find work for her family).

TRASPATIO (about the travails of Central American transnational migrants as they pass through Mexico on route to the United States).

• SLEEP DEALER (this science fictional account of a possible not-to-distant future, in which water has been converted to a private corporate monopoly and immigrant workers have been replaced in the U.S. by robots controlled by workers whose bodies have been electron-biologically connected in Mexico.Although this is science fiction it touches on phenomena apparent in current capitalist globalization in Latin America).

BORDERTOWN (about the femicide that has been going on for two decades now in the border city of Juarez and its linkage to the larger social, economic and political processes bound up with the region’s globalization, including the spread of maquiladoras).

A BETTER LIFE (a poignant story of the struggle of one man and his son as immigrants in Los Angeles)

• EVEN THE RAIN (about the struggle in Bolivia in 2000 against the privatization of water [the “water war”] with flashbacks to the Columbus conquest on genocide against indigenous).

CLANDESTINE CHILDHOOD (about life in clandestinity during the 1970s military dictatorship in Argentina).

MACHUCA (about the military coup in Chile in 1973 that overthrew, with US support, a democratically elected socialist government and ushered in a brutal military dictatorship).

KILL THE MESSENGER (about how a U.S. journalist uncovered a secret CIA operation to ferret weapons to Central America and bring back drugs that were distributed in inner-city minority communities.