Author: Karoline Pelikan

SITE IN SPANISH

By Rachel Randall, Karoline Pelikan and Anahí Berneri 

On 12 June 2024, we hosted a screening of the film Alanis (2017) by Argentine director Anahí Berneri at Kiln Cinema in London. The film focuses on the struggles of Alanis, a sex worker and young mother, who is living in Buenos Aires. Berneri recorded an introduction for our screening in which she discussed her surprise upon receiving the first version of the film’s script, which did not make it clear whether Alanis was a sex worker or a victim of sex trafficking. In this interview, Berneri discusses what inspired her to make Alanis, the research she undertook in preparation for shooting it, and whether or not she considers it to be a feminist film.

Why did you decide to make the film Alanis? What was the motive behind, or inspiration for, the film?

The inspiration, the idea for Alanís, came about or was triggered by a proposal from the Argentine Association of Actor Performers. They had been holding annual scriptwriting workshops for their actor members, and the prize for this contest was that a director would take on the task of filming the winning script, with production and funding from the Association. I was approached with the proposal for a short film, but the script wasn’t clear on whether it was about a sex worker or a trafficking victim. That was the first question I asked the screenwriter. It was really surprising to see that the screenwriter had no idea—they thought it was the same thing. So, I began to investigate, and this actor-screenwriter agreed to let us rewrite the script after researching with various associations that work with sex workers, abolitionist groups, and talking with women who work on the street and those who work privately—completely different situations.

What kind of research did you undertake before making the film (for example, to learn more about the experiences of sex workers)?

The research I conducted also involved reviewing current laws and policies, not just talking to workers, abolitionists, and associations. I even accessed surveys that discussed the type of population involved in sex work. One piece of data that caught my attention was that 80% of sex workers over the age of 25 were mothers. In the original script, Alanis was not a mother. I found it very interesting to portray the body of a woman who prostitutes herself while also being a mother. So, I started thinking that she should have a young child whom she breastfeeds. The idea of her sexualized mammary glands in her work transforming into nourishment for her baby was compelling to me.

Another part of my research involved municipal ordinances in Buenos Aires that were in place to evict and close properties used for sexual services. These ordinances required that such apartments be licensed as public service establishments, which was impossible because brothels are not legalized. This situation led to either eviction or extortion of sex workers by municipal agents. The lack of legal spaces for women to work forces them onto the streets or into the protection of pimps, who charge exorbitant fees for protection not from clients, but from municipal and security agents who threaten their livelihoods. 

This turns the state into a victimizer, revictimizing women trying to survive through sex work. While I agree that the free choice of women to engage in sex work is often limited, given the reality that this might be their best option to avoid more degrading or precarious conditions, the current policies further exclude and victimize them instead of providing a legal framework for their subsistence.

Did you collaborate or dialogue with organisations that support sex workers while you were developing the film?

I spoke with associations like AMMAR, the Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina, which, despite not being legalized, had a space in the CGT, the [Cámara General de Trabajo], during the previous government. The CGT, as an independent union, had given them a space, recognizing them even though there are no laws acknowledging them in the Ministry of Labor or in any other way. I also spoke with protective associations that defend women victims of trafficking, and I’ll check the name because I don’t remember right now—they get confused because they’re very similar.

It was very interesting because, during the filmmaking process, I tried to listen with open ears to both sides. I believe the film doesn’t take a stance or try to judge or provide answers. What happened was that at the premiere and during various discussions, I was invited by both types of associations at different times, and they both felt represented. They wanted to use the film to explain their perspective, believing it validated their stance. That was my intention, and I think it’s necessary—to talk about the lack of protection without prescribing what should be done or what’s right or wrong.

What do you think about the term “female gaze”? Does it mean anything to you? How did you use your gaze to frame desire as it is represented in the film (or, in other words, the objectification of the female body and/or the rejection of that objectification)?

The idea of a “female perspective” bothers me because it’s singular. I believe there are multiple female perspectives, male perspectives, and also trans perspectives. That’s what I believe. Regarding desire, I think that one directs, films, and creates from their own body. I completely agree with that. For me, as a screenwriter and director, and as a director of actors, I’m always filtering the stories I tell through my body. I think there’s something like “transvestism,” where you put on the character’s clothes, the character’s shoes, without prejudice, to understand the situation and be able to write and film it.

Would you say that Alanis is a feminist film, or do you prefer not to use that label for your creative works?

I don’t like it when people say Alanís is a feminist film or that my films are feminist. I’m comfortable being recognized as a feminist in my approach, not because I’m didactic or obedient to certain feminist movements, but because I address issues relevant to feminism. I think Alanís is a film that tackles an unresolved debate within feminism. Sex work is an unresolved debate within feminism, and it’s a topic that divides the movement, for sure. There are other issues within feminism that we still need to address, and I always try to focus on those areas. I’m not interested in cinema made to propagate a feminist policy, but rather in cinema that encourages reflection on issues that sometimes seem very clear-cut, stagnant, or unresolved.

 

 

SITE IN SPANISH

By Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio, Daniela Meneses Sala and Rachel Randall 

On 30 November 2023 we organised a workshop at the University of Cambridge that was supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). The result of the workshop — ‘Creative Interventions in the Archive: Working with Photographs of Wet Nurses in the Courret Archive (Lima, Peru)’ – is a print and digital zine entitled: ‘Wet Nurses in Nineteenth-Century Lima: An Alternative Archive’

The event constituted a second iteration of a workshop we held at the University of Bristol on 25 May 2023: ‘Creative Visual Methodologies: Affective Interventions in the Archive’. At both the Cambridge and Bristol workshops, our objective was to explore a series of photographs featuring wet nurses and infants that were taken in Lima in nineteenth century, which are now held at the Courret Archive in the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP). We were interested in considering both how creative depictions of affective and immaterial labour can raise awareness of exploitative employment practices that have been shaped by Latin America’s colonial legacy and how academics, artists and activists can strive to make their work on these forms of labour is as ethical as possible.

The zine features a series of reappropriations and critical reworkings, via collage techniques, of a set of photographs from the Courret Archive at the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP).

The archive, now fully digitised, is made up of the thousands of glass plates originally from Fotografía Central, a photography studio founded in Lima in 1863 by the French brothers Eugène and Achilles Courret. In nineteenth-century Peru, the Courret brothers were key figures involved in one of the crucial technologies of “mechanical reproduction” conceived to construct the bourgeois, modern image of the nation and its citizens: photography. Through the lens of Eugène Courret, we see the creole elite of a Lima in which independence was still nascent. Even if society’s marginal citizens were not the focus of Courret’s photographs, they still appear in many of his portraits, often as secondary characters. His representations, as such, contributed to the creation of stereotypes, often reinforcing differences of class and race.

   

This is the case of a series of images, scattered within the archive, where children appear held by their wet nurse or nanny, a role which at the time was popular amongst Lima’s elite families and which was commonly taken up by Afro-Peruvian women. In some of these photographs, these women appear covered with drapes or partially concealed; in others they look directly at the camera, as they hold their charge close to their chests; and in some, which are meant to feature newborns on their own, the wet nurses are almost entirely erased from the frame, though occasionally they leave behind a trace for the careful observer, like a hand or the glimpse of a head.

Our first encounter with these images provoked a series of questions related to how archives articulate remembrance, how they perpetuate (and yet invisibilise) the violent structural conditions sustaining the historical moments they memorialise. Society’s marginalised actors are anonymised, violently hidden and ignored, even if the archive retains their presence in plain sight. It was in this context that we came up with the idea of making an art workshop. Inspired by the works of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, our aim was to recuperate, in a caring manner, the centrality of the wet nurse figure in the Courret Archive. By “caring”, we refer to a critical engagement encompassing the complexity of this task, the fact that we may often be required to sit with discomfort and the conscious recognition that each of the women who appear in the photographs were subjects with a life and a history of their own. We wanted to create a counter-archive that would bring attention to these women, their care work and the structures behind their oppression, both within and beyond the archive.

After presenting contextual information about the situation of wet nurses in Peru, about the Courret Archive, and about critical archive studies, we prompted participants to critically reflect on the photographs’ materialities, cutting them up, juxtaposing them, finding associations with quotations and other visual objects. Part of our objective was to produce a collective and thoughtful response to the archive, one that could consider the various forms by which material, active interventions could bring the often invisibilised labour of care work to the fore.

In their hands, participants held a selection of printed photographs of varied sizes taken from the BNP archive: some stamped with the BNP institutional watermark; others, bearing the markings of time on their surfaces. Additional materials were provided; for example, a picture of Hipólito Unanue, one of the nineteenth-century intellectuals with views on the subject of wet nursing, as well as images from the periodicals Semanario Crítico and Diario de Lima, which were both key sources, respectively, in sanctioning and disseminating the practice. Alongside these images, participants had a set of quotations spanning different critical views and fictional portrayals of wet nursing, as well as fragments from texts on archive studies, critical race theory and care work.

The pages that the workshop participants and facilitators created compose the zine. The thought-provoking interventions reflect individual and collective concerns as well as the participants’ varied disciplinary backgrounds in Modern Languages, Latin American Studies, English, Film Studies, Sociology, Visual Arts, Gender Studies, History, Social Anthropology,
Geography and Political Science. The pages are united by themes including care, agency, (in)visibility and social reproduction. Some interventions evoke the passing of time and implicitly or explicitly raise the question of how much has changed in terms of race, gender and class relations in Peru and who bears the burden of responsibility for undertaking reproductive labour, including by depicting clock faces, for example. Other pages play on the visible signs of wear and tear in the photographs, which are deployed as indictments both of violent archival practices and of the suffering that the role of wet nurse could have entailed for some of the women pictured. Several interventions thematise the wet nurses’ centrality by using flaps that can be lifted up to reveal their presence or by converting the traces of these women – including their hands and concealed bodies – into the focal point of their pages. Finally, one participant chose to cover several of the photographs with Peruvian flags constructed from red and white card, thereby foregrounding how the idealised, modern Peruvian nation has been sustained and reproduced by these women – particularly considering that many of the infants for whom they cared would later have become adult members of the country’s ruling class.

The process of intervening in these photographs over the course of the two workshops we have co-facilitated in Cambridge and in Bristol has reinforced for us the ethical issues that inevitably arise when working with photographs that invisibilise or objectify Afro-descendant women, which were likely taken without their explicit consent in the context of their labour relation. While neither the workshops nor the zine can resolve these ethical issues, we hope that the discomfort participants experienced when intervening in the photographs forced them to ask themselves how they continue to be implicated in the social discourses arising from these images. This questioning translated into our own practice and, during the second workshop that we held in Cambridge, we decided to address an issue that had bothered us from the beginning; that we were three white women co-organising these events. While we had raised this issue at the Bristol workshop, thanks to CRASSH funding, we were able to go beyond a reflection on our positionality, and invite Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado, an Afro-Peruvian academic and activist, to join us online. At the workshop, Ana Lucía critically engaged with the photographs and talked about the situation of Afro-Peruvian women today. Her powerful text is incorporated into the final version of the zine.

SITE IN SPANISH

By Valentina Montoya Robledo and Rachel Randall

Domestic workers make up one in every five working women in Latin America, totalling approximately 13 million individuals. In recent decades, a significant transformation has occurred as many domestic workers have shifted from living in their employers’ homes to commuting daily from their own residences due to rapid urbanization processes. Latin America became the most urbanized region in the world in 2014. By 2020, 83% of domestic workers in Colombia, for example, resided in their own homes. Their precarious earnings and the fact that more than 80% of them are informal workers, however, have forced them to live in city outskirts. Both their homes and the households where they work often lack proper connections to public transport as well as pavements for pedestrians, making their lengthy commutes both time consuming and expensive.

This shift has led to extensive commuting times across Latin America, with domestic workers’ journeys reaching up to seven hours per day in Bogotá, six hours in Lima, five hours in São Paulo (Montoya Robledo, forthcoming) and three and a half hours in smaller Colombian cities like Manizales. According to Bogotá’s 2015 Mobility Survey, domestic workers have the longest commutes among all urban occupations in Colombia. In many countries they also allocate a significant portion of their income to cover transport costs: 36% in Lima, for example, and 28% in Medellín. During these prolonged journeys, domestic workers often face racial discrimination, gender-based violence, common crime and road safety concerns.

These hardships not only risk domestic workers’ safety but also hinder their access to a range of opportunities from education to leisure to political participation. And yet, local governments in Latin America frequently overlook their situation. The Invisible Commutes project was set up in 2019 to shed light on this critical issue, starting with a documentary about domestic workers’ concerns, which was expanded into a transmedia project in 2020. Collaborating with musician and cultural manager Andres Gonzalez and filmmaker Daniel Gomez, the project aims to raise awareness not only among scholars but also the general public and mobility experts about domestic workers’ limited Right to the City in Latin America.

Invisible Commutes uses various media to depict domestic workers’ expensive, violent and lengthy commutes in order to advocate for their Right to the City. The project includes short audio segments featuring their testimonials, which focus on their experiences when commuting and their perspectives on mobility infrastructure projects. It includes a section on the maps that domestic workers have drawn of their commutes. The project also produces opinion pieces and journal papers, and engages in academic, civil society and local government discussions. Recognized in 2023 as a ‘Remarkable Feminist Voice in Transport’ by Tumi and Women Mobilize Women, Invisible Commutes is a comprehensive effort to address transportation injustice for millions of women.

Filming for the Invisible Commutes documentary, Invisible, has taken place over an extended period, beginning in 2019 with a focus on Reinalda Chaverra, a domestic worker based in Medellín. In 2022 filming continued in Bogotá with domestic worker Belén García. In 2023, Invisible Commutes was awarded funds by Migration Mobilities Bristol to complete the documentary short and hold a workshop with the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (UTRASD) in Medellín.

The workshop explored how domestic workers themselves want to see their commutes represented on screen and enabled their voices to feed into the form and content of the final documentary. This was crucial for us because, despite a recent upsurge in Latin American films that focus on domestic worker protagonists, almost none depict the workers’ lengthy and challenging commutes. It is widely acknowledged that these films tend to be made by directors whose perspectives are more closely aligned with those of employers, rather than employees. They often dramatize the dynamics of employer-employee relationships within employers’ homes by taking live-in domestic workers as their protagonists, as is the case, for example, of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015). In reality, hourly paid roles are becoming more popular than live-in forms of domestic work, as this report focusing on Brazil also shows. When we talked about the lack of visual representations of domestic workers’ commutes at the workshop, one participant explained that it is not convenient for employers to acknowledge the long, challenging and costly journeys that their employees have to undertake because it raises the question of how these commutes should be compensated.

As a starting point for our discussion, we watched clips from the film Roma, which focuses on domestic worker Cleo. Set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, Cleo’s story is strongly inspired by the real experiences of Liboria Rodríguez who was employed by director Alfonso Cuarón’s family when he was a child. Although Roma risks reinforcing a narrative in which its protagonist is both celebrated as, and relegated to, the status of a surrogate member of her employer family, the way the film dwells on Cleo’s gruelling routine maintaining an extensive house and supporting her employers’ four children sparked strong affective responses among the workshop’s participants. Some addressed the negative implications this kind of workload has for managing to exercise or relax, while others reflected on the impact it has for workers’ relationships to their own loved ones, namely their children.

Many of the insights that fed into Invisible were, nonetheless, provoked by the participants’ reflections on the differences between their experiences commuting and those depicted in one of the only Latin American films that focuses on this topic. Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014) traces the lengthy journeys undertaken by its protagonist Ramona, an hourly-paid cleaner who commutes on public transport from her home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to her employers’ upmarket apartments in its centre. Like Roma, Réimon also dwells on the details of Ramona’s work and routine. One workshop participant praised the grace and elegance that characterises Ramona’s portrayal: she is always nicely dressed and well presented. The importance of this became clear as multiple participants spoke about how the distance that they need to walk across difficult terrain to catch initial transport links means they are forced to arrive at work with unclean clothes, suffer rude comments from other commuters, or take a cloth with them to try and wipe off the dirt. The dignity of Ramona’s depiction resonated with UTRASD members who shared experiences of having been denigrated by others due to their occupation and discriminated against on the basis of their race.

One participant also noted that Ramona does not appear to feel afraid walking through the city in the dark of the early morning, while the participant herself has often feared being attacked. Ohers attested to how common it is to be sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport. Another participant observed that Ramona is shown getting a seat on the train, while the buses they catch are so full at peak times that they must always stand.  

In response to these challenges, Invisible concludes with the changes that UTRASD members themselves would make to improve domestic workers’ experiences commuting to their employers’ homes. These include: building more public bathrooms in stations and across the city; introducing women-only carriages; giving domestic workers preference in queues at peak times; and subsidising public transport for domestic workers or introducing forms of transport specifically for them. The final three proposals would likely require individuals to register formally as domestic workers, which would be a positive given the challenges that widespread informality brings across the sector.

We hope that the documentary encourages policy makers and urban planners to take up their proposals and continue hearing what they have to say.

‘Invisible’ (Valentina Montoya Robledo, Daniel Gómez Restrepo and Andres Gonzalez Robledo 2024) will be screened in London at BLOC cinema, Queen Mary University of London on 30 May 2024. Registration is free: https://invisible-screening-panel.eventbrite.com

This blog post was originally published on Migration Mobilities Bristol. 

Valentina Montoya Robledo is a Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford. She directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes on domestic workers’ commuting experiences. Her most recent paper is ‘That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them’: Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City.

Rachel Randall is Reader in Latin American Studies at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Her book, Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture has recently been published by the University of Texas Press. It explores the struggles of domestic workers in Latin America through an analysis of films, texts and digital media produced with them or inspired by their experiences. The book is available with a 30% discount using the code UTXM30 in the UK and Europe and in the US and Latin America.