"Santo Luzbel" (1997) trailer
Channel: Genner Llanes-Ortiz
Date: 2016-10-10

Santo Luzbel (Saint Lucifer) - 1997
Dir. Miguel Sabido, starring La Compañía de Teatro Náhuatl.

Despite its melodramatic, telenovelesque aesthetics, Miguel Sabido's "Santo Luzbel" aptly captures the complex and entangled cultural politics which characterises Mexico's ambivalent relationship with its Indigenous peoples.
This clip reflects the active way in which Indigenous individuals - notably, women - negotiate their image in the romantically tainted tourist industry. Rather than shying away from global engagements, or passively accepting the "noble savage" slot that Westerners often assign them, Indigenous people employ diverse sophisticated knowledge in ways that defy simplistic representations of Indigenous women as passive agents or victims.
"Santo Luzbel"'s story is also underpinned by the brilliant performances of the Nahuatl Theatre Company. This was one of the first Mexican films performed in an Indigenous language (Náhuatl of the Northern Sierra de Puebla) and which employed Indigenous actors instead of White Mestizo performers in "brown-face" (ie, Pedro Infante in "Tizoc" or Dolores del Río in "María Candelaria").
It was released shortly after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, but the themes that this film explores - intercultural conflict, racism, identity crisis, Indigenous epistemologies, ritual, gender and aesthetics, among many others, are just as relevant today in Mexico and Latin America as they were then.
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This video clip is published for educational purposes.