Plots between the documentary series La misma tierra. Bolivianos en Argentina (1986) and politics at the beginning of democracy: memory, representations and borders

Abstract

The advent of democracy in Argentina forged new relationships between documentary and politics, creating a space for filmmakers to build, through their critical gaze, social and political awareness. From these “fragments of history”, embodied through the voice-over, testimonies, authorized voices, film materials, archives, etc., there is an underground memory (Halbwachs in Pollak, 1998) that from the present allows deconstructing representations that emerge as a symptom of another era. In this polarity of inclusion/expulsion and documentary/political relationship, it is worth asking if the memories produced by documentary series La otra tierra, in the chapter La misma tierra, Bolivianos en Argentina (1986) operate (Durkheimian model) in the duration, continuity and stability of certain representations or seek to reinforce social cohesion through the affective community (Halbwachs in Pollak, 1998). What happens at cultural borders (Cebrelli, 2018) when these representations and memories emerge in the present?

This article will seek to investigate the representations of Bolivians in Argentina in the national memory, built during the Videla Law as the figure of the “expellable foreigner/external enemy”. Therefore analyze whether in the manipulation of the interpretation of the past (Pollak, 1988) that documentalists project onto the present, codes continue to circulate underground whose marks of origin become chameleonic, for which reason they would not be recognizable or identifiable to contemporaries.