RP3: “Tú ya estás muerto”

Watching El Norte, made me angry for many reasons. One, because this happens all the time, even though time changes it still keeps happening. When people immigrate or migrate to other places they still need to think how to assimilate, hot to survive without the ideas and beliefs that they carry. They must follow other ideas; conforming to the modern world in which they are living in because their world has been taken away from them. Second, I just don’t understand why it’s so hard for others to understand the different worlds of different people. Why is it that people need to be “superior” and those who are not are told that their land is worth nothing because it is not seen as “superior”? Finally, even our own people harm us, in every possible way. Those that believe that coloniality and modernity is the way of living are the ones that tell our story of how we are no longer alive, that our way of living is not “the right way”.

 This film had a lot of themes going on. The main ones that I kind of connected were colonization, ethnosuicide and assimilation. The way I define ethnosuicide is the killing of yourself and your people by accepting colonization. Colonization then is defined as “the idea that certain people do not belong to history”, from Mignolo’s reading, The Americas, Christian expansion, and the modern/colonial foundation of Racism. Reading Rabassa’s Elsewheres and the definition of ethnosuicide made me think of Nacha’s line in the film, “Tú ya estás muerto”. Why is it that Nacha tells Enrique, “Tú ya estás muerto”? Well first because he is forgetting his beliefs and traditions, ethnosuicide. By him accepting to assimilate it’s a way of saying, “I have to become somebody else to be accepted”. He believes that assimilating is the only way he is going to survive. Therefore, assimilating to a new environment will be to tell the story of how you became colonized and how you narrated your ethnosuicide.

When I think about Enrique and Rosas’s role in the film, the ideas that each one of them represents makes me think of assimilation. Rosa and Enrique, along with other characters in the film, were assimilating little by little. In some occasions it was by their choice and on others by force because it was implemented on them. In example, one of Rosa’s lines was “Qué diferencia hay en la forma que lo hago?” She is told that the way she does it is not the right way. That is the same idea that Europeans implemented on the people from colonized territories, specifically, the Aztecs and Incas. This brings me to the connection to modernity and how modernity and coloniality cannot be separated as how Mignolo defines it. “ You can not be modern without being colonial” (Mignolo, pg.6). Being Modern means that you have adopted an advanced and modern way of thinking and working, and this comes from the idea of becoming colonized. Therefore, the film shows colonization, assimilation and ethnosuicide at the same time, in which these three ideas intersect with one another and work together.