Voices and narratives of migration in the documentary Casa en Tierra Ajena

Abstract

Migratory issues are among the most pressing nowadays, and cinema, as one of the forms of representation, has appropriated this theme quite pertinently, with migration, mainly international mobility, being the subject of many films, both documentary and fictional, most of all since the 2000s. Our proposal is to approach this issue through a perspective of the displacement of populations in Central American countries towards the Eldorado, which, in the imaginary of many people, represents the United States. The documentary by Costa Rican movie maker Ivannia Villalobos Vindas, Casa en Tierra Ajena, made in 2017, presents the narrative of people who are in the process of migration, leaving their countries of origin seeking to reach Mexico and from this country to reach their goal, to cross the US border. They come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, all of them fleeing the sorrowful reality of their countries, either in terms of political and/or socioeconomic violence, hoping to find in the future settlement better living conditions for themselves and their families. The documentary gives voice to multiple social actors who tell their stories, dreams and suffering in front of the directors camera. Transiting between the proposed notion by Bill Nichols of the documentary voice as well as the category suggested by Leger Grindon about the poetics of the interview in the documentary movie, we seek to analyze the documentary Casa en Tierra Ajena, under the prism of these different voices that populate the documentary as well as the sonorous mise en scène present in the interviews conducted with the social actors.