Latin American Literature Commons^™

Huaso Romance As Neoliberal Reform In Sebastián Silva's La Nana, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

Building on the work of recent critics, this essay asserts that the narrative of illness and recovery at the center of Sebastián Silva's film La nana (2009) can be understood as allegorically working through the contradictions between economy and culture in contemporary Chile. Diverging from these critics, however, the essay argues that the film operates its critique by mobilizing the narrative structures that characterized Chilean criollista novels, and in particular the huaso romance narrative. Far from arguing that the film represents a nationalist or folkloric take on contemporary Chile, the essay asserts that Silva reconfigures the huaso romance to construct …