Levantamuertos (Miguel Núñez, 2013) opens with a close-up of a dying pigeon on a patch of barren soil, followed by a scene depicting ants erupting out of an anthill. Almost immediately, we become attuned to the hum of an air conditioner that abruptly ceases. An elderly woman observes from her window as a utility vehicle from the electric company cuts off her electricity, causing her cooling unit to falter. Determined, the woman steps outside in an attempt to catch up with the utility workers. Through a series of long shots, we witness the woman walking aimlessly along a desert highway. The sound of fire and the fleeting glimpses of the blinding sun immediately transport the viewer to the unforgiving heat of a scorching climate, culminating in a scene where the woman collapses to the ground, her life ended by the intense heat. This opening sequence establishes the tone for the film’s setting: Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, a city built on desert land that is renowned for being Mexico’s hottest metropolitan area. Here, amidst the arid expanse, we encounter the film’s protagonist, Iván, a young worker for the Medical Forensic Service (SEMEFO, in Spanish). His duty: transporting the deceased to the city morgue. On the edge of the vast cotton plantations of the region’s numerous ejidos, Iván collects the remains of the elderly woman. Throughout the film, viewers will shadow this aspiring embalmer as he navigates the streets of Mexicali and the surrounding region.
A pivotal moment of the film unfolds when the protagonist, Iván, encounters Rosa. At her behest, they engage in a physically violent sexual encounter in an old hotel in the city center. After the encounter, Iván is alarmed by the possibility that he may have inadvertently killed Rosa. In the days that follow, he is haunted by the prospect of being summoned by the SEMEFO to retrieve the lifeless body of a woman from a downtown hotel. This situation forces Iván to grapple with an unresolved issue from his past – the death of his brother. Against this ominous backdrop consistent with dark comedy, the film’s director introduces a tapestry of absurdist vignettes, which include the spectacle of a pig being raffled off – the animal ends up taking residence in Iván’s home – but also several more realistic scenes including those of a community rallying against exorbitant utility prices in a region where air conditioning is a matter of survival, as well as sequences involving three violent deaths on the outskirts of the city.
Critics lauded this independent film for distancing itself from the stereotypes of border cinema and instead centering on everyday life. Jorge Ayala Blanco found the film to be exemplary in the sense that it tells the story of “surviving in the midst of infernal heat and violence in northern Mexico, without ever highlighting a single migrant or mentioning drug trafficking directly (these stereotypes have become unavoidable when discussing cities in this genre of film)”. 1Jorge Ayala Blanco, La novedad del cine mexicano (Mexico: UNAM, 2017), 240. In the same vein, the film’s director, a native of Mexicali, expressed his interest in “creating a film that resonated with my place of origin, while distancing itself from issues such as drug trafficking and immigration; because although these issues undeniably take place in everyday Mexicali, people’s lives extend far beyond them.” Aside from focusing on the oppressive heat, Núñez explored everyday and absurd deaths – such as an elderly man dying from a Viagra overdose – allowing for “an opening through which to introduce dark humor into the narrative, which helps distance us from the tragic or violent connotations its title might suggest.”2Cuauhtémoc Ruelas, “Entrevista: Miguel Núñez, Director De Levantamuertos,” Tomatazos, October 29, 2015, https://cms.tomatazos.com/articulo/entrevista-miguel-nunez-director-levantamuertos/ (translation by Diego Olavarría). While the film eschews the stereotypical depictions of violence often associated with the region, in the following analysis I will explore how the spatial dynamics of Mexicali are encoded through representations of death. I will also discuss the director’s strategies for revealing the underlying brutality present in the border areas of Northern Mexico. I argue that the film does not focus on immediate, spectacular, or visually explosive deaths but instead constructs a series of images that embody what Rob Nixon terms “slow violence”; in other words, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”3Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. My objective is to examine how slow violence can shed light on everyday life in a modest city on Mexico’s northern border. To build my argument, I will explore how Levantamuertos uses representations of the everyday city through the lens of slow violence, ultimately questioning the effects and implications of these strategies within the broader context of border cinema.
The city in context
Situated along the US–Mexico border amidst vast expanses of desert, Mexicali is one of Mexico’s youngest cities, its official founding dating back to 1903. Its existence can be traced to a series of water diversion initiatives in the United States, which rerouted the Colorado River, allowing the emergence of both the adjacent Imperial Valley and Mexicali as agricultural powerhouses, chiefly devoted to cotton cultivation. Through extensive irrigation efforts, the once-desert landscape blossomed into a highly productive agricultural region. By 1937, Mexicali, now designated as the state capital, had integrated into a free-trade region spanning northeastern Mexico. In the 1970s, it began attracting maquiladoras – manufacturing plants operating within the free-trade zone, primarily aimed at exporting to the United States.
Under the control of US corporations, these fertile lands attracted thousands of laborers from across Mexico, as well as a significant contingent of Chinese migrants, drawn by the promise of employment opportunities in the burgeoning agricultural sector dominated by the Colorado River Land Company. This influx of laborers laid the foundation for Mexicali’s present ethos, predominantly centered around work and commerce.
The population of Mexicali has always been remarkably diverse, owing to various factors. The city’s strategic location on the US border has made it a hub for foreign migrants: in recent years this trend has seen waves of Haitians, Central Americans, Cubans, and Mexicans from other regions en route to the US in pursuit of a better life, many of whom end up establishing themselves in the region. This constant flux of humanity has imbued Mexicali with a transient character, despite its recent milestone of surpassing a population of one million residents.
Despite its noteworthy attributes, Mexicali has rarely been depicted in Mexican cinema, in part because the industry is concentrated in Mexico City, the nation’s capital. Since its inception, Mexican cinema has featured the capital city as a central motif in a number of films. This cinematic tradition has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry, which has examined the evolution of Mexico City from its nascent urbanization to its metamorphosis into a megalopolis. Cinema has played a defining role in building urban imaginaries of Mexico City. 4See Georgina Cebey, “Introducción,” in Cine y megalópolis. Aproximaciones a la ciudad latinoamericana desde el cine urbano, ed. Georgina Cebey (México: UNAM – Facultad de arquitectura, 2021), 15-39. Consequently, the depiction of the capital in domestic cinema has exerted considerable influence on hegemonic perceptions of life across the country.
In contrast, cinematic visions of Mexicali are deeply tied to its nature as a border city and its desert landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexicali emerged as a notable player in the US film industry. Its proximity to Hollywood, coupled with an abundance of labor and its distinctive landscape, rendered the city a prime location for filming scenes that would eventually become a part of Hollywood history. As Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz notes, Mexicali served as “a representation of faraway countries or lands, embodying the perception of the Mexican border as no-man’s land, a lawless frontier, where outlaws thrived and violence was commonplace.”5Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Tan cerca de Hollywood: Cine, televisión y video en Baja California (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2010), 114. These visions highlight the power asymmetries between both countries.6Dominique Brégent-Head, “Dark Limbo: Film Noir and the North American Borders”, The Journal of American Culture 29 (2006): 126.
In this same sense, there exists a strain of cinema that relies on stereotypes of violence and drug trafficking, which depicts these regions not as “communities with shared experiences”7Daniel D. Arreola, “Forget the Alamo: The Border as Place in John Sayles’ Lone Star”, Journal of Cultural Geography 23 (2005): 25. but as lawless territories devoid of rules. Instead of fostering an understanding of border interactions, these portrayals often dehumanize the communities that inhabit the region. A number of Mexican films, however, have attempted to subvert these stereotypes, creating their own visions and depicting the region’s complexities,8For example, Raza de bronce (1927) and Sol de gloria (1929), both indigenist claims by director Guillermo Calles, which also tried to promote the image of the region as a development zone. See Grabriel Trujillo, Tan cerca de Hollywood, 128. resulting in a form of contemporary cinema focused on exploring the sociocultural and political dynamics of northern Mexico, including themes of identity, immigration, and the experiences of border communities, which is the case with Levantamuertos.
Mexicali, the desert, and slow violence
The plot of Levantamuertos unfolds in a medium-sized city easily recognizable by its desert landscape and intense heat. The visual portrayal of Mexicali does not rely on explicitly displaying its iconic landmarks, such as the local Chinatown. Instead, the plot focuses on Iván’s experiences, which oscillate between the city’s outskirts where he resides and the city center, where he works, frequents a bar, and visits a hotel with Rosa. These settings are only broadly depicted. Even though the downtown area plays a significant role in the film, the urban space is not meticulously constructed within the narrative itself. It is the characters themselves who explicitly mention their intentions to visit a downtown cantina or to check for any bodies that need collecting in the area. The border fence is featured only once, in a scene where vendors are seen selling drinks and food to drivers in the long lines of cars waiting to cross into the United States. Although the film is set in a border city, the cross-national dynamics of border life are always subtly implied, but are made explicit only in this single scene.
Mexicali is depicted as a city in constant motion. Through various shots that convey a sense of place, the film highlights avenues clogged with traffic, sparsely populated sidewalks, and sprawling single-story homes, reflecting Mexicali’s predominantly horizontal growth. Public life is minimal and mostly occurs at night, once the oppressive heat has diminished. One exterior shot, for example, features several street food stalls and a firebreather performing at a streetlight. In contrast, the protagonist lives on the outskirts, in a sparsely built neighborhood with little traffic. The film offers a series of small glimpses that reveal what everyday life is like in a region where heat permeates every aspect of life. Throughout the narrative, we witness Iván’s meticulous rituals to combat the heat’s oppressive presence; for instance, he carefully rolls down his vehicle’s windows before entering it, mindful to avoid scalding his skin on the searing metal of the door. The climate dictates daily life in the city and is captured in poignant scenes: an ice cream vendor seeks respite under a solitary tree, while street vendors hawk water bottles along the border fence separating Mexico and the United States. Against the hazy backdrop of the landscape, distorted by the relentless heat, a sign displays an alarming temperature of 50°C. Amidst his routine, Iván sifts through newspaper clippings detailing the city’s casualties, seeks solace from the sweltering heat with a cold beer from the local shop, while continuing to drive the streets of Mexicali.
This aspect reveals itself to be crucial, as the film frequently shows Iván driving through the city, moving from one location to another, underscoring the notion of Mexicali as a place of transit. This portrayal emphasizes the middling city as an impersonal space that both contains and reveals everyday violence. For instance, one of Iván’s colleagues, while recounting the previous day’s work, illustrates this inherent violence by stating: “You missed out on a lot, we had a bunch of them: a stabbing, an overturned car with two dead, a decapitation, two burned bodies, a hangman… it was quite the work day, real busy.” In a subsequent scene, as Iván drives through the city, a radio host reports: “Three bodies were located in a clandestine grave in Los Mochis, eleven bodies were found in Durango, seven of them decapitated. And this forces us to repeat what we’ve said before: the Mexican police has been overwhelmed by organized crime.” These broadcasts underscore some of the ways in which normalization of violence occurs in society while serving as a cinematic strategy to illustrate the impact of the so-called war against drugs, which has been ravaging Mexico for nearly two decades.
In his article “Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence”, Juan Llamas-Rodríguez analyzes films centered on drug-related violence and argues that these productions reveal the unfolding of slow violence, even when they also depict explicit violence. According to Llamas-Rodríguez, slow violence is a prolonged and gradual system of aggression that affects the communities portrayed in these films. While Llamas-Rodríguez focuses on a type of cinema that links the border with organized crime, it’s important to note that the concept of slow violence in Mexican cinema is somewhat diffuse. Beyond narrative and aesthetic strategies, the development of slow violence on screen suggests a new way of engaging with the realities of these regions. In this regard, despite the fact that Levantamuertos does not address drug-related violence, Núñez’s work resonates with Llamas-Rodríguez’s notion of slow violence cinema by explicity and consciously depicting communities’ everyday lives and enhancing the visibility of slow violence.9Juan Llamas-Rodríguez, “Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2018): 29–30.
In Levantamuertos, this reflection occurs in the desert. Like all border areas, the desert is a territory where boundaries are blurry, giving rise to imagery rooted in the interstitial. Along Mexico’s northern border, the desert infiltrates this imagery, giving rise to a rich profusion of intricate scenes defined by the glaring sun, the silence of the hinterlands and the lack of human presence. According to Edith Mora, the desert serves as a catalyst for narratives that conjure themes of “silence, solitude and absence, but also the anxieties and pursuits of those who inhabit the arid, ruinous, and suffocating scenarios of the Mexican desert.”10Edith Mora, “Tres circos, tres novelas. Buscando un lugar en el desierto mexicano: La territorialización de los confines,” Taller de Letras 55 (2014): 115 (translation by Diego Olavarría). Mora contends that the desert, in the context of northern Mexico, embodies a conceptual realm where themes of destruction, transition, and creation are ever-present. In line with the imaginaries that Mora describes in contemporary literature, Levantamuertos depicts destruction through disorienting, infernal landscapes characterized by extreme temperatures and drought; in synthesis, “all are allusions to the forms of chaos,”11Edith Mora, “Tres circos, tres novelas,” 118 (translation by Diego Olavarría). and form a tableau that allows the representation of agony, phantasmagoria, death, and oblivion.
This tradition of representing the desert informs several pivotal moments in the film. For instance, when Iván unexpectedly encounters Rosa on the street and dispels his fears of her death, he opens up about his inner turmoil, deeply rooted in the loss of his brother. Subsequently, they decide to embark on a journey along the Rumorosa mountain highway to visit the very spot where Iván’s brother lost his life. Through a wide long shot, we see Iván’s old red car navigating an arid landscape, following a winding road that links the desert valley to the surrounding region and the city of Tecate. This area is renowned for its striking landscape, particularly the highways that cut through the rock, forming deep gorges where the wind echoes through the crevices. In a subsequent scene, amidst towering rock formations, against the backdrop of the whistling wind, Iván and Rosa approach a ravine where remnants of rocks and discarded tires litter the ground. Their path leads them to a cross marking the site of Iván’s brother’s accident. The howling wind and the oppressive heat unnerve Iván, triggering hallucinations of his past. Amidst the desolation of the landscape, Rosa asks Iván whether he fears that one day he will be called to collect the body of a loved one. In this scene, slow violence manifests as a pervasive fear present in the everyday lives of the general population, extending even into the desert landscape. The director deliberately distances himself from the hegemonic portrayal of spectacular violence often seen in audiovisual productions, opting instead to convey slow violence through a tense, fearful dialogue set against a landscape that anchors the spatial identity of the region.
Two additional scenes exemplify the concept of slow violence and its relation with the desert landscape. In the first instance, Iván ventures into a garbage dump. Through wide shots, we witness the area covered in trash, while close-ups capture scavengers making their way through the waste. One of these scavengers recounts discovering a lifeless infant concealed within an empty sack. Clad in forensic attire, Iván traverses the dump, eventually locating the small form amidst rubble, old tires, and other forms of debris. After shrouding it in black plastic, he transports the body to the SEMEFO vehicle. Meanwhile, the relentless wind persists, and the camera offers various angles of the dump. This aesthetic portrayal of landscape not only reflects the protagonist’s psyche but also reshapes the landscape into a purgatorial realm tied to the desert. Echoing Edith Mora, the northern border emerges as a space of rootlessness, where “individuals are presented as social detritus, rejected and isolated by those at the center. Additional considerations emerge, including the impossibility of belonging, the complexity of choosing an identity in spaces of transit, and the solitude of life on the border.”12Edith Mora, “Estética de los lugares de paso en la literatura de la frontera norte de México,” Chasqui 45 (2016): 125. (translation by Diego Olavarría). These reflections provide an opportunity to meditate on the representation of slow violence in these settings. The aforementioned scene also invites a deeper exploration of the embodiment of the subject as a social detritus of sorts.
The second pivotal scene, which emphasizes the subtle yet profound impact of slow violence within the landscape, unfolds towards the film’s ending. Iván is dispatched to the Valle de Mexicali, the agricultural region encircling the city, tasked with retrieving several bodies discovered in the area. There he encounters a trio of corpses, their hands bound, at the base of a ravine. Inquiring of the patrolling officers about the arrival of additional police, he learns of another homicide nearby, which has caused the response team to be delayed. As they wait, Iván discerns twitching among the lifeless forms. He swiftly descends the rocky terrain and discovers one of the victims clinging to life – a moment witnessed by a white dove. One of the police officers remarks that the survivor “returned from hell.” In this moment, Iván’s emotions configure the surrounding landscape into something interstitial – in Mora’s words, “a place of transit and withdrawal, full of meaning as a border space, and as one of physical and spiritual transition”.13Mora, “Estética de los lugares de paso en la literatura de la frontera norte de México,” 125 (translation by Diego Olavarría). The scene subverts the typical forms of violence that Iván encounters in his job, instead shifting the focus toward a more insidious spectrum of slow violence – a burden that Iván must endure as part of his work.
Final Considerations
Mexicali is far from being a global city. As the seventeenth largest city in Mexico, it holds limited national relevance, yet it operates with unique dynamics. Levantamuertos offers a glimpse into how the city’s distinctive characteristics – its harsh climate and the survival strategies it necessitates, its geostrategic location, and the social problems stemming from decades of organized crime – are embedded in the everyday lives of its inhabitants. By analyzing how these three factors interact and intertwine, and applying the concept of slow violence, we can broaden our understanding of daily life in a middling border city in the Global South.
While the film perhaps does not overtly depict immediate violence, death permeates its plot. The protagonist, a forensic worker, meticulously collects newspaper clippings chronicling the city’s fatalities, constructing a scrapbook or diary of sorts. In a sense, death is a marker of time passing. The catalyst for his transformation lies in the suspicion of killing a woman during a sexual encounter – a memory that reignites trauma surrounding his brother’s death and sends him into a state of crisis. While avoiding the stereotypical motifs of violence in border cinema, the film confronts the harsh reality of everyday life in a medium-sized northern Mexican city, where violence is normalized while leaving a mark on the landscape and its interpretation. In this sense, Núñez’s film articulates a story of life on a border where violence, landscape, and subjectivity intertwine.
In the context of border cinema, which has often developed hegemonic narratives centered on drug trafficking and sensationalist violence, identifying a film that departs from these paradigms and seeks new ways to portray such issues is significant. Levantamuertos subtly weaves elements of slow violence with sociocultural context, aligning with what Llamas refers to as a “heuristic cinema of slow violence.” This concept suggests that the ethical approach to depicting violence defines the work a film performs, rather than any specific formal treatment of that violence.14Llamas-Rodríguez, “Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence,” 28. In line with this ethical disposition, Levantamuertos offers a general portrayal of everyday life in an unpredictable region, and through its emphasis on landscape, character psychology, and social particularities, provides a unique perspective for understanding the community that inhabits this universe.
The filmmakers take a creative risk by representing how communities are forced to endure multiple forms of violence in this region—ranging from harsh weather and the constant threat of organized crime to the violence of energy inequality —through counter-hegemonic strategies like dark humor and realist depictions of everyday life. Levantamuertos is an effort to capture the complexity of life in an ostensibly ordinary city that is much more complex than it seems on the surface. Slow violence allows the director to to make visible the residual impacts of Mexico’s recent transformations due to the war on drugs on everday life, and this constitutes a political choice. This approach to filmmaking reveals how this event in the nation’s history permeates all aspects of the territory, paving the way for new cultural discussions about the border.
Notes
| ↑1 | Jorge Ayala Blanco, La novedad del cine mexicano (Mexico: UNAM, 2017), 240. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Cuauhtémoc Ruelas, “Entrevista: Miguel Núñez, Director De Levantamuertos,” Tomatazos, October 29, 2015, https://cms.tomatazos.com/articulo/entrevista-miguel-nunez-director-levantamuertos/ (translation by Diego Olavarría). |
| ↑3 | Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. |
| ↑4 | See Georgina Cebey, “Introducción,” in Cine y megalópolis. Aproximaciones a la ciudad latinoamericana desde el cine urbano, ed. Georgina Cebey (México: UNAM – Facultad de arquitectura, 2021), 15-39. |
| ↑5 | Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Tan cerca de Hollywood: Cine, televisión y video en Baja California (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2010), 114. |
| ↑6 | Dominique Brégent-Head, “Dark Limbo: Film Noir and the North American Borders”, The Journal of American Culture 29 (2006): 126. |
| ↑7 | Daniel D. Arreola, “Forget the Alamo: The Border as Place in John Sayles’ Lone Star”, Journal of Cultural Geography 23 (2005): 25. |
| ↑8 | For example, Raza de bronce (1927) and Sol de gloria (1929), both indigenist claims by director Guillermo Calles, which also tried to promote the image of the region as a development zone. See Grabriel Trujillo, Tan cerca de Hollywood, 128. |
| ↑9 | Juan Llamas-Rodríguez, “Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2018): 29–30. |
| ↑10 | Edith Mora, “Tres circos, tres novelas. Buscando un lugar en el desierto mexicano: La territorialización de los confines,” Taller de Letras 55 (2014): 115 (translation by Diego Olavarría). |
| ↑11 | Edith Mora, “Tres circos, tres novelas,” 118 (translation by Diego Olavarría). |
| ↑12 | Edith Mora, “Estética de los lugares de paso en la literatura de la frontera norte de México,” Chasqui 45 (2016): 125. (translation by Diego Olavarría). |
| ↑13 | Mora, “Estética de los lugares de paso en la literatura de la frontera norte de México,” 125 (translation by Diego Olavarría). |
| ↑14 | Llamas-Rodríguez, “Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence,” 28. |
Georgina Cebey is a faculty member at the School of Architecture of the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) and member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico. She received her PhD in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her work focuses on the history of architecture, with emphasis on the representation of space and architecture in art and media. She is the author of Arquitectura del fracaso (Mexico, Feta: 2017/ Festina: 2022) wich won the Vasconcelos national essay prize in Mexico; editor of “Cine y megalópolis. Aproximaciones a la ciudad latinoamericana desde el cine urbano (Mexico: UNAM-Facultad de Arquitectura, 2022); and coeditor of The Routledge Handook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities (Abingdon, Routledge: 2024).
