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Capitalist Realism, Human Rights and the Documentary Mode

By Rebecca Janzen

This piece considers Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, and how documentaries that deal with human rights exemplify this mode in Mexico. Fisher’s framework is helpful because the central lies of capitalism that he identified remain; his ideas show the ways that the imagination is confined by the system, that “capitalism occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”1 This system, in turn, continues to affect the art we examine, the movies we watch, and the books we read. 

Fisher, however, does not include a case study of Mexico. His work never mentions Latin America, gender, women, Indigenous people, or the kind of violence common in Mexico. That being said, I think his work is relevant to a study of Mexico, particularly in regard to his remarks on bureaucracy and, therefore, capitalist realism as an aesthetic that relates to this context. I understand Fisher’s argument as one that connects capitalism to bureaucratic expansion.2 This argument is certainly the case in 21st century Mexico. In Mexico, the military and the police are at the heart of the state, which is not always understood colloquially as part of the bureaucracy but, as it is entirely government-funded, I include it in that category.  

The combination of a large security apparatus and a rhetoric of small government, which I synthesize as an expanding bureaucracy and capitalism, prevails in 21st century Mexico. In my previous work, Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production, I showed how the conservative leaning National Action Party diverted attention away from credible allegations of electoral fraud in 2006 by creating a specter of violence. In response to this specter, party  increased police funding and received significant international aid in the form of military technology, which made Mexico more violent and in turn “necessitated” austerity politics in order to ensure public funds were diverted to the nebulous realm of security.3

Indigenous sovereignty and human rights have appeared in the Mexican political sphere with varying levels of intensity since the mid-1990s, with many ramifications for all people within Mexico’s borders. After the North American Free Trade Agreement, Zapatistas in the Mexican state of Chiapas had an uprising that was settled with the 1994 San Andrés Accords.4 This solidified an understanding of Indigenous sovereignty relating to language and cultural practices and allowed for increased use of customary law to govern decisions at the local or municipal level. For some, this was a huge victory. And yet, as Haidy Gaismar states, “Law is a problematic epistemological framework with which to navigate indigenous identity because of the unequal, colonial, power relationships that determine, for the most part, the state as a legal authority.”5 The accords also did not resolve issues Indigenous women face, as in Mexico, women’s issues are seen as separate from the expansion of Indigenous sovereignty.6 This separation was embedded in the preexisting bureaucracy that dealt with land reform in Mexico since the 1930s.  Here, indigenous sovereignty has always been defined in relation to the state and at the state’s pleasure. 

A decade later, Mexican bureaucracy expanded to incorporate questions of human rights. In 2007, the US began the Merida Initiative, a massive aid program that primarily funded security technology, and began forcing constitutional reform and new human rights laws.7 In this phase of capitalism, everyone was fixated on violence; it became a spectacle on national television and in film. Then, when politically expedient, the government focused on missing  women. Mexico also passed a number of human rights laws to protect women, children, and immigrants, all as individuals within discrete categories.8

People, however, are not bureaucratic categories. When governments consider people in this way, with limited horizons of possibility, it creates problems. In the Mexican state of Oaxaca, some Indigenous communities employed customary law that stated that women could not vote for local elections or run for local office, even though Mexico had extended suffrage to women in 1953. In 2007,one woman in Oaxaca, Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, decided to run for office at the local level, even though it was prohibited by customary law. She filed a lawsuit with the Mexican human rights commission when her community did not uphold the vote in her favor. 

This story garnered significant attention from the media, including  two documentary filmmakers, Ana Cruz Navarro and Luciana Kaplan, who each made their own film about Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza in 2012 and 2013 respectively.9 Both films inherit the history of documentary films about Indigenous people as well as the problems I have associated with human rights, the documentary mode, and capitalist realism.10 Cruz Navarro’s film focuses on the role of Indigenous women in the history of women’s suffrage in Mexico, and Kaplan’s focuses on the tensions between customary law and women’s rights. In both cases, the directors develop the story and center around a conflict that did not need to be a conflict. Yet, neither documentary can imagine a world outside of the bureaucracy, be it Mexico’s legal system or its electoral system. 

This failure is in part because the documentary is a capitalist realist genre. As Anna Kornbluh has stated with regards to Fisher’s work, drawing on the work of Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, realism is more mode than mood, and it is the aesthetic mode most intimate to capitalism.11 Documentaries and autofiction are the capitalist realist genres par excellence, as they subordinate the realistic to the personal. In this focus on the personal, they subsume alternative modes of being and knowing such that nothing is outside of the documentary. Documentaries, moreover, appeal to white viewers within and outside of Mexico because they make viewers feel like they have done their bit and do not have to do any more. Documentaries increase knowledge without changing material conditions of existence. 

The production and distribution networks of documentaries similarly connect the documentary to capitalist modes. Both films were supported by the most important funding and distribution agencies in Mexico. Cruz’s work was funded by several agencies related to the Mexican federal government, the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes[National Council of Arts and Culture] (CONACULTA), and its parent agency, the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía [Mexican Film Institute] (IMCINE); it was also funded by her alma mater, the Filmoteca de la UNAM, and, as Las Sufragistas deals with electoral politics, it secured funding from the Instituto Federal Electoral [Federal Electoral Institute] (IFE).12 Kaplan’s documentary  was also supported by Mexico’s most important federal grant programs: CONACULTA and IMCINE’s Fondo de Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad [Fund for Quality Film Production] (FOPROCINE) program,13 and by the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica [Center for Film Training] (CCC), a government-funded (although not university affiliated) film institute.14

The films undoubtedly sought to promote a vision of Mexico that would be understandable to their funders and to their audiences. When Cruz’s Las Sufragistas focuses on the right to vote and Kaplan’s La Revolución de los Alcatraces focuses on the fact that customary law prevented Eufrosina from voting and running for office, they present the idea that greater voting access would solve many issues facing Indigenous women in Mexico. This presentation also plays into ideas the directors and initial audiences in Mexico’s urban areas and people outside of Mexico would have about the types of oppression experienced by Indigenous women. This funding model and the directors’ position in the Mexican culture sphere occludes other possible stories that could be told about Cruz Mendoza and the challenges Indigenous women face in Mexico. The films also disseminate Mexican culture to render Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza’s story understandable to global audiences. Kaplan’s film, like many art-house films in Mexico, has circulated in multiple festivals.15 Cruz’s documentary is available on Kanopy, and thus could be disseminated to viewers across the United States thanks to university and public libraries.16 These films present a version of Indigenous subjectivity from the outside that is legible from those outside Mexico.

Fisher’s work is useful as we approach these documentaries. The documentaries both claim to retrieve the histories of Indigenous women and present their own limited perspectives as the sole authoritative perspectives. Like capitalism, the documentary’s narrators, producers, and directors disappear such that the mediation of the story is deliberately obfuscated. Cruz and Kaplan respond to their funders as they attempt to inspire solidarity between their middle and upper-class audiences and the subjects of their documentaries. Both films present  limited perspectives, confined within the framework of human rights, and do not consider collective possibility outside of it. They consider Indigenous rights in opposition to women’s rights because they are produced under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. They also focus on the individual for the same reasons, and they emphasize the importance of the written word. 

Kaplan’s film opens with credits rolling. After the credits, the screen fills with text about customary law and then states that Cruz Mendoza’s run for local office was annulled by local authorities because she was a woman. Cruz Navarro’s documentary, for its part, includes a similar opening sequence. After the opening credits, its black screen displays text that explains that Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza fought back after being denied the right to vote and run for office. The film then inserts newspaper clips throughout the film as proof that these events took place. 

In line with my earlier observations about autofiction, both documentaries also privilege the first-person individual account. Kaplan focuses on Eufrosina’s individual struggle–even though Cruz Mendoza’s whole reason for wanting to run for office was to improve the lives of women in her community. Cruz Navarro, for her part, puts Cruz Mendoza’s struggle into a century of women’s suffrage in Mexico, as if Indigenous women’s right to vote and run for office were the final frontier of women’s rights. Cruz Mendoza herself gives the opening voice-over narration that smoothly transitions viewers from overhead shots of rural Oaxaca to a screen that shows her in a talking head style that would be familiar to documentary viewers. 

We can start with ideas like Fisher’s but must then go further, and paying attention to most marginalized people and their concerns is how we can make that happen. I am not sure that the documentary could portray these communities as ones that could improve the material conditions of existence and exhibit gender equality in a way that makes sense in their cosmovision without abandoning their Indigenous heritage. There are other approaches to bringing these ways of being and knowing to people outside of Indigenous communities within philosophy, literature, and activism that could be brought to bear on the documentary genre. The communitarian strand of thought highlights collectivism as key to creating a good life as a community.17 Yásnaya Elena A. Gil goes further, stating that the answer to the question of equality lies in ongoing opposition to oppressive systems, which include nations and democracies, and in creating an alternative socio-economic system that allows for people to flourish.18 Literary critic Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez turns our attention to Mario Payeras’ El Mundo como Flor y Como Invento, and Osiris Aníbal Gómez Velázquez, to poetry from Ana Patricia Martínez Huichim, Hubert Matiúwàa, and Martín Tonalmeyotl, all of which present the possibility of worlds and futures beyond capitalist realism that the documentary mode need not resist .19

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Endnotes

  1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, 2nd ed., ( Zero Books, 2022), 8. 
  2. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.
  3. Rebecca Janzen, Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production, (Vanderbilt UP, 2021), 15-18.
  4. Luis Hernández Navarro, “The San Andrés Accords: Indians and the Soul,” Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine 23.1 (1999), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/san-andres-accords-indians-and-soul.
  5. Haidy Gaismar, Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property, (Duke University Press, 2013), 52. 
  6. R. Aída Hernández Castillo, “National Law and Indigenous Customary Law: The Struggle for Justice of Indigenous Women in Chiapas, Mexico,” In Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, ed. Shahra Razavi and Maxine Molyneux (Oxford University Press, 2002), 384-412. 
  7. Janzen, Unlawful Violence, 2-3, 6.
  8. Janzen, Unlawful Violence, 10-11.
  9. Ana Cruz Navarro, dir., Las sufragistas/The Suffragists, (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía), 2012; Luciana Kaplan, Luciana, dir. La revolución de los alcatraces/Eufrosina Revolution (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica; Fondo para la Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad; Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía), 2013.  
  10. Joanne Hershfield, “Paradise Regained: Sergei Eisenstein’s Que viva México! as Ethnography,” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013); Emily Hind, “Provincia in Recent Mexican Cinema, 1989-2004,” Discourse 26 (1-2): 26-45.
  11. Anna Kornbluh, “Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise,” Mediations 33.1-2 (2019-2020), 101, https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/climate-realism; Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism, (University of Iowa Press, 2014).
  12. “Ana Cruz Navarro,” Sensacine México, accessed 20 January 2025, https://www.sensacine.com.mx/actores/actor-757355/.
  13. “Luciana Kaplan,” Sensacine México, accessed 20 January 2025, https://www.sensacine.com.mx/actores/actor-667855/.
  14. Kaplan, Revolución de los alcatraces.
  15. It won awards at the Monterrey international film festival and the Vancouver Latin American film festival; “La revolución de los alcatraces: Awards,” IMDB, accessed 20 January 2025, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2676194/awards/?ref_=tt_awd.
  16. See for example the documentary at my local public library: Ana Cruz Navarro, The Suffragists, EPF Media, Inc., 2012, https://www.kanopy.com/en/richlandlibrary/video/258725, accessed January 20, 2025.
  17. María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, ( Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 65; A. Marco Marchioni, Comunidad y desarrollo, Nova Terra, 1969), 23; Juan José Rendón Monzón, La comunalidad. Modo de vida en los pueblos indios, vol. 1 (CONACULTA, 2003), 52; Guimar Rovira, Mujeres de maíz: la voz de las indígenas de Chiapas y la rebelión zapatista, (Luna, 1996), 202, 252.
  18. Yásnaya Elena [Aguilar] Gil. “Resistencia: Una breve biografía.” Revista de la Universidad de México 847: 20–27.
  19. Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez, “Forecasting Extinction at the Guatemalan Border Forests: El mundo como flor y como invento by Mario Payeras,” Symposium 77.4 (2023): 211-226; Osiris Aníbal Gómez Velázquez, “La juventud y ancestralidad de la literatura indígena. Tres claves comunalistas en torno a la transmisión y recreación literaria en Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, Hubert Matiúwàa y Martín Tonalmeyotl,” Confluencia 40.1 (2024): 108-123.

  • Rebecca Janzen

    Rebecca Janzen is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina - Columbia and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the German Mining Museum (2025-2027). She is a scholar of gender, disability and religious studies whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico. Her first book, The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), explored images of disability and illness in 20th century texts. Her second book, Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY, 2018), focused on religious minorities. Unholy Trinity: State, Church and Film in Mexico (SUNY, 2021) deals with film and religion in Mexico, and Unlawful Violence: Law and Cultural Production in 21st Century Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2022), is about human rights, law, and literature. The Collegeville Institute, the Hagley Library, the Plett Foundation, the Kreider Fellowship, the C Henry Smith Peace Trust, the Newberry library and the Marian library at the University of Dayton have supported her research.