Chapter 4 - Coda: “Phantasmal Space”

Summary

The Gulf of Mexico has nurtured diverse life forms in the region's estuaries and deltas, bayous and rivers. Gulf peoples have been at the forefront of cultural innovations while also enduring every plague known to humankind: extreme social stratification and environmental catastrophe, conquest and pandemics, the dehumanizing effects of plantation slavery, religious and capital predation, revolutions gone awry, gutted social systems and divisiveness. We have addressed a gothic realm and something older than gothic stirred up in horror or holy-dread where psychic gulfs meet the traumas of Gulf environments and history. Our notion of gothic gulfs encompasses a region across borders and beyond spatiotemporal disciplinary divisions—where submerged histories find enunciation on glyphed stone, in dance and song, novel and tale, on movie screen or YouTube posting for whoever seeks or evades a meeting point, actual or phantasmal as it may be. Our gulfs find us. And the undead realm where “rememory” engulfs us often takes gothic form.

“What's in the past is in the past,” the daughter of a genocidal ex-general tells herself at night in bed, in the family mansion as something spectral takes hold in Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante's La Llorona (2019). But folk familiar with Faulkner, Fuentes, or La Llorona know better. Something from an Indigenous Split Place older than Spanish conquest seeks justice in this twenty-first century horror film. La Llorona's legend continues inspiring film directors, novelists, poets, and playwrights because it addresses ongoing traumas and anxieties experienced by children-of-the-corn. The weeping woman in Mesoamerican culture has acquired respect and instilled fear at the same time. Awareness of her haunting presence appears stronger than respect for her daughters or their land.

In Bustamante's La Llorona, an aging, ailing General Monteverde is freed on charges of genocide from the country's 36-year civil war, and a young Maya woman (Alma) dressed in white moves through the crowd of protesters gathered outside his mansion, as she starts work as a maid in the household after the staff has quit. Viewers gradually see that Alma (Soul) and her children were killed by the General's men and that she has emerged from death's waters for a reckoning. Alma brings a frog into the house, and the film floods with aqueous energy: a bathroom overflows, a faucet continually runs, the backyard swimming pool fills with frogs.