Camino Aztlan's List of 10 Great Movies and Shows from Latin America and Beyond
Pajaros de Verano (Birds of Passage). The movie is an epic story of the rise and fall of the Wayuu people of the Guajira region of northeast Colombia and bordering northwest Venezuela. Teenaged Zaida (played by Colombian star Natalia Reyes) has just completed a rite of passage to become a woman when Rapayet asks her mother Ursula for her hand in marriage. Skeptical of Rapayet’s low family reputation, Ursula demands a high dowry. Rapayet makes a living from trading bootleg products across the Guajira with his friend Moises, the latter a non-indigenous Colombian who is distrusted by the Wayuu. When Rapayet is trying to figure out how to raise the dowry, he and Moises overhear American Peace Corps volunteers asking a bartender for a weed hookup. With the help of a distant Wayuu relative Anibal, Rapayet begins supplying large quantities of marijuana to Americans for export to the United States. Rapayet’s marriage to Zaida is only the beginning of a true-story rollercoaster ride for the Wayuu, who are rapidly drawn into the growing Colombian drug trade of the 1960’s and 70’s. Their financial success from selling marijuana strains their traditions, causes tribal conflict, and changes their society forever.
Released: 2018
Director: Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra
Available on HBO through Amazon Prime streaming here.
Museo. Also based on a true story, Museo is set in 1985 Mexico City and follows the infamous heist of the National Museum of Anthropology in which two men stole over 140 ancient artifacts. The heist was so bold and substantial that Mexican authorities believed it to be the work of a sophisticated international criminal organization. Instead, it was carried out by two young students, the mastermind played by Gael Bernal. The movie recreates the heist and the several months that followed when the perpetrators struggle to find a place for the priceless artifacts. Aside from the remarkable history, the movie provides rich insights about cultural appropriation that are as relevant today as ever.
Released: 2018
Director: Alfonso Ruizpalacios.
Available as a Youtube Original here.
Este No Es Berlin (This is Not Berlin). Set in Mexico City around the same time as Museo, Este No Es Berlin is a wild coming-of-age story of a teenage boy who discovers an exclusive underground nightclub called La Azteca that his edgy musician sister plays at. After Carlos meets seductive Nico and his eccentric artist friends, he embarks on a journey of drugs, sexual liberation, and self discovery, all set within the context of significant political unrest and the AIDS epidemic.
Released: 2019
Director: Hari Sama
Available on Amazon Prime here.
Retablo. This movie is spoken entirely in Quechua and focuses on a father and his apprentice son who build retablos, portable wooden boxes with carved painted figures depicting religious and other cultural events. Just when the young apprentice is learning the ropes and approaching the peak of respect for his father, he learns a secret that will uproot their whole family.
Released: 2017
Director: Alvaro Delgado Aparicio
Available for DVD purchase here. We could not locate a digital link for this film, but I promise you that buying the DVD is well worth it. The ending brought the first tear to my eye in years.
Wiñaypacha (Eternity). Another great indigenous production from Peru, this movie is the first feature film that is wholly in the Aymara language. After seeing how this elderly couple struggles to survive in the harsh mountains of Peru without any outside support, I tried to stop complaining about trivial inconveniences like Houston traffic. This fantastic and tragic movie won Best Picture at the 2019 Houston Latino Film Festival.
Released: 2017
Director: Oscar Catacora.
Available on Amazon Prime here.
Dos Veces Tu. This erotic psychological thriller kicks off after two cousins exchange their husbands at a wedding as a prank. After a night of drinking, they race home, each car holding one of the mismatched couples. One car crashes, killing the mismatched couple within. Things take a strange turn for the other mismatched couple as they cope with the loss of their spouses. The movie also centers on the wealthy Polanco district’s Jewish community, an influential group in Mexico City that is relatively unknown outside the city.
"A visually striking, emotionally brutal exploration that doesn't look or feel like anything else in 2019 cinemas." -Glenn Kenny (film critic, RogerEbert.com).
Released: 2020
Director: Salomon Askenazi
Available on Youtube here.
Genetefied. This show is a rich picture of the gentrification and cultural changes currently experienced by the historically Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood in East Los Angeles. A family struggles to keep their taqueria afloat as rents skyrocket in the neighborhood. The family’s patriarch “Pop,” is an old-school undocumented Mexican who is reluctantly willing to do whatever it takes to save the business, including following suggestions by his grandson Chris who wants to “modernize” the restaurant to make it more palatable to gringo hipsters. The show highlights the complexity of today’s Latinx demographic that is often over-generalized in the media. We see this type of generational conflict when young lesbian artist Ana paints a large mural of two lucha libre men kissing on the wall of a mom-and-pop store, triggering praise from younger allies but scorn from traditional Latinos in the community.
Released: Season 1 aired in 2020.
Created by: Marvin Bryan Lemus
Available on Netflix.
Vida. With subject matter that significantly overlaps with Gentefied, Vida follows the story of two sisters who come back to their childhood neighborhood Boyle Heights when their mother Vida dies. Lyn, played by Melissa Barrera (also the lead in Dos Veces Tu) is a carefree girl living off credit cards and rich boyfriends in San Francisco. Her sister Emma (played by Mishel Prada) is a cold-hearted business woman living in Chicago who thought she had put her West Coast childhood behind her. After their mother’s funeral, the sisters not only discover significant financial problems with their mother’s bar but also find out about their mother’s wife Eddy (who is also named in their mother’s will). These issues keep them in Los Angeles for way longer than they expected as they figure out what to do with Vida’s Bar.
Released: Season 2 aired in 2019.
Created by: Tanya Saracho
Available on Starz through Amazon Prime here.
1994. If you were intrigued by the jaw-dropping political history showed in the most recent season of Narcos Mexico, you will love this miniseries that delves into Mexico’s turbulent history in and around 1994, commencing with the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas on January 1, 1994. After the widespread voter fraud and public distrust generated by the prior 1988 election, Luis Donaldo Colosio was thought to be a new hope for Mexico. He vowed to lead the country away from 70 years of one-party rule and towards a more transparent society. The county’s hopes for Colosio were deflated when he was assassinated, followed by controversial investigations and other chaotic events like the Peso Crisis.
Released: 2019.
Directed by: Director Enrique Osorno
Available on Netflix.
La Balada de Hugo Sanchez (The Ballad of Hugo Sanchez). This miniseries is a spinoff of Club de Cuervos, a 4-season comedy about a brother and sister who fight for power over a Mexican soccer team when their father, the owner, passes away. Hugo Sanchez is the hapless and unrespected executive assistant of co-owner Enrique Iglesias. When Enrique has a scheduling conflict, he sends Hugo to chaperone a regional soccer tournament in Nicaragua. Hugo struggles to manage the players who don’t take the tournament serious and just want to party. On top of this impossible task, he also creates a web of lies to his mother who would rather him go to Tamaulipas to run the family’s coffin business (which is booming because of all the cartel deaths). If you need something easy and lighthearted after you dry your tears from Wiñaypacha, this one is definitely worth the laughs and Tamaulipas stereotypes.
Released: 2018.
Directed by: Mark Alazraki; Alvaro Curiel.
Available on Netlifx.