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Adaptation and the Edge Effects of Latin American Cultures

  • 2025
  • Book
Editors
Elisabeth L. Austin
Elena Lahr-Vivaz
Book Series
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
Part of
Springer Professional "Business + Economics & Engineering + Technology"
Springer Professional "Business + Economics"
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About this book

This book delves into the vibrant and dynamic cultural landscape of Latin America, exploring the creative frictions that arise from the coexistence among, and tensions between, diverse cultures. Inviting readers to think through critical questions about cultural and textual adaptation, this book examines how stories, texts, genres, and cultural practices develop into configurations that are both distinct and intimately connected to their progenitors. The metaphor of the “edge effect,” borrowed from ecology, serves as a lens to understand these productive tensions. This book addresses a wide range of topics, including cultural change in the Americas, intertextual relationships, and adaptive histories. Ideal for scholars in Latin American studies, film studies, and adaptation studies, this book offers a novel analytical framework that enriches current academic practices and theories of hybridity, contact zones, and rhizomatic connections. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the complex interrelations between Latin American cultures and their textual and artistic expressions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Introduction: Edge Effects

Frontmatter
Welcome to the Edge
Abstract
Situating the reader and this volume within adaptation studies, this preface reflects on the collection’s theme of the “edge effect” and its contribution to currents of thought within the field.
Thomas Leitch
Introduction: Latin American Adaptations on the Edge
Abstract
This introduction presents the metaphor of the “edge effect,” a term borrowed from ecology studies, to theorize the way in which Latin American adaptations bring varied histories, cultures, and styles into creative interaction with one another. In both ecological and cultural contexts, edge spaces (ecotones) become sites of potentially high fecundity when two ecosystems overlap; consequently, the rich cultures and histories of Latin America (including the Caribbean and the U.S. borderlands) harbor traditions, knowledges, and practices that interact, hybridize, and adapt one another ad infinitum. Rather than analyze cultural artifacts in isolation, our edge effect approach advocates an awareness of the embedded frictions and conflicting histories of adaptations, as seen in contributors’ chapters in the volume.
Elisabeth L. Austin, Elena Lahr-Vivaz

Historical Transmediality and Archival Adaptations

Frontmatter
Adapting and Questioning History and the Historical Archive in La venganza de las cautivas [The Revenge of the Captives]
Abstract
In 1598, Mapuche warriors began destroying Spanish settlements in present-day Chile founded by conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. When Villa Rica, one of the last strongholds, fell in 1602, only twenty-four of its five hundred inhabitants survived—thirteen of them women. By 1610, some captives had been freed, and the surviving men testified in legal proceedings against former Governor Alonso de Rivera. One charge concerned his exoneration of Captain Francisco Hernández de Ortiz, who failed to rescue Villa Rica despite being provided with troops and resources. Nevertheless, the all-male testimonies were not enough to convict him. In response to this failed justice and the limitations of official historical narratives, Chilean writer Carmen Gloria López, in La venganza de las cautivas (2018) [The Revenge of the Captives], reimagines archival records to foreground the voices of women erased from historical narratives. This chapter argues that La venganza functions as a multi-layered adaptation, exposing how legal and historical texts are themselves constructed narratives. By adapting the history of a trial, López not only recovers marginalized perspectives but also reshapes the production of historical knowledge, offering a more inclusive view of the past and expanding the critical possibilities of adaptation studies in Latin American literature.
Catalina Andrango-Walker
From Naturalist and Inventor to Puppet, Christological Figure, and Popular Hero: Reconfiguring Santiago de Cárdenas’s Memory Through Adaptations
Abstract
This chapter explores the evolving memory of Santiago de Cárdenas, a self-educated eighteenth-century Peruvian naturalist whose life and work were marginalized during his time but have since been reimagined through transmedial adaptations. Cárdenas, who wrote a scientific treatise and self-narrative, is best known for his project to build a flying machine. A pioneer in aeronautics, his contributions were overshadowed by colonial authorities, social skepticism, and popular ridicule. By analyzing Ricardo Palma’s “Santiago the Flyer” (1875), Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s The Life and Passion of Santiago the Birdman (1960), Juan Ortiz’s aerial performance (2009), and the TV series La Perricholi, 2011 (Directed by Michel Gomez. América TV. Vix Premium.), this chapter examines how Cárdenas’s narrative has been shaped to engage with the cultural and historical contexts in which these adaptations were created. Drawing on the transposition of the “edge effect” from ecological studies to adaptation theory, this chapter interprets these works as spaces where tensions between diverse cultural influences and power structures generate literary and artistic innovation. This chapter demonstrates how these adaptations not only preserve and redefine Cárdenas’s memory but also challenge entrenched historical narratives, offering new possibilities for a more dynamic understanding of the past. Ultimately, this study affirms the transformative potential of adaptations as sites of cultural negotiation and memory-making.
Martina Thorne
Return of the Hero: Adapting Insurrectionist Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s Lost History
Abstract
This chapter details the narratives of the folk hero and seditionist Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who revolted against the American presence in deep South Texas shortly before the U.S. Civil War. The story has been adapted into a popular blog, El Rrun Rrun, that has countered the many negative and devaluing representations of Cortina as a Tejano from the Rio Grande Valley. It seeks to recontextualize his position (and that of his people) in South Texas society into what the blog’s author sees as a badly needed hero for a population that has been oppressed and debased since the United States occupied the region in 1846. The reconfiguration of Cortina’s history into the El Rrun Rrun blog is a form of adaptation that has not been previously considered. Yet, it is remarkably salient in that it brings together disparate narratives that are a meaningful part of South Texas history. Their wide-ranging circulation through the internet portends significant influence on the history and identity of the region and its people.
Marie Theresa Hernández
“Comprimidas Memorias” [Compressed Memories]: Adaptations of the Modernista Movement Through Autobiography
Abstract
The story of Spanish American Modernismo, the first transnational and cohesive literary movement of the Americas, is told through the well-known poetics of the movement, the expansive archive of the journalistic crónica, and the wide network of relationships exhibited in Modernista correspondence. This chapter argues that the genre of autobiography is a Modernista collective adaptation that defined and historicized the movement through innovative and creative means. Modernista autobiography embodies the intersection of poetics, journalistic prose, current events, and cross-cultural intertextuality allowing for popular, widespread prestige from high- and low-brow audiences alike. Writers, representing their cosmopolitan experiences through narrative retellings as well as adaptations of their literary influences through form and stylistic measures, created a new Latin American movement that had a revolutionary impact on literature and culture in the region. These narrative and formalistic influences also created a new intellectual aristocracy by shaping readers and consumers who desired to model their modern experience through a particular collective aesthetic refashioning. Through an analysis of autobiographical texts by Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, Colombian José María Vargas Vila, and Peruvian author Aurora Cáceres, the Modernista autobiography will be read as instrumental in shaping the collective adaptation of and re-mediation of the literary movement itself.
Andrew Reynolds
Cosmopolitics and the Edges of Adaptation in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron [The Adventures of China Iron]
Abstract
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s 2017 Las aventuras de la China Iron [The Adventures of China Iron] adapts José Hernández’s epic poem (published in 1872 and 1879) into a tale of empowerment and a journey to freedom for China, the young wife that Hernández’s gaucho Martín Fierro leaves behind. The novel’s playful adaptation both reanimates and critiques Martín Fierro as part of Argentina’s imperialistic and patriarchal cultural foundation. When China and her lover find happiness with an Indigenous community at the end of this novel, they model an alternative space for life coexisting with/in the natural world, living what might be described as ecosophy (Guattari 2008; Næss 2005) or cosmopolítica [cosmopolitics], as Cabezón Cámara terms it. Drawing from ecological philosophy, queer ecologies, and adaptation and decolonial theories, this chapter proposes that China Iron’s adaptation of a cultural touchstone not only deconstructs the categorical edges that constrain subjects within the Argentine nation (i.e., sex/gender/race/citizenship) but also illustrates the splendor of life with/in the ecotones of cultures and texts.
Elisabeth L. Austin

Adaptive Textuality and Edge Ecologies

Spiraling Adaptations: The Contact Zones of French Cuba
Abstract
This chapter describes the contact zones of revolution between France and Cuba in the early 1960s through an analysis of Chris Marker’s Cuba Sí! (1961) and Agnes Varda’s Salut les Cubains (1963). We suggest that each filmmaker depicts revolution as an event and as an idea. We investigate the formal and political “edges” that emerge in these films, and in the historical and social influences of the French and Cuban contexts, through the figure of the spiral. The movement of the spiral informs our concluding reflection on the contact zone of (intergenerational) co-authorship and the logics of influence that destabilize the (historically) contained event, opening instead to the flows, returns, and rhythms of revolution.
Anna Corrigan, Timothy Corrigan
Aerial Adaptations and Archipelagic Identities in “The Flying Bus”
Abstract
This chapter considers Luis Rafael Sánchez’s 1983 essay “La guagua aérea” [“The Flying Bus”] alongside Luis Molina Casanova’s 1993 filmic adaptation of the same title and suggests that, in an era marked by ever-increasing global migration, “La guagua aérea” continues to signal the possibilities of aerial adaptations and archipelagic identities some four decades after its original publication. Remapping the space of the isla, or island, to point to the possibilities of the archipelago, Sánchez’s rendition of New York as a Puerto Rican location in “La guagua aérea” transgressively reframes the space of the (nominally tiny) island to incorporate that of its (putatively powerful) continental neighbor. Offering a series of flashbacks that cut between past and present to shed light on passengers’ backstories, Molina Casanova’s film encourages spectators to “mind the gaps,” as Thomas Leitch puts it, and highlights the ways in which adaptations and archipelagos alike reframe our ideas about (trans)national identities. In the aerial, archipelagic space of la guagua aérea, intersectional identities can be more fully seen and celebrated, and the gaps between islands and continents (as well as between essays and adaptations) can contribute to a richer understanding of edges and their effects on and within Latin American cultures.
Elena Lahr-Vivaz
Re/Made in Mexico: The Performance and Politics of Adaptation in the Theatre of Sabina Berman
Abstract
Sabina Berman is one of Mexico’s most ubiquitous and influential public figures. Widely regarded as the most talented and successful playwright in Mexico, she is known not only for her uncanny ability to combine humor and biting socio-political critique, but also for her habit of adapting or borrowing from the dramatic, narrative, poetic, and historical works of others. Taking into account the theories of Darwin (1859) along with those proposed by adaptation studies scholars such as Linda Hutcheon (2006), Julie Sanders (2006), Thomas Leitch (2023), and Julie Grossman (2015), this study focuses on Berman’s adaptation of three non-domestic dramatic texts—Der Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler (1900), Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones (2001), and Puppetry of the Penis by Simon Morley (2010)—as well as adaptations of her own texts. Repeated adaptations of El gordo, la pájara y el narco [The Fat Man, the Chick, and the Narco] and El narco negocia con Dios [The Narco Does Business with God], for example, reflect her understanding that theatrical works, much like living organisms, need to adapt to cultural and political changes and to their host—the audience—if they are to survive the passing of time.
Jacqueline E. Bixler
Adapting Cinema to the Uncertainties of Global Subjectivity: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Butterfly Effects and the Aesthetics of Entanglement
Abstract
This chapter examines Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) as adaptations of one another and of Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory concept of the butterfly effect, marshalling adaptation theory (Leitch, Grossman, Hutchinson, Austin and Lahr-Vivaz) and aesthetic theory (Böhme, Bersani) to argue that the failed pursuits of causality the films elicit become important aesthetic modes of resistance to the construction and policing of local and global borders. This is particularly the case, the chapter argues, as the Death Trilogy films entangle the spectator in their complex plot structures and their echoes of one another, disallowing the spectator to “solve” or complete them and thus forcing an aesthetic experience that collapses the border between audience and work as an extension of the porous borders between first and third world, white and brown, characters the films posit.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Backmatter
Title
Adaptation and the Edge Effects of Latin American Cultures
Editors
Elisabeth L. Austin
Elena Lahr-Vivaz
Copyright Year
2025
Electronic ISBN
978-3-032-01577-8
Print ISBN
978-3-032-01576-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01577-8

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