Poetics of the desert: Sensory experimentalism, cristero memory and the politics of faith in Desierto adentro

Abstract

This article examines how Desierto adentro (Plá, 2008) reframes the memory of the Cristero War through a sensory poetics that brings together landscape, body, sound, ex-voto painting and architectural incompletion. Combining phenomenological film analysis, comparative formal reading and a delimited examination of critical and institutional reception, the article argues that Plá’s film displaces the Cristero conflict from an epic and martyrological register toward an experience of guilt, enclosure and family discipline. The analysis focuses on specific sequences: Elías’s primal scene of guilt, the family’s displacement into the desert, Aureliano’s confinement, the production of ex-votos, the construction of the church and the film’s sonic regime of isolation. In contrast with Cristiada (Wright, 2012), Desierto adentro does not monumentalize the Cristero War as heroic narrative, but reinscribes it as domestic trauma and persistent affective structure. The article concludes that Plá’s formal experimentalism is not an aesthetic supplement, but the critical device through which the film thinks the endurance of patriarchal, religious and authoritarian forms in contemporary Mexico.