Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for jungle movies like this. Films where the jungle slowly ebbs away at the ego of each character until it merges with the forest and they disappear. Embrace of the Serpent, Apocalypse Now, and The Mercy of the Jungle are three great examples of this. In each of these films, the jungle is expansive and labyrinthine. As every part of it looks the same, it’s easy to see how you can begin to lose track of place and time – did I pass this tree 15 minutes ago, this rock looks familiar, etc. And once you’ve lost your place in time, the jungle starts to consume you, slowly dissolving your ego away.
Tragic Jungle stands out from the bunch in bringing the jungle to life. It uses the sounds of the Howler Monkey and Jaguar to turn it into a threatening physical entity. Their constant roars and grumbles occupying the sonic space are unnerving. The unease is further emphasized by the videos of the two animals mixed in with the main narrative. It makes it feel like the animals are just around the corner, waiting for the inevitable demise of the human protagonists. This is their home, and the Director, Yulene Olaizola, makes that clear.
The only character that seems comfortable in the jungle is the anonymous runaway, a young black Belizean woman chased across the River Hondo into Mexico by her hunters. It’s not clear if she’s escaped the gun of her hunter or not. But once she appears to a group of Mexican rubber harvesters out of the forest, she assumes her role as the Ixtabay woman, a legendary Mayan demon that appears from the forest to lure men to their deaths with her beauty. From this point, she’s completely silent among her new captors. However, her stoical face and slight smile to all the men that approach her, make it appear that she’s always in control.
Her character is exoticized by the Mexican rubber harvesters because of her race. Unlike them, who are a mix of Mexican mestizo and Mexican indigenous heritages, she is a black creole Belizean woman. She’s as unfamiliar to them as the jungle they’re working in, so it’s not surprising that they link her appearance to the supernatural.
Her exoticization also reflects the erasure of Afro-Mexicans from contemporary and historical Mexico. In using a Black creole woman from Belize as the Ixtabay woman, Tragic Jungle further ‘others’ the Black creole women of Mexico. It portrays Blackness as something exotic and unfamiliar to the Mexican characters of both indigenous and mixed Spanish and indigenous backgrounds, which enforces the foreignness of Blackness in Mexico despite it’s own Afro-Mexican community and links to African slavery. Because the Black characters are not Mexican, because they are exoticized and made to feel foreign, and because of the context of historical and present erasure of Afro-Mexicans in Mexico that is slowly gaining recognition, Tragic Jungle contributes to the systematic erasure of Blackness in Mexico.
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