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Arroz con leche: K óol uti'al k kuxtal
Arroz con leche: K óol uti’al k kuxtal (Rice pudding: Our desire for life) is an experimental documentary that I started filming in the 1990s, only a few years after Mexican development policy had taken a sharp neoliberal turn, accompanied by new gendered discourses exalting the entrepreneurial skills of rural women, in contrast to the alleged irresponsibility of rural men. Entrepreneurial projects for rural women had become the panacea for revitalizing rural development. Although my initial intention was to use audiovisual media to present a critical analysis of four such projects, instead this documentary became a means for exploring my own identity as a native of Mayan culture, one whose career as an anthropologist was being accompanied by constant pressures to distance myself from the knowledges that I had acquired in my own village. Years earlier, in the fall of 1989, I had lived in the homes of four of these entrepreneurial women while conducting field research, but the idea of making a documentary had only begun to take shape as a result of renewed contact with them during my field research of the mid-1990s. Source: Duarte, Ana Rosa. "Arroz con leche: Audiovisual Poetry and the Politics of Everyday Life." Adjusting the Lens: Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico, edited by Freya Schiwy and Byrt Wammak Weber, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017, pp. 71-89.