Power and Resistance: Visuality and Countervisuality in Mexican Documentary Cinema

Abstract

This article examines the discursive and ideological construction of poverty in Mexican documentary cinema through Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concepts of visuality and countervisuality (2011, 2016, 2023). Methodologically, it adopts a historiographical and qualitative approach to audiovisual discourse analysis, relating documentary practices to Mexico’s socioeconomic transformations. The study is structured around two levels of historiographical inquiry. The first consists of an inventory identifying discourses on poverty across the presidential administrations between 1970 and 1994. The second focuses on case studies of films produced during this period within universities and through independent contexts, including the CUEC, the CCC, and filmmaking collectives. This analysis identifies discursive models that reproduce hegemonic visuality, as well as countervisual practices that challenge dominant narratives. The article argues that documentary cinema constitutes a site of symbolic struggle in which the discourses of political power come into tension with critical ways of seeing. It concludes that documentary cinema not only represents poverty but also actively participates in its construction as a social phenomenon, demonstrating its critical role in the production of knowledge and in struggles over who has the authority to look and make social reality visible.