El documental etnográfico ha sido una de las maneras de registrar y mostrar las diversas danzas afromexicanas de la Costa Chica, el artículo argumenta que este género audiovisual también puede ser utilizado como forma de investigar la memoria danzaria. El texto realiza un primer análisis sobre los documentales producidos sobre las danzas de esta región y presenta parte del proceso de realización del largometraje documental El Quizá, donde la memoria danza, dirigido por la autora, cuyo interés primordial es contribuir a las memorias colectivas de un pueblo.

Las fotografías de la ciudad de Mérida, Yucatán, tomadas en 1913 por Wilhem Schirp, un fotógrafo alemán amateur, son el eje de análisis para reflexionar sobre la representación de esta ciudad, en particular durante el carnaval, por ser un acontecimiento de memoria. Se muestra que el ciclo festivo era utilizado por las élites para ostentar su riqueza en pleno auge henequenero si bien se apelaba a lo "popular" y lo "tradicional". En este contexto, la lente del fotógrafo captó los contrastes y desigualdades sociales en una fiesta que se suponía de inversión.

Cinematic realism is fed by reality to reflect on it. It is distinguished from traditional documentaries because it does not claim to be objective. Werner Herzog has made more than 50 realism films, and among them are found a series of portraits of extraordinary characters. This text examines two of these: Meeting Gorbachev and Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin. Both films seek to tell a biographical story that has implications for the present. This study sets out to reflect on the ways of remembering, on the interview, and on performance in cinematic realism. The study is divided into parts of rhetoric –arguments, arrangement, and figures of speech– to see how these stories are shaped by the German filmmaker.

This article focuses on aesthetic details related to the architecture of the lum, which in my attempt to capture in photographs as a part of my ethnographic work, lead me to an analysis of what I call “apparently meaningless images”. These images have a “haunting” effect, in the sense given by Avery Gordon, by which they do not try to document tangible existence but recognize what could exist. Thus, Roland Barthe’s “obtuse meaning” becomes relevant and crucial in my analysis of the images of the lum. These “apparently meaningless” images respond, on the one hand, to an aesthetic of voidness that seems more in line with the ghostly presence of the disappeared and with the denialism of the “dirty war” during the internal armed conflict in Peru. On the other hand, other “apparently meaningless” images emerge from hypervisibility, sometimes contrasting and as contrapunctums between the concrete and crystal materials predominant in the architecture of the lum, and that produce affective and political resonances that allude to racial and social tensions and exclusions that continue to prevail in the Peruvian society.