Indigenising Colombia’s Marijuana Boom: Race and Settler Colonialism in Pájaros de verano

Abstract

Colombian directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s award-winning film Pájaros de verano (2018) has garnered praise for its genre-bending fictional account of Colombia’s 1970s marijuana boom but has not yet been the subject of scholarly analysis. The film’s production methods and ethnographic depictions of the Colombian Wayuu people give an appearance of social commitment to its Indigenous subjects. However, I argue that narratively, it reinforces a false account of the marijuana boom that absolves the mestizo Colombian state of its role in the displacement and marginalisation of the Wayuu people within the context of the Colombia’s drug war. This article critically analyses Pájaros de verano’s racialised representation of drug trafficking and its seemingly contradictory referentiality to both New Latin American Cinema and Hollywood Westerns, demonstrating the film’s ideological investment in upholding dominant narratives about Colombian drug trafficking and the displacement of Indigenous communities.