Sampling and Remixing in Recent Latin American Narrative

Juan de los muertos (2011), Cuba's self-proclaimed first horror film, gained international acclaim when it won Spain's Goya award for best Spanish-language foreign film on Feb 17, 2013. The film is an able zombie movie improved by its Cuban context, with survivors wrestling with new reasons to go to Miami as they weigh the abandonment of their country that the trip has always signified. On the less serious side, the film plays with the representation of Cuban media, with official television reports referring to the zombies as political dissidents trained by the CIA as part of a US imperialist plot. What director Alejandro Brugues is doing in this film, among other things, is participating in a creative process that recently has become pronounced in both global and Latin American cultural production--he is creating a kind of mashup of global pop culture on the one hand and Latin American lived reality on the other.