This fascinating and compelling film tells the tale of the ruins, material and affective, left by monoculture capitalism in the village of Sincerín, in the hinterlands of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region. It narrates the story through the memories of the presence and depredations of a cane plantation and associated sugar mill seared into the minds of the elders of the town. The ruins and memories are filtered through the historiographical and artistic practice of a local painter, César Villa. He was not born until twenty years after the mill was closed. Nevertheless, he has taken it upon himself to research and represent in his paintings the town’s history, which was dominated from 1909 to 1953 by Colombia’s largest sugarcane mill, Ingenio Central Colombia, owned by Colombian entrepreneurs but run with the technical and managerial expertise of white Cubans, overseeing local black laborers.

Together, Villa and Bustos showed Villa’s paintings to half a dozen elders, eliciting memories of violence, surveillance, control, and the operation of hegemonic power through elite appropriation of religious symbols. In an intriguing excursion into left-of-field creativity, they also took the paintings to particular locations that resonated with the town’s sugarcane history, placed them on the ground, and waited to see what happened. In one instance, a painting of a local port, through which the sugar had traveled, was placed on the ground near the ruins of the port, now unrecognizable and taken over by animal and plant life; ants invaded the painting…In another instance, a painting depicting people playing baseball was taken to a local game, prompting a nearby elder to recount how the white Cubans who had introduced the sport had excluded local black people from participating.

Throughout, in a local Caribbean Colombian accent that has much in common with Cuban Spanish, Villa’s soft, high-pitched voice tells stories of the Ingenio, distilled from interviews with elders. We only glimpse the elders themselves in indirect shots—from the back, from the side, in a broken mirror. There are no talking heads here; the elders, like their memories, are traces filtered through the present. But they remain a powerful and haunting presence.

Hauntings reverberate through the film. Ann Stoler has written about the way the ruins and remains of empire recur over time—in dislocations, reinscriptions, and recuperations that bring the past into the present (Stoler 2016, 27). She says: “Haunting occupies the space between what we cannot see and what we know. It wrestles with elusive, nontransparent power and, not least, with attunement to the unexpected sites and lineaments that such knowledge requires” (Stoler 2006, xiii).

In Bustos’ film, power does not come across as particularly elusive. Even if its traces are now palimpsestual and fragmentary, its presence was marked with unmistakable violence. We hear of holes being filled with dead bodies, of people being exiled from their land for trivial infringements of rules in regimes of strict surveillance, of being excluded from baseball games. If the “structures of feeling and force” described by Stoler’s co-authors in their writings on U.S. empire “invoke the blur between care and coercion, respect and neglect, and in the muffled silence between consent and rape” (Stoler 2006, xiii), we do not hear of any care, respect or consent in the system of control and exploitation exercised by the Ingenio owners and their white managers. If there were such elements in the local structures of hegemony, they have been lost in the memories of the elders—at least as they are portrayed in this film.

Instead what comes across is the everyday mundane practices of resilience and aguante (holding on, tenacity) that Fals Borda describes in his four-volume “double” history of Colombia’s Caribbean region, especially in volume 3 (Fals Borda 1984), where he recounts myths about the hombre-hicotea, the man-turtle, who can hold on through extremes of environmental and climatic variation. Fals Borda’s history was “double” in two senses: first, the text itself was written in two parallel streams on facing pages, one an academic historiographical analysis, the other an account of carrying out the research in person, with a team of people travelling through these often remote regions, encountering diverse interlocutors with their stories and rummaging through archivos de baúl (archives stored in trunks or chests in people’s houses). Second, this textual division reflected the epistemological bridge created by Fals Borda and his team between academic and everyday knowledge, both seen as equally valuable, in consonance with Fals Borda’s pioneering and socially engaged investigación acción participativa (participatory action research).

This bridging between different registers of historical knowledge also recalls Johannes Fabian’s collaborative work with the Zairean painter-historian, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. Fabian says: “When ‘historical facts’ and ‘history as told’ contradict each other, the easy solution is to relativize the contradiction as a coexistence of different discourses. The question of truth is then bracketed, although the one who does the bracketing keeps his certainties up his sleeve.” But, he continues, “a relativist escape is not necessary when we grant to Tshibumba’s History the same status we must grant to academic historiography: that of a dialectical process, itself historical and hence contingent” (Fabian 1996, 316).

For me, Bustos’ film resonates strongly with Fals Borda’s participative and double-history approach, and with Fabian’s rejection of relativism. For example, we hear how the worker Diogenes Blanco was exiled for breaking the rules and took refuge in a nearby village, where he was brought food and clothes by women from Sincerín, because the company coin with which workers were paid in the refinery was not recognised outside. And we also hear how “the drums, the cumbia and the bullerengue” (local musical styles) provided him with food, drink, and a good night’s sleep. The power of local black practices of exchange and celebration to sustain life and livelihood is channeled through sustenance for the body and the soul. What a viewer might perceive in the story as a shift from history as fact (food and clothing brought by women) to history as myth (food and drink provided by drums and music) is narrated within a single ontological register. The same applies to the way the white Cubans and the mill owners are referred to as saints and gods in Villa’s re-telling of the elders’ memories: this comes across as more than just a way of talking about secular power. It is indicative of a local ontology in which the boundaries between the “supernatural,” the “natural,” and the “human” are blurred—but in ways that are also subject to appropriation by exploitative powers that benefit from the sacralization of the dominant actors.

Throughout, race and racism are not overtly named as such—as is often the case in Latin American racial formations. Nevertheless, racialized oppression is a pervasive presence, referred to in an alternative register (Wade and Moreno Figueroa 2022), evident through Villa’s consistent mention of los blancos (the whites) and the occasional reference to, for example, las negritas del batey (the black women of the refinery, who took food on the sly to the exiled Diogenes) and, in a painting by Villa, Las Vendedoras Negras en el Batey (black market women in the refinery). The mercurial, destructive force of racism is both implicit and irruptive—the occasional casting of los blancos as los dioses (the gods) is unsettling, to say the least.

For me, Bustos’ film awoke my own memories of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region and my travels through its hinterlands, some dry and dusty, others riverine and marshy, all hot and tropically humid. The sight of dilapidated old houses and odd-looking remnants of infrastructure, around which placid cattle graze and in which busy ants build their nests, is not unfamiliar. Working imaginatively and skillfully with Villa’s knowledge and art, Bustos’ film draws out the veiled history surrounding such ruins, evoking their emotional power, while also giving us a clear-sighted view of the rootedness of affective intensities in the structures of a monocultural capitalism that leaves ruins in its wake, but does not vanquish the spirit of the people who dwell with these remnants.