From Michoácan to NYC: A Review of ‘Son of Monarchs’ and the Production of Place in Film
Son of Monarchs’ opening scene introduces a pensive Mendel (Tenoch Huerta) being guided by the voice of his grandmother as he tediously examines a chrysalis under a microscope. Her words? That monarcas represent his ancestors and are miraculous and sacred creatures, a message reverbated to him in a momentary childhood flashback. The dimly-lit, sterile laboratory constitutes Mendel’s solitary life as biologist at NYU studying the monarchs’ genetic sequencing whereas the warm narration of his grandmother pulls him back to the familial life he left behind in Angangueo, Michoácan. The film’s goal is quickly captured through the stark contrast in imagery and sound: it will aim to resolve Mendel’s irreconcilable identity as a Mexican immigrant living in New York City through an ecological meta-narrative of the monarch butterfly.
Written and directed by film director and biologist Alexis Gambis, Son of Monarchs is an innovative and experimental take on both the predominant narrative of Mexican migration and the long-standing symbolism of the monarch butterfly in migration rights discourse. Rather than presenting a conventional story about “hardship and a unidirectional arriving to the U.S.” Gambis aims to reorient our understanding of mobility, place, and most importantly, hybridity, through the film’s aesthetics. As a scientist himself, Gambis is also invested in redefining what a “science film” looks like and hopes to “traverse dreamlike aesthetics through empirical gateways”. Through haunting glimpses of daunting bodies of water and cries for help, we learn of the loss of Mendel’s parents in a tragic mining accident in childhood. New York City becomes Mendel’s metropolitan refuge from his devastating past, a place where he is too busy and too far to remember. However, the unexpected passing of his grandmother demands that he finally go home to Angangueo, forcing him to unearth the trauma that he has buried for years. The film, then, becomes about his returning and reconciling the two worlds that define him.
The film is an unapologetic project of subversion, whether that be subverting established narratives on migration, representations about Mexico, or science films, but what gets lost along the way? Reviewers of the film have touched on the film’s dedication to a storytelling enmeshed in science and magical realism as well as its mesmerizing “visual landscape shrouded in unnerving color,” but there is not enough said about how the film decides to produce place. In her monumental work Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, Mary Pat Brady attends to the way narrative invokes affect and environment, arguing that narrative “uses space and spatial processes metaphorically to suggest emotions, insights, concepts, characters” (8). She also adds that narrative shapes the way spaces are “perceived, understood, and ultimately produced” (8). Though Brady’s primary focus is on literature, her methodology proves useful for examining how Son of Monarchs produces New York City and Angangueo. Both places are central to the film’s transnational storyline, but they are constructed as fixed and natural. Because of this, Mendel appears disconnected to both places throughout the film, even at the end when he is supposed to have come to terms with his hybrid identity.
New York City, for example, is muted in order to heighten a feeling of isolation. It is captured through late night scenes of Mendel looking into a microscope, meeting after meeting in conference rooms where Mendel is the only visibly racialized scientist, and the occasional outing with his colleague Pablo in the company of white women. Almost all scenes are shot in blue or gray tones. In the background there is always a constant buzzing, whether that be traffic in the distance or an airplane soaring by. Greenery is lacking, and the only butterflies present are the carcasses in Mendel’s laboratory. These visible and auditory markers work in conjunction to produce NYC as a solemn metropolis devoid of both human and non-human relationships.
The film also intentionally works to place NYC as far as it possibly can from Mexico. Towards the second half of the film, his only friend and colleague Pablo (who is also Mexican, but reads as White in comparison to Mendel) announces that he will be leaving to Texas for a new position. Mendel is left speechless, not because he is not happy for his friend, but because this solidifies his feeling of being the only Mexican person in such a far away city. Mendel brushes this off by commenting that Pablo can finally stop complaining about the lack of authentic Mexican food since he will be so close to the U.S.-Mexican border. Though written off as an inside joke, Mendel and Pablo’s minor exchange suggests that NYC essentially lacks “authentic Mexican food” because it lacks Mexican people. At the same time, this comment reproduces the U.S. Southwest as the only geographic area with people of Mexican descent due to its proximity to the U.S.-Mexican border.
This narrative ignores, if not erases, the reality of Mexican presence in New York City as the third largest Hispanic group following Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Far from being a recent phenomenon, Robert Smith, author of Mexican New York (2005), tracks Mexican migration to New York back to the 1940s. More recently, Melissa Castillo Planas looks at the post-9/11 boom of Mexican migration, theorizing this movement to NYC as diasporic as opposed to transnational in her book A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the Borderlands of Culture (2020). In sum, the film obscures the material presence of Mexican immigrants in the city in order to heighten Mendel’s character trajectory. In doing so, it upholds preconceived notions of racialized geographies and consequently produces New York City as a distant, upper-class, and mostly White metropolis.
On the other hand, Angangueo is produced as a rich and fertile environment where the priority is non-human. To contrast negative portrayals of Mexico in Hollywood (like the use of the infamous yellow filter), Son of Monarchs heavily invests in bringing the natural landscape of Michoácan to life. The grey and sullen depictions of New York City are immediately lost in the lush greenery of the land alongside captivating scenes of monarcas roaming freely. However, a significant politics of place is buried deeply under the imagery of the landscape.
What gets missed under the excess of aesthetics is an Angangueo experiencing a mass exodus of its people. Unlike the monarcas, the people of Angangueo will likely not return. The film drops clues that suggest some forces at work: Angangueo’s dying mining economy, the burgeoning ecotourism of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that rules the town, and the ongoing (il)legal logging intended to clear the land for the avocado industry. Unless you have the means to open a hotel to cater to the ecotourism like Mendel’s uncle, you are likely stuck risking your life working in the mines like Mendel’s brother Simón or resorting to illegal logging. However, the film drops the opportunity to explore these issues any further. Instead, it writes off the town’s mass exodus as desires for progress and modernity. Upon Mendel’s return to Angangueo, for example, he learns that several of his family members have left town or plan to leave it in search of better opportunities and simply accepts this at face value.
When he does express disdain for the town’s conditions, it comes from a place of privilege. We learn that Simón’s decision to work for the mines despite what happened to their parents is the reason why Mendel has such a strained relationship with him. Yet, Mendel refuses to acknowledge Simón’s dire economic condition and simply writes his brother off as stuck in his ways. Similarly, Mendel expresses contempt for the logging activity, not because of the impact it has had on the townspeople, but because of the impact it has on the monarcas. Alternatively, Mendel has no qualms about the presence, impact, and function of his uncle’s hotel as it caters to the ecotourism of the biosphere reserve. Whereas Mendel finds solace in Angangueo’s ecology and landscape, he does not extend the same courtesy to the ways in which the people of the land have been affected.
Son of Monarchs is undeniably beautiful and innovative in many ways, but it also leaves us with many questions. For one, what would it look like to create narratives that produce place without forcing us to choose between the human and non-human? Is it necessary to center subversion in the stories we tell? If so, can we accomplish this without forfeiting certain histories?
To learn more about the film, visit: https://sonofmonarchs.com/
Miriam Juárez is a writer and PhD student at New York University where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x literature and culture through the lens of space, migration, and power. With a parent on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, she spends her time triangulating between New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico, forever examining the politics of movement.