Race, class, and death: teaching the socio-cultural context of race in post-metropolitan Quito from Víctor Arreguí's My Time Will Come

Abstract

This article poses that the Ecuadorian film Cuando me toque a mí uses urban settings as heterotopic spaces which allow director Víctor Arregui to depict the complexities of human relationships among members of different races, under the colonial and postcolonial Latin American context. All the protagonists, main and secondary, cope with quotidian situations and deal with the most basic conflict: life vs. death. Arregui utilizes the photography, mise-en-scène, and sound to match form to content and deliver Quito as a city full of loneliness and darkness where members of lower classes, generally belonging to the mestizos, cholos and indigenous races and ethnicities. The characters appear trapped by their circumstances and the camera captures their states by presenting in-between frames that corner them, as if they were in jail cells. They emerge as prisoners of the urban spaces in which they wander and depict Quito as the ultimate stage of loneliness and death