Lourdes Portillo and The Devil Never Sleeps/El Diablo Nunca Duerme featured in The Baffler critical essay: "Errant Telenovelas," by Byron Davies

“The emphatically private worlds of telenovelas are never as far from politics as they might seem. For example, Lourdes Portillo’s The Devil Never Sleeps is a film firmly rooted in the year of its release, 1994—the end of Salinas’s presidential administration—and Portillo briefly compares the mysteries surrounding her Uncle Oscar’s death by gunfire in Chihuahua (officially ruled a suicide) to the assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana earlier that same year. Portillo’s use of clips from three different telenovelas—two from Televisa that aired in 1993, Más allá del puente and Los parientes pobres, as well as a significant earlier one from Brazil’s Globo, Roque Santeiro (1985–1986)—is fascinating. The whitened Mexico of the Televisa telenovelas stands in striking contrast not only with the mestizo life in Chihuahua that Portillo profiles but also with the Afro-descendent Brazilians featured in the clip from Roque Santeiro.”

- Excerpt from “Errant Telenovelas” by Byron Davies, The Baffler, June 2023

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

Aunt luz watches a telenovela, in a scene from the devil never sleeps/el diablo nunca duerme