Places
The place where an action occurs is part of the elements that create meaning. In Rebeca Lane’s Ni Una Menos, the references to places are central to constructing the collective identity.
Ron Scollon and Suzie Scollon pay attention to the role of place in creating meaning and develop a proposal in Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World, which has informed our analysis. For the authors, place semiotics include three elements. The first one is the code preference, which is the language that is chosen for a sign or in the case of multiple languages together, the order in which they appear and the reasons to make that decision. The second is inscription; it is about how we materialize language, such as typography or characteristics of handwriting. The last one is emplacement; it refers to where language as the action takes place, e.g. “Where are located the images of the action that we see in the video?”
In the lyrics, the geographic reference is to the territory where Rebeca Lane is from as just one place of many where women are being murdered and raped every day: “…cinco mujeres hoy han sido asesinadas y a la hora por lo menos veinte mujeres violadas. Esto que solo es un día en Guatemala, multiplícalo y sabrás porque estamos enojadas” (“…five women have been killed today and per hour at least 20 women raped. This is only a day in Guatemala, multiply and you will know what we are upset”, my translation). Later on, she asserts her belonging to this feminist collective identity by refering to the territories where Ni Una Menos takes place, according to the song: “Cuéntanos bien en las calles somos miles desde México hasta Chile y en el planeta entero” (“Count us well, we are thousands on the streets from Mexico to Chile and in the entire world”, my translation).
In the video, we find fragments recorded specifically for the song where the participants have a color background and there are no visual references to places. While we do not have any specific idea of where the actions take place or where they were recorded by looking at them, we still can think of these images as situated semiotics because of their relationship with the lyrics, as the women we see become part of that collective identity geolocated according to the lyrics. At the same time, the absence of reference to a particular place implies that the lyrics can happen in many places, that is that these experiences are women’s experiences beyond the borders of specific territories.
This becomes clearer with the only direct reference to a place that we find in those images with a color background. It is a handwritten message in the belly of one of the participants, which says: “12 feminicidios diarios en Latinoamérica” (Figure 1) (“12 femicides daily in Latin America”, my translation). This can be understood as transgressive semiotics because the body is not usually expected to be a place for writing. The transgression is clearer as we think of the body and its relationship with clothing. In this case, to show the text, the participant has uncovered her body by moving her upper-body garment up (or at least it seems to be in the video), opening her pants (we can see the internal white part of the pockets), and showing her belly and her underwear. In societies where we are “obliged” to be almost always dressed in public, uncovering the body conveys different meanings. On one hand, it could imply a vulnerability, showing your privacy. On the other hand, as transgressive semiotics, uncovering can also be seen as a way of resistance; for example, in the feminist movement in Latin America, some women protest topless to reclaim their freedom by freeing their breasts.
The statement about femicide in Latin America appears while the lyrics mention the obligation of children to be mothers if they are raped. In other words, the geographical reference applies to the stories of women that are mentioned in the song and foregrounds the topic of territory in a part where it is not mentioned in the lyrics.
The second reference to a place in the video is quite indirect. It appears on the balloons of the two children that say “nos duelen 56” (Figure 2) and it can be difficult to read. The phrase refers to Guatemala, as this is the number of female children who suffered trapped in a boarding school fire without any accountability by any of the possible responsible parties. This image appears exactly when the lyrics mention figures about Guatemala and the name of the country. In this way, the video amplifies the criticism of Guatemala presented in the lyrics. It is important to remember that Rebeca Lane is a Central American from Guatemala.
In the video, the scenes of documented demonstrations is where we see elements that allow us to understand where those demonstrations are emplaced. A first example of geographic reference comes from the chants of the beginning of the video: “Aquí las pibas luchan”. “Pibas” (“girls”) is specific to the geolect of Río de La Plata, thus the deictic “aquí” (´here´) becomes the place where this word is used.
Banners are also an important element when we observe emplacement. We find references to the Guatemalan Women National Union (Figure 3), an icon representing the flag of Perú (Figure 4) with information about the place similar to the one we saw in the body of the participant. In this case, according to the banner, Perú has the third highest number of rape cases in the world. We also have a reference to the Andes in the traditional women’s clothes of one of the participants of the documented demonstrations (Figure 5).
Another important element to think of emplacement is the code of preference. As the lyrics mentioned “the entire world” is the place where the feminist collective identity takes places, which is illustrated by the fact that there are banners in different languages. Above we see banners in Spanish, and we also find other banners in English (Figures 6 & 7), which implies these demonstrations might be located beyond Latin America or that people who speak different languages participate in the local protests. In fact, in Figure 7 we have multiple banners and we can see that in the one on the extreme left of the image the word “pussies/vulvas” appears in both English and Spanish. In the video, we see choosing banners in different languages as a code preference.
In addition to the English banners, we find graffiti in Italian: “Ni Una Menos” translated into “Non Una Di Meno” (Figure 16). In this case, we consider the graffiti as a manifestation of transgressive semiotics because of the inscription on the wall with handwritten characters made with spray talks about it as an illicit intervention on a public surface. We might consider that this graffiti takes place in Italy; in fact, the location can be confirmed in the credits, where the information on the archival materials used in the video is mentioned; there we find the city of Turin as one of the places where the demonstrations took place.
At the end of the video, in the credits, we can also recover some of the other places where the images come from such as Paraguay and Guatemala. It would be possible, as an additional exercise to look for the places where the materials come from, however, it would be beyond the scope of this research as would the meaning produced in the video. In the same way, there could be places that some viewers would identify that are not possible to identify others because it would depend on their knowledge of the place.
The transnational references in Rebeca Lane’s song connect to one connect to the ideas exposed by Ana Nenadovic in her work Performing Feminism, Autobiography, and Testimony. Feminist Rap in Latin America. The author explains how Latin American Feminist Rap is transnational. In Lane’s Ni Una Menos, transnationality isn’t restricted to the region. The collective identity represented in the mix of the video and the lyrics goes beyond the borders and the Atlantic Ocean, with multiple geographic references.
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.