The «cuestión criolla» in Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto (1956) and Zama, the Film by Lucrecia Martel (2006)

Zama, and its adaptation to the cinema in 2016 by Lucrecia Martel, relates the drama of Don Diego de Zama, legal advisor to the governor of a peripheral province north of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. The novel has been read as the allegory of the existential condition of the human being and, therefore, timeless. Without denying this interpretation, I propose that, both the novel and the film, dramatize the situation of «criollos» in the colonial reality of the eighteenth century from a perspective that accounts for the so-called «cuestión criolla». In the present work I try to show that both the novel and the film, but it is even more emphasized, through the symbolization of fiction itself and enrolling in a historical and geographical framework of the late eighteenth century, narrate the situation of postponement of the Creole in the structure of colonial power a few years before the independence wars.