Streaming Gentrification and Muxe Representation: Visibility, Exoticization, and Resistance in El secreto del río (Netflix, 2024)

Abstract

This article analyzes the Mexican series El secreto del río (Netflix, 2024) as a paradigmatic case of what is proposed here as streaming gentrification: the process by which global video-on-demand platforms access, reframe, and commodify local cultural phenomena, simultaneously producing visibility and the risk of exoticization. The concept is distinguished from mere visibility insofar as it does not describe the simple presence of an identity on screen, but rather the transformation that presence undergoes when integrated into the industrial logics of the global catalogue: algorithms, audience retention, and product differentiation. The study’s objective is to examine how the series reproduces and/or resists processes of exoticization and commodification of the Zapotec muxe identity within the context of the digital cultural economy. Through a queer decolonial textual-narrative analysis of ten representative sequences from the eight episodes of the first season, three registers of this process are identified: the aestheticizing visualization of muxe territory and bodies, the narrativization of identity as a dramatic resource within the cultural dramatic thriller, and the algorithmic globalization of an ancestral identity subjected to cataloguing logic. Results show that, of the ten sequences analyzed, seven present a predominance of resistance and three of exoticization, with a relevant asymmetry: exoticization operates in the visual register, resistance in the narrative. It is argued that the series produces a zone of negotiation in which narrative silence, the presence of real muxes in the cast, the narrative agency of the character Solange, and Sicarú’s autonomous ending operate as forms of partial resistance. The concept of streaming gentrification is proposed as an analytical tool for decolonial queer studies in the context of digital cultural industries, with potential to extend to other cases of indigenous gender-diverse identity representation on global platforms.