Documentary on Wheels: Car Culture in Karen Rossi’s Isla Chatarra

Puerto Rico is a nation without a state. Since 1898, it has been a colonial territory of the United States.¹ The island is also a nation on wheels, although it does not have a local auto industry. It has an average of 86 cars per hundred residents; approximately 15,000 cars enter its territory each month.² Only a documentary on wheels like Karen Rossi’s Isla Chatarra (2007) can capture the urban flows and multiple speeds of the nation on wheels.³ This documentary keeps track of the different speeds of development, consumption, and identity in a society that continues to express the contradictory aspects of car culture. In this essay, I will elaborate on a definition of the “documentary on wheels,” which, for me, is a mode of filmmaking that explores the convergence of the car and the moving image. Following Michael Chanan’s cartographic conception of documentary, I will argue that Isla Chatarra operates as a cognitive mapping of what British sociologist John Urry has defined as the system of automobility. Rossi’s documentary offers a complex and catastrophic view of car culture that highlights the environmental consequences of automobility.