In her important book The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project [here after abbreviated as NLAC (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)], Zuzana Pick argues that what has been called the “New Latin American Cinema” has been a continent-wide effort to create a cinema that speaks for and to Latin America as a whole. However, she argues that this idea of the movement, this idea of the New Latin American Cinema as a movement – it is her idea that this movement sees itself as a movement – emerged more and more explicitly as the movement evolved. This idea of the movement emerged hand-in-hand with the movement's developing practices, and hand-in-hand, as well, with the idea of Latin America as a distinct historical entity.

In Pick's view, the idea of a distinctive Latin America identity has emerged within a process, of which the New Latin American Cinema movement has been an integral part, of questioning the myths of progress that displaced the colonial legacy after Latin American countries consolidated themselves as modern nations. This idea of Latin America as a distinctive entity is based on a sense of a shared history and destiny, she argues, and also on a sense of a multiplicity of cultures that do not conform to state-defined allegiances and differences. “Latin Americans have assumed the history and envisioned the future of the continent,” she writes, “in the layering of regional specificities (those inflected by locality) and through narrative negotiations of nation, class, race and gender.