Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century 9780816537907, 9780816540495

Citation preview

LATINX CINÉ IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Latinx Pop Culture

SERIES EDITORS

Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama

LATINX CINÉ IN THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2019 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2019 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­8165-­3790-­7 (paper) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969– editor. Title: Latinx ciné in the twenty-first century / edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. Other titles: Latinx pop culture. Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2019. | Series: Latinx pop culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A collection of essays that focus on Latinx films in the twenty-first century. It looks at film over a wide variety of genres and their historical, political, and cultural contexts, and considers how production techniques depict the Latinx experience. And it discusses non-­Latinx filmmakers who complicate and enrich our understanding of the Latinx experience”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019001387 | ISBN 9780816537907 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic Americans in the motion picture industry—History—21st century. | Hispanic Americans in motion pictures—History—21st century. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H47 L385 2019 | DDC 384.808968073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001387 Printed in the United States of America ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Corina Isabel Villena-Aldama, twenty-first-century Latinx film aficionado

CONTENTS Foreword. Bearing Witness: A Latinx Filmmaker’s Journey Paul Espinosa Introduction. Latinx Ciné: Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-First Century Frederick Luis Aldama

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PART I. THE QUESTION OF TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY LATINX CINÉ 1. What Is Latinx in Today’s Documentary Filmscape? Debra A. Castillo

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2. Pantelion Films and the Latinx Spanish-Language Film Marketplace Henry Puente

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3. Reframing the Border in Contemporary Mexican American Documentary Monica Hanna

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4. Serious Docu-Games: Empathy in Action at the Virtual Border Rebecca A. Sheehan

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PART II. REFRAMING AND CENTER- STAGING LATINX NONFICTION FLICKS 5. Digitized Identidad: Color, Body, and the Tension of DVD-Constructed Chicanx Heroes Samuel Saldívar III

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6. Salsa on Film: (Corporate) Stars, Local Communities, and Global Audiences, from Our Latin Thing to El Cantante Nikolina Dobreva and Enrique García

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PART III. TOWARD A BORDERLAND CINÉ OF PRECARITY AND SITUATED EXCESS 7. On the Border Between Migration and Horror: Rendering Border Violence Strange in Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto Lee Bebout and Clarissa Goldsmith

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8. Invisible Immigrants: A Better Life and the Cinematic Undocumented Desirée J. Garcia

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9. Ex-Voto #7: Print Culture and the Creation of an Alternative Latinidad in the Work of Jim Mendiola Ariana Ruiz

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10. The Good, Bad, and the Messy: Michael Peña’s Browning of the Twenty-First-Century Silver Screen Frederick Luis Aldama and Carlos Gabriel Kelly

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11. Ethnic Avengers: Machete, Django, and the Uncertain Futures of Race and Immigration in the United States Juan J. Alonzo

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PART IV. LATINX FUTURITIES 12. Border Securities, Drone Cultures, and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer Camilla Fojas

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13. Techno/Memo: The Politics of Cultural Memory in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer J. V. Miranda

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14. Digital Rasquachismo: Alex Rivera’s Multimedia Storytelling, Humor, and Transborder Latinx Futurity Jennifer M. Lozano

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15. Extra Terrestres and the Politics of Scientific Realism Matthew David Goodwin

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PART V. SUPERHEROIC LATINXS 16. LatinX-Men: Logan’s Undocumented Voices Speak Jorge Santos 17. Laura Kinney as X-treme Niña: Monstrosity and Citizenship in Marvel’s Logan Danielle Alexis Orozco

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PART VI. PIXELATED BROWNS

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18. Very ¡MACHO! Sonic Legacies of Mexican Animated Villains Sara Veronica Hinojos

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19. The Best Mexican Is a (Day of the) Dead Mexican: Representing Mexicanness in U.S. Animated Films Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez

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20. (Re)Animating the Dead: Memory, Music, and Divine Justice in Coco John D. “Rio” Riofrio

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21. “There Is No ‘I’ in Trollhunters”: Gendered and Collective Heroism in Guillermo del Toro’s Multimedial Saga Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou

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22. Latinas in Biographical Film: Analyzing the Cultivation of a Genealogy of Latina Feministas in the United States Valentina Montero Román

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23. Impossible Mission: The Queer Geographies of Peter Bratt’s La Mission Richard T. Rodríguez

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24. Not-So-Great Expectations: Challenging Gender/Ethnic Roles and Achievement in Latinx Sports Films Mauricio Espinoza

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Twenty-First-Century Latinx Ciné: A Coda Rosa-Linda Fregoso

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Contributors

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Index

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PART VII. TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ENGENDERINGS OF LATINX CINÉ

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Foreword

BEARING WITNESS A Latinx Filmmaker’s Journey Paul Espinosa

In my journey as a filmmaker, I often think of a cryptic line delivered in . . . and the earth did not swallow him, a feature film I produced in the early 1990s. Marco, the young protagonist of the film, is admonished by an older woman to “write it down, so others will know.” There is a subversive feeling in this admonition, a suggestion that bearing witness is a defiant way to insure that truth is recorded for posterity. “Write it down, so others will know” is a mantra for many Latinx artists, whether they are writers, filmmakers, poets, or other creators. The act of inscribing, of bearing witness, to the rich, vibrant, and complicated life of our communities has provoked and inspired many of us, often in spite of the enormous obstacles placed in our way. Latinx filmmaking really burst onto the national scene in the 1980s with the work of Latinxs who came of age during the civil rights movements of African Americans, Latinxs, Native Americans, women, and others. I am part of that generation, and many of the themes and issues that dominated our films then are still very much front and center in our lives and work today. In the ensuing fifty years, our community has nearly quadrupled, and we are witnessing a new generation of creative filmmakers documenting our lives in the twenty-first century. When Frederick “Fede” Aldama asked me to write this foreword, it prompted me to think about my own journey as a filmmaker. I first met Fede in 2011 when I visited Ohio State University to give a keynote lecture on “Rethinking the U.S.-Mexico Border— A Transnational Perspective through Film.” Since then I have been impressed with the myriad topics that Fede has addressed in his writing. With this volume, Fede has gathered together some of the best writing on Latinx filmmaking in the twenty-first century. The seven sections of the book cover a wide range of critical issues from production techniques to evolving genres, from profiling those behind the camera to issues of the distribution and consumption of Latinx films. xi

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It’s comforting, if not a little disconcerting, to note that, despite the passage of time, the issues that animated me in my films over the last forty years, as well as many of my filmmaking contemporaries, are still present: issues of representation or the lack thereof, issues of identity and stereotypes, issues of hybridity, issues of immigration and detention, issues of historical recuperation and historical amnesia. For our community, these issues continue to be relevant and attract the attention of filmmakers. The issue of borders dominates many chapters in this book. Over thirty years ago, I produced In the Shadow of the Law, one of the first national documentaries to portray the life of undocumented families in the United States who had crossed the border to create better lives for themselves. Even in 1987 when the film was made, two of the four families in my film had already been in the United States for nearly twenty years without documents. My film created a window into the harsh challenges of their lives, from constant worry about apprehension by the authorities to anxieties about how to create a safe and normal life for their children. Sadly, as current headlines demonstrate, those stories continue to be relevant today and many of the films discussed in this collection address the ongoing concern of filmmakers in dealing with issues related to borders and immigration. We see this in films as diverse as Machete (2010), A Better Life (2011), Desierto (2015), The Migrant Trail (2015), Logan (2017), and Carne y Arena (2017)— many of which are analyzed in this volume. Another important theme for my generation was that of recuperating history, of recovering significant episodes in the history of our communities that had been overlooked, erased, or never been written at all. My film on The Lemon Grove Incident (1985) was a good example. In that film, we portrayed our nation’s first successful legal challenge to school segregation, revolving around a California court case in 1930 where the Mexican American community challenged a local school board’s attempt to segregate their kids from the other “American” kids in the school. The case preceded the well-known Brown v. Board of Education case by nearly twenty-five years but was barely a footnote in the history books. We were able to resurrect this story and tell a then modern audience about an important early chapter in the fight for educational equity for Latinxs. I followed with other films dealing with forgotten history such as Los mineros (1991) and The Hunt for Pancho Villa (1993) that were part of a larger mosaic of digging up the past seen in earlier films like Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1981) and Jesús Salvador Treviño’s Seguin (1982). Audiences responded with great appreciation to this recuperation of our stories. My documentary Ballad of an Unsung Hero (2016) was a case in point. The film was a portrait of Pedro J. Gonzalez, from his early days as a telegraph operator with Mexican general Pancho Villa during the Mex-

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ican Revolution to Gonzalez’s high-stakes political trial in Los Angeles in 1934 where he was convicted of statutory rape, even after witnesses recanted their testimony. In the 1980s, when I produced the film, his story was seemingly long forgotten, but when the film received a national PBS broadcast, I received hundreds of letters from fans who couldn’t believe Gonzalez was still alive. They remembered their parents listening to Gonzalez on the radio in the early morning hours throughout the Southwest before heading off to work. I can only imagine the kind of audience feedback I might receive through social media today. Besides looking back and recovering history, another important strand of Latinx filmmaking has been to look forward and imagine a new and different future. The chapters in part IV on Latinx sci-fi present insightful analyses of the innovative work of Alex Rivera, whose film Sleep Dealer (2008) has had a substantial impact on provoking writers and audiences to imagine alternative futures for our communities. The closing section of the book masterfully explores the way that a body of films presents critical femininities and masculinities, seen in films like Girlfight (2000), La Mission (2009), and Dolores (2017). For filmmakers of any generation, one of the biggest challenges has been finding the money to make films and distribute them. This led many twentieth-century filmmakers to turn to public television, which helped support an influential wave of Latinx films such as El Norte, Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Seguin, The House of Ramon Iglesias, Stand and Deliver, . . . and the earth did not swallow him, La Carpa, and Break of Dawn. These films were embraced by our communities both in festivals and on PBS and reached wide audiences beyond Latinx communities. Today, as the chapters in this book elaborate, filmmakers are reaching new audiences through the web and other forms of popular media like comics, video games, and animation. With Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century, Aldama has assembled a brilliant array of the latest writing to address the challenges facing filmmakers in capturing the incredible diversity of our Latinx community— a community that is now larger than the entire population of countries like Spain, Ukraine, Columbia, South Korea, and Argentina, and will likely surpass the populations of France, Italy, and England in the coming years. Perhaps because my generation of filmmakers dealt with some of the more obvious characters and stories, the next generation of Latinx filmmakers in the twenty-first century has had the freedom and luxury to explore other stories and other storytelling techniques. I continue to be amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of Latinx filmmakers who are making significant contributions to the canon of Latinx cinema. Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century offers an exciting panorama of the possibilities for the future, demonstrating that twenty-first-century filmmakers and writers continue to “write it down, so others will know.”

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Introduction

LATINX CINÉ Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-First Century Frederick Luis Aldama

We’re nearly two decades into the twenty-first century and a lot has changed and remains the same when it comes to Latinx cinema. Certainly, we’re witnessing some radical changes from earlier epochs. Here I think readily of the resplendent variety of brown bodies in front of and behind the camera— and from all our ancestral nooks and crannies: Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Central American, and South American. And, with the rise of Latinx-owned distribution and production companies and internet and social media platforms, these Latinx films are finding their audiences— Latinx or otherwise. I eulogize with eyes wide open. Twenty-first-century cinema by and about Latinxs also continues to see many of the same issues of earlier epochs, most notably in terms of quality and quantity of mainstream silver-screen representation. While today Latinxs make up over 18 percent of the U.S. population, in the media taken as a whole (film, TV, video games, literature, you name it) Latinxs appear in less than 3 percent. More often than not, when Latinxs do appear on mainstream screens, it’s as if we’ve been cast forever in a stock set of stereotypical molds: drug kingpins, petty criminals, buffoons, hypersexualized lovers or prostitutes, or white-aspiring virginal maids, among others. Put simply, with twenty-first-century Latinx ciné, there’s much to celebrate and still much of which to be purposefully critical. The scholarship that fills out Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century seeks to do both. Of course, today’s Latinx ciné didn’t arrive ex nihilo. It has been built on the shoulders of much struggle— and victory— in those decades prior. I think readily of filmmakers such as Isaac Artenstein, Moctezuma Esparza, Paul Espinosa, León Ichaso, Ángel Muñiz, Gregory Nava, Edward James Olmos, Lourdes Portillo, José Luis Ruiz, Jesús Treviño, and Luis Valdez. I think of significant cinematographic re-creations such as Valdez’s 1969 motionphotographic magisterial reconstruction of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s epic poem, I Am Joaquin. I think of Lourdes Portillo’s contrastively stark montage 3

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in her 1979 Después del terremoto. I think of León Ichaso’s powerful immersion in the life of Cuban exiles surviving in New York in his 1979 El Super. I think of Jesús Treviño’s significant setting straight of historical records (the Mexican-American War) with his Seguin (1981). I think of Gregory Nava’s at once poetic and deeply tragic migration story with El Norte (1983). I think of Edward James Olmos’s full-fleshing out of lives that could only lead to crime for survival in American Me (1992). I think of Robert Rodriguez’s extraordinary achievement with El Mariachi—a film shot and edited for $7,000 but that looks like a multimillion-dollar action flick (see Aldama, Cinema). I think of Allison Anders’s complexly Chicanx-focalized Mi Vida Loca / My Crazy Life (1994). I think of Darnell Martin’s life in the Nuyorican South Bronx– set I Like It Like That (1994)— a film that made several initial baby steps toward a LGBTQ-positive, feminist Latinx ciné. I think even of the somewhat overly sentimental (and Anglo-protagonized) Alfonso Arau’s A Walk in the Clouds (1995). I think of Ángel Muñiz’s groundbreaking, Dominican Latinx Nueba Yol (1995) along with Gregory Nava’s Chicanx epic, My Family (1995), and his Tejana biopic, Selena (1997). These and many other twentieth-century Latinx films that willfully deployed the visual and auditory techniques of motion photography reconstructed the many ways Latinxs exist. In so doing, they elbowed open pathways for twenty-first-century filmmakers to continue to willfully reconstruct Latinx epics and quotidian struggles, tragedies, and triumphs. They cleared the way for today’s filmmakers to show the world a rich Latinidad informed by a complexly layered culture, history, biography, and everyday life experience. In other ways, we also see how important struggles won in twentiethcentury Latinx ciné carry over into and come into their own in the twenty-first century. In this way, too, we are reminded that divisions and periodization (in this case twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latinx ciné) are in many ways a line drawn in the sand. I’m thinking about Latinx actors getting time in front of the camera eye. Throughout the twentieth century, we witnessed many important triumphs with Latinx actors pushing open Hollywood’s doors. There were those Latinx actors who significantly shaped Hollywood’s silent film era, including Myrtle Gonzalez, Gilbert Roland, Antonio Moreno, and sisters Beatriz and Vera Michelena. There were those such as Dolores del Río, Lupe Velez (RKO’s “Mexican Spitfire”), and Ramon Navarro (MGM’s “Latin lover”) whose popularity helped grow Hollywood’s talkie silver-screen studio system (see also Aldama and González). And we can add to this laundry list of names those who rose to fame during the mid-twentieth century such as José Ferrer, Emilio Fernández, Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, Ricardo Montalban, Anthony Quinn, and Raquel Welch. By the late twentieth century, we began to see all variety of Latinx actor appear in mainstream films. I think readily

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of Maria Conchita Alonso, Adriana Barraza, Benjamin Bratt, Cameron Diaz, Edward James Olmos, John Leguizamo, Cheech Marin, Alfred Molina, Esai Morales, Lupe Ontiveros, Jennifer Lopez, Andy García, Elizabeth Peña, Tony Plana, Jimmy Smits, Danny Trejo, and Benicio del Toro. (I’m not including Spaniards who crossed over into Hollywood such as Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz; nor am I including here Mexican telenovela star Salma Hayek who, with director Robert Rodriguez’s strategic hand, also crossed over.) As we move into the twenty-first century, we see many of these same actors continue to work in Hollywood— and also in films created by and for Latinx audiences; yet again, a reminder that a division between twentiethand twenty-first-century Latinx ciné is largely an academic one and that the lives of the actors and audiences don’t somehow end and begin again according to calendrical shifts. This said, the early twenty-first century does witness the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Latinx actors who we see playing Latinx-identifiable as well as ethnoracial-ambiguous roles in mainstream and Latinx films alike. I think readily of Zoe Saldana’s crossover role as Eva Rodriguez in Nicholas Hytner’s 2000 release Center Stage followed by her successful streak of action-hero roles in Avatar (2009), Colombiana (2011), and the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) franchise. I think also of Michelle Rodriguez as Diana Guzman in Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight (2000) followed by her repeated appearance as Letty Ortiz in the Fast and Furious franchise (2001– ). I also think of Jessica Alba as Chloe Keene in John Duigan’s 2000 Paranoid and her role as migra-cum-activist in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete series. I think not only of America Ferrera as Ana Garcia in Patricia Cardosa’s 2002 Real Women Have Curves but also her role as Hedy Galili in Todd Berger’s It’s a Disaster (2012). I think of Gabriel Chavarria’s role as Danny in the Latinx-focused Lowriders (and TV shows like East Los High) as well as his role as a preacher in War of the Planet of the Apes (2017). Eiza González plays the role of Monica “Darling” Costello in Baby Driver (2017) as well as Santanico Pandemonium in Robert Rodriguez’s serialized From Dusk Till Dawn (2014– 2016) and fleetingly as Nyssiana in his cyberpunk sci-fi Alita: Battle Angel (2019). Former Nickelodeon star Isabela Moner plays Izabella in Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) as well as Nina Simone in Cynthia Mort’s biopic Nina (2016). Christopher B. Landon’s found-footage horror flick Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) features an all-Latinx cast as well as a Latinx-themed paranormal mystery at the core of its plot. I also think of how Latinx actors like Rosario Dawson moved from the indie margins (Larry Clark’s 1995 Kids) to mainstream films such as Barry Sonnenfeld’s 2002 Men in Black 2 and Peter Berg’s The Rundown (2003), among many others. Finally, the twenty-first century witnessed plenty of Latinx TV actors crossing back and forth from film to TV, including Jay Hernandez, Wilmer

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Valderrama, Freddie Prinze Jr., Freddy Rodríguez, Eva Longoria, Eva Mendes, and Sophia Vergara, among many others. The twenty-first century witnessed the growth of roles and films that reconstruct Latinx passing in interesting ways. I think of Jessica Alba’s passing and ethnoracially ambiguous role as Sue Storm in Fantastic Four (2005) or as Nancy Callahan in Sin City (2005) among many others. But then I also think of her role as the migra-turned-revolutionary Sartana Rivera in Machete (2010) and Machete Kills (2013). And there’s the case of fair-skinned, blueeyed, blond-haired Cameron Diaz, who built a career playing non-Latinx roles— think The Mask (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998)— but then does play a Latina in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor (2013), along with Spaniards Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, also cast as Latinxs. In many ways, the twenty-first century opens doors for passing Latinxs (phenotype and language register) to step into Latinx roles. At the same time, it reminds us of a mainstream where Latinxs continue to be cast in stereotypical ways. Recall that Cameron Diaz “comes out” as Latina during the 2011 media blitz that surrounded the release of Bad Teacher; that is, she can come out as Latina when the media machine fully frames her as bad— as a sucia. (Notably, Hilary Swank, whose maternal grandmother— née Frances Martha Dominguez— is a Latina from El Centro, California, is never identified nor self-identifies as Latina.) We can say today that Latinx characters are beginning to pollinate the full spectrum of silver-screen genres: sci-fi, adventure, comedy, drama, horror, action, superhero, and all other storytelling vehicles and modes. While still a relative paucity compared to the Anglos who overwhelm the superhero genre, there are a few others in addition to Saldana (mentioned above), including Oscar Isaac as the immortal Apocalypse (X-Men: Apocalypse) and Michal Peña (albeit as the non-superhero sidekick) in Ant-Man (2015) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018); Carlos Kelly and I talk at length about Peña’s role here in our chapter in this volume. And for the first time we have a Latinx-identified superhero character with El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016) (see Aldama, Latinx Superheroes). The roll over into the 2000s also saw Latinx filmmakers from earlier decades continue to grow their work. With few exceptions (León Ichaso, for instance), many of these film directors (Gregory Nava, Edward James Olmos, or Robert Rodriguez, for instance) were from the Southwest. What we do see in the 2000s is a plentitude of new generation Latinx filmmakers from all regions of the United States, hailing from all of our ancestral heritages, who explore all of the rich ways that Latinxs exist in the United States. Those who come readily to mind include Miguel Arteta, Cecilia Aldarondo, Sergio Arau, Peter Bratt, Deborah Esquenazi, Aurora Guerrero, Cristina Ibarra, Alex Ri-

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vera, Franc Reyes, and Chris Weitz, among others. (I’m excluding here those like Venezuelan Ángel Garcia, Peruvian Ricardo de Montreuil, and Mexico’s Patricia Riggen and the proverbial Three Amigos: Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.) And, there were important non-Latinx filmmakers like Karyn Kusama (Girlfight), Ken Loach (Bread and Roses), Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), Diego Luna (Cesar Chavez), and Peter Sollett who have contributed significantly to the continued growing of a complex twenty-first-century Latinx ciné. In Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas (2002), for instance, he takes audiences deep into a Nuyorican and Lower East Side Dominican teen life, overturning expectations concerning Latinx masculinity (including aggressive gaze and verbal assaults on young Latinas). We see Sollett and other outsider filmmakers (Kusama, Fukunaga, Luna, and Loach) willfully reconstructing aspects of Latinx life while, importantly, casting Latinx actors with attention to nuances of cultural practice, language, religion, and everyday syncretic ritual. Sollet, for instance, captures well teen slang, generational divides, and intimacy (the abuelita carefully washing her grandson’s Afrolatinx fro) (see also García-Crespo). Twenty-first-century Latinx filmmakers such as Miguel Arteta, Cecilia Aldarondo, Peter Bratt, Aurora Guerrero, León Ichaso, and Cristina Ibarra have created films (documentary and feature) that enrich greatly the complex ways Latinxs exist in terms of gender and sexuality. While scholars in this volume such as Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou, Richard T. Rodríguez, Valentina Montero-Román, and Mauricio Espinoza go into more detail concerning how twenty-first-century Latinx ciné complicates gender and queer identities and experiences, let me mention here a few films not discussed and analyzed in the volume (see also Hernandez). León Ichaso’s Piñero (2001) not only importantly reconstructs the life of Nuyorican poet and playwright Miguel Piñero (played by Benjamin Bratt) along with other important creators like Miguel Algarín (Giancarlo Esposito) but also begins to tiptoe into otherwise unspoken of territory: Piñero’s bisexuality. With Cecilia Aldarondo we see an honest approach to family and queer sexuality in her documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart (2015), which reconstructs the life of her late gay uncle Miguel struggling to survive in a queerphobic Puerto Rican household. And we see Aurora Guerrero’s masterful use of close-ups, assembly shots, and mise-en-scènes to subtly convey a natural and innocent exploration of same-sex teen love in contrast with objects and a world that make difficult this natural way of existing. In Jeremiah Zagar’s We Are Animals (2018)— a re-creation of Justin Torres’s sinewy and haunting queer coming-of-age novel— he at once has audiences reel in terror from the machista violence of the Nuyorican Paps (Raúl Castillo) and step into the sensual world of Jonah (Evan Rosado) as he observes and explores a world that seesaws between

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nightmarish and dreamy; floating camera work, Nick Zammuto’s masterful score, and frequent cutaways to hand-drawn animations (by New York street artist Mark Samsonovich) make for a film that beautifully articulates what it means to come of age as a gay Latinx teen. And, in the twenty-first century, we see others continue to complicate straight, machista masculinities. I think of Franc. Reyes’s complex characterization of Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo) in Empire (2002) as well as Ricardo de Montreuil’s Lowriders (2016) (see also Liberato et al.). As I mentioned at the outset of this introduction, all’s not well in films about Latinxs. There are many non-Latinx directors who continue to bring a laziness to their distillations and reconstructions of Latinx subjects and experiences. I think readily of James L. Brooks’s Spanglish (2005) that depicts the Latinx character, Flor Moreno (Spaniard Paz Vega), as a single mom and maid in a fairy tale of virtue and chastity leading to rewards. Depicted as a Latinx temptress to white patriarch John Clasky (Adam Sandler), Flor decides to not accept his romantic overtures and be the cause of the break in the Anglo marital bond. For this, she’s rewarded. Brooks ends the film with Flor’s daughter’s dream come true: she gets into Princeton. And, in Ben Affleck’s prohibitionset Live by Night (2016), Saldana’s role as Graciella amounts to little more than an exotic adornment to white protagonist Joe Coughlin (played by Affleck). Arguably more damaging are the many films that continue to be made that are set in/around the U.S./Mexico borderlands— and that drive deep into the U.S. mainstream imaginary the idea that Latinxs are either sociopathic killers or victims in need of white rescue. I think of Matthew Bonifacio’s insulting and insensitive Amexicano (2007) and the total criminalization of Mexicans in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000)— recall his use of a smoky, dirty, sepiahued filter to convey a violent and corrupt Mexico— as well as Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (and the follow-ups) and the already mentioned The Counselor (2013). And there’s a slew of white-savior-themed films such as Wayne Kramer’s 2009 Crossing Over and Marco Kreuzpaintner’s 2007 Trade. And while David Riker’s 2012 The Girl also follows a white-savior narrative, the bad guys are the U.S. migra; moreover, the protagonist, Ashley (Abbie Cornish), speaks fluent Spanish, is respectful of Mexican people, and her journey— in and through Latinx everyday life— is one that leads to a deeper understanding of her (Anglo) self. One way or another, these mainstream films put center stage the white hero (civilization) saving the brown victim (child, usually) from a brown threat (U.S./Mexico borderlands as barbaric) (for more on this, see de Tirado and also work by Frank Javier Garcia Berumen.) And while I will leave the lion’s share of the discussion and analysis of animation to Sara Veronica Hinojos, Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, John D. “Rio” Riofrio, and Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou in this volume, let me men-

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tion just a few observations. There’s a long tradition of mainstream animation that casts non-Latinx voice actors to play Latinx characters. As Hinojos analyzes in this volume, since the time of Mel Blanc voice-acting Speedy Gonzales, there has been a deep, long trend of non-Latinx voice actors playing animated Latinx characters. We see the same with other underrepresented groups like African Americans or the willy-nilly of an “ethnic” actor to play an “ethnic” part, as with casting Cheech Marin as Banzai in The Lion King (1994). The casting of Robin Williams as Ramon in Happy Feet 2 is a case in point. The casting of a non-Latinx in “brown voice” is more than problematic. I leave it to the scholars in this volume to discuss this in more detail, including how Latinx creators like Jorge Gutierrez (El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera [2007– 2008] and The Book of Life [2014]) offer important counternarratives to this mainstream impulse (see also Pimentel and Velázquez). The twenty-first century is seeing a great explosion of a Latinx ciné talent in short films, documentaries, music videos, and animations. Latinx directors are flourishing in these areas partly due to today’s relatively low production costs, the availability of Kickstarter and other fundraising platforms, and internet distribution sites. We’re also seeing these films appear in Latinx film festivals across the country, from New York and Chicago to Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, as well as Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego. When it comes to music videos, I think of Alex Rivera’s activist music videos such as “El Hielo” and “Wake Me Up” that at once entertain and wake audiences to the oppression and exploitation of undocumented peoples (see Aldama, “Toward”). I also think of Jorge “Jokes” Yanes, who makes music videos as well as short films that powerfully chronicle the lives of Latinx youth in Miami. There are short films like Adel L. Morales’s Since I Laid Eyes (2014) that features Gina Rodriguez (of Jane the Virgin fame) as Ilene, a sexually empowered Latina. And there are the innovative stories created by Alba Garcia with her stop-motion and Claymation short films. Latinx documentary films continue to bring Latinx stories to life— and in incredibly complex ways. I think of Emma Christopher’s They Are We that provides necessary linkages between African American and Latinx histories and cultures, gracefully connecting an Afrolatinx culture that has arisen as a result of shared colonial violence and syncretistic cultural admixtures resulting from the transatlantic slave trade. And there are those that focus on issues of representation. Paul Espinosa’s Kickstarter-funded Singing My Way to Freedom (2018) tells the life story of San Diego musician “Chunky” Sanchez and his important struggles within the Chicano civil rights movement. Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun’s Latinos Beyond Reel (2013) puts under the microscope long histories of misrepresentation (lazy, criminal, hypersexualized, buffoon) as well as white actors in brownface and white voice actors in

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“brown voice.” In my documentary Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (2018), I bring together academics, comics, scholars, artists, and content creators from across the Latinx community and its allies to examine the history of Latinx characters in comic books from Zorro to Speedy to White Tiger and Miles Morales as Spider-Man. I’ll leave the rest of the discussion of twenty-first-century Latinx documentaries to Debra A. Castillo, Monica Hanna, and Rebecca A. Sheehan included in this volume. Twenty-first-century social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and the like) have proved to be important vehicles for raising awareness of the misrepresentation and lack of representation of Latinxs in films. I’m thinking especially of the #MovementMondays and #OscarSoWhite movements. Gina Rodriguez’s #MovementMondays asked that a Latinx actor be recognized every Monday. And the #OscarSoWhite social media shaming campaign that surrounded the 2016 Academy Awards brought attention to the dismal fact that in its eighty-plus-year history, in the best acting and best supporting acting categories, for instance, only four Latinxs have won awards: José Ferrer for his role as Cyrano in Michael Gordon’s 1950 Cyrano de Bergerac, Rita Moreno for her role as Anita in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbin’s 1961 West Side Story, Mercedes J. Ruehl for her role as Anne Napolitano in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 The Fisher King, and Benicio del Toro for his role as Javier Rodriguez in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 Traffic. Along with actors of color raising awareness via social media platforms, there’s been a long history of Latinx media watchdogs and data-gathering institutions like the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism that have called attention to the egregious history of a paucity of Latinx representation. For instance, in an Annenberg report drawn from data gathered from September 1, 2014, to August 31, 2015, Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper revealed that of the 415 films and broadcast, cable, digital series examined, only 5.8 percent of roles included Latinx speaking characters, in contrast with 71.7 percent that were white, and this in spite of the fact that Latinxs make up 18-plus percent of the population. Notably, since these social media movements began, there have been some changes in Hollywood. For instance, the Academy Awards committee pledged to double female and people of color membership by 2020. And we’ve seen similar pledges by big Los Angeles casting agencies like Creative Artists Agency to actively add Latinx clients to their rosters. And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences backed a similar initiative: “From Latin America to Hollywood: Latino Film Culture in Los Angeles 1967– 2017” seeks to screen a series of Latinx films and Latinx filmmakers’ conversations as well as to develop a K– 12 curriculum that will teach students about the influences of Latinx and Latin American filmmakers.

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The Hispanic Media Coalition and the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS) and other watchdog groups along with Latinxs working in the film industry have pointed out that Latinxs more than any other ethnoracial group buy movie tickets. Universal Studios understood this well. Its 2013 marketing campaign for Fast and Furious 6 was heavily skewed toward Latinxs. And, of course, the film’s content itself embraces appealing themes (cars and family) to Latinx audiences. Recall the film’s ending, for instance, where it celebrates a Latinx setting (East L.A.) and family life: Dom Torres (Vin Diesel) hand in hand with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) sitting down to celebrate food, family, and friendship with a goateed, Irish American Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto (a tanned Jordana Brewster) holding their newborn, mixed-race baby. The movie took in more than $120 million in its opening weekend, with a third of its tickets purchased by Latinxs. And when studios have backed Spanish-language Latinx films like Instructions Not Included (2013), there’s been a huge return on every dollar invested. We saw the same profit margins with How to Be a Latin Lover (2018) that also sold most of its theater seats to Latinx filmgoers. If there’s ever an example of the power of Latinx filmgoers, it’s with the runaway success of the all-Latinx voice cast and themed Coco (2017), which pulled in over $800 million at the box office. To right wrongs, we are also seeing Latinxs creating Latinx-focused production and distribution companies. Not only has a filmmaker like Robert Rodriguez been extremely successful making films with his Trouble Maker Studios but also we see others like Zoe Saldana (with her two sisters, Mariel and Cisely) clearing spaces for Latinx actors and films. Saldana’s Cinestar Pictures has produced, for instance, a re-creation of Joy Castro’s novel Hell or High Water as well as a documentary about murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada. And there’s Mayimbe Media that also produces, acquires, and distributes original Latinx films, including a forthcoming Bourne-styled film set in barrio, Breakneck. And in this volume, Henry Puente discusses the importance of the forming of the distribution company Pantelion (see also Puente; Noriega, “Strategies”). As I wrap up this introduction, I would like to briefly situate the scholarship herein within the important contributions to the field that have already been made. We see in the chapters that follow a building on and complicating of the pioneering work of Charles Ramírez Berg, Gary Keller, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Ana López, and Chon A. Noriega. Indeed, we see in the chapters herein the thickening and complex interweaving of the scholarly threads. For instance, some scholars identify twenty-first-century Latinx ciné taxonomies. Implicitly they build on the seminal work of Keller with his eight characteristics that define Latinx ciné as well as Berg’s 1970s– 1990s Latinx periodization. Others in the volume directly and indirectly extend and complicate the

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transnational reach so carefully developed by López. Yet others focus on excavating an alternative Latinx ciné that implicitly extends the work of Noriega (see Shot in America). And we see chapters that implicitly and explicitly build on and extend the important work of Fregoso (also the author of the coda to this volume) that drew awareness to Hollywood’s pernicious stereotypes as well as a Latinx feminist cinema. The volume as a whole also seeks to engage a rich conversation with other of today’s scholarship on Latinx cinema, including Jorge J. Barrueto’s work on how Hollywood films convey Eurocentric and expansionist ideologies; Myra Mendible and Mary Beltrán’s focus on Latinas in film and visual culture and the problematics of a voyeuristic non-Latinx spectator; Christine List’s formulating of a trans-creative barrio aesthetic in Chicanx cinema; Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s concept of a Latina ciné-subjectivity that produces new ways of Latinx agency— of seeing and talking back to a history of misrepresentation; Laura Isabel Serna’s concept of a “cinelandia” and Desirée Garcia’s excavation of the musical as respective sites for the making of contact zones of transnational cultural crosspollination; the regionally located scholarship of Ignacio López-Calvo, A. Gabriel Meléndez, Jan-Christopher Horak, Lisa Jarvinen, and Colin Gunckel who variously seek to excavate specific sites (L.A. and San Antonio, for instance) where Latinx ciné traditions have provided important counternarratives to officially sanctioned, mainstream histories and narratives that have maligned Latinxs in the United States. That is, Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century seeks to extend the conversation and the interpretive terrain of these scholars and many others who are actively enriching our understanding of the making, disseminating, and consuming of twenty-first-century Latinx ciné.

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I divide the volume into seven parts. They include the following: In this first part to the volume, “I: The Question of Twenty-First-Century Latinx Ciné,” I include chapters that begin to give shape to a twenty-firstcentury era of Latinx cinema, especially distinguished in terms of its modes of production, distribution, and marketing. Importantly, this twenty-firstcentury era of Latinx cinema is also characterized by the creating of a capacious documentary film scene that gives voice to the manifold ways that Latinx peoples exist in the United States and Hispanophone Caribbean. To lay the groundwork for answering the question of what is twentyfirst-century Latinx ciné, I open this section with Debra A. Castillo’s “What Is Latinx in Today’s Documentary Filmscape?” Castillo grapples with how to identify a corpus of twenty-first-century Latinx documentaries: what are

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the conditions and ingredients necessary for their inclusion? Is it a given director’s birthplace or ancestral heritage? Is it content focused on U.S. Latinx themes, issues, and topics? Is it the ancestry of the actors? Castillo then provides an overview and analysis of several contemporary documentaries to show how they share common ground in that they thrive “in the intersections and crossroads of history, culture, and societal transformation, making some of its most crucial and uncomfortable contributions precisely at the point where ideas about a ‘national’ cinema do not fit well.” I follow with Henry Puente’s chapter, “Pantelion Films and the Latinx Spanish Language Film Marketplace.” Puente focuses on the formation in 2010 of Pantelion Films— the first major Latinx Hollywood studio and distributor of Spanish-language films. As Puente argues, with twenty-first-century demographics (Latinxs as the majority minority) and internet and social media platforms, Pantelion Films is very much a twenty-first-century phenomenon. And while it distributed films like Cesar Chavez and How to Be a Latin Lover, for Pantelion Films to have long-term success it needs to more fully embrace the making and distributing of films that will appeal to the massive growth of English-dominant, bicultural U.S. Latinx filmgoers. In “Reframing the Border in Contemporary Mexican American Documentary,” Monica Hanna chooses to focus on a much narrower bandwidth of Latinx documentary films— those that specifically aim to disrupt a mainstream narcofilm landscape that fans the Latinx threat narrative propagandistic flame: Latinxs as hordes of border-crossing, violent criminals. In her analysis of a group of Mexican-born, U.S.-based filmmakers such as Rodrigo Reyes (Purgatorio), Bernardo Ruiz (Kingdom of Shadows), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Carne y Arena), Hanna unpacks the storyworld content and technical shaping devices (including virtual reality) used to challenge a sensationalist narcofilm imaginary. Given that we are witnessing a veritable explosion of Latinx documentary films created in all variety of filmmaking technologies— from cell phones and GoPro-styled film cameras— along with internet and social media platforms for distributing the films, I end this section with Rebecca A. Sheehan’s chapter, “Serious Docu-Games: Empathy in Action at the Virtual Border.” Sheehan focuses on a transmedial iteration of the documentary: border docu-games. In her analysis of border docu-games such as Carne y Arena, Borders, The Migrant Trail, and Turista Fronterizo, Sheehan demonstrates how they construct immersive touch, sight, and sound environments that hold at bay any voyeuristic impulse, instead creating deep empathic connections between the player and the border-crossing subject’s corporeal and psychological experience of deterioration and death. For Sheehan, the immersive aesthetics of border docu-games create a third space— a borderland— that disrupts singular and restrictive binary oppositions between user/player versus character/avatar,

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non-Latinx versus Latinx, ultimately “redefining the agency and potential of the traditional spectator by granting her the ability, in part, to make the world in which she participates.” Part II, “Reframing and Center-Staging Latinx Nonfiction Flicks,” brings together chapters that consider feature films by and about Latinx biographical subjects. Here we see how such films at once tell otherwise occluded stories of important Latinx figures of social, political, and cultural change. These chapters show how such films and their extratextual packaging invite audiences (Latinx and non-Latinx) into their narratives as well as how they reify the Latinx experience. Samuel Saldívar’s chapter, “Digitized Identidad: Color, Body, and the Tension of Constructed Chicanx Heroes,” provides the tools for understanding how important the extratextual (or paratextual) material is for setting up and welcoming audiences into subject matter that might not otherwise grab their attention. For instance, we learn how the DVD cover as paratext to Latinx biopics is the first moment of contact for mainstream audiences used to seeing Anglos as the protagonists and agents of change. For Saldívar, the paratext proves a crucial element in bringing these and other audiences into the storyworlds where one encounters the political resistance work of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Oscar Zeta Acosta. I follow this with Nikolina Dobreva and Enrique García’s chapter, “Salsa on Film: (Corporate) Stars, Local Communities, and Global Audiences, from Our Latin Thing to El Cantante.” Dobreva and García analyze León Ichaso’s 2006 feature film El Cantante alongside Leon Gast’s 1972 documentary Our Latin Thing. Here we learn how even though a Latinx director like Ichaso chooses to focus on the Puerto Rican born salsero of the 1960s– 1970s, Héctor Lavoe, it doesn’t mean that he reconstructs Latinidad in a complex and interesting way. Indeed, Dobreva and García complicate the Latinx cinema landscape by showing how Ichaso’s film can and does work as an elaborate form of publicity to promote Marc Anthony (who plays Lavoe) as the new “singer of singers” along with the launch of Nuyorican Films, the production company of Jennifer Lopez (who plays the love interest, Puchi). And Dobreva and García demonstrate, too, how its catering to a non-Latinx audience— a simulacrum of a Puerto Rican Latinidad— riled up the salsa music and dance community. Ultimately, however, they argue that if the film gets non-Latinx audiences interested in learning more about Latinx culture and history, then there is some positive value to be had with viewing and teaching a film like El Cantante. In part III, “Toward a Borderland Ciné of Precarity and Situated Excess,” the chapters consider how twenty-first-century films by and about Latinxs reconstruct in complex or simplistic ways the sense of vulnerability and precariousness experienced by many Latinx peoples, especially border crossers and

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the undocumented. The chapters also analyze how the content (Latinx-actors inclusive) and form (Mexploitation, horror-thriller, and punk, for instance) in twenty-first-century Latinx ciné can and do create instances of filmic situated excess that disrupt racist narrative schemas. I begin the section with “On the Border Between Migration and Horror: Rendering Border Violence Strange in Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto” in which Lee Bebout and Clarissa Goldsmith analyze how Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto (2015) radically reframes and complicates the way the mainstream has represented the Latinx migrant as a nonassimilable social problem. They contextualize Desierto within a tradition of a humanizing Latinx ciné of migration—El Norte (1983), My Family (1995), and Under the Same Moon / La misma luna (2008). They then discuss and analyze how the use of the horror-thriller genre pushes Desierto into new migration ciné territory. For these scholars, Cuarón’s use of the horror-thriller storytelling envelope make “legible the elements of horror that have long existed in Latinx migration films” as well as foreground the violence “migrants face outside of film.” I follow with Desirée J. Garcia’s chapter, “Invisible Immigrants: A Better Life and the Cinematic Undocumented.” Here Garcia considers how Chris Weitz’s A Better Life (2011) shines a powerful light on the undocumented immigrants’ state of precariousness (liminality and invisibility). (Notably, Weitz is the grandson of Mexican film actress Lupita Tovar, star of Universal Studios’ Spanish talkies.) Garcia shows how Weitz’s careful crafting of this film that skirts the art house with mainstream production values powerfully conveys the complex psychology of undocumented Latinxs. Garcia ends by reminding us how important these films are and yet how underserved and under-recognized they continue to be within the mainstream film industry. In the chapter “Ex-Voto #7: Print Culture and the Creation of an Alternative Latinidad in the Work of Jim Mendiola,” Ariana Ruiz locates her Latinx ciné sites of strategic excess in the Texas set, punk-rock films of Jim Mendiola. His use of a punk aesthetic and worldview in Pretty Vacant (1996) as well as his 2003 Speeder Kills provides an “alternate San Antonio time-space” that troubles an otherwise homogenous (Anglo) Texas imaginary that has historically maligned Latinx youth and Latinx communities. In “The Good, Bad, and the Messy: Michael Peña’s Browning of the TwentyFirst-Century Silver Screen,” Carlos Gabriel Kelly and I focus our analytical sights on the actor Michael Peña— a twenty-first-century Latinx actor. We identify instances in his film career where he performs what we call a “strategic palomazo”— his excessive inhabiting of stereotypes to call attention and undo the stereotypes of the criminal, buffoon, or exotic Other. I end this section with Juan J. Alonzo’s chapter, “Ethnic Avengers: Machete, Django, and the Uncertain Futures of Race and Immigration in the United States,” in which he considers the notion of a future-seeing cinema that reconstructs the

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social and political conditions that create present-day states of precarity visà-vis undocumented Latinxs. For Alonzo, Robert Rodriguez’s 2010 film Machete presages today’s Trump-era white nationalism and Latinx scapegoating. For this reason, Alonzo identifies Machete as a Latinx-futurist social text as well as an “avenger film,” that, like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), articulates an excessive cinematic imaginary that showcases different forms of political resistance and revolution. Part IV, “Latinx Futurities,” gathers scholarship that focuses on twentyfirst-century films that are shaping a Latinx sci-fi ciné. Not surprisingly, most of the chapters here focus on the work of Alex Rivera, the most active shaper of Latinx sci-fi ciné from feature and short-length films to music video and transmedial video/website creations. I begin this section with Camilla Fojas’s chapter, “Border Securities, Drone Cultures, and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Fojas begins by situating Alex Rivera’s sci-fi work within a mainstream futuristic imaginary (qua HBO’s Westworld) that projects images of Latinxs frozen in a past, out of control and in need of surveillance, and as necessary victims of a forward-propelling capitalism. She analyzes the cultural and political significance of Alex Rivera’s transmedial drone installations: Memorial over General Atomics and LowDrone (which amalgamates bones with lowrider car and surveillance drone tech). And she reveals how in Sleep Dealer, Rivera’s use of drones is more than a plot point; it indicates how the U.S. and global capitalism generally have created a state of permanent war. Moreover, Rivera’s sci-fi transmedial works show how global capitalism and its tech appendages have intensified violence against ethnoracial and gendered others in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In “Techno/Memo: The Politics of Cultural Memory in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer,” J. V. Miranda presents a more singular and sustained analysis of this film. He describes how Rivera articulates a new Latinx subjectivity— one where technology, memory, and narrative fuse to materialize a “politics of cultural memory.” Miranda demonstrates how Rivera’s building of technology into the Sleep Dealer storyworld at once identifies its destructive effects (maquiladora-structured work conditions) and how it can be used by Latinx subjects to create repositories of cultural memory in the face of violent expropriation of lands and exploitation. For Miranda, then, Rivera’s filmic construction of a “politics of cultural memory” reminds viewers that Latinx subjects can and do use technology as a source of empowerment. Jennifer  M. Lozano’s chapter, “Digital Rasquachismo: Alex Rivera’s Multimedia Storytelling, Humor, and Transborder Latinx Futurity,” also focuses on the creation, promotion, and distribution of Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. However, her focus is less on the use of drone and memory technology (destructive and progressive) and more on Rivera’s creating of a multimedia, multiplatformed and distributed, future-oriented “digital

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rasquachismo” to “mock established genres, styles, and conventions” and to trouble mainstream primitivist representations of Latinxs. Importantly, Lozano reminds us that while Rivera’s digital rasquachismo offers a complex view of Latinx future-states, it continues to project a future of traditional gender oppositions, subordinating Latinx women while protagonizing the Latinx male as the agent of change. I end this section with Matthew David Goodwin’s chapter, “Extra Terrestres and the Politics of Scientific Realism.” I do so to remind the world that there’s more to Latinx futurities than the work of Alex Rivera. Indeed, Goodwin analyzes the Puerto Rican sci-fi film Extra Terrestres (2017) within and against a U.S. South American science fiction film tradition. However, rather than create a film that reacts to these traditions, Goodwin demonstrates how Extra Terrestres extends a long tradition of Puerto Rico–based sci-fi films as well as anchors itself in the specifics of Puerto Rico geography, politics, and culture— and with a pan-Latinidad gesture toward Cuba. Part V, “Superheroic Latinxs,” focuses on how mainstream superhero films can be an important cinematic venue for articulating powerfully resistant, complex Latinx subjects. The two chapters that make up this section focus on Marvel Studio– produced Logan (2017). In “Laura Kinney as X-treme Niña: Monstrosity and Citizenship in Marvel’s Logan,” Danielle Alexis Orozco analyzes how film director James Mangold reconfigures the comic book mutant character Laura. Indeed, as Orozco demonstrates, it is not Hugh Jackman as Wolverine who takes center stage but rather the fleshing out of a complex Spanish-speaking borderland subject who does. For Orozco, Laura’s journey is less about her coming into superhero powers and more about her learning to embrace her Latinx self as a hybrid borderland subject made from and empowered by an Anzaldúan-wound time-space. Jorge Santos’s chapter, “Latinx-Men: Logan’s Undocumented Voices Speak,” focuses on how Mangold’s Logan shapes migration experiences and undocumented identities. His analysis of Laura’s strategic use of silence and voice as an undocumented Latinx subject forced to cross borders, from Mexico to the United States and finally into Canada. In the humanizing of Laura and her journey, Santos identifies how Logan disrupts mainstream narratives that depict Latinx undocumented, border-crossing subjects as criminals or hapless victims. Part VI, “Pixelated Browns,” explores the different ways that Latinx subjectivities have been constructed in twenty-first-century animation. These include negative (brown-voice minstrelsy) and positive (empowered Latinx characters) representations. In “Very ¡MACHO! Sonic Legacies of Mexican Animated Villains,” Sara Veronica Hinojos analyzes how in the Despicable Me films we continue to see the reproduction of negative Latinx stereotypes. Hinojos’s analysis of Benjamin Bratt’s voice acting along with the

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characterization of Eduardo Perez/El Macho as a twenty-first-century amalgam of Speedy Gonzales and Frito Bandito continue to cement in non-Latinx filmgoers’ minds Latinxs as bumbling, inarticulate, and heavily accented bad guys. In contrast, we see in Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez’s chapter, “The Best Mexican Is a (Day of the) Dead Mexican: Representing Mexicanness in U.S. Animated Films,” how The Book of Life and Coco can and do use the animation film format to construct complex represents of Latinx subjects and experiences. And while Martín-Rodríguez unpacks just how these Day of the Dead films present nuanced portrayals of Latinidad in voice and characterization, he notes how they do reproduce bandido and Latin lover types as well as represent Latinidad as “always forever foreign.” John D. “Rio” Riofrio’s chapter, “(Re)Animating the Dead: Memory, Music, and Divine Justice in Coco,” digs deeper into the film to show how it sidesteps the usual Disneyesque platitudes about family to present a narrative that conveys more complex understandings of familia in Latinx culture. I end this section with Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou’s analysis of Guillermo del Toro’s Troll Hunters. In this chapter, Aguirre Darancou identifies how del Toro’s creation of a multiplatform experience (comics, YA novel, encyclopedia, and animation) engages and immerses all variety of audiences in a Latinx-youth-identified space that subordinates the erstwhile hetero-masculinist tropes and schemas. For Aguirre Darancou, del Toro’s choice to make Claire the protagonist and with an infectious Latinidad (others of her team like Jim learn Spanish fluently) shows just how liberating animation can be as a narrative form to open eyes to “alternative sociabilities.” I close the volume with part VII, “Twenty-First-Century Engenderings of Latinx Ciné.” The scholarship in this section explores the ways that some films today by and about Latinxs reconstruct critical femininities and masculinities. The section begins with Valentina Montero-Román’s chapter, “Latinas in Biographical Films: Analyzing the Cultivation of a Genealogy of Latina Feministas in the United States.” While Montero-Román does analyze a film from the late 1990s, Gregory Nava’s 1997 Selena, she does so as a film that launches an important series of films that recover historically significant, Latinx feminist icons. Montero-Román analyzes how these films articulate a progressive Latina feminism that puts in the limelight Latina creators of culture and shapers of history, providing audiences with a much richer and complex understanding of a Latinidad feminista. In “Impossible Mission: The Queer Geographies of Peter Bratt’s La Mission,” Richard T. Rodríguez situates Peter Bratt’s 2009 film La Mission within the Mission and Castro districts of San Francisco to reflect on and analyze its construction of Latinidad and Latinx queer subjectivities. Rodríguez considers the film to be a “crucial cultural text” that pulls back the curtains on the destructive homophobia within

Latinx communities. For Rodríguez, however, Bratt’s foregrounding of gang violence, while not uncommon in the Mission during the era in which the story is set, “eclipses the multilayered violence faced by queer youth of color also in the same neighborhood.” That is, La Mission does much to reveal the destructive machista ways that inform Latinx families. However, that it emphasizes gang violence diminishes its resistant queer Latinx potentiality. I end this section and the volume as a whole with Mauricio Espinoza’s chapter, “Not-So-Great Expectations: Challenging Gender/Ethnic Roles and Achievement in Latinx Sports Films.” Espinoza analyzes how films by and about Latinx athletes both clear new spaces for Latinx gendered identities and continue to rigidly contain gendered experiences and identities. For instance, in his analysis of Girlfight (2000), he considers how director Karyn Kusama uses specific film techniques of lighting and camera angle to convey the empowerment of a Latina, Diana Guzman (played by Michelle Rodriguez), who decides not to follow the rigid gender roles violently enforced by a machista father. Kusama uses filmmaking techniques to convey her coming into a Latinx engendered, decolonized state of existence. And in Espinoza’s analysis of Niki Caro’s historical drama McFarland, USA (2015), he demonstrates how mainstream film continues to depict young Latinx males as viable subjects only if they abide by the rules of the U.S. masculinist, assimilationist ideological game.

Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez. University of Texas Press, 2014. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. University of Arizona Press, 2017. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Toward a Transfrontera-LatinX Aesthetic: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera.” Latino Studies, vol. 15, no. 50, 2017, pp. 373– 80. Aldama, Frederick Luis, and Christopher González. Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV. University of Arizona Press, 2019. Barrueto, Jorge J. The Hispanic Image in Hollywood: A Postcolonial Approach. Peter Lang, 2014. Beltrán, Mary. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. University of Illinois Press, 2009. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. University of Texas Press, 2002. Berumen, Frank Javier Garcia. Brown Celluloid: Latino/a Film Icons and Images in the Hollywood Film Industry. Vantage Press, 2003. Castro, Joy. Hell or High Water. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012. de Tirado, Heidi Denzel. “The Limes Mexicanicus or the ‘Barbarians at the Gate’: The Depiction of ‘Southern Invaders’ in American Film of the Twenty-First Century.” Thamyris/Intersecting, vol. 29, 2015, pp. 285– 308. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. García-Crespo, Naida. “Caribbean Transnational Films and National Culture, or How Puerto Rican or Dominican Can You Be in ‘Nueba Yol’?” Centro Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 146– 75. Garcia, Desirée J. The Migration of Musical film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

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References

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Gunckel, Colin. Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II. Rutgers University Press, 2015. Hernandez, Ellie. “Cultura Joteria: The Ins and Outs of Latino/a Popular Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Pop Culture, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2016, pp. 291– 300. Horak, Jan-Christopher, Lisa Jarvinen, and Colin Gunckel, editors. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles: Origins to 1960. Rutgers University Press, 2019. Keller, Gary. Chicano Cinema: Research, Reviews, and Resources. Bilingual Review Press, 1985. Liberato, Ana S. Q., et al. “Latinidad and Masculinidad in Hollywood Scripts.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 32, no. 6, 2009, pp. 948– 66. List, Christine. Chicano Images: Refiguring Ethnicity in Mainstream Film. Routledge, 2016. López, Ana. Hollywood, Nuestra América y Los Latinos. Havana, Ediciones Unión, 2012. López-Calvo, Ignacio. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety. University of Arizona Press, 2011. Meléndez, A. Gabriel. Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands. Rutgers University Press, 2013. Mendible, Myra. From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture. University of Texas Press, 2007. Noriega, Chon A. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Noriega, Chon A. “Strategies for Increasing Latinos’ Media Access.” Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, vol. 17, 2004, pp. 105– 9. Pimentel, Octavio, and Paul Velázquez. “Shrek 2: An Appraisal of Mainstream Animation’s Influence on Identity.” Journal of Latinos and Education, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5– 21. Puente, Henry. The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films. Peter Lang Publishing, 2011. Serna, Laura Isabel. Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. Duke University Press, 2014. Smith, Stacy L., March Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper. “Inclusion or Invisibility? Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment.” February 2016. Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative. Annenberg Foundation/USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication. annenberg .usc.edu/sites/default/files/2017/04/07/MDSCI_CARD_Report_FINAL _Exec_Summary.pdf. Accessed Mar. 6, 2019. Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. “Interrogating the Look of the Gaze: Theorizing a Latina Cinesubjectivity.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 323– 45.

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Filmography

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Alita: Battle Angel. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, 20th Century Fox, 2019. American Me. Directed by Edward James Olmos, MCA Universal, 1992. Amexicano. Directed by Matthew Bonifacio, Xenon Pictures, 2007. Ant-Man. Directed by Peyton Reed, Marvel Studios, 2015. Ant-Man and the Wasp. Directed by Peyton Reed, Marvel Studios, 2018. Avatar. Directed by James Cameron, Lightstorm Entertainment, 2009. Baby Driver. Directed by Edgar Wright, Media Rights Capital, 2017. Bad Teacher. Directed by Jake Kasdan, Sony Pictures, 2011. A Better Life. Directed by Chris Weitz, Summit Entertainment, 2011. The Book of Life. Directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez, Reel FX Creative Studios, 2014. Bread and Roses. Directed by Ken Loach, Lion’s Gate, 2001. Carne y Arena. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Legendary Pictures, 2017. Center Stage. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Columbia Pictures, 2000. Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2015. Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich, Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Colombiana. Directed by Olivier Megaton, EuropaCorp, 2011. The Counselor. Directed by Ridley Scott, Scott Free Productions, 2013. Crossing Over. Directed by Wayne Kramer, Weinstein Company, 2009. Cyrano de Bergerac. Directed by Michael Gordon, VCI, 1950.

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Desierto. Directed by Jonás Cuarón, Itaca Films, 2015. Despicable Me 2. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, Universal Pictures, 2013. Después del terremoto/After the Earthquake. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions, 1979. Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, A Band Apart, 2012. East Los High. Created by Kathleen Bedoya and Carlos Portugal, Wise Entertainment, 2013– 18. El Cantante. Directed by León Ichaso, Picturehouse, 2007. El Mariachi. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Sony Pictures, 1993. El Norte. Directed by Gregory Nava, Criterion Collection, 1983. El Super. Directed by León Ichaso, Max Mambru Films, 1979. El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. Created by Jorge R. Gutiérrez and Sandra Equihua, Mexopolis, 2007– 8. Empire. Directed by Franc. Reyes, Arenas Entertainment, 2002. Extra Terrestres. Directed by Carla Cavina, Pulsar Films, 2017. Fantastic Four. Directed by Tim Story, Constantin Film, 2005. Fast and Furious 6. Directed by Justin Lin, Universal Pictures, 2013. From Dusk Till Dawn. Created by Robert Rodriguez, FactoryMade Ventures/Miramax/Rodriguez International Pictures, 2014– 16. The Girl. Directed by David Riker, Journeyman Productions, 2012. Girlfight. Directed by Karyn Kusama, Screen Gems, 2000. Guardians of the Galaxy. Directed by James Gunn, Marvel Studios, 2014. Happy Feet 2. Directed by George Miller, Village Roadshow Productions, 2011. How to Be a Latin Lover. Directed by Ken Marino, Pantelion Films, 2017. I Am Joaquin. Directed by Luis Valdez, El Teatro Campesino, 1969. I Like It Like That. Directed by Darnell Martin, Sony Pictures, 1994. Instructions Not Included. Directed by Eugenio Derbez, Alebrije Cine y Video, 2013. It’s a Disaster. Directed by Todd Berger, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2012. Kids. Directed by Larry Clark, Independent Pictures, 1995. Kingdom of Shadows. Directed by Bernardo Ruiz, Participant Media, 2015. La Mission. Directed by Peter Bratt, Screen Media Ventures, 2009. Latinos Beyond Reel. Directed by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun, Media Education Foundation, 2013. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Directed by Daniel Garee, DG Cine, 2018. The Lion King. Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Mikoff, Walt Disney Pictures, 1994. Live by Night. Directed by Ben Affleck, RatPac, Dune, 2016. Logan. Directed by James Mangold, Marvel Entertainment, 2017. Lowriders. Directed by Ricardo de Montreuil, BH Tilt, 2017. Machete. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Troublemaker Studios, 2010. Machete Kills. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Quick Draw/Troublemaker Studios, 2013. The Mask. Directed by Charles Russell, New Line Productions, 1994. McFarland, USA. Directed by Niki Caro, Walt Disney Pictures, 2015. Memories of a Penitent Heart. Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, Passion River Films, 2015. Men in Black 2. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Columbia Pictures, 2002. Mi Vida Loca / My Crazy Life. Directed by Allison Anders, Sony Pictures, 1994. My Family. Directed by Gregory Nava, New Line Home Entertainment, 1995. Nina. Directed by Cynthia Mort, Ealing Studios, 2016. Nueba Yol. Directed by Ángel Muñiz, Kit Parker Films and D’Pelicula, 1995. Our Latin Thing. Directed by Leon Gast, Fania Records, 1972. Paranoid. Directed by John Duigan, Portman Entertainment, 2000. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. Directed by Christopher B. Landon, Blumhouse Productions, 2014. Piñero. Directed by León Ichaso, Miramax, 2001. Pretty Vacant. Directed by Jim Mendiola, Mero Pictures, 1996. Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border. Directed by Rodrigo Reyes, Alive Mind, 2015. Raising Victor Vargas. Directed by Peter Sollett, Fireworks Pictures, 2002. Real Women Have Curves. Directed by Patricia Cardosa, HBO Films, 2002. The Rundown. Directed by Peter Berg, Strike Entertainment, 2003.

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Seguin. Directed by Jesús Treviño, La Historia Productions, 1981. Selena. Directed by Gregory Nava, Q-Productions, 1997. Sicario. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Black Label Media, 2015. Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Directed by Stefano Sollima, Black Label Media, 2018. Sin City. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Troublemaker Studios, 2005. Sin Nombre. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, Canana Films, 2009. Since I Laid Eyes. Directed by Adel L. Morales, Hollyhood Productions, 2014. Singing My Way to Freedom. Directed by Paul Espinosa, Espinosa Productions, 2018. Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera, Maya Entertainment, 2008. Spanglish. Directed by James L. Brooks, Gracie Films, 2005. Speeder Kills. Directed by Jim Mendiola, BadAss Pictures, 2003. Suicide Squad. Directed by David Ayer, DC Entertainment, 2016. There’s Something About Mary. Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 20th Century Fox, 1998. They Are We. Directed by Emma Christopher, Icarus Films, 2013. Trade. Directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner, VIP Medienfonds 4, 2007. Traffic. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Bedford Falls, 2000. Transformers: The Last Knight. Directed by Michael Bay, Hasbro, 2017. Under the Same Moon / La misma luna. Directed by Patricia Riggen, Weinstein Company, 2008. A Walk in the Clouds. Directed by Alfonso Arau, 20th Century Fox, 1995. War of the Planet of the Apes. Directed by Matt Reeves, Chernin Entertainment, 2017. We Are Animals. Directed by Jeremiah Zagar, Cinereach, 2018. X-Men: Apocalypse. Directed by Bryan Singer, Marvel Entertainment, 2016.

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PART I The Question of Twenty-First-Century Latinx Ciné

Chapter 1

WHAT IS LATINX IN TODAY’S DOCUMENTARY FILMSCAPE? Debra A. Castillo

In the early twenty-first century, we seem to be in a golden age of film documentaries, parallel in some ways to the often touted golden age of memoir in published books that scholars have been following and puzzling over since the mid-1990s. In both cases, we might point to a hunger for story, and especially for a connection with individuals who are real rather than fictional creations. In both cases, we can talk about the experiments in formal organization that lead to the creation of unclassifiable and deeply satisfying constructions. Of course, books and films are very different genres, with deeply divergent start-up requirements, although the internet has made for a convergent distribution platform (anyone can start up a blog or self-publish on Amazon). One technical reason for the explosion of documentary film in particular is that cameras have become cheap and computer editing programs pervasive. Even more: almost anyone can shoot and edit on their cell phones and post on YouTube or create webcasts. Still, even with the content boom on YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, and Amazon, full-length films are hard to make and sell. Top-notch films generally require expensive equipment, often with transnational funding and large crews. While the director’s hand is generally very strongly felt in shaping the narrative in ways uncommon to most fiction film, at the high end, they are necessarily the most collaborative of genres. Good documentaries often involve travel and extensive background research; it goes without saying that they also require a good story, good writer, good camera and sound equipment, and high degree of skill at editing. And then there is the question of where and how to distribute in order to earn back the cost of the film, an economic constraint on further production that the online networks have not fully resolved. These challenges help explain why so many of the directors I’ll be discussing below have only made one film to date or work extensively with public broadcast television series. And there is at least one case— which I know about from personal conversations with the filmmaker— of an 25

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important film based on years of collaboration with the people portrayed that the filmmaker does not allow to enter general distribution and monitors very closely who sees it and in what conditions, since all the people portrayed are vulnerable members of their communities (I’m being intentionally vague so as to respect the filmmaker’s desire to avoid publicity). These basic constraints help us understand why documentaries are much less standardized in format than commercial feature films, which tend to have a basic three-act structure and have evolved to an industry-accepted standard ninety-minute run time. Documentaries are immensely variable: there are short- and medium-length films aimed at festival circuits; an archive of recirculated in-depth coverage of events produced by TV news; a growing number of Public Broadcasting System (PBS) deep dives into history; lots of amateur Vimeo material, some of it memoir-like, by very talented folks; a significant body of Facebook Live and YouTube video intended for sharing with audiences who do not have high levels of literacy in any language; and some full-length films. The documentary field in general has been shaped and dominated in the USA in recent years by a few highly recognizable figures like Michael Moore, who has been able to channel his political activism into a dozen films that by documentary standards can be considered extraordinarily successful (i.e., make, rather than lose, money). More importantly, unlike the vast majority of documentaries, Moore’s films have been able to achieve wide release and become part of a public conversation in an unusual way. This is partly because he has a body of work we can reference, rather than a single film, however powerful, however quirky, however important. A Michael Moore film is a known, bankable quality— he is, as much as Jean-Luc Godard, what film studies calls an auteur; that is, a director who shapes the collaborative, creative work of film so completely that we can identify an individual style, as we would for the author of a novel. Few documentarians come close to having a style as clear and recognizable as Moore’s, but then, few have made so many films. In this chapter I discuss only two: Eduardo Montes-Bradley, the Argentine-born documentarian with an eye-poppingly extensive body of work, and Lourdes Portillo, a Mexican-born and Chicana-identified filmmaker (as she says in her official biography on her website) who has worked most often with short and medium-length films, while also producing a pair of feature-length ones. Both of these filmmakers, by the way, focus almost entirely on Latin America and not U.S.-based Latinx stories. What is Latinx documentary? To borrow from the Gettysburg Address: is it by Latinx? about Latinx? for Latinx? I notice when I poke around helpful clearinghouse articles and blogs that in quite a few of the sites promoting Latinx documentary, a majority of the filmmakers and films cited are Latin

What Is Lat i nx i n Today ’s Doc u m e n ta r y F ilm s c a p e ?

American— that is, these are films presumably of interest to Latinx folks but not directly about or by them. So often on these websites the best “Latinx” documentaries are set in and talk about Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, or Chile— anywhere and anyone except U.S. Latinxs. They may be directed by filmmakers like Raúl de la Fuente (Spain), María José Cuevas (Mexico), or the great Patricio Guzmán (Chile), one of the few documentary filmmakers from this hemisphere whose name recognition and status approaches that of someone like Michael Moore. There is also a very significant group of films by U.S. allies of Latinx people rather than Latinx folks themselves, films where Latinx faces and stories dominate the screen but the filmmaker is not ethnically Latinx, and all the writing, shooting, and editing decisions are in non-Latinx hands. Thus, for instance, in Manuel Betancourt’s “Netflixeando: 15 Latino Documentaries You Should Stream on Netflix,” of the fifteen documentaries, two are by Latinx directors, and five others are on Latinx topics or about Latinxs. The other eight are from, by, and about Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. Carolina Moreno’s “11 Documentaries About Immigrants Everyone Should Watch Right Now” also includes two with Latinx directors; seven of these films speak to experiences of people in the USA, while the other four address the serious issue of the dangers and difficulties of the migrant route through Mexico. Nina Concepción’s “15 Latino Directors Challenging Hollywood’s Huge Diversity Problem” offers two directors who made full-length documentaries; in contrast, another is an up-and-coming coming Latino filmmaker from NYC who has one student short to his name (it is not about Latinxs). This list is rounded out with five other U.S. Latinx filmmakers of fiction films and seven directors who are mostly Mexican and Argentine. To illuminate the definitional challenge, let’s step outside of documentary for a moment and take the example of fiction filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. Among his best-known works, we might cite Sólo con tu pareja (1991), winner of four Ariel awards; the critically acclaimed Y tu mamá también (2001); the British fantasy film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004; often called the film that saved the Harry Potter franchise); and the science fiction thriller Gravity (2013), which made him the first Mexican director to win an Oscar for Best Director (this, alongside six other Academy Awards). With the exception of his role in saving Harry Potter, these films are auteur cinema in its strictest definition, with Cuarón playing major roles as writer, director, producer, and editor. Yet few of us, unless we wanted to be tendentious, would call Gravity a Mexican film. Likewise, it would be hard to argue that Harry Potter’s excellence in Azkaban is because it is fundamentally Mexican in conception, while the mediocrity of the rest of the series derives from its recalcitrant Britishness.

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Film scholars could certainly identify a Cuarón style (as they do for the other two of the so-called Mexican Three Amigos: Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro), but film experts do not attribute that style to some essential residue of ethnicity, Cuarón’s Mexicanness. Cuarón is seen as an individual, an auteur filmmaker, a Mexican director— but only some of his films, the ones made in Mexico, are generally thought of as Mexican films. Analogously, with respect to Latinx documentary, we would then have to argue that just because a filmmaker is Latinx by ethnicity, it does not necessarily mean that the films made by that person are Latinx films. In the Cuarón rule, content has an enormous influence and is more important than the director’s background. By way of contrast we might ask then if the multiple award– winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is an Indian movie. Most people say no— despite the script being adapted from an Indian novel by Vikas Swarup and the film’s featuring of Indian actors, score, and location— because the director (Danny Boyle) is British. Certainly, the historic colonial relations between the British Empire and India have some role in our perceptions, but exploration of that tangle would require a far longer discussion, and one that would be a tangent here. To take the lesson of Slumdog in documentary terms: a Latinx focus and topic does not make a Latinx film if the creative hand at the controls comes from a different national or ethnic background. That is, in the Boyle rule, content does not matter if the director is not Latinx. In this respect, based on directorial creative control and chosen content, how we define Latinx documentary comes down to a question of provenance, an alchemy of identity and topic and audience perception that is constantly shifting and highly subjective. Are we using the Cuarón rule? Or the Boyle one? Or something else? One complicating factor in documentaries, as contrasted with fiction-based auteur cinema, is that the people on-screen are generally not speaking to a script, even if a directorial vision chooses the material and shapes the narrative. Thus, people being filmed in documentaries often have a degree of agency quite unlike that of actors in fiction films, since they are narrating their own lives and experiences, and they can become true collaborators on the film— in a way perhaps akin to memoirs shaped by a ghostwriter. This agency can extend to the producer as well. A few labor-related organizations, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the United Farm Workers, have commissioned films from non-Latinx ally filmmakers for specific organizational purposes. There are other interesting controversies and minefields specific to this documentary context. One of the most highly regarded recent documentaries, Mala Mala (2014, directed by Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles), deals with the stories of transgender individuals in Puerto Rico. Sickles lives in New

York and Paris; Santini is from San Juan and moved to New York when he started college. Mala Mala, with its theme and Santini’s importance as creative shaper of the story, seems to pass both the Cuarón and the Boyle tests. It does have a complex production history. Like many recent projects, this one was partly funded through a Kickstarter campaign, though— like most documentaries— production was financed through a patchwork of support including their own production company, along with Killer Films (Christine Vachon) and Moxie Pictures (Danny Levinson) before its acquisition by Strand Releasing for North America. For many viewers, however, while the stories told in this film offer important insights into a diverse humanity, told from a sensitive, insider perspective, the colonial status of Puerto Rico with respect to the United States complicates any easy discussion of any works from that country, including Mala Mala, as somehow fitting into a category of Latinx documentary, since many Puerto Ricans reject assumptions about a U.S. national identity. So, if we take a very conservative perspective, who are some of the key filmmakers who have made documentaries that hit all three of the marks? That is, the film has a Latinx (co)director, Latinx topic, and engages a Latinx target audience. My list follows, with a few preliminary provisos. Many of these documentary directors have made one film, or if they have been involved in several, it is likely to be a part of a made-for-television series, often for PBS, rather than an independent cinema project (as is case with the

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Figure 1.1 Screen grab: Mala Mala (2014).

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prolific John Valadez). Few of these films reach the ninety-minute standard feature length. Most of the people on this list are independent filmmakers, but two of them, Cecelia Aldarondo and John Valadez— and unlike most of the people we think of as documentary filmmakers— are based in academia. While it would be difficult (in my case, impossible) to draw any conclusions about Latinx documentary based on this very diverse list, for what it’s worth, these are all awesome Latinx directors from a wide range of backgrounds and countries of ancestry who made documentary films with U.S. Latinx content, of particular interest to Latinx audiences: • •

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Magdalena Albizu (Dominican Republic): Negrita (2014), a short, autobiographical film released on Vimeo. Cecilia Aldarondo (Puerto Rico): Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016), focusing on the story of her uncle who died from complications of AIDS and her search to understand his story and that of his surviving partner. Luis Argueta (Guatemala), three linked short- and medium-length documentaries in his Immigration Trilogy, all set in, around, and about people from Postville, Iowa: abUSed: The Postville Raid (2012), Abrazos (2014), and The U Turn (2017). The first focuses on the 2008 immigration raid of a meat processing plant (the largest workplace raid to that date in U.S. history). The second tells of a human rights group that made possible the reunions of U.S.-born children with their families in Guatemala, and the most recent film focuses how workers broke the silence about labor abuses at the meatpacking plant with the help of U visas (originally created for purposes of aiding prosecution under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act) that allowed them to stay in the country and testify. Lexi Hiland (Colombia): La lotería de la vida (full-length film, in postproduction). Originally a Kickstarter-supported short, the film talks about her adoption to the USA after being abandoned as a baby in a Colombian hospital and retraces her steps to her birthplace. Cristina Ibarra (Mexican American): Las Marthas (2014). Who knew Laredo Latinas were at the forefront of the celebrations of George Washington’s birthday? In this border city, the celebration has been extended to a month of reenactments and bicultural celebrations, some of them taking place in the Mexican sister city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border. Ibarra focuses on two members of the Society of Martha Washington, their preparations for

•

• •

• •

the celebrations, and their pull-out-all-the-stops historical gowns displayed with great panache at the Colonial Ball. Eduardo Lopez (El Salvador), co-director with Peter Getzels, fulllength film: Harvest of Empire (2012), based on Juan González’s well-known 2000 book of the same title, a sweeping indictment of U.S. policy in Latin America and its relationship to Latinx experience. Miguel Picker (Chile), co-director with Chyng Sun: Latinos Beyond Reel (2013), on how media stereotypes shape our understanding of Latinx lives and experiences. Mathew Ramirez Warren, a native New Yorker and first-time director with a background in journalism, in 2014 released his full-length film on the history of boogaloo, We Like It Like That. This film also began with a Kickstarter campaign and later got National Endowment for the Arts support. It is a treasure-house of archival material, interviews, music, and images from the 1960s, extending until the advent of salsa in the 1970s and tracking boogaloo’s more recent revival in the new millennium. Alex Rivera (Peru): The Sixth Section (2003), on a Newburgh, New York, hometown organization and its activities in support of their originating community, Boquerón, Puebla, Mexico. John Valadez: a very prolific filmmaker and producer, some of his works as a director include The Head of Joaquin Murrieta (2016), The Longoria Affair (2010), The Last Conquistador (with Cristina Ibarra, 2008), and The Chicano Wave (2009). He is also an active

What Is Lat i nx i n Today ’s Doc u m e n ta r y F ilm s c a p e ?

Figure 1.2 Screen grab: The U Turn (2017).

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director and producer of episodes of documentary series such as “The Divide” (2003) from Matters of Race; “Prejudice and Pride (1965– 1980)” and “War and Peace (1942– 1954),” both from Latino Americans (2013); a writer for Beyond Brown (2004); and a collaborator on Héctor Galán’s six-part series Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture (2004), all for public television.

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I’d argue, too, that there is a place for hybrids like Puerto Rican Jennica Carmona’s Millie and the Lords (2015), given discussions with the filmmaker about how the film highlights testimony from members of the Young Lords as well as contextualizing history of their activities in the 1960s and 1970s. Lightly fictionalized, Millie tells the story of Milagros Baez, a young, workingclass, under-confident Puerto Rican woman whose life is changed for the better when she begins to learn about the Young Lords Party and her rich Puerto Rican history. On the far edge of hybridity, I would think about, but exclude, docudrama-looking films about Latinxs like Ramin Bahrani’s 2007 Chop Shop. Another way of thinking about Latinx documentary is through typical thematic groupings. Latinx directors are well represented in the major projects that focus on remediating the historical record in the USA (e.g., men like Lopez, Valadez, Picker). In this respect, while there are very important independent projects, they are the exception rather than the rule for deep-dive historical studies. Strikingly, almost all of the Latinx historical documentaries noted on my list above, and many of the culturally related ones as well, found production support and distribution through PBS as episodes framed within a larger series structure on that television channel. This is absolutely crucial, since it reminds us of the precarity of much of Latinx documentary work, as well as its positioning within wider understandings of U.S. culture. PBS has made remediation of U.S. history a priority in many of its projects, giving space and voice to Latinxs— but mostly only since the second decade of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, beyond the formal length constraints imposed by a series format, it would be the project of a much longer study to explore in depth the role that PBS has played in shaping what we think of as Latinx documentary— for instance: How are projects commissioned and funded? What is the shared narrative arc? What are the technical opportunities and limits? The importance of PBS as a funder and tastemaker cannot be overstated since it is the one reliable funder of films with social issue content. There are very few clear funding streams for filmmakers in the USA. Unlike many other countries, where national film institutes support independent filmmakers, and unlike even Latin American documentarians who are eligible for “de-

veloping world” grants, U.S. citizens cannot get third-world funding from European organizations, even for projects with minority-focused content. Hence, ironically, as Remezcla notes in a 2014 article reproduced annually in the heading to their “top 10” list for subsequent years, Latin American filmmakers are experiencing a boom of sorts, because the current structure of funding allows them, albeit with great difficulty, to cobble together grants to support their projects. But, says the article, “The children of Latino immigrants are left out in the cold. . . . There is no U.S. equivalent to the public grants that Latin American cineastas have access to. That leaves them to fight over scraps in the private sector. Have you ever tried to convince an investor to give you money for a Latino story featuring an all-Latino cast? Try it out and tell me how that works for you. (Spoiler alert: It’s virtually impossible.)” In what follows, I group together brief allusions to important projects in other areas— many directed by allies rather than Latinx folks— films that highlight Latinx contributions to music and the arts, the many short and long films that bring to the fore issues related to creative expression in other realms, socially and politically tinged studies of the dynamic of Latinx immigration, and films about insertion into the U.S. workplace, especially agriculture, as well as films denouncing other social abuses. I will end this piece, as promised, with a brief discussion of two outstanding special cases of documentarians who are particularly prominent in Latinx contexts but have not necessarily focused their work on Latinx content.

British director Jeremy Marre offers one of the earlier documentary windows into this world of nonfictional film with his sixty-minute film, Tex-Mex: Music of the Texas Mexican Borderlands (1982). This film, which has now been remastered on a very affordable DVD, follows the Texas border, seeking out performers in festivals and cantinas and even dipping into prisons and brothels, and includes the voices of Lydia Mendoza, Little Joe Hernández, and many more. The result is an extraordinary time capsule of singers and musical styles put into the social and historical context that gave shape to this music. As such, it is a foundational document to help us better understand the evolution of the music in contemporary times, as well as the social pressures on Mexican Americans in the border region. More recently, Los Angeles-based director Angela Boatwright took on a somewhat parallel project of historicizing a musical form in a different geographical space. Her Los Punks: We Are All We Have (2016) is a low-budget, high-energy film that traces the paths of punk rockers from East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, and South Central Los Angeles, often in the backyards and

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Music and Arts

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empty lots where they gather and where they perform. Boatwright is completely immersed in the deeply troubled, often violent, and poverty-stricken milieu she documents. Hip-hop is in its second generation after its early evolution in the ethnically mixed Latinx barrios and black neighborhoods of the South Bronx, New York City. It is thus both urgently contemporary and, suddenly, historical. In Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives (2015), Robert García (Bobbito, DJ Cucumber Slice) explores how, in the 1990s, the late-night Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show made these two DJs unlikely legends. The radio program featured demo tapes by then- unknown hip-hop artists, many of whom— like Big Pun, Notorious B.I.G., and the Wu-Tang Clan— later became huge hits, making Bobbito a key inside figure. The film blends offbeat humor, music, and interviews with many hip-hop legends, both Latinx and not. Likewise, in Fresh Dressed (2014), hip-hop chronicler Sacha Jenkins draws from archival materials and in-depth interviews with rap artists and designers to trace the history of hip-hop fashion in an intimate study that is also musically enthralling. Interviews with style makers like Nas, Sean “Puffy” Combs, and Kanye West, among many others, emphasize that “back in the day” being fresh, or being fly, was far more important than having money. In contrast, a recent, much more intimate film, Hasta la raíz (2017), follows Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade (a 2017 multiple Latin Grammy award winner) as she travels through Baja California and Texas while at work on her most recent album. This film, directed by Bruno Bancalari and Juan Pablo López-Fonseca, is a fifty-four-minute black-and-white documentary that explores her entire creative process in the making of the album.

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Quirky Creativity

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While a film like Fresh Dressed traces the history of how a ghetto-based fashion statement became a mainstream commercial success, and Las Marthas looks at a Latina transformation of a U.S. historical icon into an opportunity for creativity, something else is happening in the unusual and compulsively watchable prize-winning film The Wolfpack (2015). New York City-based director Crystal Moselle described how she was compelled by the sight of the six Angulo brothers running down the street one day. She chased after them, gradually got to know them, and bonded with them over their shared love of cinema (Riley). It was not until a year later that she learned the family had spent fourteen years, virtually their entire lives, locked in a Lower East Side apartment, until one of them escaped their paranoid father’s supervision in 2010, and soon the pack of brothers were surreptitiously exploring Manhattan. Meanwhile, within the confines of their apartment, the siblings

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were modestly homeschooled by their mother and found their window onto the outer world through films. They passionately explored their creativity by reenacting and filming scenes from their favorite films with sets, props, and costumes made from whatever was lying around the apartment. Since the success of the film, the young men have traveled the world, have met some of their favorite movie stars, and have begun to go out on their own (20/20). The film is only tangentially Latinx, in that the boys’ father is an immigrant from Peru; his strongly protective personality and Hare Krishna belief system seem more central to the backdrop of the film than his ethnic or cultural background. Mexican director Tin Dirdamal’s award-winning, seventy-five-minute autobiographical film Muerte en Arizona (2014) also has a claustrophobic heart, and like The Wolfpack is only somewhat tangentially connected to Latinidad. The film’s description gives us a good sense of the unusual approach: “This is a futuristic documentary seen through the windows of a Bolivian apartment over a year. It is the autobiographical depiction of a man in search of answers returning to the empty home of his now departed love. This story finds itself through the distant voices of a Yaqui tribe in Arizona that has survived the impact of a meteorite.” There is a migratory spirit animating this film, linking together indigenous stories and dreams in a way that questions how ideas about nation and nationality tend to obscure transcontinental linkages. One of the most delightful feel-good films of the decade is Mary Mazzio’s Underwater Dreams (2014), which traces the astounding story of how a pair of high school teachers from Phoenix, Arizona, inspired their students to enter a NASA-sponsored robotics contest. The four undocumented Mexican immigrant boys and their teachers used scavenged and cheap Home Depot parts to build an underwater robot, coming up with ingenious solutions to highly challenging technical problems and, in the final competition, beating college teams from across the country, including MIT’s. This brief description returns us to the question that opened this discussion, of whether we should define Latinx documentary narrowly as of, by, and for Latinxs. Certainly, the films noted above all carry some residue of Latinidad, but it is far from obvious if their main contribution is as Latinx documentary. The Wolfpack is perhaps the most knotty example in this sense; there is very little to tie the Angulo brothers to any sense of Latinidad, culturally, linguistically, or in any other sense, other than the chance genetic heritage of being born to an immigrant father. In Underwater Dreams, the backstory is more about poverty, racism, and disenfranchisement, for which the boys’ immigration status serves as a shorthand reference; the focus, though, is on the jerry-rigged engineering. The hip-hop films all recognize the creative

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Figure 1.3 Screen grab: Underwater Dreams (2014).

explosion coming from Latinx and black graffiti artists, musicians, dancers, and fashion designers in the South Bronx since the 1980s, and the films trace this rich history— but they are not, per se, histories of Latinxs in hip-hop, as is clearly evidenced in the range of interview subjects.

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Immigration Films

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The politics of ethnic attribution in the USA means that the background of transnational migration, exile, and rupture are often present in documentaries presumed to be of interest to Latinxs. Many films in recent years have focused on the dangers of traveling from Central America across Mexico with an eventual goal of arriving in the USA. They include standouts like Tin Dirdamal’s De nadie (2005), Arturo Pérez Torres’s (Mexican-Canadian) Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary (2005), Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home? (2009), and Ivannia Villalobos Vindas’s (Costa Rica) Casa en tierra ajena (2017). Many of them feature children and focus on the extremely dangerous journey from Central America to the United States, generally by following the migrant trail along with specific individuals as they travel by bus, by freight train (the infamous “Bestia”), and by foot through constantly challenging landscapes and frightening encounters. Each of these films also includes interviews with migrant advocates and safe-house operators; some also include interviews with Mexican and U.S. authorities and/or members of controversial anti-immigrant citizens groups in Texas and Arizona. There are three other films I would like to highlight briefly. Roy Germano’s The Other Side of Immigration (2009) has an unusual history; it was made

as a qualitative component to his PhD dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin and is based on a survey of 768 families in the Mexican countryside. Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border (2013), directed by Rodrigo Reyes, is a U.S.-Mexican co-production. The desert landscape dominates this film, although the locations and interview subjects are never identified— certainly intentionally, given the subject matter. Finally, Marc Silver’s Who Is Dayani Cristal? (2013) takes on the question of how authorities deal with the many unidentified people who died trying to cross the desert in the United States. Mexican actor Gael García Bernal serves as the point of view figure, following the footsteps of migrants from Central America, as the documentary also works to resolve the mystery of a man identified only by a tattoo. These films are of intense interest to Latinx folks who want to think about issues, family histories, and current events that impact their communities. Likewise, they importantly reveal transformations in Mexico, as the country struggles with a heritage of out-migration, and— more recently— the influx of Central Americans, some who die en route, many of whom settle in Mexico, and others who continue on to the USA— a border that is frequently referenced but seldom crossed in these films.

Immigrants are famously hardworking but also highly vulnerable to exploitation by their employers. While a 2017 Pew report notes that no industry currently has a majority of immigrant workers, many immigrants are highly concentrated in a narrow range of industries: farming, construction work, restaurants, textile manufacturing, cleaning, and maintenance (Desilver). Thus, it is no surprise that there are important denunciations of labor exploitation precisely in these areas. The 2007 Emmy Award– winning documentary by Almudena Carracedo (Spain), Made in L.A., follows three Latina immigrants working in Los Angeles garment sweatshops as they struggle for three years with the retailer Forever 21 to assert their rights under U.S. law to basic labor protections. The film thus reveals how workers are invisibilized by a system that takes advantage of their vulnerabilities; what makes the film superb, however, is the intimate exploration of how the struggle for their rights gradually transformed each woman’s life. A story from the other side of the country, The Hand That Feeds (2014) directed by Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick, tells of twelve undocumented immigrants who face the threat of deportation when they reveal the abuses and labor exploitation in the popular New York City restaurant where they work. Finally, in the 2015 PBS documentary Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie), director Mikaela Shwer helps undocumented activist Angy Rivera

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Social Issue and Labor Insertion

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(Colombia) share her parallel journey of being an undocumented immigrant and a victim of sexual assault. This film highlights a problem of increasing concern in the Trump era, as U visas have become less available. While in pre-Trump times Rivera was able to step out of the shadows with a popular blog and YouTube channel, the film is even more crucial today, when fears of deportation are understandably ramped up by courthouse arrests of crime victims, and reporting of domestic violence and other violent crime in Latinx neighborhoods has sharply decreased.

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Farmworker Films

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While according to Drew Desilver’s study, private household work and sweatshop labor are the two most immigrant intensive “industries” in the USA in terms of the number of workers, the agricultural sector has an outsize hold on our imagination, both for historical reasons reaching back to Jim Crow, the Bracero program, and United Farm Workers (UFW) activism and because nearly half of agricultural workers in the USA are immigrants (some on H-2A visas, others undocumented), the highest percentage in any sector. There are many, many documentaries addressing the challenges of exploitative agricultural labor in the USA, including poor working conditions, subminimum wages and wage theft, and inadequate housing. While independent documentaries have an important role, one of the most striking aspects of the struggles of workers in the agricultural sector is the way organized labor has mobilized media in all forms. I take two prominent examples, one from each side of the country. The most venerable labor advocacy organization is the UFW, founded in 1962 in California. The UFW has a robust web presence with deep archives, as well as other social media outlets like a YouTube channel (United Farm Workers) and video on their Facebook page. The documentation of these labor struggles reaches back to the beginning of the movement, and highlights include the 1986 film commissioned by UFW, Wrath of Grapes, directed by Lorena Parlee and Lenny Bourin, and the biopics about the founders: Dolores (directed by Peter Bratt, 2017), and Cesar Chavez (directed by Mexican actor Diego Luna, 2014). Founded in 1993, the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has gained an international reputation for its work in support of fair food practices, as well as its advocacy on issues ranging from gender-based violence to human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Like the UFW, the CIW has a well-developed and rich website and extensions into other social media, including a YouTube channel. Among the films that CIW highlights on their channel (Coalition of Immokalee Workers) are a CNN Freedom

Figure 1.4 Screen grab: Home page, United Farm Workers website (July 2018).

Project report on the “Fair Food Program”; a PBS Frontline documentary, “A Voice for the Workers”; a Univision exposé, “Modern Slavery in Mexico’s Produce”; and commissioned films including Food Chains, directed by Sanjay Rawal (2014), and Immokalee U.S.A., directed by Georg Koszulinksi (2008).

Let me end with a puzzle of two documentarians. Both are highly productive and have won many awards. Both came to the USA as teenagers from a major Latin American country. Both continue to make films about a variety of topics, including issues related to their countries of origin, as well as important explorations of lives of Americans of color. In terms of their imagined place in the U.S.-Latinx canon, however, they are widely divergent. Both have been included in university syllabi, yet one is almost invisible in Latinx documentary discussions; the other is at its very heart, and indeed for many people seems to define Latinx documentary. If we go back to our starting point in this meditation, one seems to fall under the Cuarón rule, the other under the Boyle rule. Eduardo Montes-Bradley (born in Argentina; he moved to the USA at eighteen after the military coup and now lives in Virginia) is one of the most prolific and highly recognized directors in the United States but is not very visible in most discussions of Latinx documentary. Among his more than forty directorial and fifty producer credits, Montes-Bradley has worked on

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The Superstar Directors

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both fiction and nonfiction films, as well as music videos, but the greatest emphasis of his work is in the documentary genre. He has made films about the civil wars in Central America; about Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay; about famous writers both in Latin America and the USA; and even about samba in Brazil. In addition to films under his own name, he has also directed and produced films using an indeterminate number of pseudonyms (all of women), including Diana Hunter, Ana Lobos, Cándida Beltrán, Emma Padilla, Lupe Velez, and Rita Clavel. A member of the board of directors for the African American Heritage Project, in recent years he has been particularly associated with the Heritage Film Project, for which he directs films about scientists, writers, artists, political activists, and philosophers whose views have changed society. Among his recent and ongoing projects is “Mere Distinctions of Colour,” a collection of photographs and documentary film portrayals of the descendants of people enslaved by U.S. president James Madison at Montpelier in Orange, Virginia. Although he was always interested in work with a philosophical bent, in an essay published after the release of his film on the African American activist politician Julian Bond, Montes-Bradley comments on the evolution of his work in the documentary genre, as he increasingly looked for greater depth in his politically tinged work. He says, “I sought out stories that made me think. I was no longer interested so much in denunciation as in the privilege of learning something, . . . [of ] probing an unexplored space” (8– 9; my translation). In this respect, he defines himself as shaped by the great tradition of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, whose 1968 film, The Hour of the Furnaces, remains a landmark not just in the Latin American Third Cinema movement of the 1960s but world cinema more generally (7). While much of his recent work has to do with the recovery of histories of people of color in the USA, and a good deal of his work both as director and producer of documentaries in the last twenty years has been of fundamental interest to Latinx folks, Montes-Bradley is not generally identified or known as a Latino director; in terms of our earlier discussion, this is a clear example of the Cuarón rule at work. Montes-Bradley’s work has a clear authorial style and focus, but his choice of non-Latinx topics defines most scholars’ understanding of it. In contrast, with Lourdes Portillo we have the Boyle rule in full force— she is beyond a doubt the most prominent Chicana documentary filmmaker in the country, and so all of her work, regardless of topic, is pulled into this orbit. I have to admit it. What first drew me to Latinx documentary as a genre was the work of Lourdes Portillo, who is a staple presence in academic discussions, a must-have in classes on Latinx culture— a key interlocutor in

every respect. In this way, Portillo comes to define what Latinx documentary is, and as Rosa Linda Fregoso says, trenchantly, at the same time she breaks all the imagined rules of ethnic and geographical limitations of the genre: “From the beginning, Portillo’s scope and vision have been much broader than the orthodox view of artistic genres or social identities allows for. Her films demonstrate how one’s cultural or social identity need not limit the choice of the subject matter. . . . If anything, Portillo’s stylistic signature is this defiance of categories and borders” (2). In this way, Portillo is very much like Montes-Bradley. An independent filmmaker, she chooses her topics and approaches, often living paycheck to paycheck on grant support and sparse commissions, sometimes having to compromise aspects of her original vision in her films in order to respond to other needs (this is the case in Corpus, as documented by Fregoso [18– 21]). Like Montes-Bradley as well, Portillo came of age with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and like him, she was profoundly influenced

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Figure 1.5 Screen grab: home page, Heritage Film Projects website (July 2018).

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by Third Cinema and New Latin American thinkers and filmmakers (in her case, she particularly acknowledges her debt to Cuban filmmakers, while Montes-Bradley cites the great Argentine documentarians). Like many Latinx folks, Portillo is an immigrant to the USA. Born in Mexico, she immigrated as a teenager, and to this day most of her central body of work is located in her country of origin. Her films Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman, 2001), Al más allá (To the Other World, 2008), El diablo nunca duerme (The Devil Never Sleeps, 1994), and La ofrenda (The Days of the Dead, 1986, in collaboration with Argentine-born director Susana Blaustein Muñoz)— all deal very specifically and precisely with Mexican issues including the intersection of politics and murder (in both Señorita and in Diablo, a film on her uncle’s unresolved death) or the healing celebration of a Mexican folkway around death (Ofrenda). Her lauded Las madres (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 1986, her second film, also co-directed with Susana Blaustein Muñoz) tells of the struggles of a group of mothers and grandmothers of disappeared activists in Buenos Aires to pressure the government for return of their children during the violent times of the Dirty War in 1970s Argentina. Her most celebrated Latinx films include her collaborations with the comedy troupe Culture Clash, which are not documentaries. She does have four documentary projects in her filmography that are all in one way or another about Latinas: her first film, Después del terremoto (After the Earthquake, 1979, with Nina Serrano), is about a Nicaraguan refugee and domestic

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Figure 1.6 Screen grab: Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman, 2001).

worker in San Francisco. A later, ten-minute commissioned film, Vida (1989), is about a young New Yorker struggling with the dangers of AIDS. She also did a homage to the great Tex-Mex singer, Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), which she considers a project of secondary quality. Her most recent film is an intimate exploration of her life with cervical cancer, Night Passages (2013). Ironically, for this iconic Latina filmmaker, none of her explicitly Latinx documentaries are among her most taught or most studied work.

As this brief overview shows, Latinx documentary is a vital and varied body of work, far too multifaceted to draw any simple conclusions. Latinx people are so diverse in their backgrounds and social contexts, carrying local and transnational cultural affiliations that mesh, or maybe do not mesh, together in complex and contradictory ways. We can find outstanding examples of Latinx documentary in every corner of our mediaverse, in forms ranging from a few minutes to a few hours in length, and it is work that thrives in the intersections and crossroads of history, culture, and societal transformation, making some of its most crucial and uncomfortable contributions precisely at the point where ideas about a “national” cinema do not fit well. By the same token, while questions of accuracy and truth are fundamental to what we understand as the documentarian’s work in general, in much Latinx documentary, “truth” is complex or multiple. While some films are straightforward denunciations of particular social problems, other films celebrate the power of calling on the imagination as an aesthetic resource more broadly. Perhaps the most that can be said is that Latinx documentary operates in what José E. Limón called a “consciousness of critical difference,” in all senses of this phrase: an awareness of standing outside dominant culture, permitting the development of a critical consciousness, and an understanding of the privilege of critique. Rather than a narrow adscription of Latinx documentary as something narrowly by, for, and about Latinx peoples, it is this underlying tension between dominant culture pieties and a brown critique, or the celebration of the gap between two understandings of an aesthetic project, that fuels the best work in this capacious genre.

References Betancourt, Manuel. “Netflixeando: 15 Latino Documentaries You Should Stream on Netflix.” Remezcla, Dec. 13, 2016, remezcla.com/lists/film/15-latino-docs-you-should-stream-on-netflix/. Coalition of Immokalee Workers. YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/CIWvideo. Concepción, Nina. “15 Latino Directors Challenging Hollywood’s Huge Diversity Problem.” Mitú, June 7, 2016, wearemitu.com/mitu-world/15-latino-directors -challenging-hollywoods -huge -diversity-problem/.

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Conclusion

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“CNN Freedom Project— The Fair Food Program.” YouTube, uploaded by CIWvideo, June 1, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpKMHIUkPQk. Desilver, Drew. “Immigrants Don’t Make Up a Majority of Workers in Any US Industry.” Pew Research Center, Mar. 16, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/16/immigrants-dont-make-up -a-majority-of-workers-in-any-u-s-industry/. Fregoso, Rosa Linda, editor. Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films. University of Texas Press, 2001. Frontline. “A Voice for the Workers.” PBS, June  24, 2013, www.pbs .org/video/frontline-voice -workers/. Limón, José E. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Politics in Mexican-American South Texas. University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Montes-Bradley, Eduardo. “Las latas abiertas de América digital: Confesiones de un documentalista díscolo.” Cinémas d’Amérique Latine, vol. 21, 2013, pp. 1– 14, journals.openedition.org/cinelatino /371. Moreno, Carolina. “11 Documentaries About Immigrants Everyone Should Watch Right Now.” Huffington Post, Jan. 17, 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/11-documentaries-about-immigrants -everyone-should-watch-right-now_us_5874fc34e4b02b5f858b20c0. Remezcla Estaff. “10 Latino Filmmakers Who Absolutely Killed It This Year.” Remezcla, Dec. 17, 2014, remezcla.com/lists/film/10-latino-filmmakers-who-absolutely-killed-it-in-2014/. Riley, Jenelle. “The Wolfpack Family and Their Dark Secret. Q&A with Director Crystal Moselle.” Variety, June 12, 2015, variety.com/2015/film/news/the-wolfpack-documentary-crystal-moselle -1201518963/. 20/20. “What Life Is Like for the ‘Wolfpack’ Brothers Today: Part 6.” ABC News, Mar. 25, 2015, abcnews .go.com/Entertainment/wolfpack-brothers -talk-places -people-met-girls/story?id= 37926258. United Farm Workers. YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/UFW. “Univsion Report: Modern Slavery in Mexico’s Produce (Nov. 2017).” YouTube, uploaded by CIWvideo, Dec. 11, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwoHcuJWJhk.

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Filmography

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Al más allá. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions, 2008. Beyond Brown. Directed by Lulie Haddad, Cyndee Readdean, and John J. Valadez, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2004. Casa en tierra ajena. Directed by Ivannia Villalobos Vindas, University of Costa Rica/Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 2017. Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2014. The Chicano Wave. Directed by John Valadez, PBS, 2009. Chop Shop. Directed by Ramin Bahrani, Big Beach Films, 2007. Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions, 1999. De nadie. Directed by Tin Dirdamal, Producciones Tranvía, 2005. El diablo nunca duerme. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions, 1994. “The Divide.” Matters of Race, episode 1. Directed by John Valadez, Roja Productions, 2003. Dolores. Directed by Peter Bratt, 5 Stick Films, 2017. Después del terremoto. Directed by Lourdes Portillo with Nina Serrano, American Film Institute, 1979. Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie). Directed by Mikaela Shwer, PBS, 2015. Food Chains. Directed by Sanjay Rawal, Two Moons Production, 2014. Fresh Dressed. Directed by Sacha Jenkins, Mass Appeal, 2014. Gravity. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Warner Bros., 2013. The Hand That Feeds. Directed by Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick, Jubilee Films, 2014. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Warner Bros., 2004. Harvest of Empire. Directed by Eduardo Lopez and Peter Getzels, EVS Communications, 2012. Hasta la raíz. Directed by Bruno Bancalari and Juan Pablo López-Fonseca, Elefante, 2016. The Head of Joaquin Murrieta. Directed by John Valadez, Fronteras/PBS, 2016.

What Is Lat i nx i n Today ’s Doc u m e n ta r y F ilm s c a p e ?

The Hour of the Furnaces. Directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, Grupo Cine Liberación, 1973. Immigration Trilogy. Directed by Luis Argueta. Includes: abUSed: The Postville Raid, PBS, 2012; Abrazos, New Day Films, 2014; and The U Turn, New Day Films, 2017. Immokalee U.S.A. Directed by Georg Koszulinksi, Substream Films, 2008. The Last Conquistador. Directed by John Valadez, POV/ITVS, 2008. Latinos Beyond Reel. Directed by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun, Media Education Foundation, 2013. The Longoria Affair. Directed by John Valadez, PBS/ITVS/Independent Lens, 2010. La lotería de la vida. Directed by Lexi Hiland (in postproduction), 2019. Made in L.A. Directed by Almudena Carracedo, PBS/POV, 2007. Las madres. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions, 1986. Mala Mala. Directed by Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles, Killer Films, 2014. Las Marthas. Directed by Cristina Ibarra, PBS/POV, 2014. Memories of a Penitent Heart. Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, PBS, 2016. Millie and the Lords. Directed by Jennica Carmona, Si Se Puede Productions, 2015. Muerte en Arizona. Directed by Tin Dirdamal, Piano, 2014. Negrita. Directed by Magdalena Albizu, Vimeo, 2014, vimeo.com/97689959. Night Passages. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Chicken and Egg Pictures, 2013. La ofrenda. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1988. The Other Side of Immigration. Directed by Roy Germano, Roy Germano Films, 2009. “Prejudice and Pride (1965– 1980).” Latino Americans, episode 5. Directed by John Valadez, WETA Washington, DC/Bosch and Co. Inc./Latino Public Broadcasting, 2013. Los Punks: We Are All We Have. Directed by Angela Boatwright, Agi Ori Productions, Univision Documentary Unit, 2016. Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border. Directed by Rodrigo Reyes, La Maroma Productions, 2013. Señorita extraviada. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions/Women Make Movies, 2001. The Sixth Section. Directed by Alex Rivera, POV/PBS, 2003. Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by Danny Boyle, Warner Bros./Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2008. Sólo con tu pareja. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematograf ía, 1991. Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives. Directed by Bobbito García, Saboteur Media, 2015. Tex-Mex: Music of the Texas Mexican Borderlands. Directed by Jeremy Marre, E1 Entertainment Distribution, 1982. Underwater Dreams. Directed by Mary Mazzio, 50 Eggs Films, 2014. “War and Peace (1942– 1954).” Latino Americans, episode 3. Directed by John Valadez, WETA Washington, DC/Bosch and Co. Inc./Latino Public Broadcasting, 2013. We Like It Like That. Directed by Mathew Ramirez Warren, Muddy Science Production, 2015. Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary. Directed by Arturo Pérez Torres, Ironweed Film Club, 2005. Which Way Home? Directed by Rebecca Cammisa, HBO Films, 2009. Who Is Dayani Cristal? Directed by Marc Silver, Pulse Films, 2013. The Wolfpack. Directed by Crystal Moselle, Magnolia Pictures, 2015. Wrath of Grapes. Directed by Lorena Parlee and Lenny Bourin, United Farm Workers, 1986. Y tu mamá también. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 20th Century Fox, 2001. Vida. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, AIDSFILMS, 1989. Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture. Directed by Héctor Galán, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2004.

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Chapter 2

PANTELION FILMS AND THE LATINX SPANISHLANGUAGE FILM MARKETPLACE Henry Puente

Pantelion Films promoted and distributed Instructions Not Included (2013), which broke U.S. box office records for a Spanish-language film (McNary, “Eugenio Derbez”). The distributor used Eugenio Derbez, a popular Mexican actor with a career spanning more than thirty years, to target Spanishspeaking or bilingual moviegoers as its primary audience. The film’s success may have caught U.S. film distributors by surprise, as many had tried to reach these moviegoers in the past, though Pantelion Films anticipated that it could attract Spanish-speaking and bilingual moviegoers on a continuous basis. While this company is not the first Latinx-oriented motion picture distributor of the twenty-first century, Pantelion has become this era’s most prolific and successful Spanish-language and U.S. Latinx film distributor. This chapter examines whether the company will or will not continue its successful run. Chronicling Pantelion’s origins and key factors that have enabled this distributor to have some financially successful films, this chapter examines how the distributor promoted and circulated its films from 2011 to 2017 and points to several significant challenges the company will need to address in order to maintain long-term success. Pantelion Films emerged in 2010 when Grupo Televisa, a Mexican media conglomerate, and Lionsgate Entertainment, a Canadian mini-major, partnered to develop this film distributor (Barnes). The company combined Televisa’s film production with Lionsgate, a marketer and distributor that had previously and successfully targeted African American moviegoers with the Madea franchise (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). The two companies would test this venture over a five-year period. Pantelion planned to annually distribute eight to ten English or Spanish-language films that were produced in the United States or internationally with the goal of acquiring, producing, and circulating content that would attract Latinx moviegoers (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). Historically, these moviegoers have not been served with sufficient content by Hollywood and Hollywood-specialty distributors. Similar companies, such as Arenas Entertainment (financed by Universal Pictures) and Cine Vista, pre46

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ceded Pantelion in an attempt to fill this void within the marketplace. However, these earlier companies lacked the financial resources to produce, acquire, and promote their content efficiently (Barnes). While this partnership is not an original concept, Pantelion is one of the first Latinx-oriented film distributors to have the capital to acquire and promote a significant amount of content and also absorb some box office disappointments. If this partnership succeeds, Pantelion could transform the film distribution industry, as it would be the first distributor to specifically target a single ethnic group and survive over a long period of time. Without a direct competitor, Pantelion Films is uniquely positioned to become the dominant distributor of content to one of the most consistent and prolific moviegoing audiences in the United States. A 2016 Motion Picture Association of America study indicated that Latinx moviegoing represented about 21 percent (or about $2.4 billion) of the $11.4 billion that the movie industry generated (MPAA). It also asserted that while Latinxs are 18 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 23 percent of frequent moviegoers— people who go to at least six films per year (MPAA). While this audience may appear easy to attract on the surface, Latinxs have proven to be challenging to attract on a consistent basis. Consequently, Pantelion faces certain hurdles, such as the need to acquire the specific types of English-language, bilingual, or Spanish-language content that will appeal to these moviegoers. Pantelion must also perfect an efficient and effective marketing and distribution model for this diverse audience with different Spanish idioms, as this group has many different types of dialects, emigrate from different countries of origin, and have different levels of acculturation that affect their moviegoing habits. Despite the fact that Latinxs are the most prolific moviegoers in the United States, scholars have failed to study how a U.S. Latinx film distributor has managed to reach Latinx moviegoers with its content. More than discussed and analyzed in David Rosen and Peter Hamilton’s Off-Hollywood: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films— which studied how a wide variety of independent films in the 1980s, including some U.S. Latinx films, were financed, promoted, and distributed outside of the studio system— this chapter examines one specific distributor of Latinx films. In so doing, I build on and extend the work done in Arlene Dávila’s influential Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People by examining how the Latinx market has been constructed by influential non-U.S. Latinxs and how this impacts the general public’s perception but outlines motion picture promotion and distribution specifically. This chapter surveys how some key social and economic events of the twenty-first century led to Pantelion Films’ emergence using Raymond Williams’s methodology of studying an entire culture and Mary Beth Haralovich’s

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approach to studying a specific period. Williams argues that all aspects of a culture, including the dominant, emergent (i.e., a new group—non-mainstream), and alternative (coexisting with the dominant), should be studied (121– 22). This chapter furthers Williams’s approach, which centers on an alternative film distributor that targets an emergent moviegoing group. Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery originally argued that by studying specific events, a scholar could create micro-periods, which they refer to as periodization (48). Haralovich agreed with Allen and Gomery that periodization could be an effective tool for studying culture. However, this approach often privileged the powerful companies (Haralovich 6). Her answer to this dilemma was that periodization should take a broader approach in order to capture smaller “segments” (7). She stressed that inclusion of “segments” that may lie outside of the mainstream provided a better reflection of the total culture within a society (10). This chapter echoes Haralovich’s point that it is vital to study nonHollywood distributors, as they may provide insight into upcoming trends not visible to mainstream distributors.

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In a short period of time, Pantelion has reached significant box office milestones for a niche market distributor. In order to reach its goals, the company has implemented several promotion and distribution tactics that have enabled some of its films to produce a substantial amount of theatrical revenue. First, it has not debuted film such as Instructions Not Included during the opening week of studio high-concept (or franchise) films. Justin Wyatt defines a high-concept film as an easily understood storyline that is highly marketable to moviegoers (17). These films are strategically produced prior to being released to a mainstream audience (Wyatt 100– 101). High-concept films are circulated during summer months to attract a global audience, especially younger moviegoers on summer break. High-concept films have big name stars and well-known producers and directors. Lastly, the studios will front-load the market with an intense advertising campaign and secure screens in nearly every single theater throughout the country. These elements make it difficult for a niche market, or any other studio film, to compete directly with these particular films. Pantelion consequently avoids debuting their films during these weekends, enabling them to have a better opportunity at a strong opening weekend that will result in a profitable theatrical run. Pantelion Films has also taken advantage of the fact that Hollywood studios consider the long Labor Day weekend as a dumping ground for subpar content (Lang, “Spanish-Language”). Pantelion has a completely different perception of the long Labor Day weekend and has filled this void repeatedly.

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Pantelion Films CEO Paul Presburger described what Labor Day meant for Latinx moviegoers: “It’s a big family weekend for Hispanics and they tend to go to the movies as a family” (Lang, “Spanish-Language”). After the success of No Manches Frida (2016), Presburger concluded that “Labor Day weekend has historically been very positive for us” (Brooks). As a result, this distributor has done an excellent job of promoting and circulating films like Instructions Not Included or No Manches Frida by taking advantage of long weekends that simultaneously do not compete against a huge film franchise. Along with filling a void, Pantelion Films seems to have developed a distribution formula to effectively target this audience. Pantelion Films has a steady stream of content that is being produced by Televisa. In the past, the Mexican government provided vital production funds because private financing was difficult to secure. However, this government funding was not always consistent. For example, Mexico only produced twelve films in 2004 (Hopewell). In 2016, Mexico produced a record-breaking 162 films. A growing number of these films are financed by private companies such as Televisa and are U.S. and Mexican co-productions (Hopewell). Pantelion uses its Televisa pipeline to reach the lucrative Spanish-speaking and U.S. bilingual Latinx audience. With its success, more Mexican and other film producers certainly will be looking to secure a U.S. distribution deal with Pantelion because it has proven that it can reach the lucrative U.S. audience. Equally important, Pantelion Films uses the Lionsgate-Televisa partnership to gain easier access to Univision’s huge audience. Televisa owns Univision, the most-viewed Spanish-language network for nearly twenty-five consecutive years (Szalai, “Univision”). While mainstream distributors struggle to reach moviegoers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine with television advertising, as these viewers do not watch as much television (James and Battaglio), Pantelion’s core audience does not appear to be so elusive in this regard. Nearly 75 percent of first-generation Spanish-language viewers prefer to watch Spanish-language television or watch it equally to Englishlanguage television (Taylor et al.). Access to Univision’s viewers is critical for Pantelion because television advertising continues to be an essential tactic for many film distributors (James and Battaglio). Pantelion Films has made better use of market research on Latinx moviegoing habits than its competitors. For example, their research concluded that Latinxs wanted to be depicted in a more positive light (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). They consequently appear to have heeded that advice, producing and circulating films about U.S. Latinx or Mexican heroes like Cantinflas (2014) and Cesar Chavez (2014). The distributor has also circulated family-friendly films such as Instructions Not Included and Un gallo con muchos huevos (2015). Lastly, it has produced films such as Prada to Nada (2011), Girl in Progress (2012),

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and Spare Parts (2015), which depict Latinxs in a manner not often seen in Hollywood films. While not all of the films have produced large box office figures, Pantelion has certainly circulated films with new Latinx images to U.S. Latinx moviegoers on a more consistent basis than any other U.S. distributor. Pantelion has taken advantage of the lack of Latino images in the marketplace and has helped to create a new movie star among U.S. Latinx moviegoers. A 2015 USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism study concluded that Latinos only made up 5.3 percent of the cast among eight hundred films that were examined (Smith et al. 2). Pantelion has been able to fill this glaring void a bit with the emergence of Eugenio Derbez. He is a well-known Mexican comedian with a long career on Televisa programs. With Televisa’s reach extending into the United States through Univision, he is recognized by many Spanish-language viewers. Arguably, however, he was not well-known among more acculturated U.S. Latinx or mainstream moviegoers. After making English- and Spanish-language talk-show appearances for his last two feature films, Pantelion can make a case that he has become a star for U.S. Latinx moviegoers— regardless of their acculturation level— and a familiar name with a growing number of mainstream moviegoers. Being a part of a media conglomerate enabled Pantelion to be malleable with its employee overhead costs. Pantelion’s chairperson, Jim McNamara, contends that the company only has eight permanent employees, but it does have the flexibility to draw human resources from Televisa or Lionsgate when needed (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). He points out that “other companies that have tried to do this either did not have enough staff, because they could not afford it, or business was such that it never allowed money to come in fast enough” (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). This arrangement enables Pantelion to have the best of both worlds. The company’s low overhead enables it to better absorb box office disappointments. Yet the distributor is able to use its partners’ professional staff when necessary. Pantelion is also taking advantage of a global phenomenon of non-English moviegoers gravitating to films produced by their native country. Local film industries are in a state of recovery, and there does appear to be a trend for consuming native content (S. Rose). For example, film industries in China, Korea, France, and Denmark are competing effectively against Hollywood films (McNary, “Lionsgate Launching”). As a result, Lionsgate became a part of a global consortium of eight global film production and distribution companies that may remake films from other countries. Lionsgate’s first film from this consortium was No Manches Frida, which is based on German remake Fack ju Gohte (McNary, “Lionsgate Launching”). This trend suggests a positive short-term future for Pantelion to produce and circulate content that bilingual or Spanish-dominant Latinxs want to hear in their native language.

Pantelion Films Marketing Pantelion Films generally did not appear to spend much money in an effort to generate a publicity campaign or create an extensive advertising campaign for the majority of its Spanish-language films. It did not create an extensive publicity or advertising for No eres tú, soy yo (2011) that featured Eugenio Derbez in order to attract Spanish-language audiences throughout Southern California. The distributor followed a similar template with most of its Spanish-language films, such as Saving Private Perez (2011) and Hazlo como hombre (2017), which did not appear to have cast members with recognizable names to U.S. Latinx moviegoers. No eres tú, soy yo and Saving Private Perez received some notable positive reviews, but general-market film critics either ignored, gave mixed reviews, or gave poor reviews to many of Pantelion’s

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Pantelion has secured vital exhibition deals with AMC and Regal Entertainment, the two largest U.S. theater chains. Early in the development of this distributor, AMC’s exhibition chief, Geraldo Lopez, agreed to reserve a screen for a Pantelion film in fifty different locations. These theaters will be located in heavily populated Latinx areas in an effort to attract Latinx moviegoers to a few more films (Barnes). In an effort to attract moviegoers, AMC likewise invested $600 million for audience comfort, including reclining seats, stadium seating, cup holders, full dining capabilities, and alcohol service (Nordyke; Verrier). Regal also supported Pantelion’s effort to produce content that may attract more Latinx moviegoers to their movie theaters (Szalai, “Lionsgate”). The exhibitors’ support is critical to Pantelion’s long-term success as it enables the company to reach its target audience in the largest U.S. Latinx markets with at least 250 screens in state-of-the-art venues. Furthermore, Pantelion Films has made Mexican content relevant for mainstream exhibitors. Up until the early 1980s, mainstream exhibition chains rarely provided a screen for a Mexican or Latin American film. Hence, Spanish-language theater chains, such as the Metropolitan, filled this void and thrived for many decades. Charles Ramírez Berg contends that there was a Spanish-language circuit of about 250 theaters located in most of the U.S. major markets, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver (214). These theaters represented an important revenue stream for Mexican films that produced about $10 million as late as 1980. However, theater chain owners did not reinvest in renovating their venues, and they disappeared eventually (“Latin America”). Without this important revenue stream, Mexican film production suffered. Pantelion has helped to reverse this trend and mainstream exhibitors now see Mexican or U.S. Latinx films as important content to attract these prolific moviegoers.

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Spanish-language films. Without actors with any significant star power who are well-known on both sides of the border or free publicity from several influential film critics, the distributor in many instances would have to rely on the film’s positive word of mouth to make its way from Mexican moviegoers to U.S. Latinx moviegoers. Pantelion followed a similar pattern of having a limited advertising budget for bilingual films Pulling Strings (2013), Ladrones (2015), Compadres (2016), and Everybody Loves Somebody (2017). These bicultural films could appeal to Spanish- and English-speaking audiences (Olsen; Aviles) and featured Latin American stars like Fernando Colunga, Bruno Birchir, Eduardo Yánez, Jaime Camil, Kate Souza, and Omar Chaparro. Pulling Strings also had some U.S. talent like Stockard Channing and Tom Arnold with some name recognition. Yet, the notoriety of these actors did not appear to be used heavily to promote their respective films in the United States. Pantelion also did not appear to heavily publicize Ladrones, a sequel to Ladrón que roba a ladrón (2007), a successful Lionsgate hit (de la Fuente). It also did not appear to aggressively advertise Un gallo con muchos huevos, a $5 million animated film and the last film of the Huevos trilogy in the mainstream media (Elena). Pulling Strings and Everybody Loves Somebody did receive some positive reviews from major newspapers or significant trade publications. In contrast, Ladrones, Un gallo con muchos huevos, and Compadres received little to no attention from film critics. Without a significant U.S. advertising or publicity campaign, the distributor would have had to hope that its target audience would be attracted the cast’s star power or that the franchise’s name recognition from Mexico would make its way into the United States. Pantelion also did not spend a lot of funds in promoting or publicizing most of its English-language films. Prada to Nada, Girl in Progress, Filly Brown (2012), and Spare Parts featured some U.S. Latinx television and film stars like Wilmer Valderrama, George Lopez, Alexa Vega, and Eva Mendes. A couple of these films had Hollywood stars like Lou Diamond Phillips, Marisa Tomei, and Jamie Lee Curtis. But none of these actors had significant name recognition with U.S. Latinx moviegoers. Pantelion did utilize some Spanish-language advertising to create awareness for films such as Prada to Nada (Fritz). For Filly Brown, Jenni Rivera, a well-known singer and reality television star, and Edward James Olmos performed a duet entitled “Hurt So Bad” that was slated to appear in the film’s soundtrack (Billboard Staff ). Girl in Progress, Filly Brown, and Spare Parts did receive positive reviews from at least one influential newspaper, such as The New York Times or Los Angeles Times, and important trade publications such as Variety. However, many film critics did not write positive reviews for these films. Without general market advertising and positive reviews, they would have to rely on Spanish-

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language media and word of mouth from Latinx moviegoers. These films appeared to present marketing challenges because their stars did not possess notable names with either English- or Spanish-language audiences. Pantelion did utilize publicity tactics, such as using some of its Hollywood and Mexican stars effectively. For example, Will Ferrell was the first Hollywood celebrity to be featured in a Pantelion motion picture when he starred in Casa de mi padre (2012). He appeared at a Mexico versus Colombia soccer match in Miami and showed the film’s trailer to the audience (Stewart, “Lionsgate”). Jenni Rivera and Edward James Olmos appeared at the Sundance Film Festival to promote Filly Brown (Billboard Staff ). Mexican star Eugenio Derbez made personal appearances at many Spanish-language radio stations and popular talk shows like Despierta América and El Gordo y La Flaca to promote Instructions Not Included (Hopewell and Young). He also crossed over and was a guest on Craig Ferguson’s talk show to discuss the film’s success at the end of its theatrical run. George Lopez appeared on NBC News to speak about the amazing Mexican kids who motivated him to produce Spare Parts (NBC News). For Everybody Loves Someone, Kate Souza appeared on El Show de Piolin, a popular Spanish-language radio program, and was interviewed on the Rachael Ray Show. Prior to the debut of How to Be a Latin Lover (2017), Derbez produced a prank video and dressed up like a Regal Cinemas employee, a stunt that generated a million Facebook views (Kelley). Derbez also completed a twelve-city grassroots marketing campaign in general market and Latinx media outlets that included photo opportunities (D’Alessandro). Derbez and Salma Hayek appeared on Good Morning America and Univision’s Despierta América and were featured on the cover of People en Español. Hayek appeared on The Tonight Show and sang “All By Myself ” on the program (D’Alessandro). These publicity tactics were vital as the distributor did not appear to spend a lot of money on advertising, and these films generally received mixed reviews from significant newspapers and trade publications. For Cesar Chavez and Cantinflas, Pantelion attempted to use film titles of an iconic Mexican comedian or Mexican American civil rights figure to attract Latinx moviegoers. Despite the fact that Cesar Chavez featured Emmy winner America Ferrera, neither of these films cast talent with recognizable names that would attract Latinx moviegoers. Both films received mixed reviews from important newspapers and trade publications. For Cesar Chavez, in an effort to overcome these mixed reviews, stars Ferrera and Michael Peña and director Diego Luna conducted several interviews. Ferrera and Luna also completed a Q&A session after an Arclight screening in Hollywood (“Cesar Chavez”). Lastly, former Participant CEO Jim Burk stated that the film would be screened in schools (Seikaly). For Cantinflas, the film’s star, Óscar Jaenada,

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conducted several interviews. Televisa’s Univision also televised several of Cantinflas’s films throughout August prior to the film’s debut in an effort to remind viewers of his significance (Danini). Pantelion hoped publicity tactics that reminded moviegoers of these important Latinx figures would overcome mixed reviews and the lack of a recognizable cast. Pantelion used promotional tie-ins and Spanish-language media to create awareness for its two star-studded films Instructions Not Included and How to Be a Latin Lover. For Instructions Not Included, it employed a Jarritos soda promotional tie-in in stores throughout the United States (Johnson; Stewart, “Hollywood”). The distributor utilized Univision as a vehicle to promote the film to Spanish-speaking audiences (Johnson). It also used billboards, print advertisements, and English- and Spanish-language radio spots in English (Johnson; Stewart, “Hollywood”). The distributor did not appear to spend as much money on the How to Be a Latin Lover advertising campaign. It promoted this feature film during Valentine’s Day with trailers and one-sheets in theaters (D’Alessandro). However, Pantelion’s marketing and publicity campaign seemed to complement Derbez and Hayek’s public appearances. Pantelion also produced a Spanish-language advertising campaign for a few of its films. It relied heavily on Univision to promote Casa de mi padre (Stewart, “Lionsgate”). It utilized Spanish-language media, billboards, and grassroots marketing to partner with supermarkets located in heavily populated Spanish-speaking neighborhoods to promote Cantinflas (Longo). Univision also planned to televise digitally enhanced motion pictures that featured Cantinflas to coincide with the debut (McNary and Seikaly). For Un gallo con muchos huevos, Pantelion targeted Latinxs between the ages of twentyfive and forty-nine and kids between the ages of six and eleven by using drive-time radio spots on Spanish-language radio and by using its talent to make guest appearances in supermarkets located in heavily populated Latinx neighborhoods (Lang, “Spanish-Language”). Pantelion used billboards and Spanish-language television and radio advertising for more than a month in order to generate awareness for No Manches Frida (Brooks). The distributor hoped that these media campaigns would suppress the mixed reviews that these films received. Pantelion has been using social media to attract more assimilated and younger Latinxs. In 2014, it created a partnership for Cesar Chavez with myLINGO, an app that enables moviegoers to listen to a film’s dialogue in their native language (PR Newswire). For No Manches Frida, it used social media for more than a month to generate awareness with moviegoers (Brooks). Pantelion’s Edward Allen noted that the film’s social media campaign attracted the attention of English-speaking individuals who typically

do not attend these films (Brooks). For How to Be a Latin Lover, it produced a bilingual social media marketing campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter that took advantage of Derbez’s 26.4 million social media fans. It also took advantage of Hayek’s rendition of “All By Myself ” on The Tonight Show that generated 1.8 million YouTube views (D’Alessandro). Derbez and Hayek also did a Wired interview that answered the web’s common questions about them, which generated more than one million YouTube views (“Salma Hayek”). Social media clearly was becoming a more strategic tactic to reach young Latinx moviegoers.

Pantelion has primarily relied on regional releases—Saving Private Perez (161 screens) to A la mala (2015) (384 screens). The vast majority of these films have been distributed throughout Southern California or other heavily populated Latinx areas. This type of smaller release enables Pantelion to utilize strategic local or regional promotional and advertising that supports its print distribution more efficiently. These campaigns also allow Pantelion to control its marketing and distribution expenses. Pantelion began to experiment with larger regional releases in excess of four hundred screens in 2014. For example, Cesar Chavez featured Englishlanguage Latinx star Michael Peña and debuted on 664 screens just prior to Cesar Chavez Day. This film represented Pantelion’s largest release to date that included English-language, subtitled, and dubbed prints (Subers, “March Preview”; Subers, “Forecast”). Later, the distributor debuted Spare Parts during the long Martin Luther King weekend on 440 screens in diverse theaters such as the Grove, Century City, and Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles in an effort to appeal to a broad audience. These larger regional releases were a bit riskier with additional expenses being used on prints, though Pantelion could still control its advertising costs. The distributor occasionally attempted to utilize a platform (or a slow expansion of screens) for its releases. It expanded Prada to Nada (256 to 261), Filly Brown (188 to 259), Cantinflas (382 to 429), Un gallo con muchos huevos (395 to 616), No Manches Frida (362 to 465), and How to Be a Latin Lover (1,118 to 1,200) from the first to second week. Pantelion used a more gradual platform release for Instructions Not Included that began with 348 screens in week one. It continued to expand the film for the next three weeks until it reached a high of 978 screens in its fourth week (Stewart, “Box”). For Un gallo con muchos huevos, Pantelion produced English- and Spanish-language versions in an attempt to also attract English speakers (Elena). It was the first Spanish-language animated film to be widely released (Amidi). How to Be a

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Distribution of Pantelion Films

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Latin Lover was Pantelion’s largest debut ever. The distributor produced both English- and Spanish-language prints in an attempt to extend Derbez’s appeal beyond Latinx moviegoers (Brevet, “Guardians”; D’Alessandro). While this distribution release strategy enables a distributor to control its prints and advertising costs, the strategy is difficult to implement.

Box Office The majority of Pantelion films struggled at the box office. Motion pictures like 3 Idiotas (2017) ($1.2 million), No eres tú, soy yo ($1.3 million), Saving Private Perez ($1.4 million), Busco novio para mi mujer (2016) ($1.7 million), and Everybody Loves Somebody ($1.7 million) did not earn more than $2 million. Films like Un padre no tan padre (2016) ($2.1 million), Girl in Progress ($2.5 million), Filly Brown ($2.8 million), and Ladrones ($3 million) had box office totals that did not earn more than $3.1 million. Compadres ($3.1 million), A la mala ($3.5 million), Spare Parts ($3.6 million), and Prada to Nada ($3.8 million) did not exceed more than $4 million at the box office. These films lacked positive reviews, were not family friendly, and lacked a recognizable cast to attract Latinx moviegoers. A few Pantelion films had some success at the box office. Cesar Chavez ($5.5 million), Casa de mi padre ($5.8 million), Pulling Strings ($5.8 million), and Cantinflas ($6.3 million) earned more than $5 million. Pantelion films Un gallo con muchos huevos ($9 million) and No Manches Frida ($11.5 million) were moderate successes at the box office and earned at least $9 million. No Manches Frida was the second Pantelion film to exceed $10 million at the box office. These films used U.S. Latinx or Hollywood stars, larger distribution debuts, or savvy marketing strategies and social media to produce the results. Pantelion had two enormous hits. Instructions Not Included earned $44.4 million, which made it the highest earning Spanish-language film in the U.S. history (Cobo). How to Be a Latin Lover had a box office of $32.1 million. It was the second Pantelion film to exceed $30 million at the box office. The box office figures of these two motion pictures are impressive as only one other Spanish-language film, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), had exceeded $30 million at the box office in U.S. film history.

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Evaluation of Pantelion’s Campaigns

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Many of Pantelion’s films may have been hurt by the lack of positive reviews from mainstream film critics, the lack of recognizable names with U.S. Latinx moviegoers, and the dearth of general market advertising campaigns.

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Despite these immense hurdles, some Pantelion films did appear to succeed in attracting their initial target market to theaters for the vital opening weekend. For example, Prada to Nada and Girl in Progress attracted 70 percent Latina moviegoers primarily (Subers, “Arthouse Audit”; Stewart, “Femme”). In addition, How to Be a Latin Lover attracted Latina moviegoers over the age of twenty-five, and nearly 90 percent of the audience was Latinx (Brevet, “Furious”; Mendelson). Lastly, Casa de mi padre attracted 68 percent Latinx moviegoers, 51 percent of whom were men (Subers, “Weekend Report: Audiences”). The distributor clearly reached its initial target audience with its publicity tactics and Spanish-language advertising. The success of the last two Eugenio Derbez films illustrates that his target audience either does not read mainstream reviews or are not interested in them. Instructions Not Included and How to Be a Latin Lover received mixed reviews from the mainstream media. Yet both films performed excellently in U.S. Latinx markets. During its opening week, Instructions Not Included generated $10.4 million at the box office, which is an astounding $29,823 per-screen average (Stewart, “Box”; Box Office Mojo, “Instructions”). This family-friendly film did well in heavily Latinx-populated states like California and Texas, which enabled it to become the largest Spanish-language debut in U.S. history (Bowles; Stewart, “Hollywood”; Subers, “Weekend Report: ‘One Direction’”). It certainly was a profitable venture for Pantelion, as it spent about $5 million to promote the film (Stewart, “Hollywood”). How to Be a Latin Lover generated more than $12 million at the box office during Mother’s Day weekend (opening week) and an impressive per-screen average of $10,959 (Mendelson; Box Office Mojo, “How”). The film performed well in theaters in heavily populated Latinx neighborhoods like South Gate (D’Alessandro). The success of these two films illustrates that a savvy publicity campaign from a big Spanish-language star through guest appearances in Spanish-language media and mainstream media does have the ability to overcome mixed reviews from English-language film critics. The success of his two films suggests that Derbez has become a new movie star with a growing number of bilingual and bicultural U.S. Latinx fans. Pantelion has also illustrated that it can overcome poor or a dearth of reviews by using family-friendly films or social media to produce a strong per-screen average for at least one weekend. Pantelion was able to use the family-friendly animated film Un gallo con muchos huevos to generate an impressive per-screen average of $11,030 during its opening weekend (Box Office Mojo, “Un Gallo”). The distributor also was able to use a strong social media campaign for No Manches Frida to produce an excellent $12,845 perscreen average during its opening weekend (Box Office Mojo, “No Manches”; McNary, “No Manches”). At the time, it was the second largest Pantelion

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debut (McNary, “No Manches”). These two factors also appeared to attract families and young moviegoers for a short period of time. While some of Pantelion’s films did well for a single week, the distributor’s six platform releases (i.e., gradual expansions) were mostly ineffective in boosting box office results. Only the Instructions Not Included expansion from 348 screens to 717 screens resulted in a small boost of 4 percent from $7.8 million to $8.1 million (Box Office Mojo, “Instructions”). However, if the entire Labor Day weekend is included, the film’s box office actually dropped 21 percent despite more than doubling the number of screens (Box Office Mojo, “Instructions”). Pantelion tried similar post-Labor Day weekend expansions with No Manches Frida, Un gallo con muchos huevos, and Cantinflas. These films had box office declines of at least 40 percent. The two non-early September (Filly Brown and How to Be a Latin Lover) expansions resulted in significant box office drops of about 60 percent. This trend suggests that Pantelion should not utilize this release strategy in most cases. Pantelion Films has had moderate success with the counterprogramming distribution strategy or by attempting to find holes in Hollywood distribution pipelines. The distributor launched its first major film, Prada to Nada, in early February, which did not feature a well-known Hollywood star. It also strategically placed Casa de mi padre in a weekend that only featured 21 Jump Street (2012) and did have to compete against any major franchise films (Subers, “Weekend Report: Audience”). Girl in Progress targeted female moviegoers, who may not be attracted to Marvel’s The Avengers (2012) (Stewart, “Instructions”). Pulling Strings was unveiled against Gravity (2013) and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013) in its second week. No Manches Frida and Un gallo con muchos huevos debuted during the long Labor Day weekend when the studios did not open a franchise film or a high-concept film. How to Be a Latin Lover was released against The Fate of the Furious (2017), which was in the third week of its box office run and ended up in second place in domestic box office (Box Office Mojo, “How”). These tactics have enabled some of its films to stand out for a single week in some cases.

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Challenges

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Pantelion still has not accomplished one of its primary goals of theatrically releasing between eight and ten motion pictures a year. Pantelion currently does not appear to have the financial resources to significantly advertise and circulate that many films. The only distributors that are able to take on the risk of an expensive theatrical release for eight to ten films a year are the Hollywood studios. These studio distributors are a part of conglomerates

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with vast resources that enable studio distributors to absorb box office busts and escalating prints and advertising (P&A) budgets that reached at least $40 million domestically in 2014 (McClintock). While Pantelion does benefit from financial support from Lionsgate and Televisa, the distributor only has modest P&A budgets for most of its films, which certainly has had a negative impact on some of its films like Everybody Loves Somebody. The conservative nature of this distributor’s owners and the highly competitive nature of the U.S. theatrical market suggest that Pantelion may never theatrically release up to eight films a year. Despite a few box office hits, Pantelion has not developed a successful pipeline of diverse films that consistently attract a broader audience (Hopewell and Young). For several decades, Hollywood distributors and similar U.S. Latinx-oriented distributors have struggled to identify content that resonates with this diverse ethnic group that has various dialects, different national backgrounds, and different levels of acculturation. In Pantelion’s case, Televisa has been the prime producer of its content. It has produced mostly romantic comedies that primarily target female moviegoers. These films tend to be culturally specific, as it is difficult to distribute humorous films internationally, even if the target audience is Spanish speakers living in the United States. A Spanish speaker living in the United States will often not have the same sense of humor as a Mexican, for example. This distributor consequently needs to either acquire or produce Mexican or Latin American dramas that may attract a more diverse group of moviegoers. Pantelion needs to develop a successful pipeline of English-language U.S. Latinx-oriented films. It has attempted to diversify its pipeline by including more English-language films like Girl in Progress or Spare Parts. It also made a deal with George Lopez’s production company in an effort to produce more films for this audience (L. Rose). Unfortunately, all of its English-language films have performed poorly at the box office. Pantelion needs to tackle this problem because its target audience is shrinking through the assimilation process (Krogstad and Gonzalez-Barrera). Pantelion’s long-term success will become more reliant on its ability to produce English-language or bilingual content that will attract an English-dominant and bilingual segment of the Latinx population who consumes English-language content primarily (Krogstad and Gonzalez-Barrera). Pantelion needs to identify another lucrative weekend for Latinx moviegoing. It certainly has illustrated to Hollywood studios that the long Labor Day weekend can be a lucrative one. Pantelion perceived this weekend differently than Hollywood studios. It did an excellent job in identifying this time as a key moviegoing weekend for its target audience and produced some excellent box office figures. At some point in time, the Hollywood studios will

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follow Pantelion’s lead and begin to debut either franchise or big budget films consistently on this particular weekend. In order for Pantelion to have longterm success, it will need to identify other lucrative weekends throughout the calendar year that will attract Latinx moviegoers. Pantelion implemented platform releases occasionally that did not boost office results, which suggests that Latinx moviegoers do not generate strong word-of-mouth results. A platform release strategy relies heavily on a moviegoer’s ability to generate a strong word of mouth, as a distributor must synchronize the film’s expansion with the audience’s word of mouth perfectly. The box office results of these films suggest that Latinx moviegoers may go watch a film during its opening weekend, but they do not appear to recommend a film to other people outside of their inner circle. Pantelion needs more coverage from mainstream publications or to make more of an effort to advertise in English-language media. While some of its films have produced some box office results without much coverage from the mainstream press, the distributor definitely needs to convince more mainstream film critics to write reviews and engage more journalists to interview their film’s stars. This free publicity can be a vital tool in helping Pantelion create more awareness when the cast lacks name recognition. It may also create anticipation with more acculturated Latinxs, who consume their media in English, or general market moviegoers. While English-language advertising is quite expensive and risky, the distributor does need to utilize a bit more advertising on a cable television channel like El Rey Network. These promotional and advertising tactics may enable its films to have a longer theatrical run by potentially attracting more non-Latinx moviegoers. Lastly, Pantelion needs to develop another Latin American or U.S. Latinx star in order to become more well-known among moviegoers. Eugenio Derbez is currently the only star who has a positive track record for Pantelion Films. He has been able to generate impressive box office results by doing an excellent job of promoting Instructions Not Included and How to Be a Latin Lover. Derbez’s latest film, Overboard (2018), which generated more than $50 million, continued his unprecedented streak of promoting Spanishlanguage or bilingual box office hits in the United States (Osegueda). But outside of Derbez’s titles, most of Pantelion’s films have had short theatrical runs and made less than $5 million. At some point in time, Derbez will stop acting. If the distributor wants to continue to have long-term success, it will need to develop another star who attracts U.S. Latinx moviegoers. Pantelion has had some success and certainly could be on a trajectory to become a formidable niche-market distributor during this era. It has been able to identify lulls in the pipeline among U.S. distributors successfully. By identifying these weaknesses, the distributor has been able to strategically

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unveil its films during these times. Pantelion consequently provides counterprogramming options for moviegoers who may not be attracted to the current Hollywood motion pictures or may have already seen a franchise film before. Pantelion appears to have a better understanding of Latinx moviegoing trends than previous distributors of Latinx content. Previous distributors have often debuted their films in inappropriate cities, have not produced an effective marketing campaign, or selected a poor debut date. While not always successful with its releases, Pantelion appears to control its costs and release its films in the appropriate markets. For example, it has used Derbez and other stars to make guest appearances on radio or television talk shows or to make guest appearances for grassroots-marketing campaigns. Lastly, Pantelion has repeatedly debuted films during three-day weekends, such as the long Labor Day weekend when Latinx moviegoers are apt to attend with their families. Pantelion Films has been able to take advantage of mainstream exhibitors’ efforts to keep attracting moviegoers. Major exhibitors, such as AMC, are trying to improve the moviegoing experience with more comfortable seats because they have to compete with increasingly sophisticated in-home options, such as larger high-definition televisions. Like AMC, Regal and Cinemark also have begun to serve alcohol in a few theaters (Lang, “How”). While the new accommodations have not resulted in a spike in moviegoing among domestic audiences, Latinx moviegoers continue to be a prolific audience for exhibitors (Nordyke). As a result, mainstream exhibitors have been looking to book more non-mainstream titles in an effort to target these prolific moviegoers. It has been able to fill mainstream exhibitors’ short-term need. The Lionsgate-Televisa partnership that resulted in Pantelion Films has been able to take advantage of marketplace gaps given that no distributor is targeting Latinx moviegoers specifically, and mainstream exhibitors’ need to attract alternative moviegoers. The partnership essentially ensures that Pantelion will receive a steady stream of Mexican films through Televisa, and Lionsgate will provide its films with a direct pipeline to U.S. Latinx moviegoers. This partnership certainly has been able to produce a couple of successful films. Despite its success with some Spanish-language and bilingual content, Pantelion Films has not been able to produce a successful English-language film, a noteworthy Spanish-language drama, or a non-Mexican film that may attract English-dominant, art film, or non-Mexican moviegoers. Pantelion needs to figure out how to attract a more assimilated U.S. Latinx and non-Mexican audience consistently either through a traditional advertising and publicity campaign or by using social media. This young, growing, and

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bicultural audience will become more vital for mainstream entertainment companies into the future. In order to attract a bicultural audience and better withstand inevitable future competition, Pantelion Films will need to diversify its content in order to better reflect the U.S. Latinx experience. The diversification of content will most likely attract more diverse and consistent moviegoers and better position this company for long-term success.

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References

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deadline.com/2017/04/emma-watson-the-circle-fate-of-the-furious-weekend-box-office-how -to-be-a-latin-lover-1202079002/. de la Fuente, Anna Marie. “Pantelion Films Sets Date for ‘Ladrón’ Comedy Sequel.” Variety, July 22, 2015, variety.com/2015/film/global/pantelion-ladrones -ladron-que-roba-a-ladron-lionsgate -fernando-colunga-eduardo-yanez-1201545917/. Elena, Ma. “Riva Brothers’ ‘Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos’ Becomes First Mexican Animated Feature in Hollywood.” LatinOne.com, July 16, 2015, www.latinone.com/articles/20721/20150716/riva -brothers-un-gallo-con-muchos-huevos-becomes-first-mexican.htm. Fritz, Ben. “Company Town: Modest Debut for ‘Prada.’ ” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 31, 2011, p. D4. Haralovich, Mary Beth. “The Social History of Film: Heterogeneity and Mediation.” Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 2, 1986, pp. 4– 14. Hopewell, John. “Guadalajara: Mexico’s Film Industry Analyzes 2016 Records, Big Picture Challenges.” Variety, Mar. 15, 2017, variety.com/2017/film/festivals/overview-of-mexican-film-industry-2016 -results-1202009705/. Hopewell, John, and James Young. “Mexico Cinema Crosses the Border with ‘Instructions,’ ‘Nobles.’ ” Variety, Nov. 6, 2013, variety.com/2013/film/global/mexico-cinema-crosses-the-border-with -instructions-nobles-1200799244/. James, Meg, and Stephen Battaglio. “How the Big TV Networks Are Adapting to Ad-Skipping Viewers . . . and Google, Snapchat and Facebook.” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2017, www.latimes.com /business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-upfront-television-advertising-20170514-story.html. Johnson, Reed. “Eugenio Derbez Finds a Following for His ‘Instructions.’ ” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 11, 2013, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-eugenio-derbez -instructions-20130911-story.html. Kelley, Seth. “Box Office: ‘Latin Lover’ Tops ‘The Circle,’ Fate of the Furious’ Rides to Third Straight No. 1.” Variety, Apr. 30, 2017, variety.com/2017/film/news/box-office-latin-lover-the-circle-fate -of-the-furious-baahubali-2-1202404074/. Krogstad, Jens Manuel, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. “A Majority of English-Speaking Hispanics in the U.S. Are Bilingual.” Pew Research Center, Mar. 24, 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03 /24/a-majority-of-english-speaking-hispanics-in-the-u-s-are-bilingual/. Lang, Brent. “How Movie Theaters Used Alcohol, Comfy Chairs to Weather Box Office Downturn.” Variety, Feb. 19, 2015, variety.com/2015/film/news/how-movie-theaters-used-alcohol-comfy -chairs-to-weather-box-office-downturn-1201437273/. Lang, Brent. “Spanish-Language Animated ‘Un Gallo’ Racks Up Big Labor Day Box Office.” Variety, Sept. 7, 2015, variety.com/2015/film/box-office/un-gallo-box-office-labor-day-1201587501/. “Latin America-Films: To Counter Drop in Hispano Cinemas, Azteca Sets Small-Mkt. Promo and Push into Homevid.” Variety, vol. 314, no. 8, Mar. 21, 1984, p. 49, 60. Longo, Donovan. “‘Cantinflas’ Movie Premieres with Impressive Numbers Despite Limited Release.” Latin Times, Sept. 2, 2014, www.latintimes.com/cantinflas-movie-premieres-impressive -numbers-despite-limited-release-205498. McClintock, Pamela. “$200 Million and Rising: Hollywood Struggles with Soaring Marketing Costs.” Hollywood Reporter, July 31, 2014, hollywoodreporter.com/news/200-million-rising-hollywood -struggles-721818. McNary, Dave. “George Lopez Movie ‘Spare Parts’ Sets Release Date for Jan. 16.” Variety, June 19, 2014, variety.com/2014/film/news/george-lopez-movie-spare-parts-release-date-jan-16-1201223958/. McNary, Dave. “Eugenio Derbez Developing ‘The Valet’ Remake Under New Pantelion Deal.” Variety, Sept. 5, 2014, variety.com/2014/film/news/eugenio-derbez-developing-the-valet-remake-under -new-pantelion-deal-1201298836/. McNary, Dave. “Lionsgate Launching Local-Language Film Consortium.” Variety, May 2, 2016, variety .com/2016/film/news/lionsgate-globalgate-local-language-movie-consortium-1201764636/. McNary, Dave. “‘No Manches Frida’ Scores Solid Results for Lionsgate’s Local Language Initiative.” Variety, Sept. 5, 2016, variety.com/2016/film/news/no-manches-frida-box-office-lionsgate-1201 852381/. McNary, Dave, and Andrea Seikaly. “‘Cantinflas’ Biopic Gets U.S. Distribution (Exclusive).” Variety, May 1, 2014, variety.com/2014/film/news/cantinflas-biopic-gets-u-s-distribution-exclusive -1201169458/.

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Mendelson, Scott. “Box Office: ‘How to Be a Latin Lover’ Nabs $12M weekend, ‘Baahubali 2’ shocks with $10M.” Forbes, Apr. 30, 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/04/30/box-office -how-to-be-a-latin-lover-nabs-12m-weekend-baahubali-2-shocks-with-10m/#5128c6082372. MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). Theatrical Market Statistics 2016. Motion Picture Association of America, 2016, www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MPAA-Theatrical -Market-Statistics-2016_Final.pdf. NBC News. “5 Questions and a Spare for George Lopez on ‘Spare Parts’ Movie.” NBC News, Jan. 14, 2014, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/5-questions-spare-george-lopez-spare-parts-movie-n285741. Nordyke, Kimberly. “AMC Theatres to Spend $600 Million for Bigger, Fully Reclining Seats.” Yahoo, July 8, 2014, www.yahoo.com/entertainment/amc-theatres-to-spend-600-million-for-bigger -fully-91160190277.html. Olsen, Mark. “Review: The Mariachi-Flavored ‘Pulling Strings’ a Fun Little Number.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 3, 2013, www.latimes .com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-pulling -strings-20131004-story.html. Osegueda, Elisa. “‘Overboard’ Star Eugenio Derbez Credits Loyal Latino Fan Base for Massive Hollywood Success (Exclusive).” Etonline, Aug. 2, 2018, www.etonline.com/overboard-star-eugenio -derbez-credits-loyal-latino-fan-base-for-massive-hollywood-success-exclusive. PR Newswire. “New myLINGO Application to Launch with the Highly Anticipated Bio Pic Cesar Chavez, Offering Spanish Audio Track for Non-English Speakers.” PR Newswire, Mar. 10, 2014, www.prnews wire.com/news -releases/new -mylingo-application-to-launch-with-the-highly -anticipated-bio-pic-cesar-chavez--offering-spanish-audio-track-for-non-english-speakers-2492 69391.html. Puente, Henry. The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films. Peter Lang, 2011. Rose, Lacey. “George Lopez Inks TV and Film Deal with Lionsgate and Televisa’s Pantelion Films, South Shore.” Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 2, 2013, hollywoodreporter.com/news/george-lopez-inks -tv-film-641581. Rose, Steve. “Cannes 2015: How Foreign-Language Film-makers Took Over English-Language Arthouse.” The Guardian, May 1, 2015, www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/30/no-subtitles -required-how-foreign-language-film-makers-took-over-english-language-arthouse. Rosen, David, and Peter Hamilton. Off-Hollywood: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. Grove Press, 1990. “Salma Hayek & Eugenio Derbez Answer the Web’s Most Searched Questions | WIRED.” YouTube, uploaded by Wired, Apr. 24, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4596GUdlSnU. Seikaly, Andrea. “Diego Luna on ‘Cesar Chavez’: ‘The Story of Farm Workers Matters.’ ” Variety, Mar. 21, 2014, variety.com/2014/scene/vpage/diego-luna-on-cesar-chavez-the-story-of-farm-workers -matters-1201141495/. Smith, Stacy M., et al. “Inequality in 800 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007– 2015.” USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Sept. 2016, annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/2017/04/10/MDSCI_Inequality_in _800_Films_FINAL.pdf. Stewart, Andrew. “Box Office: Vin Diesel’s ‘Riddick’ Should Blast ‘Butler’ with $20 Million-Plus.” Variety, Sept. 5, 2013, variety.com/2013/film/box-office/box-office-vin-diesels-riddick-should-blast -butler-with-20-million-plus-1200600135/. Stewart, Andrew. “Femme Auds Power ‘Girl.’ ” Variety, May 19, 2012, variety.com/2012/film/box -office/femme-auds-power-girl-1118054293/. Stewart, Andrew. “Hollywood Gets ‘Instructions’ from Latino Audiences.” Variety, Sept. 24, 2013, variety .com/2013/film/box-office/hollywood-gets-instructions-from-latino-audiences-1200665085/. Stewart, Andrew. “Lionsgate Lures Auds to ‘Casa.’ ” Variety, Mar. 20 2012, variety.com/2012/film /news/lionsgate-lures-auds-to-casa-1118051705/. Subers, Ray. “Arthouse Audit: ‘Blue Valentine’ Trumps ‘Nada,’ ‘Biutiful.’ ” Box Office Mojo, Jan. 31, 2011, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3065&p=.htm. Subers, Ray. “Forecast: After Months of Controversy, ‘Noah’ Finally Storms Theaters.” Box Office Mojo, Mar. 27, 2014, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3806&p=.htm. Subers, Ray. “March Preview (Part 2): ‘Divergent,’ ‘Muppets,’ ‘Noah.’ ” Box Office Mojo, Mar. 5, 2014, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3793&p=.htm.

Subers, Ray. “Weekend Report: Audiences Report to ‘21 Jump Street.’ ” Box Office Mojo, Mar. 18, 2012, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3396&p=.htm. Subers, Ray. “Weekend Report: ‘One Direction’ Rocks, ‘Instructions’ Surprises over Labor Day.” Box Office Mojo, Sept. 1, 2013, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3721&p=.htm. Szalai, Georg. “Lionsgate, Televisa Detail Hispanic Film Venture.” Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 14, 2010, hollywoodreporter.com/news/lionsgate-televisa-detail-hispanic-film-27823. Szalai, Georg. “Univision Reports Higher Quarterly Earnings, CEO Touts Ratings Trends.” Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 16, 2017, hollywoodreporter.com/news/univision-reports-higher-quarterly -earnings-sees-376m-fcc-spectrum-auction-proceeds-976353. Taylor, Paul, et al. “When Labels Don’t Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity: Part IV. Language Use Among Latinos.” Pew Research Center, Apr. 4, 2012, www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/iv -language-use-among-latinos/. Verrier, Richard. “AMC Burbank 16 Plans to Sell Alcohol— and, of course, Sell More Tickets.” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2014, www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-amc -alcohol-20140529-story.html. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977. Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. University of Texas Press, 1994.

3 Idiotas. Directed by Carlos Bolado, Greenlight Productions/Efcine/Reencuentro Films, 2017. 21 Jump Street. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Columbia Pictures/Metro-GoldwynMayer/Relativity Media/Original Film/Stephen J. Cannell Productions, 2012. A la mala. Directed by Pitipol Ybarra, Equipment and Film Design, 2015. The Avengers. Directed by Joss Whedon, Marvel Studios/Paramount Pictures, 2012. Busco novio para mi mujer. Directed by Enrique Begne, Animal de Luz Films/Azucar Films/Cacerola Films, 2016. Cantinflas. Directed by Sebastian del Amo, Kenio Films, 2014. Casa de mi Padre. Directed by Matt Piedmont, NALA Films/Pantelion Films/Televisa Films/Lionsgate/Gary Sanchez Productions, 2012. Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2014. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. Directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn, Columbia Pictures/ Sony Pictures Animation, 2013. Compadres. Directed by Enrique Begne, Draco Films/Equipment and Film Design, 2016. Everybody Loves Somebody. Directed by Catalina Aguilar Mastretta, Bh5/Draco Films/Ring Cine, 2017. Fack ju Gohte. Directed by Bora Dagtekin, Rat Pack Filmproduktion/Constantin Film, 2013. The Fate of the Furious. Directed by F. Gary Gray, Universal Pictures/China Film Co./Original Film/ One Race Films/Dentsu/Fuji Eight Company, 2017. Filly Brown. Directed by Youssef Delara and Michael D. Olmos, Cima Productions/Olmos Productions, 2013. Gallo con muchos huevos. Directed by Gabriel Riva Palacio Alatriste and Rodolfo Riva Palacio Alatriste, Simka Entertainment, 2015. Girl in Progress. Directed by Patricia Riggen, Anxiety Productions/Latitude Entertainment/Pantelion Films, 2012. Gravity. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Warner Bros./Esperanto Filmoj/Heyday Films, 2013. Hazlo como hombre. Directed by Nicholas López, Sobras International Pictures/A Todo Madre Entertainment/Bh5, 2017. How to Be a Latin Lover. Directed by Ken Marino, Pantelion Films/3Pas Studios, 2017. Instructions Not Included. Directed by Eugenio Derbez, Alebrije Cine y Video and Fulano, Mengano y Asociados, 2013. Ladrones. Directed by Joe Menendez, Lantica Media/Pinewood Dominican Republic Studios, 2015. Ladrón que roba a ladrón. Directed by Joe Menendez, Narrow Bridge Films/Panamax Films, 2007. No eres tú, soy yo. Directed by Alejandro Springall, Rio Negro/Warner Bros., 2011. No Manches Frida. Directed by Nacho G. Velilla, Pantelion Films/Alcon Entertainment/Constantin Film/Neverending Media/Videocine, 2016.

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Overboard. Directed by Rob Greenberg, Pantelion Films/3Pas Studios/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2018. Pan’s Labyrinth. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Estudios Picasso/Wild Bunch/Tequila Gang/Esperanto Filmoj/Sententia Entertainment/Telecinco/CafeFX/OMM, 2006. Prada to Nada. Directed by Angel Garcia, MWM/Gilbert Films/Lionsgate/Televisa/Hyperion Films/ Gotham Music Placement, 2011. Pulling Strings. Directed by Pitipol Ybarra, Traziende Producciones/TRZ, 2013. Saving Private Perez. Directed by Beto Gomez, Salamandra Films/Lemon Studios/Terregal Films/ Vía Media, 2011. Spare Parts. Directed by Sean McNamara, Brookwell-McNamara Entertainment/Circle of Confusion/Indieproduction/Pantelion Films/Televisa Films, 2015. Un padre no tan padre. Directed by Raul Martinez, Panorama Global, 2017.

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Chapter 3

REFRAMING THE BORDER IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY Monica Hanna

There have been several splashy, widely distributed documentaries and narrative films aimed at U.S. audiences that focus on the escalating violence related to the “drug war” in Mexico since 2006, the date marking the beginning of President Felipe Calderón’s six-year tenure that increased federal pressure on cartels, leading to instability and widespread violence among not just the cartels but also the civilian population.1 These films track shifting law enforcement and public efforts to contain the eruptions of violence as well as the movement of illicit drugs and unauthorized migrants from Latin America at the border with Mexico. Films aiming to reveal the realities of the U.S.-Mexico border to U.S. audiences include documentaries like Narco Cultura (2013) and Cartel Land (2015) and fictions like Sicario (2015). These films represent the bloody effects of the violence perpetrated by drug cartels and other actors, in some cases glorified in popular culture, and facilitated by corrupt officials and a culture of impunity within Mexico. While these films may tell compelling stories or offer insight into the lives of individual figures and the parameters of current conflicts, they often traffic in narrative and visual clichés that reaffirm general U.S. public perception of the border as an irredeemable site of endemic criminality and violence. We see this from the very outset of the films, in their titles and in the promotional posters. The titles all use terms related to drugs and violence, while the posters for the films all feature images related to death and violence, particularly centrally placed firearms. Tropes and clichés used in such films include abrupt editing styles, recalling contemporary music videos more than traditional documentary; binary representation, often embodied in figures, characters, and settings representing opposing sides (U.S. and Mexican counterparts, criminals and law enforcement officials, first- and third-world spaces); a visual focus on border landscapes, with panning shots of dry, dusty, empty desert punctuated by border fencing with its distinctive rust-colored poles or border patrol vehicles; and images that establish the physical horror of violence (blood, 67

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decapitated bodies, hanging victims, corpses tortured beyond recognition), often as stills or photographs culled from various sources including the nota roja, or “red press,” in Mexico that publishes gruesome images and graphic details of violent crimes. Also notable is what these films exclude. They present the border as a space that seems to exist in a continuous present, rarely providing adequate historical context or considering the social and political forces that have shaped this reality and instead focusing on the actions of individuals. The border becomes a limbo, an in-between space of lawlessness, where rules do not apply and impunity governs. As a result, while these images may stoke shock and indignation, those feelings are directionless because they are aimed at a situation whose context is unmined within the films. The focus on the spectacular nature of images of border violence positions the U.S. viewer as a voyeur who contemplates from afar an unsolvable quandary, a dangerous liminal space, about which ultimately there is little anyone— individual citizens, governmental agencies, or nations, much less the distant spectator— can do to make positive change. After the spectator has satisfied their curiosity, the only option left is to turn away, even if perhaps more disturbed than before, distanced from the spectacle. The border is presented as a problem, and as a result, all things related to the U.S.-Mexico border can be collapsed into this view. This is a viewpoint that already exists in some areas of U.S. policy, which treats immigration as a security concern and an issue of national security; for example, following 9/11, immigration enforcement has been under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency tasked with protecting the nation against terrorism. The identification of Mexico and Mexicans with illicitness has tracked onto Mexican migrants, Mexican Americans and Chicanxs, and the Latinx population more broadly in the popular imagination, as evidenced by anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx explosions on social media, in legislation, and in public. In this chapter, I am interested in exploring the ways in which twentyfirst-century documentary filmmaking by Latinx directors can potentially interrupt this narrative regarding the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. (and international) audiences. I examine three works from the second decade of this century by U.S.-based filmmakers born in Mexico who grew up in the United States (Rodrigo Reyes and Bernardo Ruiz) or moved to the United States as an adult (Alejandro González Iñárritu). Two of these works are films in the traditional sense—Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border (2013) and Kingdom of Shadows (2015)— while the third incorporates documentary elements within a larger artwork that encompasses installation art, virtual reality (VR), and video footage—Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) (2017). These three works are different among each

The Poetics of Slow Documentary Rodrigo Reyes’s feature-length documentary Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border (2013) is a film about the U.S.-Mexico border that provides an expansive poetic view. There are no main protagonists in the film, though the film is populated with a chorus of subjects with incredibly varied experience, including migrants, schoolchildren, a drug addict, a forensic worker, a journalist, dogcatchers, community activists, and historical reenactment actors, among many others. Though without primary subjects, the one constant human presence throughout the film is the narrator, the director himself. Speaking in Spanish throughout, he opens with a contemplation of the world before the creation of borders and the ill effects of human progress on the natural world.2 Then the narration brings a focus to the border between Mexico and the United States, including reflections on the current state of the borderlands and his own relation to the two countries as a person who has crossed the border since childhood. The use of the subjective “I” in

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other in some material and narrative ways— using different media, focusing on different aspects of borders and border crossings (migration, smuggling, law enforcement, broader quotidian experiences of border life), and making different aesthetic choices (in particular around the blending of documentary and narrative film conventions). Nonetheless, in their representations of the contours of the U.S.-Mexico border, they disrupt representations that encourage voyeurism and distant spectatorship. Instead of representing the border region itself as a problem, or current problems at the border as unsolvable, the films focus on agents of change and/or encourage the audience to understand and empathize with border inhabitants through content and aesthetics that are more nuanced in order to potentially spur a shift in action. These Latinx documentaries engage in some formal and narrative experimentation to meet these goals. Their alternative aesthetics slow down the fast-paced decontextualized models we see in mainstream U.S. films that emphasize shock over a potentially deeper and more engaged understanding. These films eschew a binary focus that can serve to reify borders as dividing lines between two discrete spaces and identities in favor of choral representations of varied individuals within larger communities. These films go beyond a focus on spectacular subjects like cartel leaders, law enforcement officials, vigilantes, and pop culture creators, to incorporate “ordinary” border inhabitants who include migrants, activists, and reformers working to effect change. These films thus privilege a different kind of representation, pivoting away the sensational toward context-rich immersive and contemplative investigations of the border and its inhabitants.

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the film already marks its distinctions from other documentaries on similar topics, which ostensibly represent a more detached perspective even though practitioners and scholars including Trinh T. Minh-ha have pointed out the fallacy of viewing certain techniques as somehow more “honest” or more “manipulative” in the documentary as a form that makes a particular claim to truth (81). Reyes’s narrative voice marks the filmmaker’s closeness to the subject and his own investment in it through his personal experiences as a migrant who grew up moving between the two countries. The early shots of the film cut between images of nature, children in school, and border fencing. The film then pauses to contemplate two migrants on the Mexican side of a stretch of border fence made up of eighteenfoot-tall, round red metal poles. The forty-six-year-old Mexican man and the twenty-five-year-old Central American man, both unnamed like all of those represented in the film, read the wording etched on a metal plaque affixed to a white stone border monument regarding the establishment of the border in the mid-nineteenth century. This scene does not show action; the subjects don’t move much and instead contemplate the fence and the border marker, then give testimony to the poverty that inspired them to make their journeys. The end of the film returns to this same scene and subjects, cutting when the younger pilgrim climbs to the top of the fence, left in visual limbo at the point of intersection between the two countries, to the final narration of the film that contemplates potential resolutions to the border conflict and the natural destruction toward which our world appears headed, accompanied by images of nature and abandoned urban landscapes. The focus on the two migrants at the border fence illustrates the title of the film, with its many literary overtones, recalling Dante’s narrative poem “Purgatorio,” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the common literary trope of the pilgrim’s journey. The clearest influence is that of the second canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy, “Purgatorio.” Dante’s vision of purgatory differs from the current popular view of a space of stasis, endless limbo, and eternal waiting, almost a kind of inferno itself. Instead, Dante represents purgatory as a mountain the pilgrim traverses, with terraces on which souls purge their sins; this place of purgation is one in which “every single soul is in progress toward salvation” (Hollander xxiii). According to Robert Hollander, in Dante’s work, “to come to purgatory is to arrive at the threshold of heaven, and to arrive there in a state of grace” (xxiii). Reyes’s title indicates a vision of the borderlands as a space in limbo that is nonetheless not static but instead a space of movement and change, beauty, and redemption. In plain words, the border is not a lost cause in Purgatorio. While it may be a confounding place, with ironies and paradoxes difficult to square (Reyes states in the film’s narration: “No puedo descifrar la frontera. Me da rabia y me siento perdido”

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[“I can’t decipher the border. It makes me angry and I feel lost”]; my translation), the border is nonetheless a place of spare beauty. That beauty is emphasized in the camera angles, shot compositions, editing, and score of the film. Unlike the fast cuts of a documentary like Narco Cultura (released the same year as Purgatorio), Reyes’s film presents fewer images for longer takes, often in wide angle. These images are often composed like still photographs in motion, capturing the sounds and images of nature and the built world. These long takes allow the viewer to rest on these images from the borderlands and see the beauty in many border sites, including even in the “ugliness” of images of detritus. In contrast with the decontextualized images the viewer finds in other documentaries, Purgatorio provides a particularly broad context for its subject while ironically decontextualizing the immediate images in order to present a broader point about borders. The director rejects the use of text to mark the names of its subjects or label the specific location of the footage. Rather than labeling facts, fixing the meaning of these individuals and places, making them easier to categorize, the filmmaker instead focuses on on the truth beyond those facts, using the film’s chorus as exemplars of the human condition at the border.3 The documentary has an unusual relation to time, as documentaries tend to be explicitly linked to the time and place of their creation. Purgatorio, though, contains scenes that are not just undated but seem out of place or time. Examples of these scenes include the reenactments of the Last Supper in a filled stadium in Mexico and a Wild West shootout in the United States. While these scenes are at first disorienting, they serve the important purpose of layering the past onto the present. They suggest that the situation at the border today is one that has been shaped over a much longer history and by longer cultural traditions. The long and lingering shots also serve to shift the audience’s understanding of time in the film. These shots rest on individuals or landscapes at length as time passes slowly and unmarked. There are many shots highlighting an unexpected, otherworldly quality to the borderscapes of the film. In one scene, for example, there are living actors who appear in a kind of cross-city tableaux. Their skin is painted white, and they wear all white while also donning wings, appearing as angels around the city as they carry signs to repent addressed to police, hitmen, extortionists, and nonbelievers. These angels are silent and immobile, perched atop bus shelters or standing on cars as police cars and other traffic move past. These images juxtapose the everyday with the heightened and capture an expression of unexpected dramatic beauty. This scene also links the immediate concerns of the border to broader questions about faith, morality, and mortality. In contrast to this representation of a borderland that is a place of purgation on the way to paradise, many contemporary documentaries and

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Figure 3.1 An “angel” perched atop a bus shelter calls for assassins to repent in front of a Secretariat of Public Security office in Purgatorio.

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narrative films revel in violent images, presenting a borderland that is infernal. Narco Cultura, for example, ostensibly critiques the violence at the U.S.Mexico border and its glorification from U.S.-based popular music producers of the narcocorrido. However, the film ironically revels in and exploits that very violence, resting on gruesome images of murders and following one of the two main figures in the film, a Los Angeles-based Mexican American narcocorrido singer named Edgar Quintero (who at the start of the film is a self-described “pocho” who has never even visited the Mexican territories he sings about in his songs4) as he toys with weapons, uses illicit drugs, and plays a drug trafficker in a narco película (narcofilm). One of his band members is shown doing research by visiting the Blog del Narco website, which presents bloody and gruesome images and video. Cartel Land, meanwhile, focuses on two vigilante figures, one an American and one a Mexican, who decide to take up arms to try to fill in for what they see as their governments’ failures to secure the border or their nations’ inhabitants. This film interestingly extends the border, focusing on one vigilante in Arizona and another in the interior state of Michoacán (labeled in the film “1,030 miles from the Arizona border”), though that space is conflated as part of the larger drug war that has enveloped Mexico far beyond border states. Both vigilantes and the groups they help to form arm themselves, patrol, and in some cases participate in violence and intimidation. The film does not provide any historical context for the creation of these groups or the governmental institutions and actions related to them; it provides only one immediate context: the violence

Yo esperaba enfrentarme a una selva de violencia descarnada. Sin embargo, me encontré con una extraña racha de suerte. Después de varias semanas de búsqueda solo pude encontrar este asesinato. No es nada espectacular. Solo un pequeño chapulín que mataron con un arma de bajo calibre. (I was expecting to face a jungle of gory violence. But instead I ran into a weird streak of luck. After several weeks of searching, this was the only murder I could find. It is really nothing spectacular. Just another smalltime dealer killed with a small-caliber handgun [my translation].)

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executed by drug cartels in Mexico. For example, the film includes a photo that José Manuel Mireles, one of the two main figures in the film, shares with the filmmaker of his neighbors’ heads lined up on a wall after being decapitated by the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) cartel. Images of blood and gore are very much in line with popular news media representation. Susan Sontag has critiqued the use of gory photographs in the media, describing their use in this way: “Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news,’ features conflict and violence— ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows— to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view” (18). Here, Sontag points to the fact that news about foreign countries focuses on violence meant to spark reactions in the viewer that don’t necessarily spark equivalent action. Narco Cultura and Cartel Land build on these audience appetites, drawing on the fascination with contemporary border violence that plays into long-running U.S. and Mexican popular interest in outlaws, illicit activity, and organized crime. Unlike this kind of information dissemination to which audiences have become accustomed, Purgatorio aims not to hide the truth about conflicts at the U.S. border but rather to give layers and nuance to those conflicts while not exploiting the spectacle of the violence associated with it. Purgatorio does not censor violent reality, but its framing is distinct, either contextualized differently, presented indirectly, or described via analogy. The first signal of this alternative model for approaching violence is a few minutes into the film when the narrator explains that he expected to find a violence- saturated landscape on the Mexican side of the border when he started filming the documentary, but this wasn’t what he found. The film offers a couple of angles on the peacefully crumpled body of a man murdered recently, his body folded in front of a concrete wall at what looks like a building under construction and in a space of unexpected beauty, the shade of blowing leaves moving across his intact body as the audio captures the sounds of birds chirping in the shade-giving tree. Reyes narrates:

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This comment (forthright? tongue-in-cheek?) marks a recalibration of method for the film; it cannot tread well-worn paths of sensational images typical for the subject and the area. The scene of death the filmmaker captures is “nothing spectacular” in both senses of the phrase: it is not unusual or unexpected in the context of drug violence, and at the same time it is not an image that draws attention to itself. The bar is high for such images to have any visual impact considering the catalog of images of cruelly inventive forms of torture and violence available in mass media. Instead, the film focuses on images that convey their meaning via different modes, working poetically, often through visual and narrative analogy. For example, the images following those of the relatively bloodless corpse are of a junk heap of used tires in a patch of dirt, suggesting that humans in this context have become akin to objects and are treated as disposable, a kind of refuse. This social harm is made analogous in the film to the widespread ecological harm documented in abundant images of garbage, abandoned construction, and pollution. Perhaps in response to the overabundance of existing images of bodily violence in border conflicts, Purgatorio offers alternative visual representations to resensitize its audience to suffering. In one scene shortly after a discussion with a U.S. forensics official tasked with identifying the bodies of migrants who have died in the desert on the U.S. side of the border, the audience follows dogcatchers in an unidentified border town. While an animal control official discusses the problem of stray dogs in the city, we see images of animal control personnel gathering strays and throwing them into trucks, then myriad dogs in cages, and finally a small, shaking dog with curly matted fur that is euthanized by injection. The camera lingers on the dog as the audience watches workers administer the injection and the animal then falls over, its limbs spasming as it dies. It is perhaps the most emotionally difficult scene to watch, and likely more difficult to watch than the scene of the dead human corpse earlier in the film. The film pushes us to consider why that is, why as audience members we are so inured to the pain and suffering of some humans yet bristle when we see the pain of nonhuman animals. Reyes has explained that he was inspired to include this footage because of an analogy that migrants make in referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facilities as “perreras,” or dog pounds (Reyes). Purgatorio, then, asks the audience to consider the pain of detention and deportation for migrants analogically, and even without knowledge regarding the term “perrera,” the audience must consider the role of various forms of human suffering in the borderlands by looking at it from a defamiliarized perspective that has the potential to shift reception. This use of analogy aligns with Reyes’s embrace of a “poetic cinema” (“About”). In this sense, his film is indebted to the work of Mexican American

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documentary filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, particularly her documentary film Señorita extraviada (2001), which investigates the femicides in the Mexican border town of Juárez at the turn of this century. Señorita extraviada, like Purgatorio, focuses on violence in the borderlands (including in Juárez) while avoiding images of dead bodies (in part to avoid exploiting the victims and their families) and uses the filmmaker’s narration throughout. Like Portillo before him, Reyes also invokes the subjective “I,” situating his own relationship to the border and marking a departure from other similar films by rejecting false notions of objectivity often associated with documentary film to expose the partiality of official sources of information, from media to government. Film scholar Rosa-Linda Fregoso writes about Portillo’s documentary aesthetics in Señorita extraviada in similar terms to those Reyes uses to describe his own work: “Instead of employing an expository mode centered on informing the audience of the details, scale, and ramifications of this issue, Portillo’s film employs what might be described as a poetic mode.” According to Fregoso, this mode “encourages an understanding and compassion for the victims and survivors of human rights violations which can potentially generate relations of solidarity and political action.” As with Portillo, in Reyes’s work, this invocation of the poetic veers away from the expository mode of current border documentary that exploits the spectacle of violence against border inhabitants, instead encouraging compassion and a broader understanding of life (as opposed to just death) at the border. Reyes’s poetic approach also serves to reorient the audience’s perception of the border in a saturated visual marketplace. This reframing is clear from the beginning of the film to the end. The film opens with a black screen and Reyes’s direct narrative address to the audience, stating, “Cierra los ojos. Intenta imaginar cómo era el mundo hace muchos, muchos años cuando no existían las fronteras” (Close your eyes. Try to imagine what the world was like many, many years ago when borders did not exist [my translation]), before cutting to the image of ocean waves, whose crashing is audible before appearing visually.5 Film viewers are rarely asked to close their eyes for a medium that relies so heavily on the visual. This instruction signals several things to the audience: first, that the film is interested in the play on (hyper) visibility and invisibility of the border and its marginalized subjects; second, that it intends to break with sensationalistic visual representations; and third, that it seeks to recontextualize the border temporally, visually, and narratively. The film ends with a similar move away from the immediate concerns of the border toward a perspective that incorporates those concerns into a larger focus on the damage humans have inflicted on the earth. In the last few minutes, Reyes narrates his preoccupation with how the Anthropocene will end, asking how long it will take for the animals to erase the mark of humans

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Figure 3.2 Plastic debris blown by the wind in the final scene of Purgatorio.

on the planet. This apocalyptic vision warns the audience about the damaging effects of apathy and violence directed toward the natural and human worlds, manifested in relief at the U.S.-Mexico border. Moving from the dreamlike to the concrete, the film attempts to move the audience in multiple senses of the term.

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Recasting the Border Documentary

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In comparison to Purgatorio, Bernardo Ruiz’s Kingdom of Shadows (2015) is more traditional, with a narrower focus and expository style. One of its most important interventions, however, is its choice of subjects in exploring the transborder drug trade as it intersects with cultures of corruption, violence, and impunity. Rather than choosing a binary pair of figures across the border, a trope of many popular documentaries as noted above, Ruiz focuses on a trio of figures who defy easy categorization. Two of them are border-crossing men, one a high-ranking DHS official whose father crossed the border from Mexico to the United States without authorization in order to settle his family in Texas, and the other a white U.S. farmer and former marijuana smuggler who worked with Mexican suppliers. Both figures are bicultural and equally comfortable speaking English and Spanish. The third is a nun who works with the families of the disappeared in the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, who seek justice for their lost family members. Rather than focusing on figures who stay on their respective sides of the border and in their expected respective social positions, then, the documentary focuses on border crossers

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and change seekers. The film plays on audience expectations and upends them throughout the film. The dark-skinned Chicano with the long goatee and bandana who rides a Harley Davidson turns out to be a high-ranking border patrol official.6 The irony of this introduction to Oscar Hagelsieb, the assistant special agent in charge of DHS in El Paso, is that he “looks” like one of the people the audience likely expects DHS to go after. This portrayal is also different than the one in other films like Narco Cultura, which portrays the Chicano subject, Quintero, as a sellout who uses his insider knowledge to profit from suffering. Hagelsieb is presented in Kingdom of Shadows in a more nuanced way. The audience learns about Hagelsieb’s career trajectory, his family history of unauthorized migration, and his differentiation between migrants and narcos. Hagelsieb isn’t the only figure presented in a way that upsets audience expectation. The clean-cut, white American cowboy Don Ford Jr., whom the film depicts tending to his farm, turns out to be a former marijuana smuggler. The quiet-voiced nun we see in chapel, Sister Consuelo Morales, turns out to be an activist holding politicians accountable for forced disappearances. The film thus focuses on figures attempting to make changes via institutions or community organizing, or who point out faults in the existing systems for dealing with drug trafficking. The primary activist presented in the film is Morales. The audience learns about her activism with families of the disappeared and her collaboration with outside groups, including Human Rights Watch. Referring to victims of violence attributed to the cartels (but in some cases perpetrated or facilitated by government-affiliated individuals or groups) as “disappeared” is a significant move because it puts them into conversation with the mass disappearances of earlier Latin American dictatorships, most notably those of Argentina and Chile. It also brings attention to this violence as a human rights issue. In this sense, the film recasts not just the subjects of border documentary but also the audience’s perception of violence in Mexico that is too easily described as cartel related, when it may also be sponsored or facilitated by individuals related to other institutions, particularly within government. This is evidenced in the film by the discussion of the findings of mass graves, connecting narco-related killings with politically motivated ones, like the forced disappearance of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 that brought intense national and international scrutiny to Mexican political corruption. “Fue el estado” (It was the state) is one of the slogans activists call out during a protest captured in the documentary. This historical layering and contextualization also recalls U.S. intervention in Latin America that helped to prop up various dictatorial and military regimes, presumably to defend U.S. Cold War interests and to prevent the spread of communism in the United States’ “backyard.”7 On the more basic

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level, the United States’ function as a drug-consuming nation is of central importance in stimulating the illicit drug trade, but this fact is all but neglected in popular films regarding cartels and violence at the border. If films touch on this subject, any such mention is often perfunctory. As the subtitle of Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace’s A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War” suggests, the violence related to drug trafficking within Mexico and at its border to the United States has been cast as a Mexican problem despite its transnational origins and present contours. Ruiz’s film nods to this history with audio from both Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 1980s declaring a “war on drugs” and advocating for Americans to “just say no.” Equally as significant as the documentary’s unexpected subjects and subject matter is what the film excludes. Rather than images of torture and violence, the film focuses on activism and highlights the testimony of survivors. In contrast to images of death, the film presents images of life, particularly in gathering the testimony of victims’ families and following their protests and actions to seek justice for their family members. Indeed, the film ends with video portraits (see figure 3.5 below) of family members, many holding signs asking for the return of their loved ones, a move that echoes images in Señorita extraviada. Portillo’s film conscientiously avoids showing images of violence in order to respect the victims, choosing instead to show pictures of the victims when they were alive in order to humanize them. Ruiz’s film highlights the work of people attempting to make change, within the community, in government, and in law enforcement forces on both sides of the border. The film disentangles various histories and current realities conflated with the illicit drug war and too easily dismissed because of that relationship.

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Expanding Documentary’s Borders

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Alejandro González Iñárritu’s multimedia art installation Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) presents an immersive experience, which the filmmaker describes as a “multi-narrative space” and a “semi-fictionalized ethnography,” compiling unauthorized migrants’ border-crossing experiences and bringing the spectator into that experience. The filmmaker met with Mexican and Central American migrants and refugees through Casa Libre, a Los Angeles nonprofit homeless shelter, when doing research for an earlier film, Babel (2006) (Miranda), and interviewed them about their experiences. González Iñárritu adapted the experiences of the migrants he interviewed, “adding specific details described by them” (Carne y Arena), and working with long-time collaborator cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki

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to create this project that encompasses installation components, video, and virtual reality (VR) created with motion capture. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017 and has since been exhibited in Milan (Fondazione Prada), Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Mexico City (Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco), and Washington, D.C. (former Trinidad Baptist Church, about two miles from Capitol Hill). The installation features three main spaces prefaced with an anteroom.8 Each participant must make an appointment to access the artwork; at the appointed time, that participant enters alone and is alone through the entirety of the exhibit unless they happen to overlap with a lingering viewer in the last room, the only untimed space. The anteroom is dark, features wall text explaining the motivations and focus of the work, and instructs participants to remove their shoes and other belongings. The wall caption explains González Iñárritu’s desire to “digitally [document the migrants’] undocumented accounts” through VR rather than film for this project: “While both are audiovisual, VR is all that cinema is not, and vice versa. The frame is gone and the two-dimensional limits are dissolved. . . . During this realistically unreal experience, our brain wires and most of our senses were tested” (Carne y Arena). This language underscores the filmmaker’s view of VR as offering alternative documentation of migration experiences and a way to change how citizens understand those experiences. He explains the goal he shared with the migrants and refugees he interviewed, “that their personal journeys would not be just a statistic for the rest of us but would instead be seen, felt, heard, and experienced by others” (Carne y Arena). Implicit in this point is the suggestion that traditional journalism and documentary are not enough (although González Iñárritu uses elements of both in the creation of this project) because statistics do not move audiences. He makes this argument explicitly in an interview, stating, “Doing virtual reality for me was a big question philosophically. How many great journalists and documentaries have been talking about this problem? But if I would have done a small documentary, nobody would have cared. We are insensitive to reality. Sometimes we have to create a virtual reality to talk about reality” (González Iñárritu, qtd. in Miranda). The goal of this project, then, is to shift how the filmmaker and the spectator understand and perceive reality via a new medium that increases the immersive nature of the artwork to gets the spectator closer to that reality, even if the use of “unreality” and imagination is necessary to arrive at that new way of viewing. After reading about the filmmaker’s impetus and process, the shoeless participant enters the first main space of the installation. It is a large, starkly lit, spare, rectangular room with sterile walls and flooring and cold metal benches. There the participant waits to be beckoned to the next room by a

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Figure 3.3 Carne y Arena poster, Cannes 2017.

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flashing red light above the door leading into that next space. The participant waits in this uncomfortably cold room, which is particularly cold on bare feet. The large room is lifeless except for the participant and empty but for the artifacts in the room: shoes, mostly singles, found in the U.S. deserts traversed by migrants. Wall captioning explains the origins of the shoes. The participant is left to contemplate these shoes in the chill. What were the

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circumstances in which they were lost? Who wore them? What happened to them? The sandy shoes are large and small, in good condition or worn and broken. There are men’s shoes, women’s shoes, and children’s shoes. During the wait, the participant may be tempted to handle the shoes, or see which may fit. Soon, though, the red light flashes and the participant moves forward to the largest room of the exhibit. This space is large, square, and darkly lit, with two men waiting in the center of it to harness the participant into the backpack of VR equipment and the headset that covers the eyes and ears. The move from the bright lights to the near darkness, the cold to the warmth, is disorienting at first. The ground is covered in rough sand that sticks to the feet and legs after the participant leaves, a physical reminder of the experience. The participant receives basic instructions from the aides, who remain to help in case the participant gets too close to a wall, gets tangled in the wires, or has a poor physical reaction to the VR. While the participant can interact with this narrative VR experience in the way(s) they choose, there is still a primary narrative that plays regardless of those choices. The participant watches as a group of migrants walk in the desert. The figures are men, women, children, and babies. Most speak Spanish in hushed tones while some speak K’iche’, the language of the Mayas. Then there is the sound of a helicopter overhead (along with wind that blows on the participant from above) and the lights of border patrol vehicles ahead as agents emerge to stop the migrants. Most of the scene is realistic, though there are some elements that are not: a dreamlike sequence or memory in which figures and a ship emerge from a table and then submerge, or the ability to enter the bodies of the various figures (the participant sees organs, bones, and a beating heart when walking “through” them). The participant is in the room, with sand underfoot, walking among the migrants, but may feel like a ghostly presence or observer since they are invisible, with no body at all when they look down. When the participant walks up to the other computer-generated migrants, those migrants do not react to their presence. This distance is further underscored upon inspection of the characters who are not photorealistic, a limit of the current state of the medium as deployed in this project. That feeling of being both within and outside the scene may change, however, when a border patrol agent points a firearm directly at the participant, ordering them to get down. When I participated in the LACMA exhibit, I sat down, perhaps conditioned to heed commanding, male voices of authority. The VR ends after six or seven minutes. The participant relinquishes backpack and headset and moves on to the final room after collecting shoes and belongings. This room is long and narrow, containing portions of border fencing along one wall, captioned as deriving from landing mats used during the Vietnam War. On the other wall is a series

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of apertures, square holes in the wall at eye-level, each with close-up video of one of the people whose stories informed the VR experience. The camera is trained on each face, zooming in or out only slightly, staying close on the face of the subject as their testimony plays in words on the screen. The sunken-in video screen requires the viewer to walk up to the aperture to see the video portrait and read and thus to face the individuals depicted there. Included are migrants from Mexico and Central America, skewing young, and one older white U.S. Border Patrol agent. This video appendix suggests the limits of VR as immersive medium as the filmmaker sees the need to contextualize it through more traditional conventions of video documentation and the use of testimony. While most of the media attention has been given to the artwork’s use of VR, the overall experience is aimed at immersion by various means. Instead of having the VR stand alone, it is part of a layered immersive experience (wall text, installation, VR, and video) backed by a layered research and documentation process (interviews, narrative intervention, motion capture, video), all geared toward immersion for the participant, breaching the border between self and other, to facilitate empathy. Early scholarship on the use of VR in shifting perceptions and actions shows that the form has great potential to increase empathy but also limits.9 Harry Farmer and Lara Maister, for example, explain that “in some cases embodying an avatar of a disadvantaged social group may have the counterproductive effect of activating stereotypes associated with that group rather than breaking them down” (342– 43). They explain that in taking on avatars who are of a different gender or race, users sometimes behave in ways associated with that gender or race and thus felt less “embodied in their avatar, suggesting that increased use of VR-based embodiment in gaming could lead to increased reinforcement of stereotyped views” (Farmer and Maister 343). Empathy is an already embedded feature of film and, beyond that medium, storytelling endeavors more generally, because audiences are typically encouraged to care about figures who differ from them. While all storytelling forms engage the imagination, newer technologies also engage the senses in a different way, appealing not just to the audiovisual but also the spatial and the haptic (temperature, air movement, the feel of sand). The title of González Iñárritu’s show suggests this desire to provide an embodied experience— the flesh (“carne”) is implicated in order to engage the interiority of the audience and to understand the physical presence yet invisibility of migrant subjects. That emphasis on embodiment is apparent throughout the installation, which attempts to give flesh to an experience that is abstracted in contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric. The artwork facilitates an encounter with the migrant subject through various media, always with a focus on their physicality (the beating hearts, internal organs, and bones

of the VR figures; the close-ups of faces in the video portraits with eyes that do not look away).

Face-to-Face with Truth

Figure 3.4 Face-to-face: video portraits in Purgatorio.

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The three Latinx documentaries discussed in this chapter attempt to present experiences about subjects who may be overlooked, presenting them in ways that prevent that overlooking. While these documentary works are aesthetically different from each other, one technique they share is a focus on the face. All three include video portraits of the works’ subjects, with close-ups that rest on each face for a prolonged period of seconds or minutes, as part of the film or artwork. These portraits are included in the credits sequence of Purgatorio, at the end of the film in Kingdom of Shadows, and on several video screens in the third part of the triptych of Carne y Arena. These works all present these faces to “give a face to,” or humanize, statistics that can be hard to grasp and also to call on the viewer’s responsibility as Emmanuel Levinas famously locates in the act of looking at the face of the other. Denuded of context, the spectator contemplates a face that calls to them for recognition. This gesture of the video portrait is one that begs reflection on the politics of representation, and how our understanding of reality is related to ideologies shaping that representation. González Iñárritu discusses this concept in his acceptance speech for the special Oscar he received in November 2017. At the end of the speech, he accepts the award “on behalf of all the immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Asia,

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Figure 3.5 Face-to-face: video portraits in Kingdom of Shadows.

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Figure 3.6 Face-to-face: video portraits in Carne y Arena.

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Africa, and all corners of the world, whose reality has been ignored and held hostage by ideologies and definitions denying them the possibility of being understood and loved” (González Iñárritu). Here, González Iñárritu expresses frustration with the overlooking or twisting of representations of immigrants but also optimism about the possibility of achieving recognition and love in a broad sense via artistic media. Of course, there are very real limits to the possibilities of effecting change through works like his not just because of the potential for it to be ignored or misunderstood but on a more basic level because of its much smaller distribution. While Cartel Land, Narco Cultura, and Sicario are widely available and were advertised broadly, Purgatorio, Kingdom of Shadows, and Carne y Arena were much smaller or

independent productions or difficult to access. The case of Carne y Arena is particular because it is an individual experience that requires physical access to an exhibition with limited availability (only a handful of admissions per day). While the D.C. exhibition is free, the other exhibitions have charged hefty prices for entry ($55 for adults at LACMA, for example).10 Despite these limitations, however, all three works suggest a possible direction for Latinx documentary that will allow it to continue to shift U.S. audiences’ understandings of the border, offering different frames of representation that can engage those audiences in ways that mainstream films about the border do not.

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Many recent works provide useful context on this subject. See, for example, Boullosa and Wallace; Gibler; Hernández; Enciso; Martínez; Osorno, El  cártel; Osorno, La guerra; and Turati. The original version of the film is narrated in Spanish, but the iTunes version is narrated in English. Toni Morrison, in the context of her fictional historical writing, describes her purpose in a related way: “Therefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot” (93). The term “pocho” (masculine form) is a term used to reference someone born and raised in the United States to Mexican parents. The term can be used pejoratively to suggest that an American of Mexican descent is assimilated or Americanized and thus out of touch with their Mexican heritage. This image in the film recalls the opening of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in which Anzaldúa’s poetry describes standing at the edge of the earth where sand meets ocean and the imposition of border fencing that presents an unnatural divide on the natural landscape. Like Anzaldúa, Reyes invokes a history before borders and criticizes borders as unnatural impositions of difference. For both, borders are imaginary lines reinforced by real power. I use the terms “Chicanx,” and “Chicano” to reference a specific Mexican-origin U.S. identity, rather than the umbrella terms “Latinx” or “Latino.” This was the case, for example, with the Central Intelligence Agency’s backing of Operation Condor, which coordinated efforts among right-wing (often military) dictatorships in South America in order to quell opposition and dissent through various forms of violence and repression, including forced disappearances. For a detailed description of the installation at Fondazione Prada in Milan, along with high-quality images of the art installation and the process used to create it, see Thirlwell.

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Notes

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9.

See Yee and Bailenson on the “Proteus effect”; Hasler, Hirschberger et al.; Hasler, Spanlang, and Slater; Schutte and Stilinović. 10. Some critics have pointed to the irony of this exclusivity and the wide class gap between participant and subject (see Cronk), though for others, this is part of the point (see Thirlwell).

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References

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“About.” RR Cinema, rrcinema.com/about. Accessed May 2, 2018. Boullosa, Carmen, and Mike Wallace. A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War.” OR Books, 2015. Cronk, Jordan. “Ready to Wear.” Film Comment, Jan.– Feb. 2018, pp. 20– 21, www.filmcomment.com /article/inarritu-carne-y-arena-at-lacma/. Enciso, Froylán. Nuestra historia narcótica: Pasajes para (re)legalizar las drogas en México. Debate, 2015. Farmer, Harry, and Lara Maister. “Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of SelfPerception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice.” Social Justice Research, vol. 30, no. 4, 2017, pp. 323– 54. Springer, doi: 10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “The Art of Witness in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (2001).” Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics, edited by Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan, Rutgers University Press, 2019, pp. 62– 80. Gibler, John. To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War. City Lights Books, 2011. González Iñárritu, Alejandro. “Alejandro González Iñárritu Accepts a Special Oscar for Carne y Arena.” YouTube, Nov. 12, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGI-nCuQuFY. Hasler, Béatrice S., Gilad Hirschberger, Tal Shani-Sherman, and Doron A. Friedman. “Virtual Peacemakers: Mimicry Increases Empathy in Simulated Contact with Virtual Outgroup Members.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 17, no. 12, 2014, pp. 766– 71. Mary Ann Liebert Inc., doi: 10.1089/cyber.2014.0213. Hasler, Béatrice S., Bernhard Spanlang, and Mel Slater. “Virtual Race Transformation Reverses Racial In-Group Bias.” PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 4, Apr. 2017, pp. 1– 20, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174965. Hernández, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. Translated by Iain Bruce, Verso, 2013. Hollander, Robert. “Introduction.” Purgatorio, by Dante. Translated by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander, Anchor Books, 2003, pp. xxiii– xxxi. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979. Martínez, Sanjuana. La frontera del narco: Un mapa conmovedor y trágico del imperio del delito en México. Editorial Planeta, 2011. Miranda, Carolina A. “How a Migrant Woman’s Death Influenced Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-Winning VR Project ‘Carne y Arena.’ ” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 2017, www.latimes.com /entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-alejandro-inarritu-lacma-20171127-htmlstory.html. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. 2nd ed., edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, pp. 83– 102. Osorno, Diego Enrique. El cártel de Sinaloa: Una historia del uso político del narco. Grijalbo, 2009. Osorno, Diego Enrique. La guerra de los Zetas: Viaje por la frontera de la necropolítica. Grijalbo, 2012. Reyes, Rodrigo. “Director Q&A.” Purgatorio Screening, California State University, Fullerton, Feb. 9, 2018. Schutte, Nicola S., and Emma J. Stilinović. “Facilitating Empathy through Virtual Reality.” Motivation and Emotion, vol. 41, no. 6, 2017, pp. 708– 12. Springer, doi: 10.1007/s11031-017-9641-7. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003. Thirlwell, Adam. “Flesh and Sand: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena at Fondazione Prada.” Tank Magazine, no. 73, Winter 2017, tankmagazine.com/issue-73/features/flesh-and-sand.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October vol. 52, Spring 1990, pp. 76– 98. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/778886. Turati, Marcela. Fuego cruzado: Las víctimas atrapadas en la guerra del narco. Grijalbo, 2011. Yee, Nick, and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior.” Human Communication Research, vol. 33, 2007, pp. 271– 90. Wiley, doi: 10.1111 /j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x.

Filmography

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Babel. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Paramount Vantage, 2006. Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible). Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Fondazione Prada/Legendary Entertainment, 2017. Cartel Land. Directed by Matthew Heineman, The Orchard, 2015. Kingdom of Shadows. Directed by Bernardo Ruiz, Participant Media/Quiet Pictures, 2015. Narco Cultura. Directed by Shaul Schwarz, Ocean Size Picture/Parts and Labor, 2013. Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border/Viaje al corazón de la frontera. Directed by Rodrigo Reyes, Foprocine/La Maroma Producciones/RR Cinema, 2013. Señorita extraviada. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions/Women Make Movies, 2001. Sicario. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Lionsgate, 2015.

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Chapter 4

SERIOUS DOCU- GAMES Empathy in Action at the Virtual Border Rebecca A. Sheehan

A host of recently developed interactive representations of the U.S.-Mexico border can be described as “docu-games,” video games that document the journey of actual migrants (or journeys and experiences typical of migration) for a spectator-turned-player. They do not do this through the traditional means of expository documentary in which the scope and procedures of the U.S.-Mexico border might be revealed through a combination of statistics relayed by “voice of god” narration, interviews with border subjects, dramatic soundtracks, and suspenseful editing. Neither do they deploy aesthetics as conventional as Matthew Heineman’s popular Cartel Land (2015) or Shaul Schwarz’s Narco Cultura (2013), or as unconventional as Rodrigo Reyes’s Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border (2013) or even Lourdes Portillo’s much earlier Señorita extraviada (2001), which utilizes a “poetic mode” to avoid sensationalizing its subject (the families of the victims of Juarez’s femicides) (Fregoso). Rather, the documentary means of border docugames are cognitively and physically immersive rather than simply informative. A number of scholars have examined the “rhetoric” of these games, exploring how they advance political agendas and ideologies. In this chapter, I challenge the notion that border docu-games argue rhetorically, proposing instead that they argue empathically in ways that can be better understood if we consider their immersive tactics in the context of how cinema has generated empathy for border subjects by using what I borrow from film theorist Laura U. Marks in identifying as a “haptic aesthetics.”1 Such an aesthetics deploys formal choices available to filmmakers in the interest of engaging not just the eyes and ears but the body of a spectator, achieving the critical means of inciting empathy by putting the spectator in an on-screen subject’s shoes. I will examine how border docu-games inform their players about the procedures of the border while advancing arguments for improved legal immigration policies by immersing a player in an empathic experience of the border and the decisions it compels from the firsthand perspectives of lives that intersect the border. I will also explore how such docu-games gen88

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erate embodied empathy through placing front and center to their setting and structure the human body (its physical needs, its risk of deterioration and death, the goal of preserving it, the fear of losing it, unidentified bodies as sites of mourning and reminders of a games’ stakes). This chapter thus seeks to better understand how video games can change a player’s relation to the U.S.-Mexico border as a documentary subject, and how the immersive nature of haptic aesthetics in border cinema can specifically shed light on the function of interactive aesthetics in border games. The film theorist Bill Nichols contends that “every film is a documentary” (1), and recent investigations into the “seriousness” of video games suggests a convincing corollary that “every video game is a documentary.” Indeed, video games document cultural and political lives and attitudes contemporaneous with their production. For instance, Frederick Luis Aldama lays out how video games document the various roles Latinxs play in popular culture and the complex ways in which American cultures perceive Latinxs. Such video games do this by registering the numerous stereotypical personas Latinx characters inhabit in the games Aldama maps out (“the hypersexualized Latina,” “members of the undocumented class,” “gangbangers,” “drug lords,” “good at fútbol”) and by replicating the ways in which Latinxs are portrayed in other media (infrequently, in the backdrop, and as underdeveloped characters overall). A number of popular video games like Borderlands and Borderlands 2 or Call of Juarez: The Cartel document the U.S.-Mexico border similarly to how the video games Aldama writes about document cultural perceptions about Latinxs. However, this chapter will focus on less commercially popular games about the U.S.-Mexico border that overlap explicitly with documentary cinema through their incorporation of or basis on real stories of migrants. Through such a focus, I hope to enhance our understanding of how, by transforming the spectator into a user, interactive gaming not only enables an audience to empathize with a documentary subject but also enhances the agency of the documentary subject by identifying her with a user who can make decisions in real time. These docu-games thus allow the spectator and the documentary subject to move beyond the confines of their binary positions as object and subject of the cinematic gaze, and as object and subject of neocolonial power. These transgressions of traditional binaries illuminate how the virtual worlds of games and the agency discovered within them can impact the real world as they ask audiences to invent and generate new relations that contest borders and the “others” defined by them. Docu-games about the border often immerse the spectator in their subject matter by confronting her with a series of decisions and their outcomes similar to what might be encountered by real people whose lives intersect with the border. For instance, in a docu-game like The Migrant Trail (based

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on Marco Williams’s 2013 documentary, The Undocumented), the user can “Play as Migrant” and attempt to cross the border as any one of a number of migrants crossing in a group based on the story of “12 migrants” who, “on May 24, 2013 . . . set out from Altar, Mexico . . . crossed the border into the United States, walking through the Sonoran desert to a pick-up near Arivaca.” Or, the user can “Play as Patrol” and encounter the decisions typically faced by a border patrol officer.2 Similarly, Gonzalo Alvarez’s docu-game Borders, based on the real migration stories of his father and mother, immerses the player in a game world that re-creates some of the basic experiences and problems faced by the migrant including dehydration, avoiding border patrol, encountering the dead bodies of migrants who didn’t make it to safety, and facing the possibility of sexual assault. The docu-game Turista Fronterizo is interested in revealing other truths about the border; namely, how economic inequalities that transcend nationality and race affect experiences at the border. Turista Fronterizo allows the player to experience the border as the “Gringo Poderoso” (a U.S. businessman engaging in cross-border financial transactions), “Gringa Activista” (a U.S. anthropology student), “El Junior” (who Phillip Penix-Tadsen describes as “the quintessence of overprivileged upper-class Mexican ‘fresa’”), or “La Todológa” [sic] (a poor Mexican woman who must work odd jobs to survive). As Penix-Tadsen has noted, “Turista Fronterizo [is] an interrogation of the socioeconomic inequalities of border life that encourages the user to compare and contrast the experiences of characters from difference sides of the border and different walks of life” (87). Breakthrough’s 2009 game ICED! (I Can End Deportation), about the experiences of undocumented migrants living in the United States, is another example of what I would categorize as a docu-game for its use of “procedural rhetoric” to expose or reveal a “truth” about the U.S.-Mexico border. As Osvaldo Cleger describes ICED!, it is “essentially a role-playing game (RPG) that offers players the opportunity to experience the lives of five different young adults who are currently being sought by immigration authorities” (26). Rather than being based on actual real-life subjects, the “young adults” the user can “role-play” in ICED! are created on the basis of real-life experiences that are somewhat universal to the realities faced by undocumented migrants. All of these docu-games seek to educate a general population about the border without necessarily invoking actual subjects, using what Ian Bogost has called the “procedural rhetoric” of games to expose truths and thus pursuing rhetorical goals akin to traditional expository documentaries. Bogost argues, “Procedural rhetoric . . . is a practice of using processes persuasively. . . . Just as verbal rhetoric is useful for both the orator and the audience . . . procedural rhetoric is useful for both . . . the game designer and the player. [It] is a technique for making arguments with computational

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systems” (3). Border docu-games no doubt participate in this rhetoric, but they also crucially transform the traditional spectator (not only of documentary cinema but also of the border as itself an ongoing spectacle of violence) into a user or player, a subject immersed in a world based on the complicated procedures and circumstances that define the U.S.-Mexico border and the borderlands. The immersive decision-making experiences afforded by these games argue affectively as well as rhetorically, cultivating a sense of empathy in the player. Cleger and Penix-Tadsen have drawn on Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric” to understand how video games represent the experiences of undocumented migrants. Bogost’s theory is no doubt applicable to border docugames, as they share something with the video games Bogost specifically cites like Tenure, a “simulation of the first year of secondary school teaching,” whose intention is to train teachers. Border docu-games harbor the intention of training their spectator to look at the border and immigration policies in certain ways, but how they do so is hardly limited to what Bogost defines as rhetorical. Rather, what scholars like Cleger and Penix-Tadsen have borrowed from Bogost in calling the “procedural” aspect of these games would be better described as an empathic aspect. That is, by putting the user/player in the place of a migrant, forcing her to make decisions that the migrant might have to make and face consequences to those decisions and actions the migrant might face, the game is eliciting an embodied empathy on the part of the user. I use the term “embodied” here to understand how the user is engaging with the migrant by encountering the world in a position distinct from watching a cinematic screen. Aldama describes the dynamics of such embodiment in video games and the implicit political and social consequences of such games being about “movement” (255) by articulating the unique sensations triggered by game play: “The video game blueprint uses images and movement to catch our eye and our thumbs to move us through different states of orientation and physiological discharge (or arousal) as directed by the mesolimbic pathway” (252). For Aldama, games provoke neurological responses producing lust, fear, attraction, curiosity, and a “range of other emotions (negative and positive)” (253). To be sure, an edge-of-your-seat drama, action, or suspense film is capable of generating a similar set of emotions, but what makes these emotions particularly embodied for the player engaged in video games (and docu-games)? Similarly, how do the haptic cinematic aesthetics of border films uniquely draw on the spectator’s entire body (rather than just her mind or her eyes)? The fact that Aldama describes the “thumbs” as equally involved in gaming as the eyes is critical to understanding the immersion of gaming not just as cognitive but as physical. This facet of docu-games links their immersive experience to a cinema defined by the “haptic,” a word that

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describes the sensory arena of tactility and touch. Such a gaming experience involves embodied action that originates with our eyes and our hands, the latter of which harbor our ability to touch and feel as well as our ability to create and act. A number of films evoke empathy for border subjects by creating immersive experiences through haptic aesthetics, suggesting that such embodied experiences offered through cinema might radically transform an audience’s epistemological engagement with the deeply divisive political issue of immigration. Indeed, “docu-games” that transform spectator into user, bystander into border subject, from basic interactive games to complex virtual reality (VR) experiences, deploy similarly immersive and embodied aesthetics as these films that fit within Laura Marks’s definition of haptic cinema. Marks describes “haptic images” as those that “do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image” (3). She explains that “because haptic visuality draws on other senses, the viewer’s body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality” (2– 3). These descriptions help beg the question of what films that challenge geopolitical and cultural borders by using haptic aesthetics to evoke empathy through immersive experiences can teach us about the empathic objectives of docu-games. To answer this question, a few films are particularly instructive: Gregory Nava’s El Norte (1983), Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy. The Death Trilogy includes Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006), films in which embodied sensations like that of deafness (Babel) or the taste and smell of blood (Amores Perros) create embodied empathy. González Iñárritu’s “haptic” cinematic aesthetics are singularly instructive with regard to understanding the immersive nature of U.S.-Mexico border docu-games, as a through-line can be traced from the haptic aesthetics of the Death Trilogy to Carne y Arena (2017), González Iñárritu’s VR installation based on the true stories of several Central American and Mexican migrants, which I will read as a docu-game. Compellingly, the nonlinear story structure of the films comprising the Death Trilogy (the “Rashomon Effect,” by which a single event unfolds through multiple angles and perspectives) mimics the algorithmic outcomes and iterations of play inherent to gaming, another through-line between González Iñárritu’s haptic cinema and his docu-game. Such a through-line offers a picture of how the techniques of immersion and hapticity employed in cinema about the U.S.-Mexico border informs contemporary interactive media experiments that place the spectator into the embodied position of an Other. As González Iñárritu is careful to note about his exhibition Carne y Arena, “There are no actors here. These are true stories reenacted by the peo-

Figure 4.1 The animated faces of the migrants the player of The Migrant Trail must successfully “play” in order to transport them across the border. These are the only images provided of the avatars for the gamer.

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ple who experienced them”; thus, the distance between the “player” of Carne y Arena and the subjective position of the migrant that might exist between cinematic spectator and migration as a documentary subject is collapsed in this exhibition. Similarly, there is no “acting” that comprises the lower-tech interactive games I have discussed (Borders, The Migrant Trail, Turista Fronterizo), only actions on the part of the player as a migrant. Carne y Arena gives the player no third-person vision of his self (or an avatar), allowing him to become totally immersed in a first- person experience of the dangerous world of migration. Conversely, the interactive border docu-games discussed above enable the player to more readily immerse herself in the game as a migrant (or border patrol officer) by using avatars whose loose physical descriptions and only roughly animated faces are more inhabitable than live action images and “real” people (the actual subjects or actors) would be. Through these sites and processes of embodiment, what Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric” has confined to a cognitive process begins to merge with empathic processes at work in haptic cinema’s representations of the border. González Iñárritu’s transition from an empathic aesthetics of

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“haptic” filmmaking in the early 2000s to the immersive procedural rhetoric of Carne y Arena doesn’t leave behind the empathic embodiment that characterized his earlier films. González Iñárritu employs haptic aesthetics in Babel (2006) to communicate empathy that can transgress borders as the audience is forced to experience the world as a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (as the sound cuts out when the camera occupies her POV), and as the bodies of two geographically distant children (one a white American charge of a Mexican nanny and the other a Moroccan boy who has accidentally shot the American boy’s mother) are brought together through match-on-action cuts of their movement in the middle of the film. These unique uses of cinema’s formal elements to join the body of the spectator and the screen subject in one instance and the bodies of a Moroccan boy and an American boy in the other instance create a transgression of numerous cultural borders at the site of the human body. Babel thus forces diverse subjects to share embodied experiences despite the physical and geopolitical borders that separate them and despite the physical separation between spectator and screen. This separation inherent to the traditional cinematic experience is an implicit border González Iñárritu’s unfixing of the spectator in his VR exhibition manages to quite literally transgress. In fact, González Iñárritu intends for Carne y Arena’s visitor/player to experience the exhibition in contrast to the cinematic experience, as he tells the player before she enters, “VR is all that cinema is not, and vice versa. The frame is gone and the two-dimensional limits are dissolved.” González Iñárritu goes on to enhance his cinematic aesthetics of empathy situated in the Death Trilogy at the shared site of the human body in Carne y Arena by literally placing the visitor’s body first in a cold, metal-walled room built as a replica of a detention facility, then, after she is instructed to remove her shoes, placing her barefooted in the gritty sand of a large room, a virtual desert where a museum worker burdens her with the weight of a real backpack like one a migrant would carry. Once the visitor puts on the VR goggles, she feels actual winds that she experiences as the virtual winds of the desert landscape in which she visually and aurally finds herself immersed with a group of fellow migrants, one of whom can no longer walk. These real winds pick up as a virtual border patrol helicopter and then a truck hone in on the caravan with which she is traveling. Eventually, this visitor— the experience is said to be different for each person— found her body at gunpoint, facing the chaos of not knowing either what happens next in the game/film or what to do next. The embodied experience of the other in border cinema like González Iñárritu’s often seeks to transform the passive political spectator into an active political subject. We see the same logic of empathy geared toward action accomplished through sensory immersion and mimetic border crossings in

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docu-games like The Migrant Trail and Borders, which offer the experiences of decision-making, chance, and determination that ensue from policies and procedures that comprise the U.S.-Mexico border, thus documenting the border as an elaborate game. The contingencies of choice within these docugames disrupt both the linearity of a conventional story and the implicit indexical authority of the documentary image. They do this by issuing a hypertextual prerogative for the user that empathically translates how freedom of movement gives way to a sensation of endangered movement and fear, choice into the burden of having no choice but to choose. Thus, these immersive translations of haptic cinema go beyond the embodied sensations that have characterized border cinema to invoke the perils of embodied action as sites generating empathic experiences of hope, and, sometimes, of despair, as the user must embrace the persistent risks of both action and inaction. The ironic burden of this “freedom” to act is captured by The Migrant Trail’s instructions to the player when she chooses to “Play as Migrant”: “Experience the journey as each member of the crossing party. Your goal is to get each character safely to the U.S. You can play each member of the party once. Once you’ve played them their fates are sealed. To change it, you’ll need to restart the party and replay all the characters” (The Migrant Trail). The game’s simultaneous object of getting one character (at a time) safely across and getting “each character” safely across becomes as paradoxical as the migrant’s freedom to act becoming her confinement to constant movement and (re)action. Marks generates her definition of the “haptic” from Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s definition of “smooth space,” which, she explains, “must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment, as when navigating an expanse of snow or sand” (xii). The genesis of Marks’s thinking about haptic visuality from such an immersive concept as “smooth space,” and, indeed, from the notion of “navigating” an environment, makes it particularly relevant for the experiences evinced by playing docu-games. Marks goes on to explain that “in my emphasis on haptic visuality and haptic criticism, I intend to restore a flow between the haptic and the optical that our culture is currently lacking. That vision should have ceased to be understood as a form of contact and instead become disembodied and adequated with knowledge itself is a function of European post-Enlightenment rationality” (xiii). Marks’s interest in returning visual media to functioning as a “form of contact” is compelling for how the haptic might act in relation to and conjunction with a docu-game hoping to create contact between those on opposing sides of a border (and on opposing sides of the hot topic of immigration). Importantly, Marks also notes that “haptic criticism is mimetic: it presses up to the object and takes its shape. Mimesis is a form of representation based on getting close enough to the other thing to become it” (xiii).

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The sensual experiences evoked by the host of films Marks identifies in her book allow the spectator to embody mimetically what a subject on-screen experiences. Not only do docu-games allow the player to literally mime the encounters and decision-making a migrant would face but also frequently engage sensual experiences that transcend vision and cognitive logistics. For example, Alvarez wanted players of his Borders game to have the visceral encounter with death that migrants (like his parents) have faced. For this reason, unidentifiable skeletons are strewn in the path of the players within the game and, as Alvarez notes, “These are brothers, these are sisters, these are fathers, these are mothers, and their family will never know what happened to them. They just literally disappear. These are the unnamed skeletons of the players who have died playing this game” (Borders). Such a visceral encounter with the idea of death serves as a mimetic device. In Alvarez’s game, these skeletons (and what they represent) are unavoidable if the player is going to progress through the game. The ubiquity of death and dead bodies is also an essential feature of The Migrant Trail, whose home page (which it shares with the documentary The Undocumented) is an image of the U.S.-Mexico border spattered with crosses marking the locations where migrants have died. If the user clicks on any given cross, information about the migrant, including his or her name, the date on which the body was found, and the cause of death, is revealed. Thus, the site engages the user physically in unearthing information about each migrant through the click of her cursor. Cinema depicting the U.S.-Mexico border has particularly marked the transition from what Marks has described as the “disembodiment” of vision and the alignment of it with “post-Enlightenment rationality” to the use of

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Figure 4.2 Home page for The Undocumented (2013) and The Migrant Trail where visitors can click on any given cross to learn about the bodily remains found at that location on the map.

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vision deployed through a host of formal choices available to filmmakers to function as a “form of contact.” Perhaps the earliest example of this transition to vision-as-contact and embodied spectatorship in a border film is Gregory Nava’s El Norte (1983) about a Guatemalan brother and sister, Enrique and Rosa, who flee political persecution at home to journey through Mexico to Los Angeles. Indeed, El Norte’s phenomenal use of sound and its vibrant palette of colors have been explicitly tied to the migrants’ bodies by film critics. For instance, in his review of the film, Roger Ebert writes, “[The film paints] its story not in the grim grays of neorealism but with the palette of Mexico, filled with color and fantasy,” and, although Ebert seems to have momentarily forgotten that the early scenes in the film he’s describing are meant to take place in Guatemala, not Mexico, he goes on to note that “Nava once explained to me one reason for the Mexican love of color: ‘The rich browns and reds and yellows make brown skin look beautiful; American interiors are painted an egg-shell white that doesn’t do much for brown skin or any other kind of skin.’ ” The siblings’ journey begins with the body: an indelible image of the severed head of their father hanging from a tree. This visual composition creates a graphic motif of a circle centered in the middle of the screen that is replaced at first by an image of the moon and then an image of a drum at the father’s funeral procession. The same graphic composition haunts later moments in the film; for instance, the shot picturing the circular light at the end of the sewer tunnel through which the siblings travel from Mexico into the United States assumes the same composition. Their father’s head thus visually compels their journey as his literal death has motivated their exile. The most memorable moments from the film, and the ones that sow the seed of the story’s ultimate tragedy, the death of Rosa from typhus, are located viscerally at the site of the migrant’s body. After a failed attempt at crossing the border in which a Mexican coyote ultimately tries to rob them, the siblings turn to a coyote who sets them on a horrifying journey crossing the border through a sewer pipe. In these scenes, the spectator is immersed with the migrants in the darkness of the tunnel as the film uses darkness to expand the space of the screen into the theater. This was a trick deployed by some of the earliest films where Thomas A. Edison, for instance, used the darkness of the theater as an extension of the darkness of a train in a tunnel. Sitting in the dark in the right moment made spectators feel as if they too were inside of the train on screen, waiting with the characters for it to emerge into daylight and held in suspense as to what was taking place in the interim.3 Thus, with Enrique and Rosa in this darkness, the audience is, like them, thrust into the unknown, and then suddenly we are surrounded by the sounds of rats squealing (sounds that evoke the squealing of bats that accompany Enrique’s discovery of the nighttime massacre of his father earlier in the film).

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Figures 4.3–4.5 The audience emerges from the blackness of the sewer tunnel with Rosa and Enrique toward a circular light that evokes the image from earlier in the film of their father’s decapitated head hanging from a tree, an image replaced by a graphically similar shot of the moon.

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A few flashes of light provide us with the information that the rats are indeed biting and attacking the siblings. As Ebert writes, “The scene is horrifying, not least because it’s pretty clear these are real rats. Disease-free rats purchased from a laboratory, yes, but real rats all the same, and although Gutierrez [who plays Rosa, the sister] was phobic about rats, she insisted on doing her own scenes, and her panic is real.” By being placed in this situation, the real body of the actress playing Rosa collapses the distance between actress and character, provoking a collapse of the distance between spectator and character. Such a collapse (which calls to mind González Iñárritu’s description of Carne y Arena: “There are no actors here”) is thus part and parcel to the embodied experience this scene lends to the spectator, an experience that creates the most visceral kind of empathy not only for the experiences of the migrant in this moment but for the choices that have forced the siblings into these dismal circumstances. Another excellent example of the use of haptic aesthetics to create embodied empathy is Tommy Lee Jones’s 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. In this film, Mike, a racist and xenophobic border patrol agent from Missouri, accidentally shoots Melquiades, a Mexican ranch hand. The film follows Mike as he is subsequently kidnapped and forced by the ranch hand’s American employer and friend, Pete, to return Melquiades’s body to his family in a small Mexican town. The film functions mimetically (as Marks has described the haptic) in a number of ways; the plot structure creates a mirror to the typical northern migration story by forcing Mike into a southern migration. It also exchanges the brown Mexican body as the site of the bodily horrors of the journey across the desert with the body of a white American. Pete forces Mike to wear Melquiades’s clothes and to cross the desert at one point without shoes (a situation that calls to mind González Iñárritu having Carne y Arena’s visitor/player remove her shoes and run through a room of gritty sand). In trying to escape his captor, Mike hides in a cave only to be bitten by a rattlesnake. This leads him to seek the help of a Mexican curandera (folk healer) whose nose he broke when he encountered her as a migrant trying to cross the border earlier in the film. She exacts her revenge for the pain inflicted on her body by pouring boiling coffee on him and using the container to break his nose. Mike’s nose is not just important as the site of embodied justice in this instance but also serves an important function in Pete’s elaborate empathy lesson. The most visceral encounter the audience has (along with Mike) of the death of Melquiades comes not from sight or sound but from evocations of smell as Mike (and mimetically through him, the spectator) endures the smell of Melquiades’s rotting corpse as it makes the long journey back to Mexico and as Mike is forced to ride alongside it on horseback and sleep next to it at night. As Marks writes, “Of all the senses,

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smell is most likely to operate mimetically. . . . It acts on our bodies before we are conscious of it” (115). Three Burials’ use of smell as an aspect of its haptic visuality goes along with the mimetic nature of its story; that the border patrol agent, Mike Norton, is forced to embody the journey of Melquiades Estrada (only in reverse). There is a racial commentary here too. Whether consciously or not, the film’s insistence that the spectator embody the struggles of migration through a white American character’s body (at the direction of another white character) speaks to the identificatory assumptions at work here. Is the film saying that any audience accustomed to Hollywood’s primarily white characters can best empathize with the embodied experience of a white character such that a Mexican migrant’s experience can only successfully evince empathy through the body of Mike as a mimetic conduit? Whether the film intends to make this commentary or not, its representation of such a scenario documents a truth to it; consciously or unconsciously, it suggests that, like Mike, a typical audience is less likely to empathize with a brown body (without the intermediary of a white body). Three Burials’ story and plot is also squarely within gaming territory, putting it into conversation with the genre of border docu-games. The revenge plot hashed out by Pete becomes an elaborate game, one that is as sick as the game the border forces migrants to play. Mike’s playing of Melquiades within the context Pete has arranged puts him in a similar position to the player of the border’s game and its design around a procedural rhetoric comprised of decision-making and the overcoming of obstacles that defines “serious” games for theorists like Bogost. In Three Burials, haptic aesthetics, which evoke mimetic responses to create empathy, become part and parcel to the empathic experience of playing a game as someone else. This experience provides an embodied insight into what motivations drive the player (and the migrant), what survival decisions he is confronted with, and what choices he has to make as the harsh rules of the border’s procedures and environment reveal themselves through Mike’s frictional encounters with it. Indeed, haptic aesthetics, as they go beyond cinema’s traditional reliance on the senses of sight and sound, are immersive, engaging the spectator in ways that collapse the distance between her body and the subjects on screen. González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy creates immersion to evoke empathy not only through the previously mentioned haptic aesthetics of matchon-action cuts joining characters a world away from each other in Babel or as the visceral bodily motif of blood runs through and unites the worlds of four characters from extremely different class backgrounds in Amores Perros but also through immersive plot structures as González Iñárritu employs the Rashomon effect for the story structure of Amores Perros, Babel, and 21 Grams. In these films comprising the Death Trilogy, this plot structure acts

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immersively, surrounding us with the stories of various characters impacted by a single car crash at the center of Amores Perros, for instance, or with the lives of the various characters impacted by and influential to the single gunshot at the center of Babel’s story. These plots thus surround the audience by picturing (and repeating) a single event from multiple angles, suggesting a potentially infinite number of perspectives and outcomes radiating from a single instant. Such plot structures, like the plot of Three Burials, have an affinity with games. Three Burials is organized around a literal game of revenge, and its “three burials” instead of one suggests an iterative nonlinear structure (similar to a game in which a player might enjoy numerous “lives” and thus numerous outcomes to the game). Similarly, the Rashomon effect that organizes the films comprising González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy are nonlinear in ways that bear the imprint of hypertextual structures of interactive media, particularly video games. It is thus clear that Carne y Arena demonstrates a transition between the immersive and empathic (or, as Marks would call it, mimetic) nature of the haptic aesthetics that define González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy to the total immersion of the spectator in his VR game based on the actual journeys of Central American and Mexican migrants. The actual individuals upon whose lives Carne y Arena is based are only revealed to the player/visitor once she enters a separate room at the end of her visit. She enters this room only after she has been thrown blindly (the exhibition never explains what experience the visitor is about to have) into an attempted border crossing, immersed in a VR version of a journey across the border in which she not only experiences the embodied sensations of traveling through the desert but also the migrant’s lack of information and the compulsion to nevertheless move, to act, to make decisions. Thus, Carne y Arena exercises a procedural rhetoric in that it makes an argument about the desperation, chaos, and injustices of the migratory process and the border’s apparatus, but it makes this argument by exercising a haptic aesthetics of immersion evoking empathy whereby the visitor/user experiences the decisionmaking processes that Bogost might describe as procedural rhetoric, firsthand. Cleger comes close to talking about empathy with interactive games about the U.S.-Mexico border when he argues that the video game ICED!, in trying to educate its users about immigration with “myth-or-fact questions” asks the player to answer as she moves through the city (in exchange for which she either receives points or loses them), fails in its endeavors. Referring to a point in the game when it asks the player whether immigrants pay taxes (if she says “no,” she loses points and a box pops up informing her about the contributions immigrants make to government taxes), Cleger argues, “A procedural way to present this content, rather than quizzing users for a specific answer, would have focused more on putting the player in the

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situation of having to pay taxes. Playing as Javier, the only undocumented resident in the game, the player could have discovered that, despite being undocumented, he still has payroll taxes deducted from his paycheck, which are regularly credited to the fake social security number he uses to work” (31). Indeed, Cleger is correct that this tactic would likely have made ICED!’s rhetorical objective (educating people about the true experiences and lives of undocumented subjects) more effective. But why? Going one step further, the situation Cleger describes as “procedural” is in fact not just effective from a rhetorical standpoint (demonstrating the processes that define the lives of migrants) but also from an empathic standpoint; by “playing” Javier, we would experience frustration and demoralization from the immersive experience of working really hard within the game only to have our money taken from us. Bogost himself skirts around the empathic aspects of procedural rhetoric when he notes, “We often talk about procedures only when they go wrong. . . . We tend to ‘see’ a process only when we challenge it” (3). Indeed, this visibility of procedures is dependent upon the frustration we might feel as someone like Javier having to pay taxes into a system that does not give back to him. Penix-Tadsen also uses descriptions of encounters with procedural rhetoric that allude to without addressing head-on empathy’s role within them as he notes, “Designing ethically challenging games means creating a friction that causes the player to question the causes and effects of the actions undertaken in the game world” (77). The “friction” Penix-Tadsen describes is clearly similar to the aforementioned frustrations a player might experience paying taxes as Javier in Cleger’s suggested improvement on the rhetoric of ICED! or the frustration and the fear of the migrant suddenly, and inexplicably, faced with the barrel of a gun in González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena. Penix-Tadsen goes on to describe the ethical conflict at work in some border docu-games in a way that expands my argument for the empathic engagement evoked by them, arguing that “persuasive games function in the way that they do because they place the player in an ethical conflict between their own desires as a real-world moral being, and their operational understanding of what actions will lead to a successful outcome within the game” (78). Penix-Tadsen describes a situation of moral compromise and conflict created by a game that evinces empathy in the player for the many scenarios stemming from border procedures that create ethical challenges similar to the one she experiences within the game. A game’s context and objectives might dictate for the player to do something that significantly departs from what her moral code would dictate for her to do outside of the game, actions her role within the game forces her to take if she doesn’t want to “lose.” This

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kind of moral compromise documents the frequent conflict between a border patrol agent’s humanity and what the law requires of him. It also documents what decisions the border’s apparatus might force a migrant to make that he or she would never make outside of the context constructed by the licit and illicit procedures of border crossing. The Migrant Trail issues a number of these scenarios of ethical conflict and compromise often pared down to binary decisions that limit the ways the player can respond. For instance, when the player selects “Play as Patrol,” she is informed that “every day U.S. Border Patrol searches the desert for undocumented migrants. They don’t simply stop migrants from crossing; they provide first aid and help collect the remains of migrants who died in the desert. Experience the game from each agent’s perspective. Your goal is to catch or help as many migrants as you can. How you distribute your time on the job is up to you.” Once the player enters the game, she realizes that the “goal” to “catch or help” is really one and the same. In other words, she must do both or neither. There are no alternative options presented and so, in the game, as in the reality of the border patrol on which it is premised, there is no way out of the ethical dilemma in which “helping” a migrant in one sense hurts her in another. “Playing as Patrol” is frankly boring as the player is forced to wait for long stretches in the context of the game for indications of a migrant in the area. The experience of this duration mimics the number of hours border patrol drives the roads of the desert turning up nothing. Interestingly, this boredom provokes an outsized reaction from the player when signs of a migrant are spotted. Thus, this approximation of the real-time experience of patrolling effectively transforms the migrant from a human subject into a long-awaited object of the game. The player experiences the border’s transformation of human subjectivity into objectivity firsthand from the perspective of a patrol agent with a mission to “win.” At the same time, when the player chooses to “Play as Migrant,” she encounters situations in which she must choose whether to use her limited survival resources (food, water, first aid) to help a fellow migrant who is struggling, a choice that decreases her own chances of survival and thus her chances of “winning” the game. As with the border patrol scenario, this catch-22 in which the parameters of a game change what a person’s moral code might otherwise dictate for her to do mirrors the real ethical compromises demanded by the scenarios and procedures that define the border and the lives of those who patrol it and those who attempt to cross it. Lest we think of these scenarios as purely rhetorical or cognitive, they each invoke and involve the experiences of the embodied player by situating the game itself at the border between a body’s life and death; before departing for the trail, the player is given a limited amount of money to purchase supplies for

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her journey, choices that will make or break her body’s chance of surviving a sojourn across a drought-stricken desert whose days are as hot as its nights are cold. Thus, she must decide how much water, food, sun protection, and clothing to take while also considering that each of these items makes her backpack heavier and thus risks exhausting and dehydrating her (yet another real-life catch-22). From the patrol end, the objective of the player’s game is organized around bodies and their traces (footprints, empty water bottles, clothing), dead bodies and those whose survival also means their physical capture. The migrant’s scenario in the game is similar to MECC’s The Oregon Trail, the widely popular educational game from the 1970s from which The Migrant Trail clearly riffs its name. The kinship between these games suggests that the many people who played The Oregon Trail growing up might draw from another virtual source in instinctually empathizing with the migrant characters in The Migrant Trail. In border docu-games (particularly in immersive VR iterations of them), thirdness and third terms contest the binary that defines the U.S.-Mexico border in numerous ways. The notion of thirdness has been essential to late twentieth-century theories of borders, from Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands,” which she imagined as a “third space” to the two nations of the United States and Mexico, to Homi K. Bhabha’s notions of hybridized identities as “a third space.” In cinema, the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino called for a “Third Cinema” in the 1960s whose alternative aesthetics and production mechanisms would contest the neocolonialism of First Cinema (and Hollywood’s hegemonic cultural power) and the weak intellectual resistance to it that only expanded colonial problems and powers embodied by Second Cinema (the critiques of Hollywood advanced by Western art house cinema). Thus, it is fitting that contemporary border docugames engage and open up third terms as a mode of rupturing political, social, and economic structures that maintain the binary of the U.S.- Mexico border. As this chapter has illustrated, these “third” terms emerge from three realms of docu-games: sensory, identificatory, and formal. In the realm of the sensory, Marks’s notion of haptic visuality helps show how an embodied relationship between spectator and screen subject emerges through touch as a third sense to the two dominant senses of cinema, sight and sound. By decentering sight and sound as colonially dominant senses, touch functions as an alternative sense that promises to help reimagine how political others engage through audiovisual media. Second, border docu-games challenge the traditional binary between documentary filmmaker and spectator with a relationship in which the user/player is both maker and watcher, thus redefining the agency and potential of the traditional spectator by granting her

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the ability, in part, to make the world in which she participates. By cultivating an empathic aesthetics of haptic communication between the spectator and docu-games subjects, this “thirdness” also presents itself as an identity between user and border subject. Third, docu-games not only comprise the generic and formal hybrid suggested by their portmanteau name but also open up a third space between documentary’s indexical relationship to the world (representing a world that is) and video games’ constructive and performative relationship to the world (representing a virtual world that is produced in every moment of the user’s encounter with the games’ subjects).4 This is not only a space between fact and fiction (though it is also that) but also a space of becoming rather than being. As González Iñárritu writes in the introduction to his exhibition, “No experience in CARNE y ARENA will ever be the same for any visitor, we created a truthful alternate space where you as a visitor will walk alongside the immigrants (and into their minds) with infinite possibilities and perspectives within a vast landscape, but you will go on your own terms.” Unlike the fixed and unidirectional representation suggested by the photographic index, the premise of documentary filmmaking’s fidelity to reality and truth, docu-games like Carne y Arena document by presenting (rather than representing) the many contingencies and paths that comprise both the experience of migration and attitudes toward migrants. These are contingencies that can generate fear and uncertainty as Carne y Arena’s visitor (just like the migrant) literally doesn’t know where the next door will lead her. But docu-games also generate, theoretically at least, “infinite possibilities,” and so, a space of hope and creation rather than a totalizing (and demarcating) representation. Trinh T. Minh-ha identified this latter quality of documentary as the “totalizing quest for meaning” and described the various ways in which the hegemonic “meaning” assigned to a subject by a filmmaker could fundamentally undermine that subject’s right to self-definition and to change. In this sense, theories of the virtual in cinema can be helpful for grasping the significance and potential of the anti-indexical, algorithmic quality of border docu-games that suggest similarly “infinite possibilities and perspectives within a vast landscape” as does Carne y Arena. As Homay King suggests, borrowing from Deleuze and Henri Bergson, “The power of the false [the virtual] . . . is simply the capacity to fabricate or forge something new out of preexisting materials in the world” (125), or as Pierre Lévy puts it, “Virtualization . . . calls into question the classical notion of identity, conceived in terms of definition, determination, exclusion, inclusion, and excluded middles. For this reason, virtualization is always heterogenesis, a becoming other, and embrace of alterity” (145). We find this heterogenesis, or “becoming other,” at work in

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Carne y Arena but also non-VR games like Borders, The Migrant Trail, and Turista Fronterizo, as these games stage an encounter for the documentary spectator-turned-user as the migrant and as they depict the borderlands as a space of “alterity” inscribed in the multiple outcomes and consequences to any number of choices presented to the gamer rather than the binary figure into which the border is so often theoretically squeezed. Such theories of the virtual articulate how cinema, and now paracinematic texts like games, can produce sites of becoming rather than being, forging new identities and conceptions of human relations from “preexisting materials.” They are thus essential to how we think of the potency and potential of border docu- games not only to act persuasively through eliciting empathy but also to incite the kind of imaginative and creative action that produces change within a game and beyond it.

Notes 1.

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4.

Marks uses the term “haptic visuality” to describe her investigation into how a logic of the tactile creates an alternative to visual and aural representations in film and media. I use the term “haptic aesthetics” to describe the formal choices filmmakers and video game programmers can employ to create a haptic experience for the spectator. Rafael Fajardo’s Crosser (2000) and La Migra (2001) are important precursors to the more recent docu-games I discuss here. Fajardo “proposed the idea of a game as a critique” of the policies and procedures of the U.S.-Mexico border. The first game puts us in the shoes of a migrant attempting to secure a visa for entry into the United States, and the second game puts us into the shoes of the border patrol with the stated goal being “to catch as many as you can to be named agent of the month”; thus, these games set the stage for docu-games like The Migrant Trail that place the player on both sides of the border’s apparatus (patrol and migration). I refer here to films like Edwin S. Porter and Thomas Edison’s What Happened in the Tunnel, in which a man is flirting with a white woman seated beside her black maid. The train in question enters a tunnel, and the entire theater goes black. When the train “emerges into daylight,” lighting up the theater, the man is pictured, to his horror, smooching the black maid. The theater erupts into laughter, but this racial joke also reflected the embodied positions of spectators in early 1900s theaters whose audiences were often comprised of a mix of genders, races, and classes. The nonlinear aspect of González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy also charts this third space: the primary contestation to a line is a third point outside of the two points that begin and end it. Not only does the Rashomon effect that structures González Iñárritu’s films suggest a Pascal’s triangle situation (the butterfly effect, the infinite impact of a single event), but this mise-en-abyme quality to thirdness and to the logic of games

(as open to increasingly infinite iterations of play/experiences for the player) replaces the determined with the indeterminate/indeterminable, the defined with the undefined, the actual with the possible/virtual.

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Getting Your Mind/Body On: Latinos in Video Games.” Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 241–58. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1982. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, 2010. Borders. Gonzalo Alvarez. Video game, macuastudios.com/borders/. Accessed Jan. 8, 2018. Carne y Arena. Virtual reality exhibit created by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2017–2018, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cleger, Osvaldo. “Procedural Rhetoric and Undocumented Migrants: Playing the Debate over Immigration Reform.” Digital Culture and Education, vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 19–39. Crosser. Rafael Fajardo. Online video game, www.rafaelfajardo.com/projects/crosser.html, 2000. Accessed July 13, 2018. Ebert, Roger. “Review of El Norte.” RogerEbert.com, Aug. 1, 2004, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great -movie-el-norte-1983. Fajardo, Rafael. “Projects: Crosser.” www.rafaelfajardo.com/projects/crosser.html. Accessed Feb. 20, 2019. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “The Art of Witness in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (2001).” Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity Through Aesthetics, edited by Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan, Rutgers University Press, 2019, pp. 62–80. ICED! (I Can End Deportation). Breakthrough. Online video game, www.icedgame.com/. Accessed Mar. 8, 2019. King, Homay. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Duke University Press, 2015. La Migra. Rafael Fajardo. Online video game, www.rafaelfajardo.com/projects/migra.html, 2001. Accessed July 13, 2018. Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Translated by Robert Bononno, Plenum Trade, 1998. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minnesota University Press, 2002. The Migrant Trail. Marco Williams. Online video game, theundocumented.com. Accessed May 20, 2018. Minh-ha, Trinh T. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov. Routledge, 1993, pp. 90–107. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2001. Penix-Tadsen, Phillip. Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America. MIT Press, 2016. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “Hacia un tercer cine.” Tricontinental no.  14, 1969, pp. 107–32. Turista Fronterizo. Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez. Online video game, www.thing.net/~coco fusco/StartPage.html. Accessed Mar. 8, 2019.

21 Grams. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, This is That Productions/Y Productions/Mediana Productions/Filmgesellschaft, 2003. Amores Perros. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Altavista Film/Zeta Film, 2000. Babel. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Paramount Pictures/Paramount Vantage/Anonymous Content, 2006. Cartel Land. Directed by Matthew Heineman, The Documentary Group/Our Time Projects, 2015.

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Filmography

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El Norte. Directed by Gregory Nava, American Playhouse/Channel Four Films/Independent Productions, 1983. Narco Cultura. Directed by Shaul Schwarz, Ocean Size Pictures/Parts and Labor, 2013. Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border. Directed by Rodrigo Reyes, Foprocine/La Maroma Producciones, 2013. Señorita extraviada. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions/Women Make Movies, 2001. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones, EuropaCorp/Javelina Film Company, 2005. The Undocumented. Directed by Marco Williams, Hiptruth Productions/Our Time Productions, 2013. What Happened in the Tunnel. Directed by Edwin S. Porter, Thomas A. Edison Inc., 1903.

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PART II Reframing and Center-Staging Latinx Nonfiction Flicks

Chapter 5

DIGITIZED IDENTIDAD Color, Body, and the Tension of DVD-Constructed Chicanx Heroes Samuel Saldívar III

As Latinxs continue to reshape demographic landscapes in the United States and abroad, their constructions in multimediated spaces continue to likewise reshape ideas of Latinidad. In fact, Frederick Luis Aldama contends that in the twenty-first century, “The building blocks of reality in the United States look, smell, sound, and feel different as a result of the Latinx presence” (3). While Aldama’s observations rightly acknowledge the scope, depth, and breadth of Latinx communities in so many areas of American culture regardless of the current political climate, this chapter will explore how Latinx writers, directors, actors, and creators are nevertheless reshaping what Americans see in spaces like film and television. While on the surface seeing films that include, are made by, or are about Latinxs does not sound immediately significant, John Berger reminds us that “seeing comes before words. . . . It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world” (7). Indeed, the role of seeing and what that seeing means becomes a significant area of analysis when Chicanx/Latinx persons, histories, and struggles are placed front and center for popular cultural consumption.1 In the last five years, for example, the stories of three polarizing figures often associated with the Chicano Movement during the mid-1960s and early ’70s have been packaged and projected onto the small and large screen. Indeed, the biopic Cesar Chavez (2014), the documentary Dolores (2017), and the loosely structured dramatized documentary Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo (2017) transport viewers into the struggles, tragedies, and triumphs of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, respectively. Although these films offer significant caveats of analysis regarding their construction and presentation to viewers, I wish to dwell on some of those initial, “paratextual” (Genette) moments of seeing that these particular films establish with their viewers by way of their DVD covers. Given that many such films are viewed via DVDs, this chapter analyzes the significance of the DVD cover as an entry point for viewers into these Chicanx/Latinx biopic storyworlds. Genette himself defines paratext as “the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally

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to the public” (261). Moreover, Genette describes pretext as a “border” that presents potential readers with an “authorial commentary” (261) and is the summation of paritext and epitext (i.e., “paratext = paritext + epitext” [264]). Paraphrasing Genette, David Gorman defines paritext as “titles and subtitles (of chapters, sections, and volumes as well as the whole work), epigraphs, dedications, prefaces, afterwords, running heads, the copyright page, and all jacket copy” (419). Epitext, on the other hand, is defined as moments when an “author comments on the work directly or indirectly, officially or unofficially— as for instance in interviews, correspondences, or journal entries” (419). And H. Porter Abbott, mindful that Genette remained focused on literary narrative, notes that although “Genette did not include plays and movies in his discussion [of paratext] . . . we can see paratextual material in the form of playbills, previews, marquees, public disclaimers, production scandals, [and] notoriety of actor” (239). For Abbott, paratext has the ability to strongly “inflect the way we interpret a narrative, sometimes powerfully” (239). If, as Genette and Abbott contend, paratext is a border that can powerfully impact the ways viewers engage a particular narrative like, in this case, a film, then the aforementioned films present a significant and important opportunity for us to understand how Chicanx and Latinx characters, stories, and histories are understood in twenty-first-century pop culture spaces. While I acknowledge that biopics and documentaries like Latin Music USA (2009), The Graduates / Los Graduados (2013), Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle (2014), and Willie Velasquez: Your Vote Is Your Voice (2016) offer similarly significant areas of academic exploration, the roles Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta continue to maintain as historical markers for generations of Chicanx, Latinx, and white Americans necessitates focused analysis. By focusing on the various elements, or mise-en-scène, as it were, of the DVD covers of these particular films, this chapter compares the paratextual construction against one another to better understand how these specific historical Chicanx heroes are constructed for our viewing. (In identifying Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta as heroes, I invoke Ilan Stavans’s definition of hero as “a person of distinguished courage.” [1]) Moving forward, it should be noted that this kind of analysis also includes the examination of bodies as narrative frames and moves beyond traditional paratextual analysis that has historically “focused on the study of titles” (Gorman 419).

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Seeing Beginning with the visual engagements of the following artifacts, paratextual analysis establishes quite a few striking similarities. While these similarities range from the visual positions of various bodies to title placement, among

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others, this chapter will also place particular emphasis on the consistent use of specific colors like shades of yellow, red, black, and white; the role that followers maintain in the background; and clear facial expression from the main characters to better understand Latinx character construction and presentation to various potential Latinx and white American viewers. Thus, I maintain the position that by focusing on these particular paratextual elements— deliberate uses of color, character presentation, and the use of followers— we are able to better understand how Latinx populations are constructed and presented as U.S. American storytelling frames. Furthermore, by placing Latinx films at the center, this chapter seeks to move these unique narratives and the paratext that frames them from the borders of engagement to the center. By this I mean that as we consider the physical parameters of these filmic artifacts (i.e., the edges of the plastic cover that holds a colored paper image and that houses a DVD made up of several layers of polycarbonate plastic), we must be mindful that the presentation of human bodies as frames themselves have the capacity to inflect, for better or worse, a multitude of engagements from viewers who interact with the films. Whether or not the viewer chooses to become a viewer, the visual constructions these film texts provide inherently tell a story that we would be remiss not to consider. Directed by Mexican actor Diego Luna, Cesar Chavez chronicles the early years of farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, played by Michael Peña, as he fights against white farmers for the rights and freedoms of predominantly Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers. The cast includes America Ferrera as Chavez’s wife, Helen, Rosario Dawson as Dolores Huerta, and John Malkovich as farmer Bogdanovich Sr., the film’s primary antagonist. If, before engaging the film, we consider the paratextual construction and presentation of the work contained between the clear sleeves of the DVD case, we see a specific, directional narrative already unfolding. The most prominent elements on the cover are the uses of yellow and red throughout. In fact, aside from the limited use of white on a few articles of clothing, the entire visual artifact is washed in a very prominent shade of yellow save for the announcement of the names of the aforementioned actors that are situated at the center/top of the artifact. The yellow tones overtake the various individuals standing behind a yellow-toned, phenotypically brown male character who defiantly stares out at viewers. Like the use of yellow tones, the color red is also activated throughout much of the artifact. Situated at the center, and just below the actor’s names, the title “CESAR CHAVEZ” reads in all-capital red letters and draws our visual attention to the artifact itself. Just below the title viewers are invited to contemplate Dwight Brown’s epitextual description of the work as a “rousing and empowering film.” Aside from the large red-lettered title,

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Figure 5.1 The front cover of Cesar Chavez (2014).

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various bodies that stand just behind the most foregrounded male have their faces covered in shades of washed-out yellows and reds. Other red elements present in the artifact include a red bandana hanging from an individual’s neck and covering his face and a faded section of a United Farm Workers sign that another individual carries near the left edge of the artifact. Yet, for all of its presence, the use of red is consistently subsumed by the use of yellow. This is most evident in the film’s title, which is also made up of various streaks of yellow throughout. Having been drawn into the artifact by these prominently used colors, our sight moves from the yellows and reds toward the actual characters themselves. Looking directly out at us, many characters have been placed within the frame of the DVD’s cover. And although these activists maintain visible space on the cover, viewers are invited to confront the foregrounded brown male

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character who is positioned as the largest, most foregrounded character. This character is situated on the right third of the frame in front of everyone. His left arm is fully raised above his head, and his left hand is closed to produce a very pronounced fist. Behind him, a group of men, women, and children hold various signs that read “HUELGA,” among others. Clearly, he is inflected as the leader, as Cesar Chavez himself. Another sign held by a member of the group walking behind Chavez bears the symbolic eagle of the United Farm Workers, also known as the National Farm Workers Association. Just off to Chavez’s right, we see a child holding a basket of grapes as they peer out at the viewer, and an adult individual stands with his face half-covered by a bandana and a hat covering his head. The child and the bandana-covered individual peer out directly at us. As our sight is drawn to Chavez himself, we see that his face is contorted with a look of serious determination and struggle. His presentation is the singular, most definitive body out of the various members, and, like many other elements on the DVD cover, his entire frame is awash in an array of yellows and reds. This particular presentation of Michael Peña as Cesar Chavez bears a striking (no pun intended) similarity to the documentary film cover of Dolores. Although the artifacts are not identical, there are significant correlations between the uses of yellow and red. The documentary Dolores, which was directed by Peter Bratt, examines the progressive growth of activist Dolores Huerta. Beginning with Huerta’s early work as a lobbyist fighting for Mexican and Mexican American workers, the audience follows Huerta’s journey as she co-founds the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez, the various struggles she endured confronting teamsters and farmers, and the work she is currently doing through her Dolores Huerta Foundation. The documentary also highlights Huerta’s personal struggles with social and familial relationships and her role as a leader and mother of eleven children. The cover for the documentary attempts to acknowledge some of these particular themes with its use of color, language, and image. Much like the DVD cover of the Chavez film, the cover of Dolores is consumed by a muted yellow that acts as the primary color that all other images and titles are set against. A zoomed-in image of Huerta wearing a straw hat with an unintelligible pin set at its center is positioned in the left middle-third of the cover and stops just below the neckline of her red shirt with small white polka dots. She holds a megaphone to her mouth as if in the act of speaking as she looks off into an unknown middle distance. Like Chavez, Huerta’s face is contorted with a look of serious concern. Her face is framed by black hair falling out of the hat she is wearing. Coming up from the lower-third of the cover, yellow hands, akin to flames, appear to be reaching for both Huerta and

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Figure 5.2 The front cover of Dolores (2017).

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the megaphone, and a sign with the iconic Rosita image by Robert Valadez, also known as Rosita Adelita (¡Sí Se Puede!), rises up from the wave of flamelike hands. Behind Huerta, the upper-third of the film cover is comprised of streaks of red that cut through the yellow backdrop and resemble the rows in a field whose lines draw our attention to the title of the movie, Dolores. Below the red rows, in between the multicolored fields and Huerta’s megaphone, a group composed predominantly of men appear to be walking toward the right of the frame with the foremost person in the group waving an American flag. Behind the flag bearer, a man holds a partially covered picketing sign with the abbreviation NFWA, which stands for the National Farm Workers Association, and just above the abbreviation we see the farmworker eagle that symbolized the NFWA. All of the faces are awash

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in a mixture of yellows and reds that are difficult to discern. Aside from the presentation and construction of color, the use and position of language on much of the cover also inflects the viewer’s thoughts and ideas about the documentary. The title for Dolores, which is placed just below the center-top of a silver and white band with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) logo that traverses the entire cover, is read in large, muted red letters that have been splashed with a similarly muted yellow. Below the title, the descriptive words “REBEL. ACTIVIST. FEMINIST. MOTHER” in capital black lettering appear to describe the titular character and the film itself. At the bottom of the cover, and just below the wave of hands, notices for two film awards— San Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary and Seattle International Film Festival Golden Space Needle Award for Best Documentary— and the official Sundance film festival selection are stamped in clear white lettering for the viewer’s contemplation while also identifying an award-worthy film. Unlike Cesar Chavez and Dolores, the DVD cover of The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo (hereafter Rise and Fall) inverts the uses of color (figure  5.3) and relies more on the use of a muted, darker shade of red with specks of yellow to inflect emotions from viewers. Rise and Fall chronicles the life and struggles of Chicano lawyer, author, and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. Constructed as a dramatized documentary with actors reenacting significant moments in Acosta’s life that included interactions with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Rise and Fall elucidates for viewers the complicated social, personal, and racialized experiences Acosta had as a Mexican American growing up on the borderlands of Texas and California. Relying in part on fictionalized events Acosta documented in his novels Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People, Rise and Fall also brings to center a Chicano Movement voice that, like Huerta, has often remained invisible to Chicanx/Latinx studies scholars but who was an instrumental figure in the fight for the rights of Chicanxs and Mexicans in social and legal spaces. An analysis of the documentary’s DVD cover introduces these particular themes via color and imaging and speaks to threaded nuances that tie all three of these Latinx-centric works together. Using a darker, muted red to frame the cover, our eyes are immediately drawn to the center of the cover as we confront an outline of a buffalo in midstride. The interior edges have been set ablaze by decidedly yellow flames. Interestingly, the use of a buffalo on the cover is an acknowledgment of the name Acosta gives himself throughout his novel Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo as a way of situating his positionality in the United States and in Mexico. The flames on the cover, however, are not contained by the buffalo cutout, as flecks of yellow fire appear to be rising from the bottom of the

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Figure 5.3 The front cover of Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo (2018).

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cover. At the center of the engulfed buffalo we see a black-and-white image of Acosta with his left hand to his mouth as if holding a microphone of sorts. His eyes are contorted with a serious look as he looks off to his right. Around his neck hangs a bolo tie ornamented with the NFWA eagle, and he is flanked on all sides by a crowd of men and women who appear to be yelling. Both Acosta and the crowd are contained by the frame of the buffalo while being consumed by the yellow flames. The consuming flames are most evident on Acosta’s left arm, which is already more fire than arm. Unlike the titles of the Chavez and Huerta films, however, the title of Rise and Fall is situated at the top of the cover in different-sized, all-white capital

lettering that stands out when placed against the muted red backdrop. It has not been affected by the flames consuming Acosta and the crowd standing behind him. Just above the title, a smaller declaration that reads “FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BENICIO DEL TORO” is centrally aligned in muted yellow. Aside from the potential validation Del Toro lends to the film’s legitimacy as an actor and producer, his connection to the documentary is rather ironic considering he played the character Dr. Gonzo in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Gonzo is actually the fictional name Thompson gives Acosta, who is also described as a Samoan rather than a Chicano. At the bottom of the cover, in a font smaller than the title, we read “A FILM BY PHILLIP RODRIGUEZ” in all-capital white letters. Just above this declaration, viewers read “‘Call me Zeta. It is a name of historical proportions. A name to be reckoned with.’ — Oscar Zeta Acosta” in muted yellow letters. For viewers, this declaration, along with the other phrases and colors, establishes a significant and specific filmic inflection that seeks to identify Acosta as a historical figure, character, and paratextual element.

That all three covers share strong connections to colors like yellow, red, black, and white is not an accident. Genette reminds us that the paratexts we engage are calculated “productions” that seek to elicit a specific “transaction” (161). Comic scholar Scott McCloud notes that, as a way of engaging a potential viewer, colors have the capacity to “objectify their subjects,” while also making viewers “more aware of the physical form” of objects (189). For McCloud, the use of color attempts to draw in and focus one’s attention to a given object, which in this case are all the elements that comprise the DVD covers. The various uses of yellows, reds, and white as primary colors on all three of these artifacts, then, function in very complicated ways when we consider the historical relationship that color has maintained in multimediated western American spaces. The use of specific colors on all three of the DVD covers is, at initial glance, quite striking considering that Dolores was produced by 5 Stick Films, Rise and Fall was produced by City Projects, and Cesar Chavez was distributed by Canana Films. By this I mean that while all three of the examined films focused on Chicanx activists, they were distributed by different entities. Historically, colors have maintained unique relationships with and are connected to particular feelings, beliefs, and expectations in relation to film. As early as 1942, Sergei Eisenstein devotes a whole chapter of his text to “color and meaning” in film. Eisenstein contends that the use of color on the stage and in film has a significant impact on audiences, and he spends much

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time addressing the specific uses of yellows and reds in relation to the “evolution of symbolic meanings within certain colors” (125). From his vantage, the color yellow had evolved from a color that the Greeks associated with “love and concord” to the Western Christian association of yellow with “ideas of perfidy, treason, and sin” (125). For Eisenstein, the use of yellow in the early 1940s was often associated with the sinful licentious nature of humanity that is also known as “the color of treachery” (133). Aside from the uses of yellow, red also maintains a strong emotional presence for Eisenstein, who notes that “red . . . is associated with revolution” (143) among other violent acts (for better or worse). Indeed, Naz Kaya and Helen H. Epps, having completed a controlled study on the relationship between color and emotion among college students, found that out of the 98 students tested, 35 percent associated the color red with anger and/or sadness. And while yellow on its own netted a high association with happiness at 74 percent, it dropped by over 40 percent when both yellow and red were combined. Instead, the yellow-red combination saw an increase with annoyance, boredom, and disgust (403). Moreover, Kaya and Epps also contend that “color is an inseparable part of our everyday lives and its presence is evident in everything that we perceive” (396), like on DVD covers whose colors, while attempting to capture our attention, inflect our initial engagements with works that, in this case, illicit tense, guarded emotions. While the use of colors draws out emotional engagements from viewers, the use of bodies has a similar capacity to shape the narrative viewers anticipate while looking at the DVD covers. As was already mentioned, all three works rely on the bodily presence of their main characters— Chavez, Huerta, Acosta— as well as the presence of other individuals who are strategically placed behind them. Helena Maria Viramontes declares that even in the United States, Chicanx/Latinx persons are too often objectified as “commodities . . . imprisoned bodies of labor” (6). Viramontes goes on to assert that the “danger of this objectifying, the danger of considering someone less than human, is that inevitably both victims and perpetrators become dehumanized” (7) persons who perpetuate social and cinematic stereotypes about Chicanx and Latinx characters. That our main characters are placed at the foreground of these groups, leading these individuals amid questionable color palettes, creates a unique narrative tension between dehumanized Chicanx and Latinx communities and the battles that all three of these Chicanx heroes confronted as they struggled for equality, equity, and inclusion. Indeed, the way all three main characters are prominently positioned on their respective DVD covers reinforces the significance of their brown bodies. Although this chapter has already discussed how these main characters are situated, we should not overlook the significance of their positionality.

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Interestingly, the faces of Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta are the largest on their respective covers and draw our visual attention. They are also placed at or near the middle-center of the covers, and all three are awash with color. The covers deliberately draw our attention to the main characters’ faces. Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta have serious, furrowed brows that, however unintended, inflect specific emotions from viewers. Torben Grodal notes as much when he observes that when it comes to characters, “The face is the most important cue for understanding intentions and emotions of other minds, and the emotions resonate in the viewers” (198). In other words, as viewers engage these covers and read the faces, they are also reading and engaging the emotions that the faces are projecting onto them. In the case of the films, the faces of Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta establish that their films will be serious given their clarity and visual prominence and will focus on their struggles as leaders. In a rather troubling move, all three main characters have had the color of their faces altered in some fashion. Acosta, for example, is predominately shaded gray, and Huerta is shaded in a softer shade of the muted yellow that covers the DVD. Chavez’s face, however, is the most affected and is an amalgamation of yellows, reds, white, and sections of brown. Such decisions should not be taken lightly when we consider the significant role phenotype maintains in the United States. Frank Montalvo and Edward Codina define phenotype as “the act of assigning value . . . according to skin color” (322). Moreover, they contend that even at an early age, we are “taught to prefer light skin” (328) in the United States as we exist among social groups in which lighter people are assigned higher value than darker colored individuals. Thus, “those with dark skin who were born in America [suffer] more . . . discrimination” (337) than their lighter counterparts. That the three main characters have been deliberately shaded and are also surrounded by smaller faces that share their serious looks of concern, struggle, frustration, and similar coloration makes it clear that the faces and bodies that have been placed on the cover inflect specific emotional engagements that place a negative light on Latinx characters in relation to dominant U.S. Americans. Indeed, Suzanne Obler contends that “Latina/os are perpetually ‘foreign’ to the image of who is American” (471). For Obler, Latinxs inherently complicate the idea of who Americans are and what those Americans can look like, and the move to shade the various characters on all of the DVD covers further espouses the concept of foreignness that Latinxs are already having to push against. Returning to the covers, initial paratextual engagements establish a specific tension in that while all three are documented Americans by birth, they are inherently read as foreign to the United States. Acknowledging the roles that color and character construction maintain in establishing an initial relationship with the viewer is significant when

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we account for the spaces Chicanx and Latinx communities maintain in a broader U.S. landscape. The multitude of brown bodies that have been placed on the covers of these particular films are the first engagements of a very compelling story that attempts to place Chicanx characters at the center. But, as this chapter has outlined, these covers further complicate the ideas that works by and about Latinx characters are making progressive moves in U.S. popular culture spaces. The inherent irony regarding these observations is that the characters these films highlight fought to directly contest dominant U.S. social, racial, and economic oppression that many Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanxs were experiencing in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Moreover, while the films themselves actively work to humanize Chavez, Huerta, and Acosta as revolutionary agents of change, their films’ paratextual constructions, at the very least, establish a tension for the viewer that is predicated on historical and social associations with color and stereotype. And although paratextual analysis has historically remained focused on textual titles, this chapter has directly examined the role of the body in an attempt to expand the areas of analysis to include the bodily frames that also make significant impacts on the ways that we engage the narratives they promote. More importantly, these paratextual observations highlight just how much of a story is already being told on its DVD cover.

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I define “Chicanx” as a person of Mexican and/or Mexican American ethnicity and descent who is conscious of their history of oppression and invisibility within the United States, and who engages social and political institutions that continue to oppress Mexican and/or Mexican American populations. “Chicanx” is a historically conscious and presently active political identity within the United States. I define “Latinx” as an identity with origins in the Spanish-speaking countries of, but not limited to, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and those comprising Central and South America. And although countries like Spain and Equatorial Guinea are also identified as Spanish-speaking countries, the Latinxidentified locations are “united by a common heritage” with the United States. The use of the letter “x” attempts to destabilize identifications and or associations of gender scripts that are often associated with the use of o/a.

References Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Multimediated Latinos in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction.” Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Palgrave McMillan, 2013, pp. 1– 31. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. BBC/Penguin Books, 1972.

Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. Translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1947. Genette, Gerard. “Introduction to the Pretext.” New Literary History, vol. 22, 1991, pp. 261– 72. Gorman, David. “Paratext.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Routledge, 2005, p. 419. Grodal, Torben. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford University Press, 2009. Kaya, Naz, and Helen H. Epps. “Relationship Between Color and Emotion: A Study of College Students.” College Student Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, pp. 396– 405. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1994. Montalvo, Frank, and Edward Codina. “Skin Color and Latinos in the United States.” Ethnicities, vol. 1, no. 3, 2001, pp. 321– 41. Obler, Susanne. “Latinas/os and the (Re)racializing of US Society and Politics.” A Companion to Latina/o Studies, edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 469– 79. Stavans, Ilan, and Frederick Luis Aldama. ¡Muy Pop! Conversations on Latino Popular Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2013. Viramontes, Helena Maria. “Marks of the Chicano Corpus: An Intervention in the Universality Debate.” A Companion to Latina/o Studies, edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, WileyBlackwell, 2011, pp. 3– 14.

Filmography

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Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2014. Dolores. Directed by Peter Bratt, 5 Stick Films, 2017. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Directed by Terry Gilliam, Universal Pictures, 1998. The Graduates / Los Graduados. Directed by Bernardo Ruiz, Quiet Pictures, 2013. Latin Music USA. Created by Adriana Bosch, WGBH Educational Foundation/BBC, 2009. Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo. Directed by Phillip Rodriguez, City Projects, 2017. Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle. Directed by Phillip Rodriguez, City Projects, 2014. Willie Velasquez: Your Vote Is Your Voice. Directed by Hector Galán, PBS, 2016.

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Chapter 6

SALSA ON FILM (Corporate) Stars, Local Communities, and Global Audiences, from Our Latin Thing to El Cantante Nikolina Dobreva and Enrique García

Salsa is one of the best-known genres of Latinx music around the world. Originating in the streets of Spanish Harlem in 1960s New York City, salsa has now reached global audiences and has become an integral part of mainstream music culture, with the genre being featured not only on stage and in movie soundtracks but also embraced by audiences to the extent that it has become a staple in ballroom dancing and ice skating routines. One of the most iconic names in the salsa music of the 1960s and ’70s was Héctor Lavoe, a Puerto Rico– born salsero who became one of the biggest stars of Fania Records. In his lifetime, Lavoe was admired by Spanish-speaking U.S. and Latin American fans but was virtually unknown to Anglophone Americans and other mainstream audiences. After Lavoe’s death in 1993, salsa continued to gain prominence, as a new generation of musicians comfortable performing in both English and Spanish, such as Marc Anthony, rose to fame. A decade after Lavoe’s death, a mainstream Hollywood film telling his story became possible due to continued consumption of Lavoe’s music and merchandise by Latin American and Latinx audiences and the rising economic power and name-brand recognition of Nuyorican stars Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. The resulting film, El Cantante (2006), was designed to launch Lopez’s new production company, Nuyorican Films, and to cement the image of Marc Anthony as the new “singer of singers” and heir to Lavoe. When the finished product was released, however, its representation of Lavoe angered diehard salsa audiences, was scorned by critics, and was subjected to harsh criticism by Lavoe’s contemporary musicians, even those who were involved in the project. One of the most poignant reactions to the film was that of Leslie Pérez, Lavoe’s daughter, who criticized the project in the Puerto Rican press for focusing mostly on her father’s decadent drug abuse instead of highlighting his role as a father and a family man, and, even more importantly, for the notable absence of scenes that reveal Lavoe’s relationship with his fans and the Latinx community (see “El Cantante”). This sentiment was 124

repeated by an array of salseros, including close Lavoe collaborator Willie Colón, who opposed what they saw as a promotion of “the negative side of our Latin music culture” (Gurza). When examining El Cantante as a big-screen representation of salsa in the context of earlier visual narratives that helped launch and popularize the genre, it is easy to see why the old generation of salsa musicians and hardcore audiences who live and breathe salsa were not satisfied with the film, and especially with its blatant disregard of the connection that salseros have with their community and fans. In this chapter, we use El Cantante as a framework for our exploration of the changes that have occurred in the salsa industry since the 1960s. However, unlike earlier academic work that is almost exclusively focused either on historical aspects related to the development and popularization of the genre or on the analysis of the music industry, we take a cinematic approach by tracing how the structure of the film industry affects the changing visual representation of salsa as a performance through several key films. We first examine Fania’s original documentary Our Latin Thing (1972) as a fascinating product of its time in terms of worker/ethnic representation that empowered the Latinx community by highlighting audience interaction with the Fania superstars. We then explore the idea that, while El Cantante may be criticized as a globalized superstar vehicle for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony that disconnects from salsa’s original community and fandom, the film is the product of changes in the salsa industry that had already been happening over several decades, as salsa music developed and its icons evolved from local ethnic stars to global superstars. We thus look at the way in which Fania’s documentaries, and specifically the 1976 Salsa, produced after Our Latin Thing, began to phase out the Latinx ethnic communities in New York in their quest to create a more global image for the label. The tensions between community and corporate expansion are further explored in our analysis of El Cantante director Léon Ichaso’s first salsa film, Crossover Dreams (1985), which featured Fania star Rubén Blades. We conclude with a detailed examination of El Cantante as an important postmodern nexus of the different faces of salsa and its stars and as a seminal text that uses nostalgia to redefine ideas of place, community, and identity related to Latinx visual representation.

The Fania All-Stars is the most iconic salsa band from the ’70s that assembled the most popular musicians signed with Fania Records. This was a truly transnational group that included performers of Puerto Rican, Cuban,

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Dominican, Panamanian, African American, and Russian heritage. The term “salsa” (sauce) was coined by Fania Records to reflect this mixture of ethnic backgrounds and musical styles. Music scholar Frances Aparicio discusses how salsa is often associated with Cuban musical roots (such as the son) but argues that “unlike earlier Cuban music, the lyrics of salsa have documented the ‘visión de mundo’ of the Latina/o (mostly Puerto Rican) working class sector” (Listening 80). The lyrics of songs such as Lavoe’s “El día de mi suerte” dealt with themes that reflected the bleak immigration experience of pan-Latinx workers, which made performers like Lavoe and other members of the Fania All-Stars popular within transethnic and transnational Hispanic groups. This may be one of the best examples of the controversial sociological idea of Latinidad that was introduced by scholars such as Felix Padilla, and in which a certain ethnic Latinx experience becomes part of the shared Latinx subculture. The founders of the Fania label, Jerry Masucci and Johnny Pacheco, claim that they wanted to do for Latinx musicians and salsa what Motown records did for African American musicians and R&B.1 They tirelessly and aggressively promoted the genre and their label’s musicians. Contemporaries and music historians agree that salsa gained new importance literally overnight when all of the Fania All-Stars performed live before a capacity audience inside the Cheetah Lounge on August 26, 1971, in New York City.2 The performance was recorded, paired with other footage shot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on the day of the concert, and released to great success and critical acclaim as a movie, Our Latin Thing, the following year. The film followed each salsa piece performance with a vignette focused on one of the salsa musicians featured in the song in an interaction with members of the community. Ordinary people singing and dancing in the streets were also included in the finished film, as were the performance rehearsal and an impromptu street concert by Larry Harlow’s band.3 Directed by Leon Gast, a photographer who had worked on some of the Fania album covers, the film was conceived by Johnny Pacheco as an attempt to elevate the Fania All-Stars to movie star status all the while focusing on their link to a specific place (Spanish Harlem) and on their role as members of a vibrant Latinx community (see Rondón et al.). As a result, Our Latin Thing successfully blurs the boundaries between the audience, the broader community, and superstar musicians. Transitions between young children playing improvised instruments in the street and the All-Stars playing professionally on stage clearly indicate a continuity and root salsa in the rhythms of the barrio in New York City (even though the movie is shot in the Lower East Side). The All-Stars themselves are portrayed as part of the community in the vignettes that punctuate the concert at the Cheetah. In one scene, conga player

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Ray Barretto plays a piragüero, selling piragüas (a Puerto Rican shaved-ice dessert) to Latinx customers of the barrio. In another scene, crooner Ismael Miranda works in a santería store (a store that sells spiritual items) and chats with a Puerto Rican customer about his recent trip to the island while selling him sacred candles.4 It is interesting to observe that the stars participating in these everyday activities are not identified by name. They would be instantly recognizable to some 1970s Latinx audiences, but a contemporary viewer unschooled in the history of salsa is unlikely to know who they are and might assume they are random local community members. The structure of the film further relies on this “anonymity” of the stars. The opening credits feature an unnamed Latino child who signals the camera to follow him and then goes on to present the cast by pointing at their names drawn as graffiti in the street, an example where the director uses mise-enscène to associate a non-hegemonic art form with his ethnic subject. The next cut shows the child meeting with other kids and performing Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Then this community performance dissolves into Ray Barretto’s conga playing and the Fania All-Stars’ practice performance, an editing technique that visualizes the music the stars are playing as originating from the neighborhood.5 Appearing without any introduction on stage at the Cheetah, then in vignettes as part of the community, the stars are finally recognized in a flamboyant roll call at the very end of the movie, thus establishing in narrative, as well as visual, terms the progression of the musicians from ordinary people to superstars and of salsa from a variety of street sounds to a genre loved by millions. In this progression, they are firmly rooted in a community, which does not remain passive in the background but functions as an integral part of making salsa (and the All-Stars) successful. That community is both the source of the music and a fully participatory audience. During the improvised street performance, for example, people dance and mill around. Some are watching the Fania stars, others are dancing, and still others watching the dancers. There are no passive concert viewers in Our Latin Thing, but rather neighborhood dancers and musicians performing for fun. This relationship between stars, the community, and audiences is radically transformed in the second Fania film, Salsa (1976). The films, both directed by Leon Gast, share a structure that relies on musical numbers interspersed with vignettes that serve as a breather and provide some context to the music. From the onset of the movie, however, it becomes clear that the Fania performers have a different status as stars. Their names are no longer scribbled in graffiti format on run-down city walls. They are now famous performers who have been able to attract audiences large enough to fill Yankee Stadium. The film begins with a roll call at the stadium venue, each musician introduced as they come on stage to wild cheers and applause.6 The vignettes

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are no longer unmediated attempts portraying the Fania stars as ordinary people firmly rooted in community. Instead, featuring archival footage and Geraldo Rivera as a narrator, they point to salsa’s connection to Africa and to trained mainstream musicians such as Al Jolson and Desi Arnaz. The concert itself is set up in a traditional way, with the All-Stars on stage, physically separated from their audience. In fact, when the audience attempts to breach the distance and pours onto the stage, the concert is interrupted and the musicians leave.7 Shots of audience members dancing and enjoying the concert are few and far between, and the location shifts from Yankee Stadium in New York to a Puerto Rican venue on the island without any indication. The participatory audience rooted in place and community in Our Latin Thing is replaced with a distant audience attending two hard-to-distinguish venues dedicated to performance alone.8 This approach to filming the Fania All-Stars aligns perfectly with what Fania co-founder Jerry Masucci (also credited as a co-director of Salsa) had in mind about the two films:

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First of all, we made two movies. The first one put the artists into another perspective. They went from a stage to a big screen. The second movie we called Salsa. It turned the business from a small Spanish record label into a major force. Salsa became important, it became known. (Kent 316)

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The movie titles already suggest a shift from a community experience (“our” thing) to a commercial genre that can be sold to wide audiences. Masucci’s words confirm that impression by emphasizing the focus on artistry in the first film and on business in the second. Another important difference between the two films is the inclusion of Cuban singer Celia Cruz in the All-Stars lineup. Salsa features several of her performances, with no indication that they came from a concert recorded in Puerto Rico and not in Yankee Stadium. This strategy marks the beginning of a shift toward globalizing salsa stars and moving away from its birthplace.9 It attempts to legitimize salsa by focusing on widely accepted musicians performing in different genres in concert as well as in the vignettes and showcasing stars with connections to foreign countries (Celia Cruz and Manu Dibango) with established musical traditions.10 It also foreshadows the beginning of what was to become a major geopolitical shift for salsa from New York City to Miami, where Cuban Americans would soon take control of the industry. This transition also marked a change for salsa sound, as the new labels insisted on a more “palatable” ballad music, salsa romántica.

In an important study of gender issues in salsa, Aparicio observes that, unlike the salsa of the 1960s and ’70s, which was the product of a specific moment in history and art, salsa romántica was conceived by the music industry, which was looking for wider audiences and hence modified the content and sound of salsa to be less political and more romantic (“La Lupe” 139). Celia Cruz was an important figure for salsa romántica and the perceived feminization of the genre, as were other women; for example, La India. Marc Anthony, the star of El Cantante, comes from that second type of salsa tradition that also represents a new type of masculinity, an important detail that affects his representation of Héctor Lavoe in the film. Before El Cantante, however, director Léon Ichaso made another film about salsa music, which illustrates the transition between Fania’s salsa dura (the ’70s sound that emphasized long instrumental solos) and the salsa romántica of the 1980s and explains how the industry transformed at the time.

One of the important figures in this transition period for salsa in the late 1970s and early 1980s was Panama-born musician and songwriter Rubén Blades, and perhaps no other movie exemplifies this shift better than Léon Ichaso’s 1985 Crossover Dreams. In the film, Blades plays Rudy Veloz, a salsa musician who tries to leave the barrio and make it big as a mainstream performer. The crossover, however, is unsuccessful as his album flops and he is forced to return to his roots, both physically and in terms of the type of music he plays. The conflict in the film is rooted in the tension between the problems the protagonist encounters within the salsa circuit and the money-driven mainstream industry, which fails to repackage the salsero for Anglophone audiences. The role of community is underscored, as Rudy is understood and supported by family and friends, including fellow musicians and his girlfriend. However, the only available venues for salsa are clubs in the barrio controlled by unscrupulous men with ties to the international drug trade, so musicians are underpaid and get little exposure beyond nightly live performances. When Rudy is finally able to first audition and then record for a mainstream label, his move to another part of town and shift to a sound more palatable to Anglophone audiences detaches him from his community, including their food and music, and is perceived as a betrayal by his friends and family. The performances shown on screen also change, as packed nightclubs with bodies swinging in rhythm with the music and happy people having fun are replaced with lonely studio recording sessions and participation in promotional radio programs. Instead of eating dinner surrounded by family

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and friends, Rudy now smokes alone, sprawled on a mattress on the floor of his empty apartment. Unlike Our Latin Thing and Salsa, which focus exclusively on electrifying performances, portray the Fania All-Stars as talented musicians, and gloss over any problems, Crossover Dreams offers an introspective look at salsa musicians who find themselves in a difficult position with little opportunity for development. The plot of the movie also takes a different format. This is not a string of performances punctuated by snippets of context but the reverse. The linear story is told in chronological order through a string of scenes illustrating the protagonist’s career path but does feature occasional music performances, evidently used for emotional impact and not necessarily to showcase the musician’s skill or, for that matter, even salsa as a unique music genre. The most prominent of these are undoubtedly the performances of the song that friend and mentor Cheo Babalú teaches Rudy, especially since the song serves as a metaphor for all the issues related to community, belonging, and identity tackled in the film. A passionate call to return to one’s roots, the song “Todos vuelven” (Everyone Goes Back) plays in different arrangements in key moments in the film. The first comes early on, when Rudy is considering crossing over. An annoyed Cheo asks him, “Who do you think you are, Elvis Presley? Or a hippie?” and then proceeds to teach him the song accompanied only by maracas. This diegetic rendition of the song in an intimate setting (the two musicians are alone together in Rudy’s apartment) points not only to the cooperative roots of salsa, where music is always a communal experience, but (as Leopoldo Tablante observes) also to salsa as an object of resistance (172). The second rendition of the song occurs when Rudy finally makes up his mind to leave. Alone and drunk on the rooftop at night, he begins to play his guitar and sing. As the scene progresses, the music becomes non-diegetic, and the camera sways to show, through unusual angles and longer takes, the urban setting of Rudy’s roots. A lengthy take featuring a flock of birds flying away further underscores Rudy’s desire to leave. This is by far the most interesting, from a cinematic perspective, part of the film. The song, playing diegetically and non-diegetically, together with the dreamlike camerawork create a liminal space for the protagonist who is looking to grow as an artist and take his music in a new direction. The last, again diegetic (as in the beginning) rendition of the song marks Rudy’s decision to return to Harlem. The session where Cheo first introduced Rudy to the song is playing on a tape recorder as Rudy is packing a suitcase in his motel room. When Rudy is ready, he turns off the recorder and heads back to his “roots,” the neighborhood where he first became a musician. The film ends on a happy note, with Rudy reunited with his musician friend and band

partner Orlando, eager to start over, now that he has found his roots again. A montage featuring the streets of the barrio and its inhabitants cements the essential role that community plays for the salsero’s success. Ichaso thus establishes the impossibility of a crossover for salsa dura, salsa as resistance, which loses its identity once detached from the community and the streets of the barrio. Unlike Our Latin Thing, which takes a cinema verité approach to its subjects and does not focus on any one musician as “the” star of the show, Crossover Dreams is shot entirely from the perspective of Rudy. In the context of the film, this is simply a melodramatic device focusing on the individual and his experience, but it becomes difficult to detach Blades, a famous salsero himself, from the character he is portraying. Ichaso would later take this pattern even further with his next film, El Cantante, in which the community must take a back seat while Marc Anthony as Lavoe becomes the only subject worth exploring cinematically. A production detail relevant to salsa’s transition period that needs to be addressed concerns the involvement of Cuban talent in the film. In Crossover Dreams, Blades plays a Puerto Rican, yet the film easily reads as a Cuban exile project. Co-written and directed by Ichaso, whose family left Cuba for the United States when he was fourteen, this was the filmmaker’s second feature, after the Spanish-language El Super (1979). The star of the film, Rubén Blades, is Cuban on his mother’s side. The actress who plays his girlfriend, Elizabeth Peña, is American of Cuban descent, and Cuban percussionist Virgilio Martí portrays Rudy’s teacher, Cheo Babalú. Despite resistance from Blades himself, critics have consistently attempted to link his character with a perceived Cuban identity. Exiled Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante writes,

The attempt to assert a Cuban identity for Blades’s character despite the fact that he is clearly marked as Puerto Rican in the film is likely prompted by a link to the director’s artistic interests. Ichaso had already tackled issues of exile and community in his earlier feature project. With Crossover Dreams he himself could potentially cross over into Hollywood by exploring these issues in an English-language film. Indeed, as Tablante observes, the movie is

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Here was a film of several successive exiles. Exiled is its music, a salsa that is the offspring of Cuban popular music of the Forties and Fifties surfacing in New York, with the double link of Blades being half Cuban and Ichaso being all Cuban, with a sense of rhythm and riot. . . . This movie is in fact almost a job of the Cuban brotherhood, the meta-mafiosi, full of total allegiances and doublecrossover dreams that any can buy. (44)11

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a reflection both of salsa’s turn to becoming a Latin genre and of the gradual professionalization of Latin directors seeking to emulate Hollywood style (172– 73).12 More importantly, this attempt to appropriate the film as a Cuban product reflects accurately the development of salsa at the time, as Cubans in Miami were beginning to control salsa music production and were pushing for a more appealing softer sound, salsa romántica.13 Ichaso’s next project, El Cantante, would rely precisely on the global appeal of Nuyorican power then-couple Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to visualize the salsa of the 1970s to new, wide audiences in a sort of posthumous crossover for Héctor Lavoe’s music.

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El Cantante: The Star Supplants the Community

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Marc Anthony is a prominent and influential Puerto Rican superstar who has embraced his ethnic identity and continually displays pride in his love for his people, as when he recently organized a benefit concert to help the island’s struggles after Hurricane Maria. In an interview with Mary Kent, he explains how his singing career began with Anglophone pop genres, but then he turned to salsa when he decided to do a cover of Juan Gabriel’s songs. Even though his producer wanted him to listen to over two hundred CDs of salsa so that he could adjust his singing style to the conventions of the genre, Marc Anthony refused, since he wanted to bring his own style to the music. Later, as he began to sing more salsa professionally, he broke away with the industry’s traditions such as wearing specific costumes, performing a specific masculinity, and even paying members of his band under the table (see Kent 206– 8). Like Blades before him, he was opposed to salsa performers’ links to drugs and drug trafficking, which provided him with a cleaner image and more mainstream corporate appeal. As many began to consider him the new “cantante de los cantantes” (singer of singers) and the heir of Fania legend Héctor Lavoe, it seemed fitting for him to bolster that reputation with El Cantante, a biopic about his predecessor. El Cantante (2006) was released nationwide in over five hundred theaters. It opened to mostly negative reviews and was a box office failure that made under $8 million including both the domestic and international markets. Some press materials indicate that the film cost around $18 million, which makes it a costly misfire, especially taking into account that its subject is popular in the Latin American markets, that salsa music is marketable around the world, and that both Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are global superstars. The complex production issues surrounding the making and release of the film had already given audiences and critics a lot to discuss (and complain about) before the film even premiered.14 For example, in terms of gender,

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the salsa dura of the 1960s and 1970s held no place for women on stage, as many critics have observed (see specifically Aparicio, “La Lupe”). However, since Lopez obtained the rights for this biopic from Héctor Lavoe’s wife, Nilda “Puchi” Roman Pérez, whom she played in the film, the narrative used Puchi’s point of view by telling Lavoe’s story through his relationship with his wife. That perspective is also visually present in the monochrome personal interviews that frame Lavoe’s life story. The approach angered Fania musicians who saw Puchi as little more than a gold digger undeserving of being elevated to such important status, but it also gave a strange double significance to the film, as many saw the relationship between Lavoe and his wife as a representation of Marc Anthony and Lopez’s real-life relationship.15 As the producer of the film and a superstar actor and musician in her own right, Lopez needed to take on a prominent role in the film. Yet Puchi was not a musician, and Lopez had to portray her as simply a caretaker trying to keep her family together. Unable to detach completely from her own star persona, however, Lopez/Puchi is consistently included in performances as an onlooker who attends every show, admiring Lavoe from backstage and dancing alone to the music he makes. The film opens with an interview snippet, in which a resentful and defiant Puchi (Lopez) promises to tell her version of the story. Then a fast-paced sequence, beginning with her taking a bath, shows her getting dressed to the nines, and then jumping into a limo, collecting her husband from a drug house, and snapping him back into shape so he can perform at a concert. This introduction not only establishes her as the film’s narrator and principal character and highlights her role as a caregiver and the only stable influence in Lavoe’s life but also romanticizes her, as Lopez is filmed with a lot of care to emphasize her beauty and style, a technique undoubtedly made successful by her own star persona. Another controversial topic central to the narrative, Lavoe’s drug addiction, is also introduced at the very beginning. Fans and critics alike have blasted Lavoe’s representation in the film as a drug addict. English-language papers and Anglophone critics found the presence of drugs in the film a cliché convention, while salsa fans, especially Puerto Ricans, reeled at what they saw as a desecration of their beloved star’s memory.16 Drugs, however, were inseparable from the salsa scene of the 1960s and 1970s. They were consumed by musicians, record producers, and club attendees. Used to fund many of the club performances, at times they were even offered as payment to musicians. The role of the drug trade (especially cocaine), as well as the importance of Colombian drug cartels and U.S. government policy toward drugs during the rise of salsa, is well documented and explained in Christopher Washburne’s Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City. Washburne also

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notes that researchers have consistently shied away from the topic, choosing to either ignore the close connection between salsa and cocaine or to simply mention it without much analysis (137). If the relationship between drugs and salsa music has been consistently swept under the rug, even in academic research, it is of little surprise that Lavoe fans reacted strongly to the depiction of their idol as an out-of-control junkie. Considered in comparison to the other salsa movies discussed in this chapter, El Cantante is a radical departure from Fania’s tradition of representing the salsa musicians as fun-loving but clean professionals. Drugs are not mentioned at all in the Fania documentaries, which focus instead on music and community. Illegal activities, such as cockfighting and gambling, are represented in Our Latin Thing, but they are linked to community and identity and promote brotherhood, not decay, among the inhabitants of the city. Perhaps with El Cantante the filmmakers intended to do something innovative by prominently featuring Lavoe’s slippage into drugs at important points in the narrative, typically accompanied by dramatic non-diegetic music. In the process, however, they fell straight into music biopic conventions, showing the tortured artist inevitably turning to substance abuse in order to keep up with his hectic lifestyle. The presence of drugs in the film is by no means as intrusive as critics (and especially Lavoe’s fans and his daughter) would have us believe. However, it is a very palpable element of Ichaso’s departure in filmmaking style and in the representation of salsa from both the Fania documentaries and the director’s own earlier work, Crossover Dreams. For El Cantante is not just a biopic; it is a new visual representation of Lavoe, whose life and music are now repackaged Hollywood style to appeal to audiences who equate salsa with Marc Anthony and who might prefer the softer sounds of salsa romántica to the hard-hitting salsa of Fania fame. With globalization, most researchers agree, came the decay of salsa, as the genre became more about eroticism, and lyrics focused on love rather than social criticism. It is also possible that the lyrics of salsa songs have lost meaning to many contemporary dancers around the world, who don’t know Spanish and who now see salsa as just another type of ballroom dancing. This is a phenomenon very similar to what happened with the Argentine tango, whose original Lunfardo slang and bleak moodiness reflected the melancholy of the European immigrants in early twentieth-century Argentina. Once this type of ethnic/working-class music became global, its attractive beat was consistently emphasized over its dialectic semantics. While El Cantante technically focuses on the salsa of Lavoe’s time, the way music is approached in the film is more consistent with the salsa of Marc Anthony’s time. Many of Lavoe’s signature songs are present and performed

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by Marc Anthony, including “Mi gente” (My People), “Quítate tú” (Step Aside), and “El día de mi suerte” (My Lucky Day), among others, and perhaps most prominently in bookend performances of “El cantante,” from the movie’s title. The importance of these pieces is visually indicated, as their lyrics appear in English translation as large titles fading in and out on-screen. However, these songs are detached from their original meaning and are instead converted into melodramatic devices punctuating a star’s personal narrative. A notable example is the song “El día de mi suerte,” which originally appeared in 1973 as part of Lo Mato, the last album Lavoe would record with Colón before their partnership ended when Colón could no longer bear Lavoe’s drug use and his irresponsible attitude toward their music engagements. The song is about an out-of-luck man, perhaps an outlaw, who has suffered a lot of loss in his life, beginning with losing his parents at a young age, and who is still hoping for better days. None of this history or context is preserved in the film, however. “El día de mi suerte” appears for the first and only time at the very end of the movie, and instead of being about the suffering of oppressed city dwellers, it refers to Lavoe’s fading stardom as his performance in Puerto Rico fails to attract much of an audience. Marc Anthony offers some excellent performances, but, as the above example demonstrates, Lavoe’s songs featured in the film are taken out of context and used exclusively as a melodramatic device to highlight the emotions of the protagonist. More importantly, Lavoe (and the other musicians who appear on-screen) is completely disconnected from the music-making process. There is no explanation of how he fashioned his approach to singing or of how his artistic collaboration with Colón developed. This detachment from the musical aspect of Lavoe’s career goes hand in hand with the complete absence of an attachment to a community in the film. Lavoe is shown singing with his father in Puerto Rico, having family dinners with his sister in Spanish Harlem, or enjoying a decadent lifestyle with Puchi in the city. These are, as the melodrama genre dictates, all family relations, and the conflict shown in the film takes place predominantly within the family. Lavoe fights with his father who practically disowns him and refuses to forgive him for going to New York, even after he has become “el cantante.” He also fights with his sister, who is unaccepting of Puchi, as well as with Puchi herself throughout most of the movie. This is a big departure from Our Latin Thing’s careful attempt to include the community together with the performers, showing transitions from the hands of a young boy drumming away on a conga drum to the hands of Ray Barreto in concert and vignettes featuring piragüas or cockfights. El Cantante features only a selfish Lavoe who has developed his voice and perfected his salsa performances seemingly without any work and without any aid from other musicians or from the community of the city.

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This difference is reflected in the filmmaking style of Ichaso, which is quite removed from the first Fania documentary. Gast makes a conscious attempt to use a cinema verité style and to capture unmediated performances in Our Latin Thing, a strategy that is admittedly transformed in the second documentary, which inserts salsa into accepted music tradition through Geraldo Rivera’s narration. In contrast, throughout both his salsa films, Ichaso carefully stages the performances so that they are palatable to wide audiences. Musical numbers in Crossover Dreams are often explained through dialogue and make sense as illustrations of Rudy’s story. El Cantante also focuses exclusively on its protagonist (Lavoe), as if other musicians do not exist. If in Our Latin Thing Lavoe was just one of the All-Stars, who steps back into the background at the end of his song, in El Cantante he is the only musician who matters. Many of the others appear in passing and some are not even named. Conga drummers, featured prominently in Our Latin Thing with long trance-like sequences that raise the level of audience involvement and make the performance memorable, are completely absent in El Cantante, as are salsa dancers whose skill level and enjoyment of the music is essential to the success of the performance.17 The most prominent audience member in the film remains Lavoe’s wife, Puchi, who watches him, usually alone, from backstage or from the bar. This is where Jennifer Lopez’s involvement in the project becomes an obstacle to its becoming a truly captivating and groundbreaking movie. Before starring in El Cantante, Lopez had already achieved success as an actress with her protagonist role as Mexican American star Selena (Selena, directed by Gregory Nava, 1997). Lopez had established herself as the highest paid Latina actress through several Hollywood projects and had her own production company, a status that allowed her to obtain the rights to the movie and use it as a movie career vehicle for her then-husband, Marc Anthony. As a superstar who produced the film and plays a principal role in it, Lopez should be able to hold the movie together, and her character should be able to serve as a connection between Lavoe and the community. As a portrayal of Lavoe’s wife, however, that remains impossible, since Puchi Pérez, albeit a native New Yorker, was not a musician, and her connection to Lavoe was purely romantic/sexual. Thus, by giving such an important role to this character, the filmmakers were forced to depart from the musical aspect of the film and focus instead on family relationships. Of course, limiting or completely eliminating the character would not have been possible either, for how could Puchi not play an important role in the narrative if she is the one who holds the copyright to the story and if she is the one portrayed by Lopez?18 This conundrum is best exemplified in a scene in which Lavoe is sitting on the couch in his apartment, Puerto Rican vedette Iris Chacón is perform-

Anthony’s not eager to be lumped into any Latin crossover trend with Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, et al.—“at all,” he emphasizes. “I started out singing in English, so what am I crossing over to?

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ing on TV, and Puchi is dancing in front of the TV, blocking her boyfriend’s view. Clearly referring to her own performance, Puchi asks him if he likes “it,” but he tells her to move her behind so he can see Chacón’s on the screen. This brief interaction demonstrates the complex relationship in which the actors, characters, and salsa have found themselves. Lopez is a star performer, but she cannot appear as such in the film, since her character was never part of the music industry. She thus participates in pseudo performances (dancing at home or backstage) and is objectified without being acknowledged as an artist. In the process, her presence becomes an obstacle to the movie’s focus on Lavoe, as Lopez is literally blocking his connection with music and musicians by shifting the narrative emphasis onto personal relationships. The use of Iris Chacón in this case is interesting, as she broke many conventions of the music industry, which then allowed performers like Lopez to become superstars, though she remains best known for sexualizing herself through provocative dancing.19 Another aspect of the detachment of the character of Lavoe from the Latinx community and the audience has to do with the changes in the salsa genre and Marc Anthony’s own career and identity. As salsa was becoming mainstream and transnational in the 1990s, new performers (such as Marc Anthony) became popular. These new performers, however, had a different relationship to identity, community, and music. While Héctor Lavoe was raised on the island and became a nexus between Puerto Ricans from the island and those in the New York City communities, Marc Anthony is a native New Yorker who began his career singing English-language pop music such as freestyle, and then, after a few successful performances, later added Spanish-language songs to his repertoire. Born and raised in a working-class Nuyorican family, Marc Anthony grew up one of eight siblings. He was detached from the salsa tradition though his father was a musician and the family sang and heard boleros and rancheras at home (Kent 204– 5). He has performed iconic songs in both English and Spanish, but, similarly to what happened with Lopez, his American global superstar persona sometimes overshadows his ethnic identity. One issue that Marc Anthony is very adamant about is that he never “crossed over” to English-language pop, because he was originally an Englishlanguage freestyle singer, and he even had to work on his Spanish once he started performing in that language. If anything, he claims, he crossed back into Spanish-language salsa, as a 1999 article confirms:

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That makes it sound like I’m trying my hand at somebody else’s music. But I’m just as American as I am Puerto Rican. This is my music as much as anybody else’s.” (Willman)

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This comment shows how Marc Anthony’s identity and his music are constructed very differently in comparison to Lavoe’s. Lavoe’s music was grounded in his Puerto Rican roots and intrinsically related to a close-knit, predominantly Spanish-speaking community in New York and the other musicians there, who used their own diverse musical backgrounds and training to create a new genre. In contrast, Marc Anthony was part of the mainstream since the beginning of his career. He is comfortable addressing wide audiences in both English and Spanish, and his sound is developed in a corporate studio setting, not in the streets and clubs of Spanish Harlem. It is precisely this aspect of Marc Anthony’s own identity as a musician that surfaces in his portrayal of Lavoe.20 In the film, Lavoe remains passive and aloof and rarely interacts with audiences. He prefers to be alone and finds more comfort in sex and drugs than in music. An early montage showing his (international) tours focuses on Lavoe’s excesses, with city names flashing on the screen while he and other members of his band are shown, instead of playing music (one of Lavoe’s songs is playing, but it is non-diegetic), engaging in drug use and sex. At the end of the sequence, another musician introduces the singer to heroin, which marks his now irreversible drug dependence. Later sequences shot in a similar manner explore Lavoe’s collaboration with Colón and their breakup but are again focused on visuals (e.g., a new album cover) and personal issues and not the music that they’ve created together. This detachment from community, place, and even music is much more fitting for a global superstar with a wide audience base, such as Marc Anthony, rather than for Lavoe, a beloved Spanish-language performer whose music was integrally linked to the clubs and audiences of Spanish Harlem, yet who also had a strong connection to his Puerto Rican roots. In El Cantante, the friction between Puerto Ricans from the island and those from New York is shown through Lavoe’s family’s stubborn determination to reject Héctor’s New York life and identity. His father (played by iconic Fania salsero Ismael Miranda) tells him that he’ll never forgive him if he moves to New York, and he keeps his word. On a trip to Puerto Rico after Lavoe has become famous, he tries to talk to his father, who is still angry. The father refuses to forgive him, with Lavoe’s horrified wife and son witnessing the rejection. While this scene works to distance Lavoe from Puerto Rico and to push him toward a more Nuyorican identity in the film, it never really took place, as Héctor’s father was happy about his success and supportive of his career later in life.21

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Another rejection of Lavoe’s Nuyorican identity occurs when he first introduces Puchi to his sister Priscilla (Romi Dias). Priscilla becomes openly hostile when she finds out her brother’s girlfriend was born and raised in New York, suggesting that she does not speak Spanish and her family are all drug dealers. Lavoe tries to ease the confrontation by stating that he is the part of Puerto Rico that Puchi needs. “It doesn’t matter where she was raised, cause she got me now. Palm trees, beaches, pork hash, in person,” he proclaims. It is difficult not to read this scene as a comment on Marc Anthony’s (and perhaps Jennifer Lopez’s) own Nuyorican identity. Marc Anthony’s job in the film is to serve as a link between contemporary and past salsa stars, between musicians and audiences across genres, and between Puerto Rico, New York, and the world. As a result, Lavoe’s music in the film is detached from the salsa dura of the 1970s, and the performer’s relationship with his family supplants his connection to musicians and audiences. In this representation, New York is just a string of clubs and apartments, and Puerto Rico remains little more than a tropical backdrop. All scenes on the island are shot in San Juan, even those that take place in Lavoe’s native Ponce. To anyone familiar with the island, this plays as a blatant “mistake,” the result of a rushed shoot, the authenticity of which is unimportant to the Nuyorican stars. Even the performance of Lavoe’s iconic song “Mi gente” (My People) in the street rings false. Despite valiant efforts (through quick pans and the avoidance of wide crowd shots) to make it seem like a huge audience is in attendance, it is obvious that only a handful of people are actually present at the scene. Visual connections with Our Latin Thing abound, from replica shots of people playing dominoes and mothers swaying in rhythm with their infants in hand to Puchi dancing on stage in a Fania All-Star T-shirt. Lavoe’s Puerto Rican identity is emphasized, for these and not the New Yorkers are apparently “his people.” Yet, when the song ends, Lavoe walks away alone again and ends up doing drugs by the beach.22 In the end, El Cantante may be a contradictory narrative because it is a nostalgia project about the past, the consequence of modern consumption and ethnic pride, and is made by contemporary ethnic superstars who belong to a different era from the one depicted on screen. It might in fact be too nostalgic with its attempt to establish a linear continuity between salsa stars old and new. Critic Linda Hutcheon specifically points to irony as an essential component in escaping the nostalgia that makes us regress into convention.23 In El Cantante, Ichaso attempted to re-create signifiers that may or may not be identified by audiences (historical references, characters, specific songs, etc.) but the meanings of which have already shifted as the needs of contemporary global audiences are different from those of the

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narrower Latin American and Latinx viewership. Even though the film tries to “ironically” deconstruct the character of Héctor Lavoe by positioning his legendary performances alongside his drug-related downfall, its narrative devices fit the conventions of a mainstream Hollywood biopic more than those of a liberatory ethnic narrative. Perhaps precisely because of that, Anglophone students, or at least the ones we have taught in our classes, tend to react well to the film, as they appreciate its simpler narrative development (even if it is full of ethnic references), unlike the chaos of Our Latin Thing, which leaves them flabbergasted. Ultimately, if mainstream audiences come to understand Lavoe and become interested in salsa through Marc Anthony’s performance, then the film is a successful conclusion of a process that began with Fania’s own self-promotion in Our Latin Thing and was developed further by Ichaso and Blades in Crossover Dreams. Of course, it also remains a nostalgic pet project for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, both of whom stand to benefit from their association with an early salsa icon who is still revered throughout the Americas.

Notes

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1. 2. 3.

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See the interviews in “The Salsa Revolution,” aired on PBS. See, for example, Flores (178) and the interviews in “The Salsa Revolution.” The vignettes were carefully staged, with the stars often suggesting the plot of the sketch. In addition, some of the “community members” featured are the stars’ family members (see Slater). Nevertheless, they are meant to showcase the stars as ordinary people involved in ordinary activities. 4. Leon Gast provides a more detailed list of who the musicians are and what role they were playing in each vignette (Slater). 5. For a more detailed analysis of this and other transitions in the film as they relate specifically to salsa’s rootedness in a Puerto Rican identity, see Negrón (284– 85). 6. In comparison, as stated above, the roll call does not take place until the very end of Our Latin Thing. 7. In “The Salsa Revolution,” a disappointed Masucci even complains about unruly audiences stealing the piano from the stage. 8. Unlike Our Latin Thing, Salsa did not do well in theaters, but salsa as a musical genre was already beginning to be embraced around the world (“The Salsa Revolution”). 9. This tendency is taken further in two more films that Fania produced and that were little more than just concerts for international audiences: Fania All-Stars Live in Africa (1974) and Fania All-Stars Live in Puerto Rico (1994). 10. This is very important in view of the fact that salsa was considered an “inferior” type of music not worthy of study. See, for example, Marisol Berrios-Miranda’s account of her experience in music school in the late 1970s (“Salsa Music” 168). See also the

debates on whether salsa could even be labeled a “genre” of music as examined by Berrios-Miranda (“Is Salsa”). 11. Famous Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban from the island, tries to establish a connection between Blades’s performance and renowned Cuban musician Benny Moré, which the actor rejects. In his interview with Blades, the Panamanian musician reasserts that his main influence is Puerto Rican music. When Padura Fuentes asks again if he was influenced by Cuban musicians, Blades says that Cuban musicians were behind in terms of music in comparison to Puerto Rican musicians (81). 12. Critic Enrique Fernandez similarly quotes the film’s producer and another Cuban actor, who both assert that “Rudy Veloz is us” (4). 13. Aparicio examines the transition from salsa dura to salsa romántica by focusing on gender issues:

14. Some of the resentment about the film stemmed from the fact that it was competing with another struggling Héctor Lavoe project that was being produced by salsa star La India, one of Lavoe’s best friends. In a series of interviews, she criticized her former friend Marc Anthony and claimed that Lavoe hated him, as he thought he was only using everyone in the salsa community. This type of interview created ripples of discontent against Marc Anthony in the salsa community because it changed the perception of El Cantante from an homage to a product that was intended to use Lavoe’s prestige to build up Marc Anthony’s superstardom. 15. As Penny Spirou observes, “Marc Anthony’s current star power crosses over to Lavoe’s past star power. The film merges both personae into one star identity, blurring the distinction between reality and fabrication” (32). 16. “Another tale of a junkie, this one with a salsa beat” proclaimed The Boston Globe (Burr). The Los Angeles Daily News declared: “And of course, drug addiction. There is no good music without drug addiction” (Strauss). Variety also chimed in: “He ends up being among the dullest of movie drug addicts” (Koehler). 17. Performer Edwin Rivera has a notable stage dance performance inspired by Roberto Roena. This is one of the rare occasions in which a dancer and drummers are prominently featured in El Cantante. However, the whole scene is intercut with shots of Puchi at the bar, drinking and frowning as she watches the performance unfold while Lavoe ignores her.

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The ensuing social and cultural meanings of salsa, then, shift from a working-class, black/mulatto, male oppositionality that is indexed by strong sounds of drumming and percussion and that exhorts a dialogic relationship with its audience, to a music that is meant to attract passive, middle-class audiences in concert-hall settings and that is not perceived as socially threatening, or as chaotic, disturbing “noise.” Salsa romántica is deemed salsa monga (limp salsa) because of the resignified social, race, and class meanings that it has produced. (“La Lupe” 140)

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18. See Shapiro’s (chap. 13) account of how the script was acquired. 19. Another layer of meaning is added by the fact that Lavoe used to call Puchi “Chaconazo, ‘like a big Iris Chacón,’ . . . invoking a famous Puerto Rican performer known for her generous curves” (Martorell). This is one of the many miniscule but authentic details that the film includes, making Lavoe’s persona inaccessible to novices, who are unlikely to be in on the joke in such cases. 20. As Aparicio explains, “The new salsa is a musical articulation of a new generational Latinidad (Latin identity) that transcends the cultural nationalism of the 1970s” and that makes “all things Latin suddenly seem cool.” She further details the process and importance of Marc Anthony’s “reverse crossover” (“La Lupe” 142–43). 21. See Shapiro (chap. 9) on the resolution of the conflict between Lavoe and his father. 22. Interestingly, the stand-alone music video for the song features Marc Anthony as Lavoe in Puerto Rico and as himself in New York. Surrounded by adoring crowds in both locations, he interacts with them, walks among the people, and shakes their hands. None of this is included in the film, where the focus is completely shifted to Jennifer Lopez’s character. 23. “But it is postmodernism that Jameson and others accuse of being nostalgic. The postmodern does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia’s affective power. In the postmodern, in other words (and here is the source of the tension), nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge” (Hutcheon and Valdés 23).

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References

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Aparicio, Frances. “La Lupe, La India, and Celia: Toward a Feminist Genealogy of Salsa Music.” Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, edited by Lise Waxer, Routledge, 2002, pp. 135– 60. Aparicio, Frances. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. University Press of New England, 1998. Berrios-Miranda, Marisol. “Is Salsa a Musical Genre?” Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, edited by Lise Waxer, Routledge, 2002, pp. 23– 50. Berrios-Miranda, Marisol. “Salsa Music as Expressive Liberation.” Centro Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 159– 73. Burr, Ty. “Another Tale of a Junkie, This One with a Salsa Beat.” Boston Globe, Aug. 3, 2007, archive .boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/08/03/another_tale_of_a_junkie_this_one_with_a_salsa _beat/. “El Cantante no gustó a hija de Lavoe.” Diario Libre, July 27, 2007, www.diariolibre.com/revista/el -cantante-no-gust-a-hija-de-lavoe-DNDL144315. Fernandez, Enrique. “Enrique Fernandez from New York: Crossover Dreams, ’83.” Film Comment, vol. 19, no. 4, July/Aug. 1983, pp. 4, 6– 7. Flores, Juan. Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Gurza, Agustin. “Friendly Fire over Salsa Movie.” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 4, 2007, articles.latimes .com/2007/aug/04/entertainment/et-culture4/2. Hutcheon, Linda, and Mario Valdés. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue.” Poligraf ías: Revista de literatura comparada, vol. 3, 1998– 2000, pp. 18– 41. Infante, Guillermo Cabrera. “Cuba’s Shadow.” Film Comment, vol. 21, no. 3, May/June 1985, pp. 43– 45. Kent, Mary. Salsa Talks: A Musical Heritage Uncovered. Digital Domain, 2005. Koehler, Robert. “El Cantante.” Variety, Sept. 25, 2006, variety.com/2006/film/awards/el-cantante -1200513222/. Martorell, Carlos Rodríguez. “For the Love of Lavoe.” New York Daily News, July 25, 2007, www .nydailynews.com/latino/love-lavoe-article-1.266694. Negrón, Marisol. “Fania Records and its Nuyorican Imaginary: Representing Salsa as Commodity and Cultural Sign in Our Latin Thing.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2015, pp. 274– 303. Padura Fuentes, Leonardo. Faces of Salsa: A Spoken History of the Music. Translated by Stephen J. Clark, Smithsonian Books, 2003. Rondón, César M., et al. The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City. University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Shapiro, Marc. Passion and Pain: The Life of Hector Lavoe. Kindle ed., St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Slater, Russ. “It Was Our Thing, Our Latin Thing: An Interview with Leon Gast.” Sounds and Colors, Nov. 29, 2011, soundsandcolours .com/subjects/film/it-was-our-thing-our-latin-thing-an -interview-with-leon-gast-10838/. Spirou, Penny. “Cinematic Perspective: Decoding and Interpreting the Life Story of Héctor Lavoe from the Musical Biopic El Cantante.” HRD Journal: Humanity, 2009, pp. 29– 34, http://arts.mq .edu.au/documents/05PSPIROU_29-34.pdf. Strauss, Bob. “El Cantante’s Music Is Hot, But Its Star Is Not.” Daily News (Los Angeles), Aug. 3, 2007. Tablante, Leopoldo. El dólar de la salsa: Del barrio latino a la industria global de fonogramas, 1971– 1999. Iberoamericana, 2014. Washburne, Christopher. Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City. Temple University Press, 2008. Willman, Chris. “Marquee Marc Anthony.” Entertainment Weekly, Oct. 8, 1999, ew.com/article/1999 /10/08/marquee-marc-anthony/.

Filmography

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Crossover Dreams. Directed by Léon Ichaso, CF Inc./Max Mambru Films, 1985. El Cantante. Directed by Léon Ichaso, Nuyorican Productions, 2006. El Super. Directed by Léon Ichaso, Max Mambru Films, 1979. Fania All-Stars Live in Africa. Fania Records, 1974. Fania All-Stars Live in Puerto Rico. Fania Records, 1994. Our Latin Thing. Directed by Leon Gast, Fania Records, 1972. Salsa. Directed by Leon Gast, Fania Records, 1976. “The Salsa Revolution.” Latin Music USA, episode 2. Directed by Jeremey Marre, WGBH Educational Foundation/BBC, 2009. Selena. Directed by Gregory Nava, Q Productions, 1997.

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PART III Toward a Borderland Ciné of Precarity and Situated Excess

Chapter 7

ON THE BORDER BETWEEN MIGRATION AND HORROR Rendering Border Violence Strange in Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto Lee Bebout and Clarissa Goldsmith

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the image of the Latinx migrant has been deployed to conjure, depict, and isolate social problems in the U.S. white imagination. In the early twentieth century, social scientists, journalists, and policy makers used the “Mexican Problem” discourse to assert that Mexican immigrants both failed to assimilate into normative white U.S. culture, and because of chain migration, more immigrants would continue to arrive (McWilliams 163– 80). Since the sociopolitical shift of the 1960s civil rights struggles and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national origin quotas and as a result increased the possibility of legal migration from Latin America, the image of the Latinx immigrant has become a particularly charged figure within immigration debates that have arisen again and again in U.S. political culture in the 1980s, 1990s, and twenty-first century. Nativist activists, conservative politicians, and mainstream media have repeatedly circulated images of migrants crossing the border: migrants wading the Rio Grande, migrants scaling the border fence. Nativist rhetoric has framed migrants as societal drains, carriers of disease, bringing crime, and bent on a reconquest of the U.S. Southwest (Chavez; Jacobson; Santa Ana). Over the last four decades, in effort to foster a counterimagination, Latinx ciné has developed the genre of Latinx migration films. Individually and collectively, these films undertake what William Anthony Nericcio has described as a project of Xicanosmosis, wherein cultural works offer an interplay and exchange between Mexican and Mexican American artists, a cultural dynamic that counters the white gaze and disrupts the “seductive hallucinations” of racial scripts (192– 93). Whether emerging from mainstream or independent cinema, created by Latinxs or non-Latinxs, these films offer narratives and images that undermine dominant “racial scripts” as a means to humanize Latinx migrants and their experiences.1 For example, documentaries like La Bestia (2010), El Inmigrante (2005), and Romántico 147

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(2005) emphasize the brutal hardships and dangers that migrants face both in the journey and in living without documentation in the United States. Dramas such as El Norte (1983), My Family (1995), and Under the Same Moon / La misma luna (2008) depict immigrant aspiration for a better, more stable life in the United States, often rendering Latinx migrants as worthy of belonging, respect, and citizenship. Jonás Cuarón’s 2015 film Desierto draws on and departs from this Latinx film tradition, transforming a migration story into a horror-thriller film. In Desierto, a group of Latinx migrants traverse the Sonoran Desert region of the U.S.-Mexico border. This land is marked by rugged terrain and temperatures that reach 118°F in the summer months (“Sonoran Desert”). As Luis Alberto Urrea has illustrated in The Devil’s Highway, this land of “desolation” is the most dangerous crossing and regularly claims lives of migrants. In Desierto, however, the land is not the killer. The film follows a group of migrants who must cross on foot after their truck breaks down. Led across by the coyote Lobo and his partners Coyote and Mechas, the migrant group consists of Moises (Gael García Bernal), a father who hopes to return to California to be with his wife and son; Adela (Alondra Hidalgo), a young woman who left Mexico City because her family feared for her safety; Ramiro, a man who accompanies and sexually harasses Adela; Ulises, an Afro-Latino Central American migrant; and eight other unnamed migrants. Shortly after the group enters the United States, a white border vigilante named Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his German shepherd, Tracker, begin to track, hunt, and murder the migrants. After Sam uses his high-powered rifle to kill Lobo, Coyote, and the eight unnamed other migrants as they walk through the open desert, Sam and Tracker go after the remaining five crossers, hunting them down one by one. Eventually, the film’s protagonists Moises and Adela begin to turn the tables on the killer gringo. Thus, rooted in the Latinx migration tradition, Desierto is simultaneously a horror film— it is the horror that emerges when undocumented migrants meet the killer gringo. At first glance, Desierto’s political imagination and the cultural work it performs appear to be clear. By drawing on the migration and horror film traditions, the film seeks to depict the horror and violence of migration. In this vein, Sam embodies the manifestation of the violent potential of U.S. border policy and the nation’s history of nativist vitriol. The horror film becomes the logical extension of dehumanization and terror characterizing Latinx migration experiences in the United States and depicted in the Latinx migration genre. Sam’s murders of the migrants follows and reinforces the hierarchical dehumanization that nativist and immigration discourse usually rely on. Engaging both genre traditions renders border violence hypervisible by embodying it within Sam and Tracker. This filmic innovation, however, si-

multaneously undercuts the film’s political imagination. Through reliance on Latinx migration and horror film conventions, Desierto also erases the very real, slow violence of U.S. border policy and inadvertently allows only Sam, the racist mass murderer, to be shown with human complexity. While yoking these film traditions together may seem like a didactic move, the result is a film of marked political ambivalence. In the following pages, we frame our analysis of Desierto’s genre work by exploring common characteristics of the Latinx and horror film traditions and then examine how these elements are at play within Desierto. We expose how the film works against its own political vision, creating an ambivalence that erases material dangers and humanizes the film’s killer gringo. These elements coalesce to depict the killer gringo as an outgrowth of U.S. nativism and border policy. Ultimately, we contend that such a move obscures many real, slow forms of violence that characterize U.S. border and immigration policy. But first, to understand this film and its political imagination, one must recognize the conventions of the film traditions Desierto invokes and plays on.

In order to examine the interplay of Latinx migration and horror cinematic traditions, an exploration of genre is required. Jason Mittell has outlined a cultural approach to genre study that we find particularly useful for interrogating how Desierto engages multiple generic categories. First, Mittell notes that genres are not defined by individual works. Rather, drawing on Michel Foucault, Mittell treats genres as “discursive clusters” constituted by the interrelationship of works (11). Second, genres are mutable and change over time (8). This historical change may be rooted in technological development, social change, or political shifts. Together, treating genre as a discursive cluster and recognizing its historical contingency counter approaches that would examine a work against a fixed set of transhistorical attributes as is often done in literary studies. Therefore, Mittell recognizes that genres are more accurately marked by a shifting set of conventions. Critically, not all works of a genre will deploy the same conventions or do so in the same way. Mittell’s approach provides a framework for our analysis because we recognize the vast diversity within Latinx migration and horror filmic traditions. Moreover, we view Desierto’s engagement of both genres not simply as an aesthetic experiment but as one rooted in the contemporary sociopolitical moment. In the next few pages, we identify some of the characterizing elements of these two seemingly discrete genres. Latinx migration films form a tradition that stretches across, intersects with, and may transform mainstream genres from comedy and drama to

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A Tale of Two Genres, or Horror on the Border

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documentary. Despite their diversity, Latinx migration films, like all genres, are characterized by a number of common conventions. Here, we outline four conventions of Latinx migration films. First, perhaps most obviously, these films focus on the subject of Latinx migrant lives. Gregory Nava’s El Norte epitomizes this element as it was one of the first films to offer a sympathetic depiction of Latinx migrant lives. The focus on migrant lives allows critics to recognize that the comedy Born in East L.A. (1987) also functions as a migration film, for not only does Rudy need to migrate back to the United States but the film also touches on the lives of other, noncitizen migrants. Second, in an effort to humanize migrants, the Latinx migration genre also embraces and deploys a “good immigrant” model to counter dominant, anti-immigrant discourses that readily dehumanize them. Films like Under the Same Moon / La misma luna, A Better Life (2011), and Spanglish (2004) render immigrants as hardworking, contributing members of society, a move that positions them as ideal citizen-subjects. Even a film like Maria Full of Grace (2004), which deals with drug trafficking, fashions the title character as sympathetic and worthy in contrast to the drug organization that destroys the lives of immigrants. Third, Latinx migration films are often characterized by a depiction of the journey north. In some films, like the documentary La Bestia, the journey occupies most of the film. In others, however, like My Family and Spanglish, the journey merely functions as an establishing device to frame the experiences of migrant lives in the United States. Finally, Latinx migration films often engage the dangers migrants face during the journey and once they arrive in the United States. For example, while La Bestia explores the experiences of robbery and rape migrants face, El Inmigrante examines an incident of U.S. vigilantism during which a white Texan named Sam Blackwood murdered a migrant named Eusebio de Haro Espinosa who was seeking water on his property after crossing. Evidencing a more bureaucratic but very real danger, A Better Life depicts the life-threatening and family-destroying possibility of being ensnared by the immigration system. Together these conventions form the foundation of Latinx migration as a genre. Recognizing migration films as a tradition and genre within Latinx ciné allows critics to identify and understand the deployments of the genre conventions, interrogating how these elements operate within a film. Recognition of the genre and its conventions also functions to place seemingly disparate works into conversation, allowing critics to explore a sprawling and diverse body of film. With such a wide-ranging and dynamic body of works, this genre does not arise solely as a response to nativism. In part this genre emerges from the imperative for Latinx stories to be told, and migration is often, although not always, a part of Latinx family stories. That being said, the Latinx migration genre has been fundamentally shaped by nativist atti-

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tudes and policy in the United States. Indeed, this is where Desierto and its connection to horror enter the migration genre. In contrast to the Latinx migration tradition, the horror genre has a longer, more established tradition. With roots in films as early as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Dracula (1931), horror has developed a set of subgenres, from monster films and psychological thrillers to slasher and roadhorror. At first glance, the horror tradition may seem like a strange pairing for a migration film. Like the majority of American genre films, horror has been lacking in racial diversity, both on camera and behind it. What presence people of color have is predominantly limited to side roles and an unfortunate penchant for dying early, if not first, within the film. With the exception of George Romero, Robert Rodriguez, and Guillermo del Toro, U.S. horror films have rarely been produced by, directed by, or star Latinxs. Moreover, horror is often dismissed as an indulgent or superficial genre, lacking the potential for serious political critique and rich characterization found in migration films (Syder 78). That being said, horror has a long tradition of invoking political and social commentary as the source of its terror (Tompkins 38). Just as the migration genre emerges in response to anti-immigrant politics and development within Latinx communities, horror is a prescient genre that is both for and of the times. Because of its dedication to the extreme and to the speculative, horror can be an unfiltered lens into contemporaneous social anxieties and political unrest (Ballard 19). Ranging from the giant monsters created by nuclear fallout during the Cold War to the fear of Reaganistic consumerism in 1980s zombie flicks, horror is capable of extrapolating on fears and anxieties in more direct ways than most other genres (Phillips). Cuarón, like so many others, builds off of the tropes of American horror films just as he has from the migrant film genre. It is his mixture of the two genres that leads to Desierto’s unique position in the Latinx ciné canon. Because of horror’s well-recognized tradition and established subgenres, it should be noted that Desierto fits most squarely within the road-horror and slasher traditions. Within this context, we outline four common conventions that are essential to these subgenres, Desierto, and our later analysis. First, slasher and road-horror films deploy and reinforce a social hierarchy through the victims’ deaths. Because promiscuous women and people of color are often killed first, these films regularly place less value and offer less audience identification with these characters. These films typically feature a last survivor who is either a sexually “pure” or otherwise morally strong woman, sometimes known as the “final girl,” or there is a “heroic” or “wholesome” distinctly white masculine man who becomes the “last man standing.”2 Second, with rare exception, horror movies do not humanize the killers. In most horror films, particularly those on the slasher-related subgenres, the killers are not

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required or expected to have an interiority. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface— all of these famous and great horror antagonists are motivated only by their evil nature (and the occasional childhood trauma).3 Third, in terms of both time and place, setting is critical in these films. Almost all horror films fashion night and its darkness as the time when murder and torture flourish (Sanna). Moreover, films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and numerous others depict the victims encroaching on the killers’ territory (Ballard 15). These evil forces usually only hunt their prey after their prey have entered the killers’ home space. Finally, road-horror and slasher films deploy extreme, gratuitous, and pornographic depictions of violence (Ballard). Films like those in the Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) franchises revel in extreme violence both to render the unimaginability of evil imaginable and for the audience’s visual pleasure. Situated between and within the historically distinct genres of migration and horror, Desierto draws on and engages conventions from each tradition. Desierto and its ambivalent political vision emerge not simply from Cuarón placing these genres in conversation but from his deployment of some genre conventions and his active rejection or complication of others. Recognizing these conventions exposes Desierto’s entanglement with both genres’ traditions and the U.S. political imagination.

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Desierto opens with the migrant journey in medias res, framing the film within the Latinx migration genre. With a wide establishing shot of the Sonoran Desert, the sun peaks above a mountain range as a truck traverses the screen moving north toward the United States. Viewers then enter the back of the truck where a group of migrants rest against the walls, rocking to the rhythm of the drive. Moises sits holding his son’s teddy bear, his tether to his family in the United States, his motivation for the journey. When the truck breaks down, a common convention in the road-horror genre, the migrants must continue their journey across the desert on foot during the heat of day. Beyond introducing the film’s narrative, these scenes link Desierto to other migration films. The journey of Moises, Adela, and the others echoes the travels of migrants described in El Inmigrante, at the end of A Better Life, and others. In other words, Desierto’s opening sequence establishes the film squarely within the migration genre. From there, the film introduces Sam and Tracker, interlacing their hunt with the migrants’ story. This move follows the horror tradition of introducing the killer with a long tracking shot, with the desert being viewed through

Figure 7.1 The killer drives into the desert in search of prey in Desierto (2015).

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the killer’s eyes. Sam is coded immediately as a racist border vigilante who distrusts the U.S. government. He drives his truck through the desert, drinking whiskey, listening to country music, and flying the Confederate flag.4 When he comes across a Border Patrol agent, he asks if they had looked into the “illegal immigrant tracks” he reported earlier, and he is unsurprised when the agent says that he has not heard anything about the report. At the film’s narrative center, Sam functions as a psychopathic elaboration of Minute Men and other border vigilantes who hunt, report, harass, and have been known to attack migrants. Through Sam and his violent obsession, Cuarón differentiates Desierto from other migration movies. Violence is no longer a feature of a migrant’s story, but the focus of it. Cuarón’s vision of Desierto as a horror movie is indivisible from the film’s political imagination. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film’s setting is critical to the interplay between migration and horror. The film takes place on the desert border between the United States and Mexico. In 1994, the United States implemented Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, which fortified the border and greatly reduced migration through California and Texas. According to Marta Caminero-Santangelo, this era of border militarization also had a rhetorical effect, fashioning an investment in the border as an inviolable line and migrants as invaders who could never belong (2– 5). As a result of this militarization, migrants have been funneled to cross the more dangerous Sonoran Desert border region. As this setting speaks to a common crossing experience of migrants, the crossing also invokes the horror convention where the killer acts out against those who enter and trespass his domain (Ballard). Consider how Jason from Friday the 13th murders his victims who

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enter Camp Crystal Lake or how Papa Jupiter and his clan kill the family members in The Hills Have Eyes for entering their part of the Nevada desert. At the intersection of migration and horror, Desierto raises the question of whose territory is the desert? From a current U.S. geopolitical perspective, there may appear no question that the desert is U.S. national space. However, others may note that Latinxs have a history in the U.S. Southwest that long outstrips, and has more legitimate claim than, that of the United States. For our analysis, it is crucial to note three overlapping ways of understanding who belongs in and to whom this space belongs in Desierto. First, U.S. border policy, as noted earlier, has pushed migrants into the desert region for crossing. As such, there is an element of the U.S. racial-political imagination that positions migrants as both belonging in the desert and not belonging in the United States. Second, just as horror deploys the trope of victims encroaching on the killer’s territory, so do nativists argue that the country is being invaded (Chavez; Buchanan). Indeed, this “invasion” is what underwrites their actions against migrant communities. This logic of nativism-cum-horror is particularly evidenced when Sam celebrates murdering the first group of immigrants by yelling, “It’s my home. You won’t fuck with me now, will you?” Here, he is not simply a Minute Man– inspired border vigilante. His actions align him with the extreme violence of horror movie villains, transforming him into a killer gringo. Finally, the Devil’s Highway is a portion of the desert where no human belongs. While Sam may believe that this land is his home, Desierto illustrates that the desert is the ultimate killer.5 As with location, the temporal setting also engages both migration and horror. In Desierto, the film’s dramatic action all takes place during the daylight hours of two days. During the one night, Moises and Adela are able to achieve respite from Sam’s hunting. Setting the action during the day inverts the dynamic typically found in horror films. In horror, night functions as a time for evil to prowl and for killers to seek and murder their prey (Sanna). Desierto, however, recognizes that with desert migration, the day is the most dangerous time. Migrant crossers are more susceptible to border patrol following their trail and intercepting them. During the day, migrants are more likely to fall to the unbearable sun, treacherous terrain, and hyperthermia. Indeed, since the Operation Gatekeeper era, heat and dehydration combine to kill hundreds of migrants each year.6 Shot blindingly bright, Desierto’s desert hunts the migrants just as much as Sam. The bright light of the sun is a reminder of the ever-present threat of heat death. Thus, in Desierto, Sam is not the only killer. He collaborates with the desert to track, hunt, and kill the migrants. That is, until he loses his truck, his dog, and eventually his rifle. Then Sam is made equally vulnerable to the power of the desert.

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Beyond the deadly environment and menace of the killer, Desierto also depicts other dangers and hardships that migrants face on their journey. During the journey, migrants are susceptible to robbery and abandonment by the coyotes they paid and entrusted to guide them to the United States. In Desierto, once the migrants trek on foot, the lead coyote Lobo refuses to wait for the slower crossers. As a result, he leads the larger group into a desert valley where Sam easily murders them. Another danger of crossing, cisgender women and transgender migrants face the potential of being sexually assaulted as well. In an early scene in Desierto, Ramiro sexually harasses Adela. As she responds, the film gestures toward but does not fully depict the sexual predation cisgender women and transgender migrants face. Not only does Adela refuse Ramiro’s advances but Moises interrupts them and says, “La señorita te está diciendo que la dejes en paz” (This lady is asking you to leave her alone). Later in the film, Adela even mourns his passing, further removing this form of horror from the migrant narrative. These dangers, mistreatment by coyotes and sexual assault, contribute to the social hierarchy that horror films rely on and reinforce. Because the coyote Lobo and the sexual predator Ramiro are scripted as morally unfit, the audience is asked to revel in their deaths. In marked contrast, the sexual harassment positions Adela and Moises as the pure “final girl” and good “last man standing” within the horror tradition. Fashioning Moises as the good man and Adela as the pure girl does more than signal a common horror convention. Against the backdrop of anti-immigrant discourse that has historically dehumanized and criminalized undocumented migrants, these actions perform a counternarrative to the dominant social and racial scripts. Moises and Adela, like protagonists of other migration films, are rendered ideal, worthy (potential) citizen-subjects. This construction of Moises and Adela as good subjects is demonstrated through their motivations for migration. Adela undertakes the dangerous journey for better opportunities and a safer place to live. Her motivation, in essence, rearticulates the traditional American dream narrative and ironically reinforces the racial script of Mexico and the rest of Latin American countries being an infernal paradise and the United States being a site of safety and law.7 In contrast, Moises is returning to the United States. He had been deported and hopes to return to his wife and son. Here, Moises’s migration story deploys the rhetoric of family reunification and good fatherhood. In other words, he is not a societal drain or a criminal but a good man doing what any good man would do, establishing him as worthy of belonging in the United States. The motivation for Adela and Moises’s journeys is part of a broader immigrant rights movement discourse. Migration films like El Norte and A Better Life have underscored the goodness of Latinx migrants, but

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constructing migrants as good and worthy potential citizen-subjects is not relegated to the migration film genre alone. Immigration rights activists have adopted the “good migrant” model both as a corrective to nativist discourse and a strategic means for advancing reforms. For example, during the 2006 mega-marches, protesters wore white shirts to signal their goodness and worthiness (Baker-Cristales). Likewise, since the early twenty-first century, undocumented youth have been identified as Dreamers (an acronym derived from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), a move that both gestures to the American dream and highlights their innocence in the decision to come to the United States.8 Even as Desierto fashions the migrant protagonists Moises and Adela as ideal potential citizen-subjects, the film goes to great length to humanize Sam, the killer. For example, the scene in which he lashes out against the migrants for coming into “his home” depicts his actions, although horrific and violent in nature, as having an internal logic and being reactionary, if not defensive, in nature. Later in the film, when Moises kills Sam’s dog Tracker, Sam displays an outward expression of grief and raging hurt. Strangely, only Moises is also depicted with such an expression of emotion, which Desierto counters with multiple scenes that plumb the depths of Sam’s emotion. In his director’s commentary, Cuarón specifically identifies these scenes as attempts to depict Sam’s humanity.9 This humanizing effort rubs against the conventions of horror and migration films. For horror, films rarely seek to humanize the killer because it is their lack of humanity that makes them so powerful. Sam is not faceless, or even unrepentant, and he is not, at his core, irrevocably evil. While going against the common horror convention, humanizing Sam works to expose a more insidious horror: if the killer gringo is a fully emotional and complex human, are not all nativists also potentially killers? Where does one draw the line? And when one draws the line, is it a line of distinction or connection? Ultimately, the humanization of Sam and granting him a nuanced interiority strangely offers a site of audience identification with the killer, and if the killer is worthy of emotional consideration, then might not his motives also be? It is this move that forges the film’s political ambivalence by reinforcing the problematic social hierarchies. Embodying a common element of the horror genre, Moises and Adela fight back in the film’s third act. In the film’s first two acts, Sam tracks and slaughters the large group of migrants and then hunts and individually murders members of the smaller group. In these acts, Sam and Tracker collaborate with the desert, partnering with the landscape to enact terror and horror. For example, the large expanse of open desert initially allows Sam to snipe the large group of crossers with a high-powered rifle. Later, Sam uses a narrow canyon to trap the remaining migrants between him on one side

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and Tracker on the other. In these scenes, the desert functions as a means of murder for Sam just as his rifle and Tracker do. At the beginning of the second day, however, Moises and Adela retaliate, this time using the desert to their advantage. Discovering a nest of rattlesnakes, Adela devises a plan to lure Tracker and Sam away from the killer’s truck. Doing so allows Moises to hotwire the truck and escape with Adela, temporarily. Although Sam shoots Adela and causes Moises to crash the truck, the tables have begun to turn. Sam, like the migrants he hunts, is exposed to the elements. He can no longer simply weaponize the desert, for the desert also has him in its sights. With Adela injured, Moises leaves her, luring Sam away into the desert. For the remainder of the film, Moises continues to use the desert landscape against his hunters. He draws Tracker into a thicket of cacti, allowing him to shoot the dog with a flare gun he stole from the truck. Then Moises ascends a butte, escaping Sam and giving him advantage to fight back for the final conflict, thus wresting control of the environment. This dynamic simultaneously speaks back to and challenges migration films. While migration films often depict migrants undergoing the hardships of the journey, they are shown surviving obstacles, not weaponizing them. However, this is a common convention in horror where, in order to best the villain, the last man standing will weaponize the environment that was previously used against him. In forcing Sam to confront the elements the way migrants do, Desierto flattens out the power relations between migrants and the nativist murderer who dehumanizes and seeks to obliterate them. In a climax that echoes and challenges the horror genre, Moises throws himself and Sam off of a butte but never engages in the same form of explicit gratuitous violence as the killer. While the murders in Desierto are not depicted with the extreme gore as often found in road-horror, the film renders the deaths with a particularly pornographic visual pleasure. As Sam shoots the migrants from afar, blood splatters from them before their bodies hit the ground. As Tracker mauls Ramiro, the audience sees the sexual harasser shaken and torn from the force of the dog’s jaws. However, after Sam and Moises fall from the butte, Moises picks up Sam’s rifle but does not murder Sam at close range as the killer had done to Mechas, one of the coyotes, in the canyon earlier. Rather, having broken his leg in the fall, Sam is left pleading: “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Help me, help me.” Without forgiveness or sympathy, Moises leaves Sam in the desert to return to Adela and carry her to safety. This refusal to engage in the killer’s form of sadistic violence can be read in two contradictory ways. First, one may see Moises as more noble and less violent. In this vein, refusing to be a murderer reinforces the model migrant trope established earlier. Second, as Cuarón notes, there is something unforgiving and cruel about leaving Sam alone with

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Figure 7.2 Moises abandons Sam to die in the desert in Desierto (2015).

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a broken leg in the desert. Here, Moises turns Sam over to the certain death that numerous migrants face in the desert each year. Although not a psychopathic killer, Moises ultimately deploys the desert to mete out justice the way the United States uses the desert to enforce law. In both readings, Moises and Desierto refuse to allow the audience the visual pleasure of witnessing Sam’s death, a move that resists the vengeful impulse of horror. The film closes with Moises carrying Adela across a salt flat with lights in the distance. Through the lens of the horror genre, this is the protagonists surviving to see another day. Read through the migration genre, this ending must be seen as ambivalent at best. Will the exhausted Moises be able to carry the bleeding Adela to safety? Or will they collapse and die in the desert expanse? The film does not answer. From the migrant film tradition, we know that the lights do not simply signify safety as they may in a horror film. If Moises and Adela reach the lights, they are likely to be deported and forced to begin the journey through the desert again. If they are not deported immediately, their lives in the United States will be filled with hardships and the potential for capture and expulsion. In the future the film does not depict, terror and horror take on more mundane forms than a killer gringo and his dog because horror and terror are subtle aspects of the migrant film tradition and very real experiences of migrant lives.

Social Death, Slow Violence, and the Political Limitations of Migration Horror While migration and horror may at first appear to be an odd generic pairing, Cuarón deploys conventions of each to merge the genres in Desierto. In essence, this endeavor offers a political vision: migration is horror. This dictum rests on Sam’s role as the culminating embodiment of nativist attitudes and

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immigration policies. However, Desierto’s blending of horror and migration is neither perfect nor seamless. The genre expectations of horror foster an instability and unexpected ambivalence within the film’s execution of this political vision. Sam’s role as killer gringo— the personification of evil found in nativism and state-sanctioned violence— has two debilitating consequences: through Sam, Desierto reinforces the social death hierarchy that devalues migrant lives, and Sam’s role obscures very real forms of slow violence. Desierto’s political vision is first complicated by the way in which horror traditionally reinforces social hierarchy, a move that reproduces the troubling logic of social death prevalent in immigration and anti-immigrant discourse. Drawing on Orlando Patterson, Lisa Cacho describes social death as the condition in which individuals and communities are rendered rightless and ineligible for personhood (7). It is a condition brought about and enforced by a history of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, but it continues in the present as social and racial scripts position individuals and communities as dehumanized and deserving of mistreatment and violence. Social death underwrites the logic that exposes immigrants and enemy combatants to horrific forms of rightlessness. Cacho argues for a reevaluation of social justice rhetoric and its relationship to social death, asserting that as social justice rhetoric grants personhood to some groups, it simultaneously casts social death on others. This is particularly useful for understanding the contemporary immigration debate. Cacho’s analysis illustrates that when immigrant rights activists position Dreamers and other migrants as worthy of citizenship and human rights, the same discourse implicitly relies on the belief that some “bad subjects” are neither worthy of citizenship nor human rights. That is, even as social justice struggles work against the condition of social death, they may remain entrenched in its logic and dependent on the rightlessness of others. As a genre, horror readily deploys the logic of social death through the way in which social hierarchy often determines the order and means of victims’ murders and the degree to which audiences are expected to delight in them. In Desierto, the logic and condition of social death plays out in several ways. In the first act, Sam kills Lobo and a group of unnamed migrants. Sam snipes them from afar as the deaths are impersonal, quick, and spectral, blood flying from their bodies before they hit the ground. The first to die, Lobo is the coyote who abandoned the slower group of migrants and led the others to their doom in Sam’s sights. Per horror conventions and the logic of social death, the audience is asked to believe Lobo deserves death. They may even revel and be in awe of it. While few would suggest the large group of migrants deserve to die, they are unnamed and treated as “cattle,” which one of the coyotes had called them. This migrant “herd” is picked off indis-

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Figure 7.3 Blood splatters from an unnamed migrant woman as her body is rocked into the air from the force of the killer’s bullet in Desierto (2015).

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criminately not to demonstrate the horror of life lost but to illustrate Sam’s shooting prowess and the danger he presents. There is a similar element of spectacle in the death of Ramiro, the migrant who sexually harasses Adela earlier in the film. Tracker savagely tackles and then rips Ramiro’s throat out. Similar to Lobo, Ramiro’s actions toward Adela mark him as being deserving of death. His death serves a dual purpose: first to punish Ramiro for his transgressions and second to demonstrate Tracker’s deadly ferocity. It is not meant to invoke sympathy; it is meant to be brutal and spectacular. In contrast, the Central American migrant Ulises’s death is almost forgettable. After failing to make the jump between two boulders, Sam easily picks Ulises off, his body dropping unceremoniously off screen. Overweight and out of breath, Ulises’s struggles in the desert are present even before Sam begins his killing spree. His death is not a tragedy; it was an inevitability. Unlike Lobo and Ramiro, whose deaths were prescribed by social transgressions, Ulises’s death is separated from spectacle, although it is far from dignified. Ulises’s body acts as transgressor instead. Black and overweight, his body is devalued in hegemonic orderings, making its failing in the film expected and accepted. Mechas is the final coyote and the last of the migrants to die. Mechas falls from a rock face and is attacked by Tracker, only for Sam to call the dog off and kill Mechas at point-blank range with his rifle, a blood-splatter halo forming around his head. Although Mechas did not initially abandon the migrants like Lobo, he is still ultimately characterized by his cowardice as he attempts to leave Moises and Adela behind. This places him in the same category as Lobo, deserving of death both by the filmic language of horror and the logic of social death. Through the logic of social death, horror’s reliance and reinforcement of a social hierarchy culminates with Moises and Adela as the surviving pro-

Figure 7.5 After Tracker’s attack, the killer stands above Mechas, ready to finish him off in Desierto (2015).

tagonists. Not only are they the “good guy” and “pure girl” of horror convention but they embody the good migrant trope of immigrant rights discourse. Both characters are molded into the racial script of the model migrant and stand in contrast to the other migrants. Moises and Adela’s bid for citizensubjecthood, and thus sympathy, is predicated up the presumed criminality and dehumanization of the other migrants. In particular, Lobo and Mechas are marked as invalid for sympathy because of their roles as coyotes. By

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Figure 7.4 The audience sees Ulises and Moises through the killer’s sights in Desierto (2015).

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emphasizing the scripts of criminality embedded in characters like Ramiro and the other migrants, they become value-less and their deaths acceptable, even natural. In consequence, Moises and Adela, because of the lack of criminality signified by their survival, become valued. Recognizing that Desierto relies on and replicates social death exposes that the film positions Sam as the agent and embodiment of state-sanctioned violence. That is, that Sam’s violence aligns with the state’s goals. The murders that Sam commits are not aberrant. They align with decades of border policy, the militarization of the border, and even the actions of Border Patrol agents. Sam’s massacre of the migrants, and in particular those like Lobo and Mechas who are already in line with the logic of social death, becomes a legitimate act of violence in which he streamlines immigration policy. Although Sam is separate from state agencies, he is nonetheless aligned with state motives, a more direct and efficient manifestation of Operation Gatekeeper. Sam, in his role as monster-as-vigilante, is essentially an “illegal demonstration of state-sanctioned violence” (Cacho 37). Sam replaces the Border Patrol, the U.S. government and legal system, and even the desert as the perpetrator of racial violence against the migrants. The migrants are being hunted by statesanctioned violence made sentient, and, in consequence, conscionable. His actions become recognizable as acts of state and thus acceptable. This is only exacerbated by the sympathetic portrayal of the killer gringo. The intense humanization of Sam in Desierto creates a sympathetic nativist narrative and further legitimizes his state-sanctioned violence. However, the displacement of the Border Patrol and Sam acting as a state-sanctioned vigilante have another dire implication and consequence. The state, in accordance with Cacho’s argument, regulates the legality of personhood. Through legal parameters, the state acts as an enforcer of social death and negotiates its boundaries and influences; the state regulates “how human value and humans’ values are assumed and assigned, justified and denied” (Cacho 12). In the absence of the state, Sam becomes that regulator and enforcer. Although he is characterized as explicitly separate from government agencies, Sam and his rifle and his dog become the conduits of state violence.10 His murder of the migrants outlines his (and the state’s) ordering of hegemonic human value and personhood. While horror may function as a natural generic home for social death, the logic of social death is problematic and contradictory for the Latinx migration tradition. Social death requires the belief that some individuals are worthy of dehumanization, mistreatment, and death. Moreover, it requires an identification with and embrace of state violence. Critically, however, horror’s reproduction of social death is not Desierto’s only contradictory impulse, for in crafting Sam as a sympathetic embodiment of nativist, state-sanctioned

violence, the film takes attention away from other perils that characterize migration films and migrant lives. Considering the brutality of Desierto’s murders, it may seem counterintuitive to claim that the film elides forms of violence that characterize migration. Here we must note that horror and migration films often depict very different forms of violence. Horror typically renders violence that is explicit, gratuitous, and interpersonal. For horror, violence exists in the foreground for the delight, terror, and terrorizing delight of the audience. In the migration film tradition, however, violence often haunts the background, weighing on and shaping the foregrounded migration story. In this tradition, violence may be interpersonal, but it is also impersonal, structural, and bureaucratic; what Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego describe as the “legal violence” migrants face. While Desierto depicts both forms of violence, Sam’s foregrounded horror film violence eclipses the very real terror and “slow violence” migrants face both in their journeys and in their lives in the United States. In describing migration as characterized by “slow violence,” we draw on the work of Rob Nixon. According to Nixon, slow violence is a

Whereas Nixon conceptualizes slow violence to name and make legible environmental destruction, climate change, and their impacts on the most vulnerable, we repurpose and deploy the term as a framework for understanding migrant experiences. At its core, slow violence is characterized by three elements. Slow violence does not rely on an individual act, but rather it may often result from structural conditions and policy decisions. Slow violence is not immediate but develops and compounds over time. Finally, slow violence challenges traditional representational strategies, making it difficult to identify and confront. Because of these elements and their interplay, slow violence may not only be invisible but may also appear natural, to some. While environmental racism and climate change embody the slow violence of Nixon’s framework, what is the slow violence that migrants face?

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violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need . . . to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretiative, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (2)

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For Latinx migrants, slow violence may be found in economic policies that destabilize local economies, U.S. interventionism that shapes who has political power in sending countries, and the demand for drugs and supply of guns that give rise to the fast violence of narco wars and the more enduring toll of living in terror. For Latinx migrants, slow violence is confronting a U.S. immigration system that requires wealth, in-demand advanced degrees, or over a decade of waiting in order to migrate legally; a system that recognizes as legitimate only some political asylum seekers and no economic refugees; an immigration system that militarizes a two-thousand-mile border and funnels migrants through some of the most dangerous desert terrain on the planet; an immigration system so restrictive and a border so policed that in order to cross, migrants will pay exorbitant prices to people who may abandon, rob, rape, ransom, or kill them; being pushed to cross in a region that may slowly overheat one’s body, leaving one to bake in the desert; the purposeful destruction of life-saving water stations by the Border Patrol; and the surveillance of the border by the state agencies and vigilante groups. For the Latinx migrants who make it, slow violence is also living in perpetual fear of deportation, being unable to rely on police to protect them when the same police may separate the family, living in a country where the history of white supremacy means that the children and grandchildren of migrants will often be assumed to be not “real” Americans, and the accretion of pain and loss of living in a society where systemic racism leads to food insecurity, negative health outcomes, and the continued devaluation of one’s home culture. Although Nixon’s environmentally rooted slow violence may not initially appear to be a natural fit for explaining migration experiences, his framework encapsulates how this broad and sprawling constellation of factors form a slow, systemic, often invisible, and thus naturalized expression of violence that characterizes Latinx migrant experiences. Critically, this slow violence of migration is often invisible to those who do not experience it. As a genre, Latinx migration films have worked against this representational challenge, making this violence and its effects legible. However, while Desierto gestures to the slow violence of migration, the horror genre emphasis on extreme, gratuitous violence overrides this more realistic violence that characterizes migration. Horror often requires an embodiment of evil to terrorize the film’s protagonists; this is particularly true of slasher and road-horror subgenres. Throughout Desierto, Sam’s murderous hunt echoes the traditional violence against which Nixon defines slow violence. One need only see the migrants’ blood explode from their bodies to recognize Nixon’s commonly understood violence: “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (2). In marked contrast, migration films deploy

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a more ethereal, bureaucratic, and less individually embodied violence. Because this violence lacks an agent and accretiates over time, this slow violence of migration faces a challenge of representation. How does one represent the horror of migration when violence is slow? Desierto attempts to answer this representational challenge by imagining the horror of a killer gringo, fashioning Sam as the embodiment of nativism and state-sanctioned violence. In drawing together horror and migration, Desierto finds an imperfect answer to the representational challenge that the slow violence of migration offers. Sam both relies on and obscures the slow violence that characterizes migration. Desierto’s slow violence exists largely in the background. It propels the migrants to leave their homes, separates them from their families, and funnels them into the treacherous desert landscape. It places migrant lives in the hands of men who consider them “cattle” and have no problem leaving them behind. In other words, slow violence gives Sam the power and opportunity to hunt the migrants. Here, Desierto relies on horror and the embodiment of evil to represent the force and impact of slow violence. Sam is not just an abstract embodiment of evil but the embodiment of nativism and U.S. policies that take advantage of and target the dispossessed and vulnerable, and as noted earlier, Sam’s killing marks and reinforces a social hierarchy. Because Desierto depicts Sam’s extreme violence as a focal point of the narrative, the film simultaneously further pushes the more representationally challenged forms of violence to the background. For example, in the one scene with the Border Patrol, Sam dismisses them as inefficient and insufficient to stop migrants crossing into the United States. The agency, represented by an assuming white man, is not an active perpetrator of border violence. Instead, the Border Patrol is characterized by negligence and haplessness— not an active threat, just an incidental one. In reality, the militarization of the border both funnels migrants to this dangerous landscape and pushes them to rely on coyotes for their passage. Moreover, there have been numerous cases of Border Patrol agents destroying life-saving water stations, harassing migrant rescue groups, and killing migrants. In contrast, the film’s negligent and hapless Border Patrol erases the agency’s history of violence and transposes it onto Sam. Indeed, Sam becomes the most dangerous part of the migrants’ journey, as demonstrated by the scene in which Moises attempts to hail a Border Patrol agent in an attempt to save himself and his companions. The Border Patrol is not another threat, and even at the end of the film, when Sam has been left for dead in the desert, Moises and Adela look with hope and relief at a busy freeway— salvation, not a threat of deportation. Sam also displaces the danger of migration through the Sonoran Desert. After the truck breaks down, the migrants trek on foot during the hottest

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part of the day, led by coyotes who see them as nothing more than cattle and who are willing to abandon them. At this point, the migrants are already in danger of dying. However, they only recognize danger when they hear Sam shooting in the distance. Because he is the embodiment of nativism and state-sanctioned violence, the film only signals the migrants’ danger when Sam begins hunting them. In truth however, they have been in danger since they undertook the journey just as slow violence has spurred and shaped their migration experiences. As an imperfect answer to the representational challenge of slow violence, Sam’s murderous hunt highlights for the audience migrant vulnerabilities: Sam is the cause of danger for the precarious lives of the crossers. This representational sleight of hand is a dangerous move because the audience may focus on the psychopathic and sympathetic killer gringo and forget about the actual killers: economic policies, immigration policies, underground migrant economies, and the desert, to name a few.

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Beyond Desierto

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Through drawing together seemingly disparate genres, Desierto exposes the possibilities and limitations of treating migration as horror. The film engages conventions from each tradition as it executes Cuarón’s vision. Yet in key ways, these genres and conventions work against each other as well. The humanized nativist killer gringo enforces a social hierarchy that elevates good, named, and sympathetic migrant lives through normalizing or reveling in the deaths of bad, unnamed, or unsympathetic crossers. As the embodiment of state-sanctioned violence, Sam gives form to the often representationally challenged dangers migrants face. In so doing, the film’s focus on immediate, spectacular violence obscures the slow violence that structures every stage of the migration experience. Despite its limitations, Cuarón’s genre-blending experiment, when read with a critical eye, offers important ways of understanding Latinx migration beyond Desierto. Because genres are discursive clusters that evolve over time, Desierto’s overt deployment of horror makes legible the elements of horror that have long existed in Latinx migration films: the sewer rats attacking Rosa and Enrique in El Norte, the police lights flashing in the dead of night signaling Carlos will soon be deported in A Better Life, or Deborah confusing Flor’s name with “what I walk on,” gesturing to the mistreatment of migrant domestic workers in Spanglish. All of these scenes and numerous others now reverberate with the potential for horror. But a critical reading of Desierto asks viewers to consider the violences migrants face outside of film as well. Even as Sam is humanized, there is no question that he is the bad guy. His violence is sadistic and cruel. However,

hundreds of migrants die while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border each year, and those are just the ones found and recorded. When one considers how slow violence propels migrants north, directs their paths into the United States, and shapes their lives here, there is no question that this is a long-term, slowmoving humanitarian crisis. Even when border patrol agents or vigilantes harass, endanger, or kill migrants, the stories fail to capture national attention beyond the occasional headline. Is this because the violence is so slow and accretiative? Or is it because the logic of social death requires that the U.S. racial imagination treat migrant rightlessness and death as normal, expected, and acceptable? In truth, the answer is both: slow violence is difficult to see, and social death explains away the horrors of everyday slow and immediate violence. With this, other questions emerge: If a serial killer was found to be murdering migrants in the desert as part of his nativist fantasies, would U.S. citizens take notice? Would they pay prolonged attention? And as Sam is just the embodiment of already enacted nativist policies and state violence, and as people are already dying in the desert and facing tremendous dangers throughout their journeys, why do we let migration as horror continue?

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Natalia Molina uses “racial scripts” to name how cultural representations may shape and be shaped by institutional agents, governmental policies, and ordinary citizens (6). In using racial scripts, we elucidate U.S. immigration policy has long been predicated on the nativist dehumanization of Latinx migrants, and the Latinx migration film tradition and Latinx immigration rights activists have actively offered strategies of “counterscripting.” The term “final girl” was popularized by the filmography of Wes Craven, specifically his films Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream (1996). It refers to the woman, or girl, who survives until the end of the horror film and usually must defeat the villain. Her virginity and chastity are integral to her survival. In contrast, the “last man standing” trope is less defined (and sometimes exchanged for “final guy”) and arose organically from horror discourse. In contrast to the “final girl,” the “last man standing” survives because of his wits and resilience. Respectively, Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). While the Confederate flag is an obvious signifier of racism, the film also uses country music as a metonym to signal the U.S. South and its attendant cultural association of racism. This filmic shorthand elides the complex ways white supremacy and nativism permeate the United States, different economic statuses, and regions. Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway also takes this approach. Urrea charges the desert with a supernatural element of “desolation” as devils or demons peek their head out of the

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Notes

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sand, waiting for the death of migrants. Moreover, Urrea recognizes that this is not a new phenomenon, for the desert has been claiming lives since before written history (5– 12). 6. Accounting for those who cross and die along the journey is notoriously difficult. Their bodies may never be found, and their remains may not be identifiable. According to a 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, migrant deaths doubled annually since 1995, the year following Operation Gatekeeper. The Tucson sector of the border, known as the Devil’s Highway, accounted for the majority of deaths. While the annual reported deaths may range from approximately two hundred to five hundred, even these numbers are suspect. Because of the environmental conditions, it may be difficult to determine whether a body is a recent migrant or someone who died many years ago. Complicating matters further, as a May 2018 CNN investigative report notes, U.S. Border Patrol has failed to report hundreds of migrant border deaths (Ortega). 7. The film gestures to an inversion of this infernal paradise trope. While Adela migrates because her parents think their town is too dangerous, it is actually within the boundaries of the United States that Adela and the other migrants face death. For more discussion of how the infernal paradise trope works, see Alarcón (39–94). 8. Connecting to the dynamics of social death discussed later, these claims of innocence and the American dream of the Dreamers rely on the rejection of other migrants, including the parents of Dreamers, as criminals or unworthy. Cognizant of this, many Dreamer activists have argued for a “Clean DREAM Act,” one that does not further criminalize their parents. Some have also referred to their parents as the “Original Dreamers” (“Celebrating Parents”). 9. Indeed, Cuarón notes in the Blu-ray/DVD director’s commentary that there was another scene that showed Sam calling his wife. While this scene would have humanized Sam even further, cutting the scene allowed him to fashion Sam’s isolation from society. With either choice, Cuarón actively humanized the killer. 10. Although Sam is not officially affiliated with any state agency, he chooses to wear desert camo pants and to carry a high-powered rifle in an attempt to align himself with the U.S. military. He is desirous of militarism but is only an imitation of it.

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References Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. University of Arizona Press, 1997. Baker-Cristales, Beth. “Mediated Resistance: The Construction of Neoliberal Citizenship in the Immigrant Rights Movement.” Latino Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60– 82. Ballard, Finn. “No Trespassing: The Post-Millennial Road-Horror Movie.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 4, 2008, pp. 15– 29, irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/finn -ballard.pdf. Buchanan, Patrick J. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002.

Filmography La Bestia. Directed by Pedro Ultreras, Venevision International, 2010. A Better Life. Directed by Chris Weitz, Summit Entertainment, 2011. Born in East L.A. Directed by Cheech Marin, Universal Pictures, 1987. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Weine, Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920. Desierto. Directed by Jonás Cuarón, STX Films, 2015. Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, Universal Pictures, 1931. El Inmigrante. Directed by Dave Eckenrode, John Eckenrode, and John Sheedy, Indican, 2005. El Norte. Directed by Gregory Nava, Cinecom International, 1983. Friday the 13th. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures, 1980. Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, Compáss International Pictures, 1978. The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Wes Craven, Blood Relations Co., 1977. Hostel. Directed by Eli Roth, Next Entertainment, 2005.

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Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York University Press, 2012. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper. University Press of Florida, 2016. “Celebrating Parents, the Original Dreamers.” DefineAmerican.com, Mar. 13, 2014, defineamerican .com/blog/celebrating-parents-the-original-dreamers/. Accessed May 17, 2018. Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. 2nd ed., Stanford University Press, 2013. Jacobson, Robin Dale. The New Nativism: Proposition 187 and the Debate over Immigration. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. 3rd ed. 1948. Praeger, 2016. Menjívar, Cecilia, and Leisy J. Abrego. “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 5, 2012, pp. 1380– 1421. Mittell, Jason. “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory.” Cinema Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 2001, pp. 3– 24. Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. University of California Press, 2014. Nericcio, William Anthony. Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. University of Texas Press, 2007. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2013. Ortega, Bob. “Border Patrol Failed to Count Hundreds of Migrant Deaths on U.S. Soil.” CNN, May 15, 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/us/border-patrol-migrant-death-count-invs/index.html. Phillips, Kendall R. Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Sanna, Antonio. “A ‘New’ Environment for the Horror Film: The Cave as Negation of Postmodernity and Globalization.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 65, no. 4, 2013, pp. 17– 28. Santa Ana, Otto. Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary Public Discourse. University of Texas Press, 2002. “Sonoran Desert Network Ecosystems.” NPS.gov (National Park Service), Apr. 3, 2018, www.nps.gov /im/sodn/ecosystems.htm. Syder, Andrew. “Knowing the Rules: Postmodernism and the Horror Film.” Spectator, vol. 22, no. 2, 2002, pp. 78– 88. Tompkins, Joe. “The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism.” Popular Communication, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 32– 47. U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Illegal Immigration: Border-Crossing Deaths Have Doubled Since 1995; Border Patrol’s Efforts to Prevent Deaths Have Not Been Fully Evaluated.” August 2006, www.gao.gov/new.items/d06770.pdf. Accessed May 17, 2018. Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story. Little Brown, 2004.

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Maria Full of Grace. Directed by Joshua Marston, HBO Films, 2004. My Family. Directed by Gregory Nava, New Line Cinema, 1995. Nightmare on Elm Street. Directed by Wes Craven, New Line Cinema, 1984. Romántico. Directed by Mark Becker, Kino International, 2005. Saw. Directed by James Wan, Evolution Entertainment, 2004. Scream. Directed by Wes Craven, Woods Entertainment, 1996. Spanglish. Directed by James L. Brooks, Columbia Pictures, 2004. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Directed by Tobe Hooper, Vortex, 1974. Under the Same Moon / La misma luna. Directed by Patricia Riggen, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2008.

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Chapter 8

INVISIBLE IMMIGRANTS A Better Life and the Cinematic Undocumented Desirée J. Garcia

In a moment of narrative pause, the two protagonists in A Better Life (2011) attend a charreada, or Mexican rodeo (see figure 8.1). Carlos (Demián Bichir), an undocumented immigrant, and his American teenage son, Luis (José Julián), have been in a desperate search for their truck, which was stolen by Santiago (Carlos Linares), a Salvadoran immigrant. While waiting for Santiago to arrive at his work, Carlos and Luis notice the flags, music, and crowds across the street, and they venture toward it. Father and son marvel at the Mexicans in folkloric dress and the virtuosic riding demonstrations by men on horseback. The charreada, the characters come to find, preserves the Mexican past within the Los Angeles present. While the cultural space is familiar to Carlos, it is less so for Luis, who has difficulty processing the Spanish being spoken over the loudspeaker. His father urges him to listen closely, reminding him that he understands Spanish and that this is his culture, too. Having been beset by financial insecurity and social marginalization, father and son find respite at the charreada, which offers them color, abundance, and cultural belonging. The moment does not last long, however, and Carlos and Luis must soon confront the reality of the stolen truck once again. The pause in action that the charreada scene offers is singular in the film given that the story’s momentum is driven by the pursuit of the truck. For this reason, as director Chris Weitz noted in an interview about the film, it was the “obvious thing to cut” because of the “time and effort and expense.” Nevertheless, the scene is a “moment of color and life and optimism,” as Weitz explained, that represents “the birthright that the kid has been denied and what the father has left behind” (Weitz). While much of the film focuses on the outsider status of both the father and son, the charreada sequence connects them to their Mexican history and cultural lineage. Weitz said he made the film in part because of the strength of the original script but also because of its subject matter. He possesses Mexican heritage himself. His grandmother was actress Lupita Tovar, star of early Spanishlanguage talkies at Universal Studios and the first Mexican sound film, Santa 171

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Figure 8.1 Carlos and Luis attend the charreada in A Better Life (2011).

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(1932). His mother, Susan Kohner, is half-Mexican, an identity that is not widely acknowledged in reports about her best-known role as Sarah Jane in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), in which she plays a self-hating, mixed-race young woman. While he does not identify as a Latino filmmaker, Weitz’s lineage nevertheless provides him with a unique subjectivity regarding the place of Mexicans in American society. This chapter explores the significance of A Better Life on the levels of story, form, and distribution. Specifically, it follows the themes of liminality and invisibility as they manifest in the film’s production to its distribution, which makes apparent the connection between the undocumented experience and the ongoing marginalized existence of Latinxs as they register within mainstream American entertainment. Told from the perspective of an undocumented immigrant, whose illegal status relegates him to the fringes of American life, the film traces an experience that receives scant attention in Hollywood. Weitz uses visual motifs and cinematic language to traverse the physical and geographical spaces of undocumented lives and in so doing conveys the precariousness of such an existence, prompting the audience to feel the immigrant’s mixed emotions of hope, anxiety, and despair. Finally, the film’s distribution, which walked the line between a mainstream art house release and a “Latinx” film, demonstrates the extent to which films made about and for Latinxs, and Spanish speakers generally, are still perplexing for the Hollywood studios. Like many Latinx-themed films before it, A Better Life ultimately suffered from a lack of awareness on the part of the studios to first identify the Latinx market and second, to serve it.

The undocumented immigrant appears rarely in American cinema and rarer still in Hollywood studio productions. For that reason, A Better Life deserves special attention. It is worthwhile, however, to compare Weitz’s film to earlier independent productions that specifically examine Mexican undocumented lives in the United States. Two notable films with which A Better Life is in dialogue is Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000) and Robert M. Young’s Alambrista! (1977). Both of these films convey the experience of illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and explore the various forms of uncertainty and exploitation that define social interactions and work environments. In the former, a coyote smuggles Maya (Pilar Padilla) across the border, after which she reunites with her sister in Los Angeles, begins a night job cleaning office buildings, meets a union organizer (Adrian Brody), and becomes an activist for workers’ rights. In Alambrista! an immigrant from the Mexican countryside ventures north to find work in order to support his wife and child back home. His hardships are many as he struggles to evade la migra (border patrol), find food and work, and navigate a corrupt and exploitative labor system in the fields of California. While A Better Life shares a similarly defined protagonist, an undocumented immigrant, it departs from these previous cinematic interpretations in critical ways and thus furthers our understanding of and appreciation for the lives of the undocumented in a contemporary and particularly urban setting. Loach’s film centers on the main character’s awakening of a political consciousness, and some of the most powerful moments of the film depict her at the forefront of a labor struggle. In a climactic moment, she marches with her coworkers out into the streets of Los Angeles and calls the attention of the city to the unfair treatment of its workers. Such scenes are empowering because they evoke the dozens of historical and contemporary demonstrations for workers’ rights in places like Los Angeles. Ultimately, however, the presence of Brody’s character, Sam, qualifies Maya’s agency. Sam plays two roles in the film: the first is as a labor organizer who risks all in order to help workers like Maya, and the second as a romantic lead. His role is critical to educating Maya on the ways that she is being exploited and to provide her with instructions on how to respond to that exploitation. And their palpable, if subtle, romantic feelings for one another add further dimensions to their internal, relational politics. As a white savior figure, Sam both exposes the problems in society and helps those who are marginalized to help themselves, providing comfort and inspiration along the way. A Better Life contains no such white savior. Indeed, it is one of the few Hollywood films to feature people of color as protagonists who operate

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entirely without the assistance of a white character. In this way, the film makes Carlos’s experience as an undocumented immigrant primary. He struggles alone and often invisibly to the world around him. In the absence of a savior, the protagonist’s emotions remain internalized, made evident to the audience by Demián Bichir’s expressive face and the language of the film. Nor is Carlos’s isolation, a product of his marginalized legal status, relieved by a secondary inspirational figure. In a nod to scenes like the one described above in Bread and Roses, Carlos passes by an immigrant rights demonstration in the city as he rides the bus, beginning his long search for the truck. In a short montage, we see protestors gathering in the streets, carrying American and Mexican flags, and crying “Sí se puede.” At the end of the montage, the film reveals that Carlos is watching them through the bus window as his son sleeps on his shoulder. His glance is both one of wonder and incredulity. But it is also fleeting because the bus soon whisks them past the scene to another area of Los Angeles. Rather than the awakening of a political consciousness and the triumphalist moment of public protest, A Better Life conveys the experience of one who is so marginalized that to be public in any way is a threat. His concerns are so immediate that he can only live in the day to day. His reaction shot to the street protests echoes many shots in the film that we have seen by that point, which involve Carlos looking out the window of a moving vehicle, marveling at the leisure class of L.A. society who have time to jog, surf, sip coffee in sidewalk cafes, and spend time with their families. Seen in this light, the street protest is merely one more example of a privileged existence to which he does not have access. Finally, the absence of a white savior figure in the film negates the inevitability of a happy ending. As Weitz acknowledged, the film does not have that “ring of positivity” to it in the sense that the narrative culminates in a state of redemption for the main character. Quite to the contrary, the worst fears of father and son are realized when Carlos is deported to Mexico, separating him from his family and subjecting him to the ordeal of crossing the border again in order to return to them. It is not how society changes and reforms that provides narrative closure, the film suggests, but the continuity and persistence of the marginalized among us to pursue “a better life” at all costs. The isolation of the main character is something that Alambrista! and A Better Life have in common, although in the latter, it is an urbanized existence that the undocumented immigrant experiences. The act of border crossing does not occupy the centralized place in the narrative that it does in the earlier film. Instead, it is the act of making a home and a life that Weitz privileges. Far from the border in time and space, Carlos ekes out an existence in the barrio of East L.A. where he performs work not in the vast agricultural fields of California but in the lush yards of white, upper-class Los Angelenos.

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In Alambrista! the main character, Roberto (Domingo Ambriz), physically traverses the margins of society, relegated to fields and workers’ camps away from populated spaces. By contrast, Carlos’s existence is deeply embedded within and, indeed, critical to the operation of the day-to-day workings of the privileged classes of Los Angeles. He works around their homes, eats lunch on the sidewalk curbs of their manicured neighborhoods, and drives through their streets. And yet he remains just as invisible as if he were working out in the fields. Throughout the film, we see Carlos watching the activities of the world around him, which echoes Alambrista! for the ways that it, as Cordelia Candelaria notes, represents “the consciousness and gaze of a mestizo worker” (143). Just as critical to A Better Life, however, are the ways in which the people around Carlos go out of their way not to return his gaze. This is apparent in the scene when Carlos tries to get a driver to stop and help him chase his stolen truck. The driver responds by swerving around him in an act that is both blatant and annoyed. The film further emphasizes his helplessness when he sees a policeman nearby but cannot approach him for fear of calling attention to his legal status. He is vulnerable to crime and exploitation because he has no rights as a citizen, but the film also shows how places like Los Angeles depend on such a labor pool in order to operate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an early scene in the film when a female client (Nancy Lenehan) expresses concern about the dangers of having men climb and prune palm trees on her property. Carlos’s employer explains that using a cherry picker will cost her more. She responds with silence but exhibits a telling smile that suggests her willingness to keep the current, less expensive arrangement. Despite the anxiety and invisibility that Carlos experiences, he nevertheless makes Los Angeles his home, as have many immigrants both past and present. The charreada sequence is critical for demonstrating the ways that immigrants have found and created “México de afuera” (Mexico from outside). The robust, vibrant, and somewhat anachronistic spectacle of the charreada in the midst of Los Angeles provides a visual archive for cultural retention and adaptability in otherwise inhospitable settings. It is also a sign of the many ways that Latinx immigrants have exhibited “a commitment to public presence,” as A. K. Sandoval-Strausz has argued, that is an adaptation of “long-standing urban behaviors common in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America” (808). Plazas and parks, as public spaces, have been both occupied and reclaimed for the creation of a “Hispanic place identity” that bolsters community through the celebration of fiestas and “everyday sociability” (816). The folkloric costumes, riding and dance customs, food, and language that defines the charreada renders public space in Los Angeles as Mexican space.

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Though subtle, we also see the effects of immigrant settlement throughout the urban landscape of Los Angeles in A Better Life. The routine of leaving his home in the early morning to go to work takes Carlos through the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. As we experience his daily journey, we see the businesses that cater to, and are potentially owned by, immigrants themselves. But we also see the homes that immigrants have made for themselves, which include elaborate, fenced-in front yards that face the street. As Sandoval-Strausz asserts, these spaces were a uniquely “Mexican American residential form that combined the freestanding Anglo dwelling with the Mexican courtyard house” that had implications for structuring social space as well: This hybrid homescape extended the social space out of the house, onto the porch, and into the front yard to a chain link or wrought iron fence at the property line. In contrast with the archetypal Anglo front yard—well kept but empty of people—this Latino domestic space saw constant use, with family and friends sitting on porches or stairs, supervising small children who could safely play inside the fence line. (820)

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Carlos’s work schedule, which requires him to leave the house at dawn and return at night, precludes him from partaking in any social life that these spaces invite. Nevertheless, as he exits and reenters the neighborhood, the built landscape reminds us that this is an immigrant space that individuals

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Figure 8.2 A tracking shot during the opening credits sequence of A Better Life (2011) in which Carlos passes by homes in East Los Angeles.

and families have made meaningful for themselves. Carlos himself has created his own garden, which he tends before he leaves for work. His careful attention to the plants in his own yard suggests that he takes pride in his work but also that he feels a commitment to making a home for himself and his son. Luis, who watches his father planting the garden from the bathroom window, does not understand these impulses. He derisively shakes his head and turns away. It is one of many instances of intergenerational discord in the film, but it also provides a nuanced interpretation of this particular father and son relationship in which they are divided not only by age but by differences in legal status that determine the parameters of one’s life.

Weitz makes use of visual motifs in order to convey and elaborate on the themes of the film, which in turn give meaning to the undocumented experience. As Carlos navigates Los Angeles in search of a better life, we see the spaces he occupies, their qualities and their ways of ordering society. One motif that occurs persistently and in different contexts is the chain link fence, a metal structure of demarcation that contains people and regulates bodies. Luis’s high school is a fenced-in, prison-like structure where the young man spends much of his time. But his reality is the school courtyard, not the classroom. In the courtyard, which is divided into distinct sections by extensive chain link fencing, Luis works out the politics of gang life, his identity as a man, and his relationship to his girlfriend. The presence of police cars on the periphery of the space creates an environment of surveillance and control of the mostly poor Latinx and immigrant students. In two later instances, the chain link fence serves not only to contain but to distance Carlos from the better life that he seeks. It separates Carlos and Luis from the truck when they find it in a guarded lot. Cold, austere, and topped with barbed wire, this fence divides them from what is rightfully theirs. In a brief, exhilarating moment, they scale the fence, get in the truck, and accelerate quickly, breaking through the locked gate and out to the road. This scene carries symbolic weight not only because it is a moment that prompts Luis to respect his father but also because it is liberatory. In emancipating and reclaiming the truck and breaking down the barrier between marginalization and mobility, they have also liberated themselves. The euphoria does not last long, however, for the police quickly pull them over and ask for Carlos’s driver’s license. The next scene shows Carlos entrapped by fencing, first in the bus that delivers him to a detention center and again in the center itself. Weitz has the audience experience Carlos’s detention by using the fencing as a lens. In this sequence, the fence refracts the

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eye of the camera and divides the frame according to the spaces between the wires. Alternately, other shots show the fence as backdrop for Carlos who, as he looks around, sees fencing on all sides and both above and below him. This sequence reveals the extent to which he is contained by the state, declared a criminal, and divided from his family once more. Another visual motif communicates the liminality that pervades undocumented lives. Carlos spends much time in the film in spaces that function as thresholds; they are neither here nor there. Sidewalks, curbs, and bus stops are transitory spaces that belong neither to the street nor to the residences and businesses that border it. While he labors in the gardens of the wealthy, his lunchtime must be spent sitting on the curb on the street. The sidewalk becomes a metonym for the marginalized and desperate, which becomes apparent in the scene when Carlos loses his job and must join the group of day workers who stand on a street corner. His familiarity with the process of waiting for a potential employer to pull up suggests that he has done this before. Like them, he is both vulnerable and desperate. Weitz communicates this by showing us what this group looks like to an employer who drives up to them. We see them converge on the truck, clamoring for any work available, and see their despairing faces when the driver declares that he only needs two men for the day. Even with the urgent matter of finding his truck and knowing that time could cost him everything, Carlos must rely on the public transit system in order to find it. With each new lead on where the truck might be, we see him in long shot, by himself, waiting on the corner for another bus. In each of

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Figure 8.3 Carlos stands on the corner among the day workers in A Better Life (2011).

Figure 8.4 Carlos admires Los Angeles from atop the palm tree in A Better Life (2011).

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these spaces, whether curb, sidewalk, or bus stop, the liminal status of those who occupy them is placed in harsh relief. People like Carlos occupy the insecure margins of the more stable spaces of private property, and they must rely on others in order to get where they want to go. The film’s title infuses the film’s visual iconography with meaning. As we see throughout the film, Carlos holds out hope for a better life and ceaselessly works to realize it. The truck itself is a symbol of a better existence. The sequence in which Carlos first drives the truck as his own, outfits it with Mexican dash ornaments, and then watches lovingly as it is being washed (while other men watch the women who are doing the washing) shows him experiencing a rare moment of happiness. As he tells Luis, the truck is good for them both. It is both a figurative and a literal symbol of mobility. Another visual icon is synonymous with Los Angeles itself: the palm tree. It is a symbol of glamor, leisure, and exotic lifestyles. For Carlos, however, it is a source of work. He makes his living by climbing their towering stalks and pruning their fronds. The plethora of palm trees in L.A. provides him with steady employment. But it is dangerous and arduous work. Significantly, the character Santiago steals the truck while Carlos is pruning one of these trees. The scene holds the multivalent dimensions of the palm tree in balance. The sequence begins with a high-angle shot from the tree as Carlos and Santiago approach it from well below. A close-up reveals Carlos dropping his keys onto the ground and carefully rigging his harness with a series of buckles and clasps. He then makes the sign of the cross before beginning his ascent. He knows it is dangerous to climb it, but in the search

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for what it represents, he is willing to take on the task. In medium shot, Carlos laboriously climbs the tree in a series of movements that slowly inch his body upward. Sweating and out of breath, he stops to marvel at the view from the top. “How beautiful it is,” he exclaims. But as he looks down for Santiago, he realizes that his keys are gone and Santiago is running toward the truck. The descent is even more arduous, and he struggles to do it quickly but to no avail. Santiago and the truck are gone. In the film, the palm tree is a site of both hope and despair. It defines the Los Angeles landscape and embodies the aspirational qualities of the American dream. Nevertheless, the tree is Carlos’s downfall. Just as he reaches the top, he loses what little he has left. Weitz uses the palm tree— its height and its precarity— to suggest the vast distance between the dreams of immigrants and their realization. The film exposes the profound irony of palm trees. They symbolize the good life, but as the film shows, the trees depend on an invisible underclass of immigrant workers whose very existence belies the myth of American opportunity.

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A Better Life and the Latinx Market

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As I have outlined here, A Better Life presents a story about contemporary undocumented immigrants in ways that depart from the norm in American cinema. To an extent, the film’s subject matter and aesthetics suggested the viability of an art house release. As Weitz recalls, “[A Better Life] was very worthy, it had political content, and it had a very strong lead role so that a lot of their attention could be thereby diverted to setting it up in in the Landmark Theatres . . . and concentrating on . . . the critical reception rather than making it a breakout success.” And yet, the film’s subject matter also placed it in dialogue with a very potentially lucrative market, the Latinx audience in the United States, which as of 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, numbered 50.5 million (2011). Understanding and marketing to Latinxs, however, has always been challenging for the Hollywood studios. Summit’s marketing of A Better Life is no exception and attests to the ways that the experience of liminality in Weitz’s film also extended to the historical relationship between the movie industry and its Latinx audience. The director explains that while the studio courted an art house audience, it also sought to “cast as wide a net as possible” with its marketing campaign (Weitz). This led to an emphasis on the universal qualities of the film rather than its politics. Such a strategy is manifest on the film’s poster, which has a caption that reads “Every father wants more for his son” and shows Carlos and Luis from behind walking down a Los Angeles street. Weitz believes this was a mistake. “I wish in retrospect that we had gone very political from the beginning,” he lamented. “There was a notion that we

shouldn’t do that; they would just say, ‘Oh, it’s just a universal story about a father and child,’ which actually shows that nobody knew which boat to sail in.” In retrospect, he regrets that they did not address the question of immigration directly. “The best thing that could have happened to us would have been Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck attacking us,” he said, “but the studio didn’t want to do that” (Weitz). Emphasizing Latinx stories as universal ones has a deep history in American cinema and can be attributed to both Anglo and Latinx filmmakers. Such a strategy emerged not only from the desire to maximize audience potential but also, on the part of Latinx directors, to make a case for the place of Latinx stories in the larger American narrative. We see this at work with the first Latinx-directed Hollywood film, Zoot Suit (1981), which took as its subject the 1943 race riots in Los Angeles. Yet, while executives were interested in

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Figure 8.5 Original poster for A Better Life (2011).

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exploiting the “Hispanic” market, as it was then identified, they also believed that the film could have crossover potential, and in the end, they promoted the film as one that both “Hispanics” and “non-Hispanics” should enjoy. As then head of Universal Ned Tanen told the Los Angeles Times,

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I see it as a possible breakthrough for reaching Hispanic audiences in this country. We’ll market it in Hispanic centers, but we’re not going to eliminate other outlets. It’s colorful, it has energy, style and music. I think it’s capable of broad appeal. . . . I don’t want to do exploitation material. I don’t want to put out Spanish “Blaculas.” But I think there’s a major audience out there, and “Zoot Suit” will help us find it. (Christon 1, 5)

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Tanen’s “major audience” was one that included Latinxs, but the ultimate goal was to reach beyond them. Zoot Suit director Luis Valdez’s particular perspective on the place of Latinxs in American society and culture aligned with Tanen’s ideas. Despite the fractious nature of Zoot Suit’s content, Valdez’s ultimate goal was to create what he called a “New American Play” that included rather than excluded Latinx experiences for a “New American Audience,” which he defined as one that was ethnically and racially integrated. Upon the premiere of the film, Valdez explained further, saying, “As we approach the Eighties, I think we’re going to see the resurgence of the whole concept of integration again, but a qualified integration. Everyone won’t have to sacrifice their sense of cultural identity and their sense of cultural being in order to belong to the mass” (Benitel 36). This utopian vision for the audience of Latinx stories did not manifest as Valdez hoped. Nor did the production of Latinx films pour out of the Hollywood studios in subsequent decades. Nevertheless, the push toward universal narratives has persisted as we see with Summit’s characterization of A Better Life. As Weitz remembers, the head of marketing at the studio “kept talking about the Jaime Escalante story” as a point of comparison. That film, Stand and Deliver (1988), starred Edward James Olmos as an inspirational math teacher of Latinx youth. Its producers emphasized the universal dimensions of the teacher-student relationship as a way of selling a movie about a culturally specific group (Weitz). Summit expressed interest in tapping the box office potential of the Latinx audience but ultimately failed to effectively market it to that group. Again, the explanations are multiple. As with earlier Latinx films like Zoot Suit, studios ran into a problem of definition. Cultural and linguistic diversity and degrees of acculturation within the United States makes for a remarkably complex demographic group. In order to demystify it at the time of

Zoot Suit’s release, Universal Studios hired the Los Angeles-based advertising agency Horlick Levin Hodges Inc. to conduct a study of the film’s marketability to Spanish speakers in the United States. The final report not only makes clear the extent to which the “Hispanic market” was growing in importance but also how it remained separate or “parallel” to the Anglo market. It recommends a “precise segmentation” approach with “parallel distribution” to movie theaters, warning against the placement of the film in movie houses that might indicate to any one group that the film is “one of theirs” (Horlick Levin Hodges Inc.). The report sheds light on the racial politics of the time and the extent to which moviegoing was a largely culturally segregated activity. While the cultural ownership of A Better Life was not a concern, the possibility of offending or deterring the Latinx audience was. As Weitz explains, Summit expressed doubt whether “Hispanics would come out and see a movie about a Hispanic character.” The studio believed that there exists “an aspirational quality to the Hispanic demographic in which they didn’t want to see movies about struggle or about discrimination or about difficulties.” The way to lure Latinx audiences, the studio believed, was to continue to make escapist, entertaining fare instead. This opinion led, at least in part, to a change in the film’s title. Originally called “The Gardener,” the studio adopted the title “A Better Life” only after previews and as a means of coaxing the Latinx audience into the theater. As Weitz explained,

Whereas “The Gardener” had indicated a distinct class and racialized position in American society, especially in places like Los Angeles, “A Better Life” shifted the focus of the film to a more generalized immigrant experience and, specifically, the relationship between parents and children. The name change, however, was not sufficient for attracting a Latinx audience. As Henry Puente has shown in his study of the historical promotion

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It was considered that “The Gardener” sounded like a very artsy movie but that Hispanic audiences were not going to see a movie called “The Gardener.” That perhaps they would see it as insulting. Perhaps they would see it as downright depressing. And “A Better Life” was arrived at after thirty, forty, fifty titles had been thrown around at a fairly kind of surreal meeting. It has that ring of positivity to it that people like. And people used it in discussions after screenings of the movie. But definitely there was the attitude to turn it into something aspirational rather than something a bit more austere.

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and distribution of Latinx films, the most effective campaigns were the ones that took a grassroots approach. For The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1981), for example, the self-named “Cortez group,” made up of the film’s stars and producer Moctezuma Esparza, engaged in a community-based marketing strategy that hinged on developing good word of mouth (Puente 19). Another successful strategy for distributing Latinx films was to release dubbed versions of the film simultaneously, which Luis Valdez and Columbia Pictures had done effectively with the release of La Bamba (1987) (Puente 45). Summit did not employ either of these distribution practices. Instead, they advertised the film in Home Depot stores and arranged a marketing tie-in with Jarritos, the Mexican soda company. Weitz admits that they did not go far enough: “In retrospect, from going around and doing Q&As and to various conferences having to do with various elements of the movie, I’m pretty convinced that the only way that this had to change to really hit in the Hispanic market would have been to go to as many churches, as many neighborhood meets as possible and to really do a door-to-door political campaign.” In order for the studio to have undertaken such strategy, however, would have taken them out of their comfort zone, as Weitz says, “they like to do things the way they’re used to.” When Latinxs did not attend the film in great numbers, it had the effect of confirming the notion that Latinx audiences only see movies that are aspirational or escapist. “I guess unfortunately the final effect is kind of a self-reinforcing mechanism,” Weitz concludes, “whereby because A Better Life . . . lost money essentially, I think that the studio certainly will be leery of doing something with an Hispanic theme again anytime soon.” He points to one anecdote that for him symbolized the attitudinal positionings of the Hollywood studios toward Latinxs and Spanish speakers broadly. In 2011, A Better Life opened the Morelia International Film Festival at which Weitz was in attendance. As he watched the unspooling of the film, he noticed that it was in “terrible, terrible condition.” He soon realized that it was an American print that had circulated and been shown many times before coming to Mexico. “I sort of felt like that was really indicative of cross-border relations,” he said. “It was kind of like, ‘Well, you can have our first-run movie but you’re going to get it later and it’s gonna be a used copy’” (Weitz). Weitz’s film privileges the subjectivity of the undocumented experience by demonstrating the lived spaces of immigrants in Los Angeles, both private and public, and by the use of visual motifs that communicate the precariousness of their lives. As we see in the film, immigrants are everywhere and are integral to the day-to-day workings of our society. Their persistent invisibility, a function of their legal status and anti-immigrant sentiment, reveals the hypocrisy that is endemic to the American system.

Remarkably, even with a film that makes these social dynamics abundantly clear, the divide between the mainstream film industry and Latinx audiences remains strong. As the example of the Mexican film print shows, the theme of invisibility carried over into the realms of marketing and distribution. While A Better Life represents a demographic group whose experiences rarely receive cinematic attention, and speaks to the condition of Latinx peoples in the United States more broadly, it nevertheless fell short of reaching its full potential as a crossover film. Continuing a pattern, the Hollywood studio proved unwilling to employ strategies of promotion and distribution despite the fact that those strategies had been effective for marketing Latinx-themed films in the past. This demonstrates that while their numbers make them anything but invisible as consumers of American movies, Latinxs remain as a secondary concern for film marketers. In this way, the production and distribution of A Better Life reveals the extent to which social and cultural liminality remains a salient feature of the Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

References Benitel, Tomas. “Facing the Issues Beyond ‘Zoot Suit’: An Interview with Playwright Luis Valdez.” New World, vol. 4, no. 4, 1978, pp. 34–38. Candelaria, Cordelia. “Tightrope Walking the Border: Alambrista and the Acrobatics of Mestizo Representation.” Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants, edited by Nicholas J. Cull and Davíd Carrasco, University of New Mexico Press, 2004, pp. 137–49. Christon, Lawrence. “Zoot Suit on Film: A Tailor Made Transition.” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 3, 1981, pp. 1, 5. Horlick Levin Hodges Inc. “Positioning Zoot Suit.” Mar. 6, 1981, El Teatro Campesino Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara. Puente, Henry. The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films. Peter Lang, 2011. Sandoval-Strausz, A. K. “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America.” Journal of American History, vol. 101, no. 3, Dec. 2014, pp. 804–31. U.S. Census Bureau. “The Hispanic Population 2010.” Census.gov, May 2011, www.census.gov/prod /cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf. Accessed June 1, 2017. Weitz, Chris. Personal interview. June 3, 2012.

Alambrista! Directed by Robert M. Young, Filmhaus, 1977. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. Directed by Robert M. Young, American Playhouse, 1982. A Better Life. Directed by Chris Weitz, Summit Entertainment, 2011. Bread and Roses. Directed by Ken Loach, Parallax Pictures, 2000. Imitation of Life. Directed by Douglas Sirk, Universal International Pictures, 1959. La Bamba. Directed by Luis Valdez, Columbia Pictures, 1987. Santa. Directed by Antonio Moreno, Compañía Nacional Productora de Películas, 1932. Stand and Deliver. Directed by Ramon Menendez, American Playhouse, 1988. Zoot Suit. Directed by Luis Valdez, Universal Pictures, 1981.

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Chapter 9

EX- VOTO #7 Print Culture and the Creation of an Alternative Latinidad in the Work of Jim Mendiola Ariana Ruiz

All contemporary works of art— whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture— have as their underlying impulse— albeit in what is often distorted and repressed, unconscious form— our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived. — FREDERIC JAMESON, “REIFICATION AND UTOPIA IN MASS CULTURE”

It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered and the truth fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern: Eres Mi Vida, Sueño Contigo Mi Amor, Suspiro Por Ti, Sólo Tú. —SANDRA CISNEROS, CARAMELO

Molly Vasquez and Amalia Ortiz, respective protagonists of Jim Mendiola’s Texas-based punk rock film series Pretty Vacant (1996) and Speeder Kills (2003), aim to interrupt San Antonio (cultural and civic) history. While Molly’s overarching concern is to successfully evade the annual family pilgrimage to Mexico, and Amalia’s goal is to meet her Rockefeller Foundation grant project deadline (as both women tell it), each comes across her historically intervening project by happenstance. In Pretty Vacant, set in the 1990s, Molly visits the site of the British punk band Sex Pistols’ infamous 1978 show at Randy’s Rodeo and discovers their playlist hidden behind the stage. Scribbled in pencil, following “12. Anarchy UK,” is what Molly makes out to read as accordion-legend Steve Jordan’s “El Kranke.” As Molly sees it, the Sex Pistols were going to close their San Antonio show with a cover of that Tejano classic. Meanwhile, in Speeder Kills, approximately five years later, while looking for inspiration to complete a film project on Latinx youth culture, Amalia comes across a wall full of flyers for local punk shows. It is there, in front of the wall, that she decides to make a documentary on local San Antonio punk 186

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band Speeder.1 The band consents to the project only after Amalia agrees to direct their entry into a music video contest. Amalia gets the idea for the music video while stuck in traffic resulting from the city’s preparations for the annual Fiesta festival. And consequently, she convinces Speeder to model their music video after the Von Steuben Day parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) by similarly taking over a float at the Fiesta Battle of Flowers parade. Among these plotlines, Jim Mendiola has filled the protagonists’ world with newspapers, maps, posters, flyers, et cetera, that tell the viewer about their respective lives and cultural likes. In this chapter, I assess Mendiola’s construction and incorporation of print material in these film productions in order to establish an archive of Latinx presence that counters official history and highlights cultural production that often overlooks this population. 2 I begin by discussing how Mendiola’s films offer a counternarrative to Texas nationalist history and follow with Mendiola’s contributions specifically to Chicanx film, and Latinx film more broadly.3 I then move to an assessment of the creation and inclusion of newspaper articles and maps in Pretty Vacant and Speeder Kills that play with “official” state-sponsored documents to address the alternative histories Mendiola’s work posits. In this reading, I thereby invoke Emma Pérez’s notion of “sitios y lenguas” (sites and tongues) where “works emerge from un sitio y una lengua that rejects colonial ideology and by-products of colonialism and capitalist patriarchy— sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.” (“Sexuality and Discourse” 161). I see Molly and Amalia actively engaged in creating and documenting their San Antonio— their sitio in their lengua— a process done almost entirely through voice-over.4 Through their respective narrations, the audience is walked through major plotlines and also offered multiple digressions. Whether it is to inform us of the significance of Steve Jordan, provide a poetic assessment of the San Antonio landscape, explain the history of Fiesta, or tell us about what led to one of their extended returns to San Antonio from San Francisco, Molly and Amalia have some necessary backstories to share. In one of the first national reviews of Speeder Kills, Robert Koehler remarks how Mendiola “maniacally packs his movie full of sidebars, commentaries and films-within-films” (27). However, given the significance of place (Sex Pistols at Randy’s Rodeo and the takeover of the Fiesta Float), these sidebars are necessary lessons that harken on traditional practices of oral history that thereby establish the importance of these revisionary historical projects. As Juan J. Alonzo notes regarding Mendiola’s first full-length film, Come and Take It Day (2002), Mendiola’s work draws inspiration from alternative forms of historical documentation established by the likes of Américo Parades: “Day [and I would add Pretty Vacant and Speeder Kills] argues that

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the construction of history depends on the discursive communities within which one participates, as well as the power relations within these communities” (Alonzo 150). The storytelling practices of Molly and Amalia, therefore, function as a form of maintaining, transmitting, and revising narratives that are generally absent from “official” archival records. Furthermore, Molly and Amalia are not only invested in telling stories but also in collecting and creating content for this alternative archive. This is done through the incorporation of photos, home video footage, and music, as well as material created by Molly and Amalia (via Mendiola). Thus, Mendiola documents a contemporary San Antonio punk scene that establishes and reimagines an alternative Tejanx, Chicanx, and Latinx San Antonio past and futures.5 I read Mendiola’s creation of and play with “official” material print culture— specifically newspapers and maps— not only as props that support the films’ narratives but also as an archive that intervenes in homogenous cultural identification practices of the Latinx experience in the United States.

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From Deep in the Heart of Tejas . . .

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Five seconds into the short thirty-three-minute film, gritos from Mariachi Azteca’s “Son de la negra” fills the void of Pretty Vacant’s darkened screen.6 Following, the first of several title cards in black and white (like the short film itself ), typeset, with a mix of upper- and lowercase letters appears to name its setting: “Deep in the heart of Tejas . . .” Speeder Kills repeats this familiar chyron, albeit in lowercase cursive letters, as “Ay, Jalisco” (also by Mariachi Azteca) plays in the background to tie both films together as part of the same music-inspired series. Referencing the song “Deep in the Heart of Texas” made popular in the 1940s, the phrase sets the stakes for Mendiola’s project (by way of Molly and Amalia) of repurposing recognizable cultural codes. In this case, “Tejas” serves as a placeholder to the often-anxious relationship for Latinx in San Antonio, and Texas more broadly. The Alamo, San Jacinto, Fiesta, and the Battle of Flowers parade figure prominently in this history of San Antonio and the celluloid world of Molly and Amalia. As Pérez notes, by “building monuments and naming battlefields after those who ‘won the West,’ the colonialists eulogized their victories. In Texas, the Alamo Mission and San Jacinto battlefields continue to occupy firm space as they contribute to the production of colonial knowledge” (Decolonial Imaginary 16– 17). Molly and Amalia are born into this colonial history and decidedly subvert it. This is done, for example, when Molly describes the influence for and content of the third issue of her zine, Ex-Voto. In a tight shot, her hands hold a postcard depicting the façade of the Alamo Mission. She states, “The Alamo [pause] sucks” as she simultaneously turns the postcard on its head (Pretty

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Vacant). A result of these types of relics of conquest is that deep in the heart of Texas is a vast tourist industry that is often at odds with the Latinx community: “[Miguel] de Oliver traces the ways that San Antonio’s contemporary tourist industry simultaneously endorses multiculturalism and practices racial discrimination. Though the industry celebrates and sells Mexican culture, city planners have spatially and economically excluded Mexicano residents from the benefits of this industry” (Hernández-Ehrisman 171). Furthermore, the state-sponsored Mexican culture that is presented is a romanticized, Old World style that further entrenches Mexicans and their descendants as foreign Others temporally stuck in the past. The mythologizing of the Alamo is particularly vexing for Chicanx as a site tied to a public history of American victors and Mexican defeat. As Holly Beachley Brear states, “Any reclaiming of the Hispanic contributions to the past (and therefore inheritance rights in the present) comes slowly, having to push against the social categories defined in the Texas creation mythology” (125). The postcard, as souvenir, encapsulates this history and agitation toward the Alamo. Molly reads it as spectacle and (like Amalia) talks back to it through the symbolic gesture of turning it upside down, including it in her zine, and narrating it for the viewer. Given the Alamo’s symbolic meaning as the “social womb” for the state of Texas, it is a logical site for Latinx resistance (Brear 64). Mendiola has addressed the spectacle surrounding it and its cultural mythologizing in several of his projects including (as mentioned above) Come and Take It Day (2002), as well as several collaborations with media artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres, such as the motion-activated statue Fountain/Ozzy Visits the Alamo. As part of Fountain/Ozzy Visits the Alamo, Mendiola included a bound copy of newspaper articles “documenting absurd moments in Alamo history. . . . [As Mendiola contends:] ‘To anyone who disputes historical accuracy of our depiction, we point them to ‘The A Files’” (Silva 1G). Consequently, the way the Alamo is remembered/documented in periodicals is entwined with myth and legend; thus, if Latinxs like Molly and Amalia are constantly implored to “remember the Alamo,” they will do so by intervening in the mythmaking to revise the way we remember it. As Richard R. Flores argues in his analysis of the Alamo in the American imaginary, “Its presence in the repertoire of American cultural memory— and the divergent understandings of it— the competing, even at time silent interpretations— are the result of its transformation from a site of defeat in 1836 into a powerfully rendered and racially produced icon of American cultural memory” (xiv). My interest in highlighting the Alamo in Mendiola’s projects is to emphasize the looming colonial history and circulation of myth in the city while underscoring the significance of young Latinx as social actors pushing back and initiating revisionary content. For Molly and Amalia to create, interrupt, and contest the aggressive sociocultural

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performance that is the Alamo is to, as Mendiola asks us to do with the film Pretty Vacant, “Forget the Alamo. On January 8, 1978, real San Antonio history was made” (“Anarchy in SA”).

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Play This Film Loud

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Speeder Kills’s first title card instructs the viewer to “Play This Film Loud” and is followed by a montage of parade-goers retelling their version of the Speeder-Fiesta float takeover as the Runaways’ 1976 single “Cherry Bomb” plays in the background. The parade attendees state their surprise to see such a nontraditional float participate in the parade and note the reaction of others in the crowd including “abuelitas [grandmothers] . . . crossing themselves” (Speeder Kills). Speeder’s performance is clearly at odds with the festival, and the band’s presence (sound, attire, performance) is thus registered as noise. As such, “to play this film loud” is to claim its dissonance— an intrusiveness at various scales from plotline, to reception, to its place in expanding representations of Latinx people in cinema. Mendiola was first introduced to Latinx film through Chicanx history during his time at the University of Texas at Austin. He notes the impact that Chicanx filmmakers like Luis Valdez and Sylvia Morales, “and along the way, the Latin American, and specifically Cuban movies that these Chicano filmmakers used as references” had on his storytelling techniques (“In Search”). Like his Chicanx and Latin American cinematic predecessors, Mendiola is drawn to stories that document his community. For Mendiola, this means films that focus on San Antonio and more specifically the Latinx punk subculture of the area. This is a Latinx youth culture that equally draws inspiration from the Chicanx movement, the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets comic series, the writing of Sor Juana and Gabriel García Márquez, and British punk bands like the Clash. Similarly, Mendiola’s work is drawing from the Latinx film canon as much as it is in conversation with photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and the teenage comedy-dramas of John Hughes. These multiple references mark Mendiola as not only a regional Chicanx filmmaker but a filmmaker engaging with cultural referents that expand homogenous notions and categories of Latinx films. According to Alonzo, Chicanx cinema can be categorized into four sometimes overlapping phases beginning in the late 1960s with the Chicanx civil rights movement. The first phase is exemplified by Luis Valdez’s short film I Am Joaquin (1969) based on Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s poem of the same name. This phase is marked by its opposition to American culture and a Chicanx essentialism: “The 1980s mark another [second] important milestone for Chicano/a cultural production, for it is arguable that at this moment film

begins to articulate a more contingent Chicano/a identity” (Alonzo 140). For Alonzo, Luis Valdez’s work once again demonstrates this cinematic shift with Zoot Suit (1981). The third phase begins in the midnineties and is marked by Chicanxs’ minor and limited involvement in mainstream Hollywood as seen through Gregory Nava’s My Family (1995) and Selena (1997). Lastly, the fourth phase, which overlaps with phases two and three, is characterized by contingency, playfulness, and a critique of American modernity; it evokes Chicano/a Movement films, but without the Movement’s complete denial of a monolithic Anglo-American culture. Fourth-phase cinema self-reflexively appropriates Hollywood’s generic conventions and transforms them in a critical fashion; it is an independent cinema because its expressive concerns deal with localized subjects outside of the ken of Hollywood’s marketing imperatives; it is internationalist, drawing upon hemispheric filmmaking traditions. And finally, fourth-phase films are often shot on video and may be short format. (Alonzo 142) While Alonzo’s overarching concern is representations of Mexican American masculine identity, he includes Pretty Vacant alongside his specific analysis of Come and Take It Day as examples of this fourth dimension of Chicanx cinema. As stated, because Alonzo is concerned with masculine representations in cinema, women are not thoroughly discussed in his analysis. However, as the work of Sylvia Morales and scholarship of Rosa Linda Fregoso, among others, has shown,

In this manner, Mendiola’s decision to write films centered on female leads (punk rock aficionados, at that) documents new forms of identification rooted in Chicanidad but drawing, as previously mentioned, from various artistic references. To this end, Michelle Habell-Pallán notes how Mendiola’s

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Chicana cinematic discourse [is] markedly counter-aesthetic because Chicana filmmakers have had to counter two kinds of discourses: the dominant culture’s, which has distorted the Chicana subject; and the aesthetic discourse of Chicano males, which “renders them nameless and voiceless” (Quintana 262) and, in the case of film, imageless namely as images, functioning cosmetically as backdrops to male history. (Fregoso, “Chicana Film Practices” 171)

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Pretty Vacant shifts the writing of punk history to a Tejana while drawing on Chicana feminist art practices to thereby marry two interrelated but understudied connections (Loca Motion 149). My interest draws on this analysis to include Speeder Kills and the “official” artifacts produced in and for the worlds of Molly and Amalia in order to create this revisionary or alternative history. Mendiola’s amassing of various high and low cultural references from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom is described by Rita Gonzalez as a “radical reworking of rasquache cinema”— a form of cinematic production rooted in making do with limited resources (158). Gonzalez is particularly drawn to Mendiola’s collage-like aesthetics to carve out a space for visual representations of Mexican Americans in Texas’s historical and cultural landscape. Sonically, Josh Kun turns to Mendiola’s use of “rock en español” in Pretty Vacant to construct an aural border that comments on the connections, conflicts, and exchanges between Mexico and the United States. Temporally, Habell-Pallán (here writing on Mendiola’s work with San Antonio punk band Girl in a Coma) incorporates Afrofuturism and Chicanofuturism to render Mendiola as a sort of speculative storyteller that “rehumanizes those aggrieved by the logic of colonialism” (“Girl in a Coma” 178). In each of the studies mentioned above, Mendiola is shown as a significant Latinx cultural producer who establishes and conjures new ways of being and belonging in the past, present, and future. I read Mendiola’s creation and establishment of a print culture archive in his films as a major component of this new Latinx world project. To this end, as Amalia begins describing her third film project, Taco Havens, she quotes Fredric Jameson to reiterate “artists invent the world they want to live in” (Speeder Kills). Taco Havens follows her friend Marissa’s photo-documentation of taco joints around San Antonio. For Amalia, the real turn in Marissa’s photographs happens when she moves the focus from the exterior façade to interior shots of the taco shops. It was in the emphasis of the people in the establishments that, according to Amalia, “Marissa was truly inventing a world. Like Sandra Cisneros . . . Octavia Butler . . . John Hughes . . . and me and my constructed San Antonio” (Speeder Kills). In this statement, Amalia recognizes her own role in producing and documenting her San Antonio, a version that, similar to the use of the plural havens in the title to her short documentary, speaks to the multiple feelings (good and bad) that can be attached to one place. For Amalia (like Molly), her San Antonio is a site of music, liveliness, youth, transnational connections, and resistance. As Gonzalez has also remarked, the construction of this version of San Antonio is primarily tied to the objects that surround the protagonists. Specifically focusing on the use of photographs, Gonzalez writes, “As ‘props’ that

provide detailed geographies for a cast of characters, the photos in Speeder Kills move from the megaspace of a cohesively rendered ethnic subject to a micromap of events, personalities, attitudes, and cultural stances” (166; emphasis added). Likewise, the newspaper articles and maps produced for Pretty Vacant and Speeder Kills are symbolic micromaps of the space(s) the protagonists choose to occupy and people they are in dialogue with. There is an agency in the process by which Molly and Amalia decide to save, cut, paste, and borrow from to create what Jennifer A. González calls an autotopography: “In the creation of an autotopography— which does not include all personal property but only those objects seen to signify ‘individual’ identity— the material world is called upon to present a physical map or memory, history, and belief ” (134). An assemblage of cultural and emotional significance, the material objects produce safety and the stimulus to resist the world in which their experiences are otherwise largely unnoticed.

Molly Vasquez shares her “priorities,” telling the viewer that they are her (1) band Aztlán-a-Go-Go, (2) zine Ex-Voto, and (3) impending place in rock ’n’ roll history. Molly goes on to discuss each interest and announces that ExVoto #5 will be a special issue focused on her favorite band in her favorite city, the infamous 1978 Sex Pistols show at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio. As Molly discusses the layout of the zine, a montage of newspaper clippings tracing the rise of the band in the United Kingdom and the media hype leading up to their U.S. tour and San Antonio show plays on-screen. Molly appears twice during this sequence, and in each instance informs the strong influence of punk rock to her and Aztlán-a-Go-Go. In the first scene, while she is working on the flyer for her band’s show, Molly states through voice-over how “more importantly [the special issue of Ex-Voto will cover] the importance of punk to me, almost twenty years later” (Pretty Vacant). Although Molly tells us she was an eight-year-old girl when the Sex Pistols played Randy’s Rodeo, she nevertheless remarks the impact of their show on her sense of being. Molly is drawn to the moral panic of the period that she hopes to produce in Aztlána-Go-Go— a do-it-yourself rasquache performative aesthetic. In her second appearance, while hunched over a newspaper clipping on the Sex Pistols— XACTO-knife in hand and to her right a copy of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) with Johnny Rotten on the cover, Molly recalls the various British invasions to reach U.S. shores and how in 1978 it was punk’s turn (in San Antonio, nonetheless). Through the mise-en-scène, Molly asserts the role of historian and archivist in what she hopes will be revisionary history. While Marcus’s definitive punk rock

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¡SINVERGÜENZAS!

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Figure 9.1 Molly working on Ex-Voto #5. Still from Pretty Vacant (1996).

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history book sits beside her, she manipulates the newspaper articles that lay before her to tell her version of the Sex Pistols show that in turn inspires her contributions to Aztlán-a-Go-Go and Ex-Voto. In Pretty Vacant, Molly’s established relationship to the Sex Pistols’ mayhem through the band flyer is what gives Aztlán-a-Go-Go a second life in Speeder Kills. As highlighted above, Amalia’s inspiration for the Speeder documentary comes from a wall of flyers for local shows. Among those flyers is one for Molly’s band Aztlán-a-Go-Go, a band Amalia is not only familiar with but spends time historicizing for the viewer. In this alternate time-space, Aztlán-a-Go-Go (briefly) made it big, landing on magazine covers, climbing the billboard charts, and like Molly’s heroes the Sex Pistols, causing chaos while on tour. One of the most humorously striking images in the montage covering Aztlán-a-Go-Go’s short-lived success is the front page of Miami Sol on June 9, 1997, with the headline: “¡SINVERGUENZAS!” (Speeder Kills). In Amalia’s San Antonio, the legendary band Aztlán-a-Go-Go had not only reached American but a particular Latinx stardom with an appearance on the wildly popular and hugely influential Cristina Show. And like the Sex Pistols, the visit to Cuban talk show host Cristina Saralegui’s Miami-based program was ripe with controversy. The featured image of the Miami Sol cover includes a band member in a Che Guevara T-shirt and what appears

Figure 9.2 Miami Sol article. Still from Speeder Kills (2003).

to be band members (including Molly) moshing on stage while the language to the right of the article informs the viewer that the “wild girls” were “kicked out of Miami,” the broadcast of their episode cancelled, and the visit so incorrigible the “City Council passes 2-year ban on vulgar Punk Rock group” (Speeder Kills). Meanwhile, Amalia provides even further backstory by telling the viewer that along with the Che Guevara T-shirts, band members refused

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Figure 9.3 San Antonio Express-News article. Still from Speeder Kills (2003).

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to speak Spanish and called the host a “sellout gusana” (worm). While the incident may have led to the city of Miami banning Aztlán-a-Go-Go, to Amalia and other San Antonio youth, it was all “badass.” The Miami Sol cover story, like the Sex Pistols newspaper clippings, is an important part of San Antonio punk rock history. Moreover, the alarm and chaos the newspaper article captures represents a badass spirit of San Antonio youth sin vergüenza, or without shame, and thus not afraid to challenge the establishment and status quo. Mendiola employs the authority and seeming veracity of print in Speeder Kills not only to prove the events that Amalia is telling the viewer are true but to expand this history of transgressive San Antonio youth. The plan for the Fiesta float takeover was to perform a cover of the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb.” Amalia, along with her assistant Maya, would capture the performance and the ensuing disorder for Speeder’s music video and her documentary. When Speeder finally does make it to the performance site, Amalia’s video camera runs out of battery. And so “the only image that exists of that soon to be legendary performance [is] a blurry snapshot taken by a disposable camera from this tourist from Waco” (Speeder Kills). The blurred photograph accompanies an article titled “Speeder Kills Fiesta Spirit” that runs on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. Amalia’s (like Mendiola’s) projects are dependent on the image, one where the figures involved in the takeover are easily identifiable: “In an audiovisual culture, the image is regarded as primary, as the ultimate guarantee of truth. The filmmaker’s desire to represent ‘the’ truth visually derives from the potency of this ideological claim” (Fregoso, Bronze Screen 79). For Mendiola, this claim operates in two ways: the viewer sees Speeder taking over the float, and we believe Amalia because we see the action unfold on-screen. And secondly, we have the newspaper article with its blurred image and journalistic account to back up Speeder’s “soon to be legendary” killing of the Fiesta spirit. Mendiola interrupts the language of “official” storytelling techniques through newspapers as well as through Molly and Amalia’s mapmaking strategies. Critical to Molly’s assumption that the Sex Pistols were going to cover “El Kranke” is her ability to trace the Sex Pistols’ interest in the conjunto sound and its (would be) musical revolution. Molly creates a map that charts the movements of this new sound. Steve Jordan, Texas, Mexico, and conjunto are to the left of the page, while the United Kingdom, punk, the Clash, and reggae are to the right of it. “Pistols on tour” is written across the top of the page in order to link Texas and the United Kingdom. And paralleled below is the new musical form “on its way back.” Listed in the middle of the page are a range of New York-based bands across from their English counterparts (i.e., “New York Dolls David Bowie”). Finally, a series of observations including “[y las mujeres?]” is scribbled below.

Figure 9.4 Molly’s musical exchange map. Still from Pretty Vacant (1996).

Molly creates a document, an “official” looking chart of the sonic movement that could have taken place between United Kingdom punk and Texas conjunto music. “Pistols on tour” and “on its way back” elicit this circulation. Molly’s presentation of this movement as a circular pattern registers as an ongoing and repetitive cycle that through reiteration has the potential to continuously transform. Although she remarks that the Clash’s reggae sound was “just your typical white man appropriation of the exotic other,” as the map suggests, it was not a unilateral move (Pretty Vacant). Rather, this exchange mirrors Lisa Lowe’s poignant remarks on (cultural) hybridization:

When Molly articulates her thoughts on the “white man’s appropriation,” she recognizes the uneven power relation at play even as culture moves freely.

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Hybridization is not the “free” oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which imagined communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive these violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82)

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Figure 9.5 Amalia’s Fiesta takeover map. Still from Speeder Kills (2003).

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In Molly’s enjoyment and consumption of culture, she too is negotiating her musical complicity. Molly’s map is a characterization of this hybrid, assembled identity while concomitantly asserting music’s ability to cross borders, create connections, and change tone depending on who is singing. Furthermore, the map is a product of Molly’s own assertion and insertion into this musical history. They are connections she has studied and developed as an authoritative musical cartographer. Although the maps produced by Amalia in Speeder Kills are not as intricate as the one by Molly, it nevertheless shares similar intervening agendas. Once the decision is made to perform atop a Fiesta float, Amalia sets out to plan the takeover. Standing in front of the renowned musical venue Tacoland, Amalia maps out the terrain— first in a notebook, and then on a large sheet of paper to explain the scheme to Speeder. The main streets depicted in the maps are Grayson, Elmira, and the main parade route, Broadway. The only buildings depicted on the maps are Tacoland, where the targeted float would be parked, and Pearl Brewery, a brewery that operated till 2001 and is now a retail and dining location. Toward the middle of the map, Amalia included the staging area, and running down the middle the only natural landmark on the maps: the San Antonio River. Amalia’s maps include only what is necessary to carry out the plan for Speeder’s music video, her documentary, and to politically talk back to Fiesta. The Fiesta takeover maps are brimming with possibility for the disruption and potential (if only momentary) transformation of state identity. As the

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montage of firsthand accounts of the performance mentioned above describe, seeing and hearing Speeder was “badass.” The blueprints for this interference are in the maps that work to set the game plan in action to contest the principles of Fiesta and play on Speeder’s (and the viewers) familiarity with San Antonio’s landscape. What is included and not included on the maps tells us about what the characters of Speeder Kills know and what we can (or can’t) imagine lies between Grayson and Broadway. As Chon A. Noriega writes, “How can Chicanos depict history when historians, journalists, and Hollywood have either distorted, censored, or repressed the history of the Chicano experience? The answer, more often than not, has been to deconstruct the objective discourse of history and proffer instead specific stories of conflict, resistance, and mestizaje” (153). Like the larger intention of Molly’s map of musical migration, Amalia is changing the subjects that have dominated Fiesta and by extension official history. In this manner, the performance and the audience’s reception of it places tension and possibilities for local and national identities, especially for youth of color. As Speeder Kills comes to a close, we learn that Maya (Amalia’s assistant and member of local punk band Shazammm) edited the documentary footage to create the winning entry for Speeder’s music video. The now awardwinning band travels to New York City with Maya (who has borrowed Amalia’s video camera) in tow to play an award show. Amalia begins to fill the viewer in on the band’s antics before stopping herself: “Anyway, don’t get me started on Speeder’s adventures in New York City. It could be a whole other story. In fact, it will be. . . . [Maya] shot over forty-five hours of footage. She’s been editing for a year. I saw a rough cut last week and believe me, it’s gonna be very badass” (Speeder Kills). With this information, Amalia sets the precedent for the continuation of what could be Jim Mendiola’s San Antonio punk scene trilogy as told by Latinx youth. While the actual San Antonio band Speeder had already broken up by the time Mendiola began Speeder Kills, like Aztlán-a-Go-Go, in this cinematic alternate San Antonio time-space universe, they never disbanded, are legendary, and are still performing. In the site specific revisions and production of alternate futures, Mendiola cinematically responds to the state-sponsored nationalism of the Alamo and Fiesta while recognizing local people and places. As Fregoso notes, “Far from fabricating or inventing a community, Chicanas and Chicanos have reinvented (imagined anew) a ‘community’ of Chicanos and Chicanas. In the words of Anderson, ‘communities are to be distinguished . . . by the style in which they are imagined.’ There is no better place to explore this style than in cinema: the social/cultural technology of the imagination” (Bronze Screen xxiii). Mendiola exercises Fregoso’s views

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and celebrates this community of Latinx. It is a recognition of a subculture of punk that has recently been undertaken within Latinx studies but, as Mendiola’s archive shows, has long existed and will continue to produce noise in the public sphere.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

While Speeder was an active local San Antonio musical group, they had disbanded by the time Mendiola began working on Speeder Kills and were thus fictionalized in the film. Specifically, in the city of San Antonio where according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics make up 63 percent of the population (www.census.gov/prod /cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf ). Here I make a distinction between Chicanx and Latinx film in order to note that Mendiola is initially working within the Chicanx film canon. In fact, the viewer hears Molly and Amalia before they even see them. Molly opens the film by explaining her overarching story with a shot of her father walking toward the camera: “This is my dad. Too scary, huh?” (Pretty Vacant). And Amalia begins by narrating footage from her award-winning short film, My Life in 200 Seconds. San Antonio as the setting of Pretty Vacant and Speeder Kills is important to the identity and community formation of Molly and Amalia. As such, I use Tejanx, Chicanx, and Latinx to emphasize the various scales of identification that are impacted (local, regional, and national) by the establishment of an alternative past and futures. A grito, or emotive cry, is a popular form of expression in mariachi music characterized by long deep shouts or cries during the performance of a song.

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References

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Alonzo, Juan J. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film. University of Arizona Press, 2015. Brear, Holly Beachley. Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine. University of Texas Press, 1995. Flores, Richard R. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. University of Texas Press, 2002. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. “Chicana Film Practices: Confronting the ‘Many-Headed Demon of Oppression.’ ” Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, edited by Chon A. Noriega, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 168– 82. González, Jennifer A. “Autotopographies.” Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, edited by Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll, Westview Press, 1995, pp. 133– 50. Gonzalez, Rita. “Surplus Memories: From the Slide Show to the Digital Bulletin Board in Jim Mendiola’s Speeder Kills.” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, edited by Karen Redrobe Beckman and Jean Ma, Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 158– 71. Habell-Pallán, Michelle. “‘Girl in a Coma’ Tweets Chicanafuturism: New Media and Archivista Praxis.” Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Cath-

erine J. Merla-Watson and B. V. Olguín, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2017, pp. 160– 82. Habell-Pallán, Michelle. Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture. New York University Press, 2005. Hernández-Ehrisman, Laura. Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio. University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Koehler, Robert. “Speeder Kills. (Movie Review).” Variety, vol. 391, no. 7, June 2003, p. 27. Kun, Josh. “The Aural Border.” Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1– 21. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996. Mendiola, Jim. “Anarchy in SA.” San Antonio Current, Jan. 2, 2003, www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio /anarchy-in-sa/Content?oid=2266831. Mendiola, Jim. “In Search of Aztlán-A-Go-Go: A Visit with Filmmaker Jim Mendiola.” Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Re-Imagining Border Crossing Symposium. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Feb. 2009. Keynote address. Morales, Sylvia. “Chicano-Produced Celluloid Mujeres.” Chicano Cinema: Research, Reviews, and Resources, edited by Gary D. Keller, Bilingual Press, 1985, pp. 89– 93. Noriega, Chon A. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Indiana University Press, 1999. Pérez, Emma. “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor.” Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, edited by Carla Trujillo, Third Woman Press, 1991, pp. 159– 84. Silva, Elda. “Alamo Art: Thanks for the Memories— ArtPace Collaboration Pays Homage to OffCenter Recollections of San Antonio’s Famed Structure.” San Antonio Express-News, Nov. 14, 2001, p. 1G.

Filmography

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Come and Take It Day. Directed by Jim Mendiola, CTD Pictures, 2001. A Hard Day’s Night. Directed by Richard Lester, United Artists, 1964. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Directed by John Hughes, Paramount Pictures, 1986. I Am Joaquin. Directed by Luis Valdez, El Teatro Campesino, 1969. My Family. Directed by Gregory Nava, American Playhouse, 1995. Pretty Vacant. Directed by Jim Mendiola, Mero Pictures, 1996. Selena. Directed by Gregory Nava, Q Productions, 1997. Speeder Kills. Directed by Jim Mendiola, BadAss Pictures, 2003. Zoot Suit. Directed by Luis Valdez, Universal Pictures, 1981.

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Chapter 10

THE GOOD, BAD, AND THE MESSY Michael Peña’s Browning of the Twenty-First-Century Silver Screen Frederick Luis Aldama and Carlos Gabriel Kelly

In many ways, the twenty-first century birthed Michael Peña, at least in terms of him as one of the most varied and complex of Latinx actors working in cinema today. It’s for this reason that we decided to focus this chapter on Peña, analyzing many of the films he stars in to demonstrate how he at once stands apart and at the same time represents Latinxs in contemporary film history. Peña has starred in (bit parts, co-lead, and as character voice) over fifty films; his laundry list of TV work is equally long. With the exception of a half dozen or so films released in the late 1990s, his roles and acting come into their own as a dominant force in the twenty-first century. Since his role in Gone in 60 Seconds in 2000, he has starred in such notable and awardwinning films such as Crash (2004), World Trade Center (2006), End of Watch (2012), American Hustle (2013), Fury (2014), and The Martian (2015). And, with his performance and witty banter, he stole the limelight (otherwise meant for the Anglo protagonist) in Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man (2015). Importantly, Peña has also chosen roles significant to the Latinx community and history, including Walkout (2006) and Cesar Chavez (2015). Although he has enjoyed a burgeoning success through an increasingly ascending presence in our mediated lives, this very success does not preclude him from making his fair share of missteps. We think readily of his choice to play the stereotypical gangster, petty criminal, drug kingpin, or buffoon sidekick. But this is what makes him so interesting to us— and to the messiness of Latinx representations in contemporary cinema. In this chapter, we consider first Peña’s situatedness in time and place of his coming into himself as a Latinx actor alongside greater Latinx demographic shifts in the United States, specifically as we move from the late twentieth into the twenty-first century. We then analyze how his various roles fit within or complicate existing schemas or paradigms of silver-screen Latinx representation; here, we analyze several of his roles in a number of different films that uncritically reproduce Latinx stereotypes and where his performance of excess or what we identify as his enacting of a strategic palomazo (see below) work to undo 202

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stereotypes. We end with a discussion of why he has yet to be cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood film; that is, we deliberately ask why— in spite of his talent and steady presence in the media limelight and in mainstream (oftblockbuster) films— he has yet to become an A-list film superstar. Peña exists within specific sociocultural, economic, and historical contexts. He was born in Chicago on January 13, 1976. He came of age during a time in Latinx history when our demographic numbers began to grow at a rapid clip and when we began to see more and more Latinxs moving from rural to urban centers. And as a result of civil rights struggles across the nation, this was also a time when Latinxs had access to education— tools for realizing their goals and ambitions— and access to a greater variety of cultural phenomena created by and for Latinxs. Peña grew up in Chicago. His mother, Nicolasa, was from Charcas in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and his father was from Villa Purificación in Jalisco, Mexico. In an interview with Giovanni Ribisi, he said his “mom and dad were farmers before they moved to the city and got factory jobs” (70). Along with others of his generation, he didn’t have to work the fields or the factory line. He could not only spend more time cultivating a richly diversified taste in all kinds of cultural phenomena but could dream of becoming part of a legion of Latinxs who produce a rich and distinct culture within the borders of the U.S.-Latinx experience. In this same interview with Ribisi, he mentions how he and his brother watched a lot of TV, and when they couldn’t watch TV, they’d create their own shows (70). In addition to having free time, he had access to education, graduating from Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago. He came of age as an actor during the moment certain social and economic conditions were met and Latinx artists and their products emerged in a continuous and varied way. This type of access was something his parents’ generation could never even have dreamed of for themselves. However, this isn’t to say that demographic shifts and civil rights gained in the 1980s and 1990s made life easy for Peña. Living as a dark-skinned Latino and being raised in a working-class part of Chicago made him the de facto “bad hombre”— at least in the eyes of the mainstream. In Diego Luna’s documentary series Back Home, Peña recalls how, in spite of scoring perfectly on a test, his teacher gave him a C, without an explanation (“Michael Peña”). He also recalls how his parents were the targets of racism, including the fact that his mamá was deported twice for no reason. There came a day when he decided to set bank telling aside and pursue acting, but he noticed a trend: his white counterparts would walk away from auditions with roles (even leads), and he’d walk away empty-handed or at best with the role of janitor (see McClintock 50).

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While xenophobia continued to impact Peña and his family, the 1990s were an epoch that did offer new generations of Latinxs varied ways to engage with the world— and to make a living at them. Peña did eventually get his break into the film industry. In relatively quick succession, he landed small roles in films like Running Free (1994), My Fellow Americans (1996), Star Maps (1997), La Cucaracha (1998), and Bellyfruit (1999). As mentioned, it was in the twenty-first century that Peña came into his own. He moved from one-scene, four-line, oft-mop-holding roles in the late 1990s into roles with greater screen time and presence as well as range. It is in the twenty-first century that we see Peña as a working family man, holding jobs as a cop, locksmith, soldier, schoolteacher, farmhand, or entrepreneur, among others. And even though he began commanding more screen time, this new presence simultaneously showed Peña continuing to deepen and cement in place stereotypes of Latinxs from yesteryear: bumbling buffoon; blinged-up, rap-listening gangbanger; pimp; and petty thief. While in numerous interviews Peña mentions choosing to play roles that undo stereotypes, he does have a sizeable list of roles that do little to upend reprehensible stereotypes. These series of stereotypical representations remind us that actors are workers, in the end. That is, a working actor (and not a megawatt superstar) still has to put food on the table, no matter the role offered. While it’s important for us to keep in mind that an actor like Peña is aware of the stereotypes and has explicitly stated that he chooses roles that resist or complicate these, it’s also a fact that acting is paid labor. We must keep in mind that scripts can and do change. From the moment an actor like Peña reads a script to the actual final cut, a lot can and does change in a film. We’re not trying to let Peña off the hook here. It’s important that we critically evaluate roles that seem to have gotten away from him and that uncritically replicate Latinx stereotypes. Beginning in 1998, when Peña was cast as a Mexican salsa-dancing janitor (and guide to Eric Roberts as down-and-out Walter Pool) who appears briefly forty-eight minutes into La Cucaracha, he has had his fair share of stereotypical roles. We think here of Alex De Rakoff ’s The Calcium Kid (2004), in which he plays a half-wit Mexican boxer, José Mendez, more concerned with his bling, slicked hair, pedicures, and lady friends than actual boxing. De Rakoff and his creative team reconstruct the Latinx as the buffoon. Admittedly, the narrative vehicle is that of a comic mockumentary, so Peña’s Mendez is not the only witless character. He exists within a panoply of other idiots, including the meathead and psychopathic British boxer Pete Wright as well as milkman-cum-boxer Jimmy Connelly. However, within this constellation of imbeciles, Peña’s character is the only one who is overtly racialized in stereotypical ways as the pimped-out, malapropistic, Spanglish-speaking

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buffoon surrounded by a coterie of cholo-styled (plaid shirts, goatees) bodyguards. And Peña continued to be typecast as the pimped-out thug character two years later when he appeared as Puma track-suited, blinged-out Eduardo in Theo Avgerinos’s Fifty Pills (2006). Avgerinos and his creative team write Peña’s Eduardo as an idiotic, crazed, trigger-happy Latino thug who functions as the obstacle— he threatens to “bust a cap” in an ass (Latinx threat narrative)— that the white protagonist Darren (Lou Taylor Pucci) must overcome as part of his coming of age journey. In 2009, Peña played Dennis Chevante in Observe and Report. His role cements further in the filmgoer’s imagination the Latinx as criminal and buffoon. Again, even when we take into consideration genre— a comedy chock-full of comical types like Seth Rogen as the bigoted, idiotic Ronnie Barnhardt— the script has Peña act the Latino sidekick Chevante as even more of an imbecile. With a permed, Jheri curl look, Peña as Chevante speaks with a near-incomprehensible mumbling lisp (“I’m criminal, man”) who leads the good mall security guard Ronnie to the dark side: getting drunk, doing coke, beating up random skateboarders, and robbing the mall. It’s the Latinx criminal-buffoon who leads the white protagonist to his epiphany: Ronnie declares that he will not become a “mother fuckin’ outlaw.” Peña continues to play this kind of stereotype in 30 Minutes or Less (2011). Yet again, he appears as the Latinx lumpenprole obstacle that the white protagonist must overcome; in this case, Peña plays the rap-listening, tattooed to the nines, gun-toting thug named Chango (Spanish for “ape” or “monkey,” which carries its own weight of racialization) encountered by the white protagonist, a slacker pizza delivery guy, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg). Peña’s lines as Chango are a repetitive series of expressions like “whaz up,” “dawg,” and “homey.” On one occasion, Peña as Chango looks at himself in a mirror and tells himself, “You’re a pimp, that’s what your mom said.” Peña’s uncritical reproduction of Latinx stereotypes extends those of the Latin lover. As Paloma Martínez-Cruz and John Cruz sum up, “In both Latin America and the United States, popular and scholarly arts and letters aided in the naturalization of a binary between Iberian and Protestant subjects that associated Latino males with voracious passion and sexuality, while ascribing to Anglo males the virtues of self-control and rationality” (206). In The Lucky Ones (2008), Peña plays this Latin lover role as Staff Sergeant T. K. Poole. Indeed, his character’s identity and the film’s conflict are built on this stereotype. The film opens with Peña as Poole talking to fellow soldiers in Iraq about his sexual prowess; that he’s so good in bed, his girlfriend washed and detailed his car for him as a postcoital reward. Soon after relaying his anecdote, shrapnel strikes Peña’s groin after his Humvee hits a landmine. He’s discharged and no longer capable of an erection. While the film’s narrative follows Poole along with two other white soldiers— Private

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First Class Colee Dunn (Rachel McAdams) and Staff Sergeant Fred Cheaver (Tim Robbins)— as they struggle with civilian life, it’s the Latino character who is defined nearly exclusively by his sexuality. His boasts as a Latino lover, emasculation, then erectile regeneration stand out, with this latter event also happening in a stereotypical way. The Latin lover recovers his puissance in and through his proximity to a white woman: he recovers his erectile function and with this his manhood while huddled up with Colee Dunn during a tornado. Aside from the problematics of Latino manhood linked to erectile function, we see once again the age-old narrative of the white subject (female here) as savior of the brown subject. As recently as 2017, we see Peña uncritically combine the Latin lover and brown buffoon type in Dax Shepard’s CHiPs. Reprising the late 1970s TV show’s Latino motorbike cop, Frank Poncherello, Peña’s twenty-first-century “Ponch” is obsessed with his looks— and a sex addict. After the film’s story launches with Peña distracted by two African American women bending over in yoga pants, filmgoers learn that Ponch has a sexual addiction, which includes sexting, random sex, and compulsive masturbation. CHiPs is supposed to be a comedy, of course. And Shepard makes this clear not only in the levity of the narrative but in his own role as Ponch’s police partner, John Baker. He’s a clueless white guy who can’t shoot a gun straight or pass aptitude tests. However, it’s the Latino character Ponch who ends being the butt of the sexualized jokes: Ponch the homophobe, Ponch who struggles with the sex addiction. Ponch also ends up playing second fiddle to a bumbling white guy who eventually steps into the white savior mold: John identifies for Ponch his sexual addiction and literally saves Ponch from getting run over by a truck. And in the end, it’s the bumbling white guy (a rookie to add insult to injury) who ultimately solves the mystery of the crime in the plot. However, we would like to offer another analysis of Peña’s Ponch, and with this a way to see other stereotypical roles performed by Peña as subversive. There are signposts throughout CHiPs that signal, even if briefly, that Peña’s performing of stereotypical Latin lover/buffoon roles can be read as resistant. So while Shepard’s camera-eye and script aim to hypersexualize Ponch, there are instances when Ponch wrestles the role away from stereotypes such as when he makes a smart, complex, and insightful diagnosis of John’s dysfunctional relationship with his ex-wife, or when he is the one who thinks before shooting, telling John he’s “not gonna empty my weapon without cause.” And, as the film’s story begins to wrap up, Ponch evidences a complex sense of masculinity that’s not built on sexual conquests or the replication of a homophobic worldview. This is to say, Peña’s role as Ponch in CHiPs is layered. We see this elsewhere with Peña’s performances of seemingly stereotypical roles. Charles

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Ramírez Berg theorizes this possibility in Latinx acting as a “performative excess” (90), whereby an actor like Peña inserts himself into a stereotypical role only to then subvert this role. Building on Berg and inspired by a moment Diego Luna captures in Back Home, when Peña naturally inserts himself into a live band to co-create their rhythms and song, we think of Peña’s roles as strategic palomazo (“Michael Peña”). For us the concept of the palomazo expresses a Latinx way of joining into whatever life throws our way (band, work, school, acting, you name it). It’s the act of inserting ourselves into an already established order of things, and within this structure we fight for what we want to contribute; we make known our contribution through acts of crossing borders, whether it is how we perform a role in film or act in school or industry. As a Latinx subject, Peña inserts himself into these stereotypical roles through a palomazo, interrupting established structures and orders. For instance, there’s Peña’s role as Luis in Ant-Man (2015)— a strategic palomazo. As such, we can read this as more than just another instance of brown buffoonery. As his flashback storytelling gains momentum, he becomes the voice of all the characters introduced. It’s the Latinx voice that ventriloquizes the subjectivities of all the characters he re-creates in his flashbacks to the white protagonist, Scott (Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd). And when he expresses his distinguished taste in wine and high art— “You know me, I’m more of a neo-Cubist kind of guy, but there was this one Rothko that was sublime”— he subverts some filmgoers’ expectations who think that somehow Latinxs don’t have interest in nor knowledge of Western art. That is, Peña inserts himself into the otherwise restrictive role to perform an excess that functions to subvert Hollywood’s “stereotyping system” (Berg 89). He does so explicitly by wresting the voice and narrative agency from the white protagonist, Scott. Through his act of strategic palomazo, he becomes the agent of the narrative told within the film’s storyworld, and as such he becomes the central shaper of how audiences experience Ant-Man. Notably, in Peña’s reprising his role as Luis in Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), he continues with his ventriloquizing of white subjectivities like Scott/Ant-Man’s, but most importantly, he introduces the most significant line in the film: “I wish I had a suit. . . . Even with minimal powers.” Not only does Peña’s presence enact a strategic palomazo, but it calls out all of Marvel Studios and white Hollywood by asking this pointed question. Peña’s strategic palomazo performances also occur in other filmic spaces. We think readily of his role as an intelligence sergeant in 12 Strong (2018). Based on the real event of the U.S. Army Special Forces sent to Afghanistan after 9/11, the film’s narrative, roles, and casting might seem to be more constrained than fiction feature films. However, what’s interesting here is that while the film chooses to cast white actors like Chris Hemsworth to play

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army Captain Mitch Nelson, who is white in real life, Peña is cast to play intelligence Sergeant First Class Sam Diller, who is also white in real life. In an interview for La Prensa (see Riddick), Michael Peña discusses the significance of rewriting the story with a Latino playing Diller, showing audiences that Latinxs not only give their lives as U.S. patriots but also how hardworking Latinxs are in the United States. And Peña’s strategic palomazo performances extend into many of his other roles beyond the soldier character: cop, locksmith, soldier, farmhand, and entrepreneur. In each of these roles, Peña complicates Latinx stereotypes. His strategic palomazo performances in films like Crash, End of Watch, War on Everyone (2016), and Collateral Beauty (2016) decisively move filmgoing audiences out of those hypermasculine white guy (civilized) versus Latinx or African American (uncivilized) prototype schemas. In Collateral Beauty, Peña plays Simon Scott, a white-collar member of a successful start-up company. Peña’s performance of Scott as a character struggling with cancer, while inhabiting an upper middle-class positionality, functions strategically to complicate filmgoing audiences’ schemas of Latinx identity and experience. His role as the tech-savvy engineer Major Rick Martinez in The Martian is another strategic palomazo. Yes, Latinxs are engineers and can be reconstructed filmically as such. In Crash, Peña’s character, Daniel Ruiz, is given a humanizing backstory: he’s a locksmith trying to make ends meet and give his daughter a better life. This stands in sharp contrast to the well-heeled racist Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock) who can only read his brown body within racist schemas. To Jean, he could never just be a locksmith. He’s a Latinx threat— a gangbanger. And director Paul Haggis intensifies the audience’s empathy for Daniel in the scene (arguably the most powerful of the film) when the Persian shop owner, Farhad (Shaun Taub), shoots blanks at his daughter, Lara (Ashlyn Sanchez). And while he plays the role of a cop in End of Watch, he’s not a corrupt cop. Peña’s performance fully humanizes Miguel Zavala as a good cop. This along with a narrative that fleshes out a broader life-context for Zavala (family life and extended family celebrations like birthdays and weddings) reconstruct Latinx identity and experience in non-stereotypical ways. In an interview with Pamela McClintock, Peña remarks on how this was his “biggest role to date, and there was actual dialogue and interaction” (50). The film’s narrative pathos ultimately gravitates around Peña’s Zavala: he’s the character with the most complexity and gravitas. It’s his tragic death at the story’s conclusion that resonates deeply with the audience long after the film ends. And in another of Peña’s buddy-film roles, we see yet again an inhabiting of Latinx types in a strategic palomazo way. In War on Everyone, Peña plays Bob Bolaño, PI partner to Terry Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Peña’s Bolaño stands in sharp contrast to his Zavala.

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Here, he’s a jerk to his kids and at his job. However, Peña inhabits these roles in ways that call attention to the Latinx machista stereotype. He plays Bolaño as an extremely book-smart Latino detective and a husband who relinquishes control to his wife’s intelligence and sexual desire: she’s the smartest character in the film and the one the camera shows taking pleasure when they have sex. Indeed, the Latinx characters are invested with the smarts rather than the white ones as audiences have come to expect. The British villain Lord James Mangan (Theo James) lives in a palatial manor but one where the books on the shelves are clearly identified as a painted façade. And the lord here turns out to be an exploitive pedophile. This, along with significant moments when Peña’s Bolaño is the object of racial epithets like “wetback” hurled by police officers, helps destabilize a filmic imaginary that has long established the white European as civilized versus the brown mestizo as primitive and barbaric. Peña has chosen roles in films that more squarely complicate the white (civilized) versus brown (barbaric) Manichean filmic imaginary. In films like Walkout, Michael Berry’s Frontera (2014), and Cesar Chavez, Peña doesn’t have to perform a strategic palomazo. The roles here are themselves complexly Latinx. For instance, in Walkout, Peña plays a charismatic Sal Castro (based on a real person), the Latino high school teacher in East L.A. who inspired students to stand up for their right to education. And in Frontera, Peña plays Miguel Ramirez, a sensitive, concerned father who is wrongfully caught up in a murder in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. With Berry giving this Latino character the lion’s share of the story and Peña’s nuanced, unsentimental performance, the narrative fleshes out and humanizes the socioeconomic circumstances that force Latinxs to make the dangerous, life-threatening border crossing; and it makes audiences aware of the everyday exploitive (coyotes or smugglers abusing the elderly and raping women, for instance) and racist acts (white teens shooting at border crossers, for instance) that have tremendous consequences for white and brown communities. In the bilingually scripted Cesar Chavez, Peña plays the historically significant Cesar Chavez. This is a film squarely about Latinx identity and experience and as such doesn’t require Peña to perform a strategic palomazo. It begins and ends with Peña as Chavez; it tells the story of Chavez and his family as they work side by side to organize Latinx farmworkers exploited by racist Anglo bosses. And while it is focused on Chavez, it also critically demonstrates the important presence of the smart, pragmatic, and powerful Dolores Huerta (co-founder of the United Farm Workers) and Chavez’s wife, Helen, by giving them sufficient screen time and by casting Rosario Dawson as Huerta and America Ferrara as Helen. In one of the narrative’s most powerful moments, Luna’s camera shows Cesar and Helen corralled like chattel by trucks driven by racist rednecks who shoot

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them with pesticides. Here, Luna gives ample narrative space to Helen. In another powerful scene, the camera allows the moment when Helen yells repeatedly “¡Huelga!” to take up significant narrative space. This film is where Peña sidesteps the comic buffoon, criminal, pimp, oversexed cop, or soldier to play the understated, deeply thoughtful Cesar Chavez. As Luna sums up Peña’s role, “He embodies his character, creating a palpable vivacity in every scene where the audience breathes the same air that nurtures his character” (16). In so doing, he steps into a role that importantly tells of the struggles that have come before and that continue today for Latinx communities across the nation. He leaves audiences with the resounding “sí se puede” and with this a reminder to us all to continue the struggle in a call to action. In 2018, Peña was cast as the lead in the sci-fi film Extinction. With so few mainstream sci-fi films even imagining Latinxs as background characters in the future, that he plays the protagonist is hugely significant. And we see here Peña at his strategic palomazo best. He plays the role of Peter, a hightech mechanic who repairs and tests machines for a corporate monolith; likely, his role here as a high-tech bracero is a subtle nod to Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008). Peña’s Peter defamiliarizes the way mainstream audiences have been conditioned to frame Latinxs as only laborers. He uses his brain to solve high-tech problems. He uses his emotions to create a warm family life. He protects his family because of his hands and his brain. They survive— and beyond the usual first fifteen minutes of a film when Latinxs are often killed off, if they indeed appear at all. In a grand palomazo reveal, the audience learns that Peña’s Peter and his wife, Alice, are a higher level of AI life. In this distilled and reconstructed reality of the future, it’s the Latinx subject who is the most evolved and advanced, not the Anglo humans. In this way, too, Peña’s palomazo in Extinction functions as an allegorical signpost for audiences to reread the treatment of immigrants and brown people within and outside the United States. Peña is the higher-order thinking and feeling brown subject who stands against the invading human forces. He subverts cinematic expectation between good (Anglo human) and bad (brown/Other alien invader), clearing the way for a new cognitive schema where audiences will introspect about how whiteness has traditionally destroyed, deported, and/or subjugated Latinx peoples. We have touched on a few of Peña’s roles in only a few of the dozens of films he’s starred in. Taken as a whole, we see a twenty-first-century working actor who has uncritically reproduced, performed a strategic palomazo excess, and played straight a range of Latinx types. And, as the twenty-first century unfolds, we see these roles increasingly leaning toward the complex and non-stereotypical. However, there’s still a paucity of representations out there. Indeed, in 2018 the National Hispanic Media Coalition determined

References Beltrán, Mary. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. University of Illinois Press, 2009. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. University of Texas Press, 2002.

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that while Latinxs represent over 18 percent of the population (and 24 percent of film ticket buyers), only 3.1 percent appear in films and never as the protagonist. And in the Academy Awards’ ninety-one-year history, only one Latinx has won— across all the categories: Benicio del Toro. Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz have won for Best Supporting Actor/Actress, but they hail from Spain. In an interview, Peña sums up the industry for Latinx actors today: “There’s a lot more of a Latin presence. But if you were to say how many Latin movie stars there are? I don’t think there’s many international movie stars like a Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, or Tom Cruise” (Franich 46– 47). Peña is arguably one of the most gifted and wide-ranging of actors working in cinema today. That he continues not to be recognized as such and that the roles available to him fall into either the sidekick or the Latinx-inneed-of-an-Anglo-savior figure reflect a continued whitewashing of mainstream cinema in the twenty-first century. Latinx filmgoers want to see more varied and complex representations of Latinx identity and experience. They want to see a Peña as the protagonist of The Martian. Why might this matter? After all, isn’t the star system simply an appendage of capitalism, reifying and turning into spectacle subjectivities to profitable ends? Perhaps it matters only in that not having Latinx stars means that Latinx actors continue to be indistinguishable from one another; that is, star making requires a media system that distinguishes one person over another. As Paul McDonald sums up, “In Hollywood, stars are represented to moviegoers as distinctively different people and stardom requires moviegoers to be able to differentiate one performer from another” (1). And with the internet today, we see how this star making can and does happen along “multi-platforms” (see Cosentino) that can and do give one actor an advantage over another. Within the current film system, we see this continue to privilege white actors. The net effect: Peña is indistinguishable from a Luna or a Del Toro or a fill-in-the-blank. And so, we will likely continue to see Peña stepping into roles where he uses a strategic palomazo to create layers, texture, and difference within a system that makes indistinguishable Latinx roles and performances. We will continue to see what Mary Beltrán, Isabel MolinaGuzmán, Priscilla Ovalle, and others have theorized about Latina actors— the need to perform Latinx roles in ways that complicate those that are otherwise an indistinguishable, gelatinous mass of brown bodies: buffoons; criminals; narco terrorists; or promiscuous, primitive, or exotic Others.

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Cosentino, Olivia. “Starring Mexico: Female Stardom, Age and Mass Media Trajectories in the 20th Century.” The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Pop Culture in Latin America, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2018, pp. 196– 205. Franich, Darren. “Michael Peña.” Entertainment Weekly, no. 1,459, Mar. 31, 2017, pp. 46– 47. Luna, Diego. “Diego Luna on Michael Peña in End of Watch.” Daily Variety, vol. 317, no. 40, Nov. 27, 2012, p. 16. Martínez-Cruz, Paloma, and John Cruz. “Hemisexualizing the Latin Lover: Film and Live Art Interpretations and Provocations.” The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Pop Culture in Latin America, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2018, pp. 206– 21. McClintock, Pamela. “Q&A: Michael Peña.” Hollywood Reporter, vol. 418, no. 35, Oct. 2, 2012, p. 50. McDonald, Paul. Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. Wallflower, 2000. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. New York University Press, 2010. National Hispanic Media Coalition. Feb. 15, 2018, www.nhmc.org/2018-oscarssowhite-protest/. Ovalle, Priscilla Peña. Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom. Rutgers University Press, 2011. Ribisi, Giovanni. “Michael Peña.” Interview, vol. 36, no. 7, Aug. 2006, pp. 70– 72. Riddick, Richard B. “Does Hollywood Have an Agenda Other than Making Profitable Movies?” XYZ, Mar. 18, 2018, www.xyz.net.au/hollywood-agenda-making-profitable-movies/.

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American Hustle. Directed by David O. Russell, Atlas Entertainment, 2013. Ant-Man. Directed by Peyton Reed, Marvel Studios, 2015. Ant-Man and the Wasp. Directed by Peyton Reed, Marvel Studios, 2018. Bellyfruit. Directed by Kerri Green, Vanguard Cinema, 1999. The Calcium Kid. Directed by Alex De Rakoff, Studio Canal, 2004. Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2015. CHiPs. Directed by Dax Shepard, Primate Pictures, 2017. Collateral Beauty. Directed by Allan Loeb, New Line Cinema, 2016. Crash. Directed by Paul Haggis, Bob Yari Productions, 2004. End of Watch. Directed by David Ayer, Studio Canal, 2012. Extinction. Directed by Ben Young, Netflix, 2018. Fifty Pills. Directed by Theo Avgerinos, PalmStar Entertainment, 2006. Frontera. Directed by Michael Berry, Ocean Blue, 2014. Fury. Directed by David Ayer, Columbia Pictures, 2014. Gone in 60 Seconds. Directed by Dominic Sena, Touchstone, 2000. La Cucaracha. Directed by Jack Perez, 20th Century Fox, 1998. The Lucky Ones. Directed by Neil Burger, Koppelman and Levien Productions, 2008. The Martian. Directed by Ridley Scott, Scott Free Productions, 2015. “Michael Peña.” Back Home, episode 1. Directed by Diego Luna, Canana Films, 2014– . My Fellow Americans. Directed by Peter Segal, Peters Entertainment, 1996. Observe and Report. Directed by Jody Hill, De Line Pictures, 2009. Running Free. Directed by Steve Kroschel, Columbia Pictures, 1994. Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera, Maya Entertainment, 2008. Star Maps. Directed by Miguel Arteta, King Films, 1997. 30 Minutes or Less. Directed by Ruben Fleisher, Media Rights Capital, 2011. 12 Strong. Directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, Alcon Entertainment, 2018. Walkout. Directed by Edward James Olmos, Moctesuma Esparza, 2006. War on Everyone. Directed by John Michael McDonagh, Bankside Films, 2016. World Trade Center. Directed by Oliver Stone, Paramount Pictures, 2006.

Chapter 11

ETHNIC AVENGERS Machete, Django, and the Uncertain Futures of Race and Immigration in the United States Juan J. Alonzo

On Cinco de Mayo of 2010, when Robert Rodriguez released the playful and politically provocative “Arizona trailer” for his Mexploitation movie Machete in anticipation of its September release, no one could imagine what we know with hindsight in 2019: that debates about immigration in the United States would be even more heated and polarizing than they were when Arizona passed its draconian Senate Bill (SB) 1070. No one could imagine that the nation would move from a state law that effectively permitted the profiling of Latinx peoples on the basis of skin color and language use to federal immigration policies authorizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to separate children from their parents before their families even entered the United States, even in cases when these families were seeking asylum. In cases of asylum requests, no one could foresee a situation in which pleas on the basis of domestic abuse or gang violence would be summarily rejected. Contemporary debates about U.S. immigration policy and the treatment of undocumented immigrants offer viewers an opportunity to reexamine the significance of Machete in the shaping of discussions about immigration. An updated analysis of Machete allows us to reframe the film’s efficacy as a critique of racist anti-immigrant discourse. Despite the film’s standing as either Mexploitation, satire, parody, comedy, gore-fest, or some combination of these categories, Machete seemingly anticipates the tenebrous status of undocumented immigrants, it presciently mocks the hateful political rhetoric surrounding immigration, and it amplifies the need for unity and resistance against the forces that place immigrants in states of precarity. Furthermore, Machete as an object of reception and critique in the public sphere and in debates about its political significance has become emblematic of extremist right-wing efforts to control discourses of free and open political expression. By labeling the film as “un-American,” anti-immigrant groups have attempted to define the range of discussion about the film. Much as was the case in 213

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another “revenge fantasy” produced during the same period, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), Machete became the target of right-wing conspiracy theorists who accused the filmmakers and the movies’ fans of being racists, and thereby put a chill on the possibility of civil discourse about issues related to immigration, race, and racism. Current federal policies aimed at curtailing the entry of undocumented immigrants— from forced separations of families to immediate deportation without the benefit of review in the cases of asylum seekers— demonstrate an inhumanity that was not present even in Arizona’s controversial SB 1070. Thus, Sean Brayton’s 2011 conclusions in “Razing Arizona: Migrant Labour and the ‘Mexican Avenger’ in Machete” read like understatement, despite Brayton’s lucid assessment of the film’s power as social critique: “Machete may be dismissed as little more than an ultraviolent ethnic fantasy that reproduces both racial and gender stereotypes. However, in the context of current immigration anxieties and competing representations of Latinas/os within and beyond Hollywood, Machete becomes a pertinent text with rich pedagogical potential” (289). In this chapter, I reevaluate the film in the context of immigration policies and social attitudes toward immigration in the age of Trump, and then I assess Machete’s impact in relation to several important issues, including the film’s use of Latinx futurism to shed light on the immigration debate and immigration policies; its embroilment, along with Django Unchained, in questions of free speech and civil discourse; and its exposure, together with Machete Kills (2013), of the ambivalent relationship between American society and its Latinx population, particularly Latinx immigrants. I analyze Machete as a social text, not merely as a cinematic or aesthetic text. As a social text, the film has social and political meanings and symbolic reverberations in the social world beyond the world of the film. Regardless of Machete’s origins— it began as the product of Robert Rodriguez’s whimsical imagination, a piece of pure entertainment— the film is fundamentally a social text around which various ideological positions have congregated and battled for position. While I believe that form and aesthetics are crucial to an understanding of film, I depart from Frederick Luis Aldama’s claim that Machete must be seen “on its own terms,” or that viewers should accept the “mind-set of a B-movie, celluloid aesthetic” and “a complete reordering of . . . reality into an aesthetic object” (125– 26). Because the film is consumed by a broad range of viewers who inevitably connect its themes to contemporary issues, I also read the movie as possessing the possibility of a social critique. Thus, I disagree with the view that Machete “is too preposterous to qualify as satire” (Holden). While the film is in fact an exaggerated celebration of vengeance and violence brought together with a singular sense of humor, its influence lies not in its representation of cinematic excess but in its inscrip-

tion as a piece of social discourse. Other critics have also commented on Machete’s uses of “social satire to engage immigration politics and working-class struggle” (Brayton 277). I am less concerned with the film’s standing as satire and more interested in its broader impact in society and its influence on discussions about Latinx immigration, and in this sense my argument parallels Zachary Ingle’s assessment that Machete “remains an earnestly political film, one worthy of scrutiny” (173). Machete, co-directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez, tells the story of Isador “Machete” Cortez (Danny Trejo), a former Mexican federal police officer who fights drug cartels and crooked politicians on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The narrative begins with the murder of Machete’s family at the hands of Torrez (Steven Seagal), a Mexican kingpin who controls a vast transnational drug cartel and who bankrolls a corrupt Texas state politician, Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). McLaughlin favors strict anti-immigration policies and runs for reelection on a campaign of hatred in which he compares immigrants to parasites and calls illegal immigration “an overt act of terrorism.” After his family’s murder in Mexico, Machete appears in Texas, seemingly living and working as an undocumented day laborer. Under threat of deportation, Machete is soon hired to assassinate McLaughlin by a businessman and associate of the senator. Unbeknownst to Machete, the assassination plan is designed to fail and pin the attempted murder on Machete, now identified as an undocumented Mexican immigrant, thereby stoking anti-immigrant paranoia and delivering the election to McLaughlin. In the course of the film, Machete convinces ICE agent Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba) that “there’s the law and there’s what’s right,” and he also teams up with Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), the leader of an underground network working to help immigrants succeed. Together, Machete, Sartana, and Luz stage an immigrant and multiethnic workers’ revolt in which they expose McLaughlin’s corruption and defeat the racist vigilantes.

It is easy to forget that Machete is a science fiction film because of its focus on comedic action and the hero’s vengeance against his corrupt adversaries. Additionally, the film does not possess recognizable science fiction themes, unlike Machete Kills (2013), which integrates many science fiction elements. Yet the film portrays a world in which technology, science, and surveillance touch every aspect of Latinx lives. In this sense, the film is firmly grounded in a Latinx futurism. Catherine Ramírez defines Chicanafuturism, which we can expand to Latinx futurism, as a mode of analysis that “explores the ways that new and everyday technologies . . . transform Mexican American life

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and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. . . . Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival” (187).1 Machete is a Latinx futurist film not only in the sense defined by Ramírez but also in the more specific sense that its futurism portends the inhumane policies that would affect undocumented immigrants only a few years after the film was released. Perhaps Machete’s most ominous example of the uncertain futures that await Latinx populations is McLaughlin’s proposal to construct an electrified fence at the border. In his 2010 review of the movie, Bryan Curtis points out that one might “chuckle when it’s revealed that evil forces want to build an electric fence,” but then one realizes that “Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul’s platform included a similar proposal.” In 2010, a border wall may have seemed outrageous— whether as a movie plot device or as part of a senate candidate’s political platform— but by 2016 it was the centerpiece of candidate Donald Trump’s presidential bid. The proposed wall may not be electrified, but the current occupant of the White House continues to insist that it be built, and his supporters in Congress seem willing to back this proposal. Machete’s Latinx futurism extends to other areas as well. The viewer sees, for instance, the use of surveillance technologies by ICE agent Sartana Rivera, who follows not only Machete’s movements but also the movements of other immigrants in the film. Since 2017, immigrants have been subjected to surveillance by ICE at greater levels than at any other time in history. For example, as part of its criminalization of undocumented immigrants and legal residents alike, ICE has carried out sweeps of Latinx communities and detained people with even minor histories of arrests, including some whose cases were resolved years in the past.2 In Latinx futurism, technology often works against communities of color. As Ramírez elaborates, “Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans are usually disassociated from science and technology, signifiers of civilization, rationality, and progress. At the same time, many Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans have been injured or killed by and/or for science and technology” (188). Ramírez goes on to argue that the Latinx relationship to technology is ultimately ambivalent, since technology is often leveraged by Latinx people and made to work in their favor: “By appropriating the imagery of science and technology, Chicanafuturist works disrupt age-old racist and sexist binaries that exclude Chicanas and Chicanos from visions of the future” (189). And while William Orchard provides several examples of how various characters in Machete adapt communications technologies and communications networks to create nodes of Latinx resistance (230– 32), the Latinx relationship to real-world surveillance technologies is fraught with danger.

In Machete, a disquieting prescience goes hand in hand with the film’s futurism. As noted, the film anticipates the proposed building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. It also foreshadows the increasingly inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants by agents of the government and private citizens alike. In one sensationalistic scene, a pregnant woman who is trying to cross the border is shot down by Senator McLaughlin and a group of border vigilantes. The scene is harrowingly over-the-top in its depiction of violence against an unborn child. The scene is also gratuitous in its manipulation of the viewer’s emotions. As unimaginable as the scene may be in real life, it is not a far stretch from the current administration’s policy of separating children from their mothers and fathers as they reach the border requesting asylum, and the scene is not unlike the violence that is visited upon vulnerable immigrants attempting to enter the United States. As reported by CNN, between April and May of 2018, some two thousand children were separated from their parents under Trump’s policy that treats all undocumented border crossers as criminals and therefore requires the separation of children from their guardians. The new aggressive tactics have also resulted in the shooting death of at least one immigrant at the border (Kopan; Ellis). In a final depressing example in which life imitates art, Machete features a hateful, racist senatorial campaign built on the demonization of immigrants. The voice-over of Senator McLaughlin declares that the “infestation has begun. Parasites have crossed our borders and are sickening our country, leeching off our system, destroying us from the inside.” This is the exact language used by President Trump in his justification to separate children from their families. In a Twitter message, he declared that Democratic lawmakers “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country” (@realDonaldTrump 2018). In this statement, immigrants are more than merely “bad,” they are an infestation and an invasion. It is remarkable how the scene comparing immigrants to parasites played for laughs in 2010 but predicted the xenophobic attitudes expressed by a sitting president just a handful of years later.

One of the most thought-provoking issues surrounding Machete is that it is one of several “ethnic avenger” films released in the 2010s that are also connected to issues of free speech in the artistic and political arenas. Along with Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012), Machete has influenced debates about what can be shown in films, particularly in connection to issues of ethnic/racial violence. All three films have garnered polarizing responses from audiences who believe the films represent either empowering

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fantasies of ethnic subjects overcoming oppressors or sadistic visions of untrammeled ethnic revenge. All three films feature an ethnic subject— whether Jewish, African American, or Latinx— who stops being a victim and becomes the aggressor, and who employs extreme violence against a usually white or European oppressor. This section of my analysis focuses solely on Machete and Django Unchained, because including Inglorious Basterds would necessitate a more extended comparison than there is space for in this chapter. However, looking only at the former two films yields productive comparative observations about the kinds of discussions that are permissible in regards to race, racial violence, and issues of free speech and open political discussion. Even before its theatrical opening in fall 2010, Machete set off a firestorm when, on May 5, 2010, Robert Rodriguez released the infamous “Arizona trailer” on the internet (Rodriguez). The “Arizona trailer” was a spoof preview intended to draw attention to the upcoming movie. Before the Arizona trailer, Rodriguez had previously created a different trailer embedded in his Grindhouse (2007) double-feature collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. Neither of these trailers were representative of the movie that would finally hit theaters in September 2010, but if the Grindhouse trailer created anticipation among Rodriguez’s fans, the Arizona trailer only drew the ire of conservative media commentator Alex Jones. If the Grindhouse trailer was understood as a “fake” trailer of a movie that had not yet been made, the Arizona trailer implied that it was a “real” trailer of a completed film. The Arizona trailer, as anyone who has seen it along with the full-length movie, resembles Machete only in that it uses clips from the movie, but it skews the montage to create different meanings. The two-minute Arizona trailer takes excerpts from Machete, reedits these, and then adds the dramatic voice of the “coming soon” narrator. The result is a preview of a completely different movie than the Machete that would be released in September. Thus, the Arizona trailer, like the Grindhouse trailer before it, is itself a “fake” movie preview. It opens with the introduction of Danny Trejo facing the camera and stating, “This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message . . . to Arizona!” (figure 11.1). There is a dramatic pause between “message” and “to Arizona,” emphasized by a wild zoom-in from a medium shot to a close-up shot of Trejo’s snarling face. The narrator’s voice then intones, “They called him Machete,” and as the film’s score begins, the next few seconds introduce the film titles and the story itself. At this point, scenes from the movie are introduced but ordered in such a way as to make the viewer believe that the character of Machete is a murderous undocumented immigrant who has been hired to kill a politician. Machete is shown looking for work at a day labor site. He is picked up by a man in a black Mercedes and asked, “Have you ever killed anyone before?” With a

panning shot of a long table stocked with an arsenal of guns and other weapons, the man states, “As you know, illegal Americans [sic] are being forced out of our country at an alarming rate. For the good of both of our people, the senator must die.” Then the narrator declares, “He was given an offer he couldn’t refuse. Set up, double-crossed, and left for dead.” What follows after these words is the attempted killing of the senator, the double-cross, and then Machete seeking revenge. Along the way, the trailer introduces the rest of the cast, including Robert De Niro as the senator, Cheech Marin as an avenging priest and Machete’s brother, Jessica Alba as an ICE agent, and Michelle Rodriguez as a defender of immigrants. We see scenes of various types of mayhem, including what appears to be an uprising of machete-wielding immigrants led by Machete and the now former ICE agent, who declares, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” (figure 11.2). This last statement is an oft-used Chicano Movement and immigrant activist slogan, but it is paired with the narrator’s voice-over that says Machete “gets the women . . . and kills the bad guys,” reminding the viewer all along that the upcoming film is a riff on the Mexploitation film genre. The trailer ends with Machete jumping his Gatlin gun– equipped motorcycle over an exploding car. As this happens, the narrator states, “But they soon realized they just fucked with the wrong Mexican.” Rodriguez’s ability to create an exciting trailer has been on display since he condensed El Mariachi (1992) into the movie preview that opened doors for him at Columbia Pictures and jump-started his filmmaking career. The trailer for Machete, however, had unintended consequences for Rodriguez. Almost immediately after the Arizona trailer appeared on the entertainment

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Figure 11.1 Danny Trejo as Machete in the “Arizona trailer” for Machete (2010).

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Figure 11.2 A victorious Machete in the finale of Machete (2010).

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website Ain’t It Cool News (AICN), it was attacked by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his website Prison PlanetTV. Though it may be difficult to believe that anyone could read the trailer as anything other than a bit of satire, Jones interpreted the “message to Arizona” and the montage literally, as a provocation for war in which Latinx immigrants were encouraged to indiscriminately kill whites. In a video originally posted to Prison PlanetTV on May 8, 2010, Jones greets his viewers and ominously proclaims, “We’re trying to avert a tragedy and a possible trigger for serious race war in the United States, something the establishment has been stoking and preparing for decades. Whether he knows it or not, Robert Rodriguez— I would say it’s a 90 percent chance right now— is going to trigger racial riots and racial killings in the United States with the September release of his film, Machete” (“Alex Jones”). After admitting that he is a fan of Rodriguez, Jones accuses the director of moving beyond political speech to a “call for violence, a call for racial warfare.” Jones’s video is a sophisticated piece of propaganda aimed to incite people predisposed to believe the worst about the Latinx immigrant community. It features Jones persuasively speaking directly to the camera. It artfully blends images of Latinx people protesting— although it does not contextualize the date and location of the protests— and includes images from the Arizona trailer. Jones expresses shock that the trailer depicts racial animus along binary terms, with Mexicans as the “good guys” and AngloAmericans as evil racists (“Alex Jones”). He is particularly troubled by the character Machete raising his machete-clenched fist, with all his fellow revolutionaries following suit. In his critique of Machete, Jones spread the erroneous assertion that the film would destabilize the amicable relations between Latinxs and Anglos in the United States. He would go on to use all the tools at his disposal, including critical reviews in Infowars and Prison PlanetTV, to encourage his readers

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to boycott the film and contact the Texas Film Commission, which was due to provide economic incentives to the film producers for shooting the movie in Texas. Jones claimed in the same May 8 video that “supposedly the film is even worse than the trailer.” Of course, he could not know this because no one except the filmmakers had access to the completed movie. Further, Jones’s video is laced with convoluted conspiracy theories about globalist control of political movements in the United States. Using images from newspapers and legitimate historical websites— cleverly presented in such a way that the viewer cannot actually read the details on the pages— Jones mendaciously compares the upcoming race war to the 1916 Plan of San Diego, when “the German government fooled a bunch of Mexicans . . . to go out and kill a bunch of white people.” In the video, he claims that the film will “intimidate Hispanic Americans to feel that they are not part of America,” that Hispanics are going to feel compelled to join MECHA (Mexican American Chicana/o Association) or the Raza Movement, which are, according to Jones, CIAcontrolled organizations that foment division within the United States. To corroborate his claims about the violence-inciting nature of the movie, Jones asserts that he was contacted by “Hispanic high-level” members of Rodriguez’s crew who were concerned about the safety of their fellow Hispanics. “I care about those innocent Hispanic children,” Jones tells the camera. In the indirect exchanges that ensued between Rodriguez and his conspiracy-obsessed critics, Rodriguez disavowed any racist intentions and affirmed his commitment to making film entertainment free of political content. The Arizona trailer, he told Harry Knowles of AICN, was created in good fun and as a satirical response “that was as absurd as what was happening in Arizona [with the passage of SB 1070].”3 By September 2010, when Machete was finally released, Alex Jones and his writers were ready to pounce and make Rodriguez’s film an example of liberal Hollywood’s excess, as well as a flashpoint for what he claimed were the anti-white provocations of a potentially dangerous Latinx voice. Jones was particularly troubled that Machete’s producers were slated to receive tax incentives from the Texas Film Commission: “While Rodriguez has a right to make as hateful and racist a film as he dares, the State of Texas should be hesitant to institutionalize support for his extreme views” (Dykes and Jones). In his Prison Planet critique, Jones provided contact information for the Texas governor and the Texas Film Commission, strongly suggesting that his readers should contact their government and express their objections to such a misuse of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, the conservative backlash against Machete succeeded to the extent that the movie was denied filmmaking incentives from the Texas Film Commission. Before the May 2010 release of the Arizona trailer and the series of negative articles that followed, the film seemed all but guaranteed to receive

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tax incentives designed to spur moviemaking in Texas. By August, after the first round of manufactured controversy, the local newspaper asked, “Will Rodriguez’s ‘Machete’ get Texas film incentives?” (Ealy, “Will Rodriguez’s”). Then in December, two months after the film’s release, the Texas Film Commission reversed course and pulled its incentives. On January 1, 2011, the Statesman’s Charles Ealy reported that an open records request to the state of Texas revealed that over “500 people bombarded the Texas Film Commission and Gov. Rick Perry’s office . . . urging the state to deny incentives. . . . More than 140 of those communications were faxed form letters, saying that ‘Machete’ was ‘nothing less than an attack on conservative Americans who oppose illegal immigration.’ The letters were sent in May after Austin-based conservative radio talk show host Alex Jones questioned the possible use of state funds for the film” (“State Offices”). That the newspaper had to make an open records request implies that the state of Texas was less than willing to reveal the process that led to its rejection of Machete’s application. The significance of the denial of economic incentives for Machete does not lie in any monetary loss the producers may have incurred after having been promised these incentives— the film was reasonably successful without these monies, and Rodriguez has continued to produce other films, including the follow-up, Machete Kills (2013). The implications of such a denial at the state level have to do with what kinds of speech acts are acceptable under the watchful eye of the state. Critics of Machete claimed that the film did not present the state of Texas in a positive light, which is one of the criteria for qualifying for filmmaking tax incentives. According to the Texas Film Commission, film projects that have applied for incentives are ineligible if they “include inappropriate content or content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion” (“Film and Television Projects”). Based on this criterion, the commission denied funding to the movie’s producers on December 1, 2010 (Ealy, “Film Commission”). However, when the commission initially received Machete’s application for incentives along with its script in spring 2010, no one expected the film to be rejected on these grounds. There was no indication from the commission, even after the film opened in theaters, that it would deny Machete’s application because of its arguably negative depiction of Texas. What seems clear, based on Ealy’s reporting in the Statesman/Austin360.com, is that the Texas Film Commission and Governor Perry’s office were under pressure from Jones and his supporters. One of the strangest ironies of the controversy over Machete’s funding is that when the film incentive program came up for increased funding in 2009, Governor Rick Perry signed the program into law at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, with Rodriguez standing at his side. By attracting filmmakers to shoot in Texas, the program was seen as creating jobs and additional

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economic activity in the state. As the most prolific working Texas filmmaker, Rodriguez was seen as a catalyst for Texas filmmaking (Whittaker). In response to the state rejecting its application for tax incentives, the film’s producers eventually sued the state for reneging on its promises. The case was heard by a Texas appeals court, and the judges sided with the Texas Film Commission, ruling that it was within the commission’s authority to review their previous decision to approve the script once the film was released (Lee). Reporting for the Texas Tribune, Jamie Lovegrove noted that the Machete controversy renewed debates within the Texas legislature over the economic efficacy of the incentives program. As the state began to experience budget shortfalls in the 2010s, the fiscally conservative legislature began reducing the program’s budget. As Jaime Lovegrove writes for The Texas Tribune “some lawmakers have proposed scrapping the film incentives program altogether, describing it as corporate welfare. In last year’s legislative session, lawmakers cut the program’s two-year budget by more than 66 percent, from $95 million to $32 million for the 2016–2017 biennium” (Lovegrove). According to the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program website, the budget for 2018– 19 was $22 million, meaning that incentives had once again been cut. Whether or not the Machete controversy initiated this downward slide is not clear— the floundering state economy was a major contributing factor— but it is also true that had the controversy not occurred, Texas lawmakers might have focused more closely on the economic benefits that filmmakers were bringing to the state. While Jones’s attempt to smear Machete as a racist, anti-white revenge fantasy and his letter-writing campaign to strip the film of its tax incentives cannot be regarded as a direct suppression of free speech, these actions certainly wrested control of the narrative about the meaning of Machete as a cultural artifact. The concerted right-wing effort— through internet postings, web fora discussions, letter writing, and scare tactics— to label Machete as a hateful movie effectively limited the range of discussions about the movie. While the film’s public release and consumption in theaters were not curtailed by the campaign against it (the extra notoriety may have even helped), the right-wing reaction fits a pattern, particularly prevalent on the internet, of a strident effort to control the discourses on race and racism, specifically as these pertain to the perception of a white culture under attack. Marina Wood, in her assessment of the ways in which different groups on the internet responded to Machete, notes that “the digital reception of the film is telling in terms of where certain demographics are in terms of discussing race. . . . Too often immigration debates claim not to be about race, but this time people had to talk about skin color, language, and culture as factors in anti-immigrant sentiment.” Wood finds these debates as “just the beginning” of a potentially productive discussion about “Latinx” as a category that

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includes race. While this analysis provides a somewhat salutary picture of the discussions that were created in the wake of the film’s release, a more troubling conclusion would claim that the real race war Jones warned about was occurring on the terrain of free speech. Paradoxically, those who take control of the discourse are also those who are able to shut down, if not free expression, then at least the possible political expression of those with whom they disagree. Put another way, the extremist response to Machete successfully defined the movie’s standing in the political arena and controlled the direction of permissible speech acts about the movie, even if this reactionary response never actually suppressed the film itself as a speech act. As stated, the conservative media response to Machete fits a pattern of calculated rhetorical strategies designed to limit the effectiveness of minority voices as cultural expression and within public discourse. Discussions surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) met a similar reactionary tamping down of minority voices, but this time with far more dire consequences for the voices involved. Two issues with regard to the response to Django Unchained are worth considering in relation to the manufactured controversy surrounding Machete: the first involves the right-wing reaction to the film itself, and the second is related to the right-wing reaction to the way minority scholars have discussed the film. Django Unchained is the story of Django (Jamie Foxx), a former slave who forms a partnership with Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist turned bounty hunter. Schultz frees Django from his masters and enlists his help in identifying a group of criminals Schultz is tracking. When Django tells Schultz about his plans to rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from bondage, Schultz is won over by their love story (it reminds Schultz of a German legend). Broomhilda was born to a benevolent German-speaking owner, but she was subsequently sold to a cruel slave master. Sometime after Django and Broomhilda were married, they tried to escape but were captured. As punishment, the couple is separated and sold to different masters. Hearing this story and already impressed with Django’s talents, Schultz proposes that he and Django team up: in the winter, they will hunt bounties together, and in the spring, Schultz will help Django free Broomhilda from the plantation in Mississippi where she is captive. The movie is classic Tarantino violent escapism and has been described by critics as the rare revenge fantasy in which slaves kill their masters. When Django Unchained was released, the critical response was polarizing, as with so much of Tarantino’s work. Liberal commentators and filmmakers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ishmael Reed, and Spike Lee objected to the film on various principles, from its potentially unproductive and unrealistic use of revenge as a response to white racial violence during the antebellum

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South to the film’s excessive use of the word “nigger” throughout the narrative. There were also renewed questions about Tarantino’s practice of cultural appropriation and potential distortion of a culture not his own (Harris; Sattin). On the right, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report posted a picture of Tarantino on his website, with “n*gger” repeated several times in large font, reminding readers that the filmmaker was once again poisoning his movies with excessive racist language. Drudge’s response was immediately derided for its faux outrage and seeming glee at repeating the same racial slur. The consensus view of Django Unchained by right-wing media critics was that by instantiating the fantasy of racial revenge through black-on-white violence, the film was exacerbating racial tensions. Stated differently, “The growing fear expressed by some on the right [is] that Django Unchained is somehow a threat to white people” (Harris). The right-wing critique of Django Unchained was typically one-dimensional, much like the critique of Machete. Few critics seemed to notice, for instance, that the bounty hunting duo are of different races, yet they form a strong friendship. Further, the violence is not exclusively black-on-white, but also black-on-black and white-on-white as Django and Schultz direct their vengeance at the injustice and suffering perpetrated upon Django’s family. The racial polemics raised by Django Unchained in 2012 were expressive of an internet media environment in which diverse views coexisted and were oftentimes in conversation with one another, if just barely. By 2017, discussions about race in the United States seemed more polarized, with holders of opposing viewpoints unwilling to speak to each other. The writings in The American Conservative offer an instructive example of the hardening of views surrounding race. The American Conservative is an online publication that bills itself as a moderate political voice supporting a conservatism “that opposes unchecked power in government and business; promotes the flourishing of families and communities through vibrant markets and free people.” Soon after the release of Django Unchained in 2012, the magazine’s cultural editor, Rod Dreher, penned a piece in which he agreed wholeheartedly with Ta-Nehisi Coates in his refusal to watch Django Unchained because of their shared belief that former slaves were not themselves seeking revenge but a way to live in peace. Dreher rejected Django Unchained’s revenge fantasy because he was cautious of the cathartic tendency to cheer on the righteous killing of our enemies: “I’m a lot more interested in individuals or communities who decide not to seek vengeance, but rather peace, forgiveness, reconciliation. . . . How do people who have every right to expect and exact suffering from their victimizers find it within themselves to forswear it? To me that’s a far more interesting topic for artistic exploration and moral contemplation than vengeance” (“Django’s Revenge”).4

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By May 2017, discussions about race in the United States had become more strained than at any other time since the 1960s. The embrace of Donald Trump’s nativist ideology, the reemergence of white nationalism as a political force, the balkanization of political perspectives in online communities— these are symptoms and not causes of a complex social phenomenon, and they describe but do not explain social divisions along racial/ethnic lines. Once again, Dreher entered the fray, this time with an explosive opinion piece. Dreher, whose columns are generally reasoned and deliberate in their argumentation, posted a piece titled “When Is It OK to Kill Whites?” Dreher’s essay was written in response to university professor Tommy Curry’s video interview in which Curry discussed the legacy of black self-defense within the historical context of black oppression, from slavery through the Jim Crow South, to present-day experiences of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. In the video interview (by then several years old but mysteriously resurfacing in 2017), Curry, an award-winning philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, argued that the contemporary discourse on black resistance and empowerment focuses exclusively on nonviolent measures, and that this discourse fails to acknowledge the very real history and possibility of armed self-defense against white violence. Curry referenced Django Unchained as an example of a movie in which black violence/vengeance directed against a white oppressor was treated as fantasy or “spectacle” by the viewing public, regardless of viewers’ race, when in actuality the kind of violence represented on-screen had real historical analogues in such figures as Nat Turner who were advocates of “radical self-defense” and revolution (“Dr. Tommy Curry”). Dreher did not present Curry’s ideas with the necessary detail and nuance required by their complexity. Instead, Dreher simply stated, “In this brief interview, he [Curry] discusses when it is appropriate to kill white people.” After providing a video link, Dreher pulled a quote from the interview: “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.” These words were certainly uttered by Curry, but Dreher presented them out of context, as if they expressed Curry’s direct views when Curry was in fact speculating what a long-ago black proponent of radical self-defense might be thinking as the battle for racial equality took flight. Curry’s statement in the interview that “some white people might have to die” was not a prescriptive utterance or a personal declaration but a way of explaining the logic of the historical black figures living in the aftermath of slavery who saw self-defense as a viable means of survival. Thus, Curry was himself not advocating violence, but rather drawing attention to a black self-defense that was real rather than pure fantasy. He was also pointing to the impossibility and taboo of discussing black self-defense when that self-defense is directed

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against a white perpetrator. In such instances, mentioning black violence against whites is unacceptable. The consequences of the unearthing of Curry’s video were almost immediate. As detailed by Steve Kolowich, Curry became the subject of intense discussions and attacks on such internet sites as Reddit and Stormfront, where his hard-won credentials were questioned and his life was threatened. On TexAgs, an independent website for current and former Texas A&M students, people demanded his firing and threatened to withhold alumni donations if the university did not take action against Curry. The president of the university, Michael K. Young, issued a statement disavowing Curry’s words as inconsistent with the university’s core values (“Affirming”). The threats on Curry’s life were serious enough that he required a police escort, and he ultimately would relocate his family while he stayed at his teaching post. As Kolowich notes, the most troubling fallout in the Tommy Curry controversy was the blow dealt to the principles of academic freedom and free speech as the university struggled to preserve its public image and maintain its community values. Essentially, the anger and confusion stirred up by the right-wing media caused the president of the university to issue confounding statements. Initially, President Young declared that Curry’s interview “features disturbing comments about race and violence that stand in stark contrast to Aggie core values— most notably those of respect, excellence, leadership and integrity— values that we hold true toward all of humanity” (“Standing”). In adding that “the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the rights of others to offer their personal views, no matter how reprehensible those views may be,” Young impugned Curry’s professional achievements as a scholar (“Standing”). Young would have to issue a second clarifying statement in which he asserted his “unwavering support for academic freedom” and in which he expressed regret for “any contributions that I may have made to misunderstandings” with regard to the legitimacy of Curry’s work (“Affirming”). Unfortunately, Young’s soft retraction and belated support of Curry’s freedom to think speculatively and express provocative ideas— as a good philosopher should— would not undo the damage done to Curry’s public reputation. If Young had come to Curry’s defense and demanded that critics of the controversial interview examine the context of Curry’s words, perhaps some of his detractors would have taken the time to listen to the full interview or read his work. One of the main points that is lost in this controversy is that movies can incite discussion about important issues such as race or immigration, but often the discussion gets hijacked and things become less about the ideas that are presented and more about shutting down those ideas. In the Curry example, a potentially productive discussion about when and if it is ethical to employ “radical self-defense” and

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about the differential treatment of ethnic groups in matters of the right to bear arms turned into a personal attack of a degreed professional. As I think through the parallels that run between Machete and Django Unchained, I also consider parallels with other ethnic “avenger films,” other movies in which the ethnic subject becomes the aggressor or the hero (The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez [1981] and Born in East L.A. [1987] come to mind). I am reminded that I teach these types of films, and I often connect them to particular historical moments of ethnic resistance or to the claiming of identity, sovereignty, and civil rights. I also teach these films as part of the tradition of Latinx film aesthetics. Does teaching Machete mean that I support wanton violence against white Americans? The answer, quite obviously, is no: first of all because a movie can be taught from different perspectives (I have also taught The Birth of a Nation [1915], and this does not mean I support the Ku Klux Klan), and secondly because I do not believe that Machete is as one-dimensional as the Alex Joneses of the world have averred. Machete, in fact, proves heuristically useful in thinking about the contradictory and often ambivalent relationship between American society and Latinx cultures, as my brief concluding remarks about Machete and Machete Kills intimate.

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I begin my concluding remarks by returning to a moment in the Alex Jones video in which he warned of a coming race war if Machete was released back in September 2010. The race war has not come to pass, and one reason for this is that people of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds have found ways to live peacefully and cooperatively in modern American society. Still, antipathy toward immigrants, particularly Latinx immigrants, has grown, and extremist provocateurs like Jones are the cause. Yet even Jones displays hidden admiration for the Latinx immigrant in the figure of Machete, and it is at the point of ambivalence— the simultaneous attraction and repulsion for the Other— upon which I will focus my closing remarks.5 In decrying the dangers posed by Machete, Jones gives away his own admiration for the tough persona inhabited by Danny Trejo as he plays the role of Machete. As he looks at the camera, scandalized by the “Arizona trailer,” Jones seems to take pleasure in repeating the “message to Arizona.” He takes his already gravelly voice and adds more texture to make himself sound like Trejo, and he emphatically declares, “This is Machete with a Cinco de Mayo message for Arizona!” Jones repeats the phrase more than once, in a way that is strangely admiring in its attempt to capture the depth and cadence of Trejo’s voice. In this moment, it is as if Jones is auditioning for the role of Machete. For a brief instance, Jones slips from hostility to amity, from repul-

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sion to attraction. Jones desires to embody the tough hombre embodied by Machete, and his attempt to faithfully imitate Machete’s voice points to an identification to which Jones would scarcely admit. Machete’s sequel, Machete Kills (2013), provides a second example of the nation’s ambivalent relationship to Latinx immigrants in its need for immigrants to render service despite the nation’s reluctance to reward that service. The film’s storyline requires that the main character perform an extraordinary task on behalf of the president of the United States. Machete is asked to prevent a former Mexican cartel member turned revolutionary from detonating a nuclear missile aimed at the U.S. capital. In his quest, Machete must also prevent a powerful billionaire industrialist from destroying the planet. In exchange for his services, the president promises Machete American citizenship. The requirement of such extraordinary service parallels what is often asked of immigrants to the United States. It is not uncommon, for example, for immigrants to serve in the U.S. armed forces even before they have applied for citizenship. In some cases, military service does not guarantee that an immigrant will be awarded citizenship.6 Regardless of the final citizenship outcome, immigrants must demonstrate fealty to the nation, prove their heroism in life-threatening situations, and provide unique skills in the performance of their jobs. In Machete Kills, the president needs Machete’s talents and implores him to “do it for your country, your new country.” Like so many immigrants aspiring for civic inclusion, Machete does just that. Machete Kills further demonstrates that the nation’s ambivalent relationship to its immigrants is often characterized by dependence. The United States needs Latinx immigrants— and immigrants of other backgrounds— to perform such tasks as harvesting the food supply and caring for the elderly, yet the United States does not welcome them because it perceives them as threats. In Machete Kills, the billionaire industrialist Luther Voz, who is played by Mel Gibson and who arguably represents American greed and technological hubris, wants to take Machete’s DNA to outer space in order to clone a Machete workforce that will protect his galactic empire. Voz demands the genetic building blocks of Machete’s labor, but he also seeks to contain the Latinx presence by transforming Machete into a docile servant. Ryan Rashotte argues that Voz represents a version of the “Gringo Savior” who functions within the film narrative to suppress a Latinx masculinity that is viewed as “a violent, socially destabilizing force” (233). In his need to elevate his own masculine agency by dominating the Latinx character, Voz further demonstrates the deeply dependent quality of the U.S. relationship with its immigrant populations. This dependence, as I have noted, is subsumed within ambivalent desire. Thus, I agree with Rashotte that in Machete

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Kills Voz “envies Machete’s superlative Mexican genes” and that he “admires Mexicans for their labor skills” (237). Desire, admiration, dependence, the need to contain— these feelings coexist in the relationship between U.S. society and its Latinx immigrants. In Machete Kills, the final twist to the narrative is that Voz plans to kidnap Mexican laborers to build his interplanetary space stations, proving that even in outer space, future civilizations will need Latinx immigrants. In outer space, however, we will all be immigrants. Machete, Machete Kills, and Django Unchained have much to teach viewers about how American society regards its ethnic and racial Others and its immigrants. The fact that these films appeared within the current turbulent decade of racial profiling, racially motivated hate crimes, and ICE raids on vulnerable immigrant communities should not be seen as merely a coincidence. While the films’ directors, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, may have created highly entertaining fantasies about “ethnic avengers,” these movies also provide incisive commentary when placed within the social and political contexts of our times. The characters of Machete and Django all at once embody an inspired resistance, a playful release of frustration, and the questionable logic of vengeance. Machete’s narrative in particular makes possible productive discussions about Latinx immigration in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The film asks questions about the uses of technology as an instrument of social control, it demands a place at the table of free speech— even when that speech is deemed too dangerous— and it uncovers the rich ambivalences at the core of the U.S. relation to its Latinx immigrant subjects.

Notes 1.

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4.

William Orchard also sees Machete as a Latinx futurist text. In “Machete Don’t Text,” Orchard “pursue[s] a different path for recuperating women and other protagonists as agents in the quest for justice” by “attending to the role that nonhuman object— especially various technologies— play in the formation of Latin@ assemblages” (223). One such example of the criminalization of immigrants, documented or undocumented, occurred in June 2018, when ICE agents arrested a sixty-two-year-old legal resident with the justification that he had a conviction record. His conviction occurred almost twenty years before and was for a misdemeanor, but he still met the “enforcement priority” requirement for criminal aliens as defined by ICE (Mervosh). For a complete summary and analysis of the ways in which different websites responded to the “Arizona trailer” and eventual release of Machete, see Wood. Although Coates refused to see Django Unchained, he also wrote in The Atlantic that films such as Django Unchained and Lincoln (2012) open new ways of thinking about race and slavery in the United States. He expressed that while he did not plan to see

5.

6.

Django Unchained, he considered the film as necessary for upsetting the conventional whitewashing of history: “I’m hoping we get more stories that are willing to do something different, more stories that are going to trouble our memory. My previous criticisms aside, I’m less concerned that all of those stories appeal to everyone. (The reviews so far are really good.) I just really hope Django (and Lincoln) clear some room for more of their kind” (Coates). My book Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican Identity in American Literature and Film examines the concept of ambivalence in the representation of Mexican identity in twentieth-century literature and film (Alonzo). In June 2018, NPR reported that the U.S. military’s immigrant recruitment program, Military Accession Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI), was experiencing delays in its strict vetting procedures, and that as a consequence, some immigrants serving in the U.S. military may be deported (Lawrence). The MAVNI fact sheet details that “about 5,000 legal permanent resident aliens (green card holders) enlist each year. Law ensures that the sacrifice of non-citizens during a time of national need is met with an opportunity for early citizenship, to recognize their contribution and sacrifice” (“Military Accessions”).

Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez. University of Texas Press, 2014. “Alex Jones on Machete and Possible Race War.wmv.” YouTube, uploaded by pickingoutnamessucks, May 16, 2010 [May 8, 2010], www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsbIL352Nh0. Alonzo, Juan J. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican Identity in American Literature and Film. University of Arizona Press, 2009. The American Conservative. “About Us.” www.theamericanconservative.com/about-us/. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. Brayton, Sean. “Razing Arizona: Migrant Labour and the ‘Mexican Avenger’ of Machete.” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 7, no. 3, 2011, pp. 275– 92. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Django Wars.” The Atlantic, Dec. 13, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment /archive/2012/12/the-django-wars/266215/. Curtis, Bryan. “Machete Stirs Immigration Debates: ‘Mexploitation’ at the Movies.” The Daily Beast, Aug. 31 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/machete-stirs-immigration-debates-mexploitation-at-the -movies. “Dr. Tommy Curry on Killing Whites.” YouTube, uploaded by Rob Redding, Dec. 27, 2012, www.you tube.com/watch?v=hzzzUhknV_o. Dreher, Rod. “Django’s Revenge Fantasy.” The American Conservative, Jan. 11, 2013, www.theamerican conservative.com/dreher/djangos-revenge-fantasy/. Dreher, Rod. “When Is It Okay to Kill Whites?” The American Conservative, May 8, 2017, www.the americanconservative.com/dreher/when-is-it-ok-to-kill-whites/. Dykes, Aaron, and Alex Jones. “‘Machete’ Producers Lied about Racist Bloodbath.” Prison Planet, Sept. 5, 2010, www.prisonplanet.com/%E2%80%98machete%E2%80%99-producers-lied-about -racist-bloodbath.html. Ealy, Charles. “Film Commission Denies Incentives for Robert Rodriguez’s ‘Machete.’ ” Austin360, Sept. 1, 2012 (originally published Dec. 8, 2010), www.austin360.com/entertainment/20120901 /film-commission-denies-incentives-for-robert-rodriguezs-machete. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. Ealy, Charles. “State Offices Faced Letter Campaign over ‘Machete’ Incentives.” Austin360, Sept. 24, 2012 (originally published Jan. 1, 2011), www.austin360.com/entertainment/20120924/state-offices -faced-letter-campaign-over-machete-incentives. Accessed Mar. 9, 2019.

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Ealy, Charles. “Will Rodriguez’s ‘Machete’ Get Texas Film Incentives?” Austin360, Sept. 1, 2012 (originally co-published with Matthew Odam Aug. 28, 2010), www.austin360.com/entertainment /20120901/will-rodriguezs-machete-get-texas-film-incentives. Accessed Mar. 9, 2019. Ellis, Ralph. “Border Patrol Agent Kills Undocumented Woman in Texas.” CNN, May 24, 2018, www .cnn.com/2018/05/23/us/undocumented-immigrant-killed-by-officer/index.html. “Film and Television Projects.” Texas Film Commission, https://gov.texas.gov/film/page/miiip_filmtv. Accessed January 22, 2019. Harris, Aisha. “Conservatives Freak Out About Django Unchained.” Slate, Dec. 19, 2012, www.slate .com/blogs/browbeat/2012/12/19/django_unchained_and_racism_drudge_report_rehashes _tarantino_n_word_flap.html. Holden, Stephen. “Growl, and Let the Severed Heads Fall Where They May.” The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/movies/03machete.html. Ingle, Zachary. “The Border Crossed Us: Machete and the Latino Threat Narrative.” Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas Press, 2015, pp. 157– 74. Knowles, Harry. “A Family-Friendly ‘Machete’? What do You Mean No Race War? & a Secret Frazetta Project??” Exclusive Robert Rodriguez Interview. Ain’t It Cool News, May 19, 2010, www.aint itcool.com/node/45169. Kolowich, Steve. “What Is a Black Professor in America Allowed to Say?” The Guardian, Aug. 3, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/03/what-is-a-black-professor-in-america-allowed -to-say-tommy-j-curry. Kopan, Tal. “DHS: 2,000 Children Separated from Parents at the Border.” CNN, June 16, 2018, www .cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/dhs-family-separation-numbers/index.html. Lawrence, Quil. “Noncitizens Recruited for an Army Program Are at Risk for Deportation.” NPR Morning Edition, June 12, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/06/12/619109956/non-citizens-recruited-for -an-army-program-are-at-risk-for-deportation. Lee, David. “Texas Court Tosses ‘Machete’ Funding Fight.” Courthouse News Service, Feb. 2, 2016, www.courthousenews.com/texas-court-tosses-machete-funding-fight/. Lovegrove, Jamie. “Court: State Can Deny Funds for ‘Machete’ Producers.” Texas Tribune, Jan. 29, 2016, www.texastribune.org/2016/01/29/court-denies-grant-appeal-machete-producers/. “Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) Recruitment Pilot Program.” Fact Sheet, dod .defense.gov/news/mavni-fact-sheet.pdf. Accessed January 22, 2019. Mervosh, Sarah. “A Legal Resident, an Arrest by ICE and Father’s Day in Jail.” The New York Times, June 17, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/legal-resident-arrested.html. Orchard, William. “Machete Don’t Text: From Genre Textualities to Media Networks in Machete.” Aztlán, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 221– 35. Ramírez, Catherine. “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin.” Aztlán, vol.  33, no.  1, 2002, pp. 185– 94. Rashotte, Ryan. “Good Gringos, Bad Hombres: The Postlapsarian Films of Mel Gibson.” The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2018, pp. 231– 41. Rodriguez, Robert, director. “Arizona Trailer.” Internet Movie Database, May 5, 2010, www.imdb.com /title/tt0985694/videoplayer/vi1947666201?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_2. Sattin, Samuel. “‘Django Unchained’s’ Secret Political Triumph.” Salon, Jan.11, 2013, www.salon.com /2013/01/11/django_unchaineds_secret_triumph/. Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program. May 30, 2017, incentivetofilm.steffanieagnew.com. Accessed February 15, 2019. @realDonaldTrump (Donald J. Trump). “Democrats are the problem . . .” Twitter, June 19, 2018, twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1009071403918864385. Whittaker, Richard. “Gov. Perry Signs Film Incentives Bill into Law.” Austin Chronicle, May 1, 2009, www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2009-05-01/774334/. Wood, Marina. “Machete Improvises: Racial Rhetoric in Digital Reception of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54, Fall 2012, www.ejumpcut.org /archive/jc54.2012/MWoodMachete/index.html.

Young, Michael K. “Affirming Our Values.” Office of the President, Texas A&M University, May 17, 2017, president.tamu.edu/messages/affirming-our-values.html. Young, Michael K. “Standing for Our Core Values.” Office of the President, Texas A&M University, May 10, 2017, president .tamu.edu/messages/standing-for-our-core-values .html?_ga=2.2288 69972.910724073.1529374924-209522175.1515868259.

Filmography

E t hnic Av enge rs

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. Directed by Robert M. Young, American Playhouse, 1982. The Birth of a Nation. Directed by D.W. Griffith, David W. Griffith Corporation, 1915. Born in East L.A. Directed by Cheech Marin, Universal Studios, 1987. Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Weinstein Company/Columbia Pictures, 2012. El Mariachi. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Columbia Pictures, 1992. Grindhouse. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, Dimension Films, 2007. Inglorious Basterds. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Universal Pictures, 2009. Lincoln. Directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures, 2012. Machete. Directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez, 20th Century Fox, 2010. Machete Kills. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2013.

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PART IV Latinx Futurities

Chapter 12

BORDER SECURITIES, DRONE CULTURES, AND ALEX RIVERA’S SLEEP DEALER Camilla Fojas

The difference between science fiction and science is timing. —COLONEL CHRISTOPHER B. CARLILE, DIRECTOR OF THE UAS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, FORT RUCKER, ALABAMA

Science fiction has a great power and potential to take the world that seems natural and normal around us and make it absurd and unstable. — ALEX RIVERA, DIRECTOR OF SLEEP DEALER

The U.S. Southwest resonates with fantasies of the Old West of freedom and mobility and simple moral values of good and bad where the freewheeling cowboy roams unhindered across the West and with little regard to the boundaries of nation or civilization. The TV show Westworld exploits this fascination with the southwestern borderlands during the settling of the West from the vantage of a highly technologized future. “Westworld,” a southwestern theme park framed by rock formations iconized during the golden age of the Western, is populated by robot-hosts who cater to the colonial desires of its vacationing visitors. The hosts are mere “code” whose labor, controlled “off-world” by programmers, is to enact the exploitative fantasies of the vacationers without complaint or consciousness of injury. The future of labor is robotic non-consciousness, pure data in human form, controlled off-site by programmers who monitor and surveil this world with total omniscience— in a vantage much like that of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone. The latter is a key part of the border surveillance apparatus, the tip of the spear of empire, and its organizing symbol. The southwestern borderlands are the icon and metonym of the nation, deeply embedded in the history of genocide and extractive capitalism while representing a future of complete social control and surveillance. The border is the theater of this future. The border is the future as much as it is the past of the Western lore of the United States. The southern frontier engages both temporalities across 237

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diverse narratives and imaginaries about the border and migration, from news stories to reality TV, fictional TV and filmic narratives, and military future maps of drone-enforced security along and beyond U.S. borders. The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a military workshop of technologized control and mass surveillance, of robots and drones. Border history is U.S. history, a mythopoetic past of chaotic extremes and racial conflict that is deeply embedded in the cultural unconscious. Along the future border, drones are the new frontier cowboys: imperious, omniscient, and hypermobile. Drones, UAVs— or UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicles) if they are armed— and RPAs (remotely piloted aerial vehicles) are piloted remotely from the ground, often very far away from their flight path. Drones are the master symbol of the surveillance apparatus at the border comprised of fixed, mobile, portable, and scalable pieces within a multi-agency security regime. They are one of the technologies that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) describe as a “force multiplier.” Moreover, the U.S. military prefers to use variations of the term “unmanned” rather than “drone” to highlight and forecast a future of complete automation (Martin and Steuter xi). They, to borrow the language of the CBP 2020 strategic plan, help extend the “zone of security” and “transcend the physical borders of the United States” (CPB 3). Paradoxically, they enforce borders as they transgress and defy them. Drones are part of a plan to “increase situational awareness” and expand mobility for “nimble and flexible deployment” to the “highest risk regions in the border environment,” often with great extravagance through blatant disregard for efficiency or cost considerations (CPB 20, 23). The extravagance of drones has various tributaries of meaning in relation to the ongoing low-intensity conflict or war on drugs and migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. The drone, particularly the Predator B, is a sign of excess related to the exaggerated affects of an anxious security state always at the ready for a preemptive strike. It signals the profligacy of Department of Homeland Security spending on a technology that far exceeds the security outcomes at the border (Nixon). And it is a sign of the surplus of U.S. wars in which the border is the repository of the excess technology and human capital of foreign conflicts. The drone signals the state of permanent war, one that is both domestic and foreign at once. In speculative fictions, military strategic plans, border and immigration policy, air force recruitment videos, and CBP future maps, from dystopic to utopic imaginaries, the drone signals a future of complete surveillance, total information awareness, and control of global mobility. The borderlands metonymize the interior and entirety of the nation as a laboratory of security techniques and procedures. Control of the perimeter presages control of the

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nation. Power and dominion belong to those who manage the mobility of migrant populations through aerial robots and various other technologies. These bots promise omnipotence and clairvoyance by capturing information about the threat and enabling forecasting and prediction within a region deemed an abyss of knowledge and the unconscious of the nation. The border drone is the future of security. The future of security is not blockades and barriers but total information awareness of and arbitrary control over mobility along with the power to assert or recognize borders at will. Cultural producers and makers resignify the drone and artistic aerial forms as cultural icons of a borderlands culture of mobility, geographical flexibility, and transnational encounter. In an interview, Alex Rivera calls drones the “meme of our time” (Paulson). He describes drones as the “crystallization of transnational dynamics” and links their mobility to other forms of time and space compression and flexibility like telepresence and telecommuting. These metaphors are literalized in the subject of the undocumented migrant who is “here physically but not legally” (Paulson). In his LowDrone project (with Angel Nevarez), he grafts the lowrider— an icon of Chicanx culture— onto the UAV to create a fabulous and culturally specific intervention onto the border surveillance apparatus. In the installation of this project, these artistically rendered objects would fly near the border fence on Mexican terrain and goad the border patrol agents on the other side. In their ostentatious and highly visible appearance, they defy their low profile and often undetectable drone kin. In another drone installation (Memorial over General Atomics), Rivera uses actual bones as parts of the vehicle to incorporate the vestiges of death into the technology of the robot. In Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), the future takes place along the border. The borderlands are a landscape of U.S. colonial and imperial ventures, a workshop of globalization and security techniques and technologies, a terrain of ecological degradation, of racial conflict and gender and sexual violence. The border of Sleep Dealer does not erase the past to showcase the future but brings these two temporalities together, foregrounding a vital critique of the fiction of modern notions of linear progress. Old technology is the basis for new DIY hardware while associating the Global South with hacker culture and the Global North with regimes of networked power linking consumer entertainment and global corporations backed by a state security apparatus. The power of the commoner, member of the commons, and migrant workers emerges in historical forms of collectivity and association— that is, not through mediated forms or digital networks. Organic forms of association and organizing occur on the ground with direct encounter contesting the future imaginary of the drone security regime.

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In Sleep Dealer, drones are aerial gods that exact the punishment of the death penalty without due process. The storyline follows a group of interconnected characters drawn together in some cases by their virtual linkages. The main character, Memo, lives in a remote village in Mexico where he hacks into a secure network to spy on government military operations in the United States. In a story inflected with the history of campesino struggles in the Americas, Memo’s family’s land and its natural resource, water, has been ceded and privatized by corporate powers who sell back the water to the family at astronomical rates. Memo hacks into the government site that puts water activists like his father under surveillance and keeps track of their water holdings in government protected sites, revealing a clear corporate-military alliance. Memo is targeted as a security risk and subject to a drone strike that incinerates his father, initiating his forced migration north to Tijuana to seek work to support his family. Ironically, this and other drone attacks are part of a reality TV show upon which Memo’s brother is fixated. This scenario recalls events in Central America in the 1980s when paramilitary attacks protecting landholder interests forced entire populations from their native lands to the north in Mexico and the United States— reflected in the film El Norte (1983). And it echoes similar stories of economic exile from debt-addled Mexico during the same era, phobically depicted in Hollywood fare like The Border (1982) or Borderline (1980). Drones in Sleep Dealer are operated by a single pilot— unlike the actual operation of military UAVs that employ a team of people. This drone future does not include automation of piloting or targeting. While this may anticipate a different future from that imagined by the U.S. military, it squares with the storyline’s emphasis on the role and meaning of human agency in the future of the border and the regimes of technologized labor. The pilot reflects the military legacy as employer of marginalized groups, particularly Latinxs. The latter find themselves at war with those who share their heritage and history, such is the case for the entire border security apparatus in which Latinxs build, manage, and secure the borderlands against brown invaders from the Global South— including migrants from Mexico, India, Africa, the Arab world, and Central and South America. For instance, the entire cast of the docu-reality series about border patrol agents, Bordertown: Laredo (A&E), is Latinx, which reflects the larger reality of border patrol personnel. The confrontation of Memo and the Latino drone pilot, Rudy Ramírez (Jacob Vargas), explores this intra-racial yet imperial dynamic. Memo and Rudy have commonalities based in shared histories and ethnic heritage that encourages Rudy to explore a past mapped across the space of the border. The actor who plays Rudy, Jacob Vargas, evokes an intertextual history of border media with a long resume as a main player in Latinx cinema and Hollywood

Guest Work as Ghost Work Curtis Marez finds that migrant labor practices in the California agricultural region might be associated more with a primitive past than the future, much like the small town in Mexico that Memo and his family originate that might be associated with pre-digital culture. Yet from these spaces emerges technologically enhanced transformative practice, for Memo through his DIY hacking skills, and Marez shows how farmworkers use media and visual practice to interrupt the dominant agribusiness narrative. Sleep Dealer, he notes, might be included in the farmworker media archive for its similarity to the farm-to-empire narrative of Star Wars (1977). Memo, like Luke Skywalker, travels from humble beginnings on his family farm to the center of the empire to aid the Rebel Alliance. Sleep Dealer evokes repressed aspects of the Star

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border film and television— from Mi Vida Loca / My Crazy Life (1993), My Family (1995), and Traffic (2000) to the border TV show Kingpin (2003). Transnational linkages represented by Rudy and other transborder figures is a key component of border media, specifically border cinema; it brings into conversation those in the Global South with those living in the Global North, much like an earlier version of this interlocution in the MexicanChicano cinematic collaboration of Raíces de Sangre (1978). Border media connect those who move between and among borders that are linguistic, ethnic, and geographic, and, in this case, it exposes the integration of the military industrial complex with networked digital cultures that form the basis of global capitalism. It shows how this integration generates new forms of labor. The condition of migration is highly mediated and commodified, the source material of a number of ancillary products. For example, on the bus north, Memo meets Luz, a writer who traffics in stories about the marginalized population in the border zone of Tijuana. He recounts his tragic story, which she promptly turns into a downloadable commodity. The story links Memo to the drone pilot who killed Memo’s father. The pilot is Luz’s first consumer of the Memo line of nonfiction. He buys into her site to assuage his guilt and find a way to make amends. Meanwhile, Luz deepens her intimacy with Memo— whose name is a homonym and root for memory— to mine his memory for more marketable stories. Memo’s work occurs on the same register for each of his two “bosses”; in both cases his unconscious is an exploitable resource as a store of both memory and of mental labors. Memory, as history, is key to excavating these connections. As Rudy indulges the consumption of Memo’s stories, he is piecing together a personal history to memorialize the man he killed, Memo’s father. He is compelled to cross the border to find aspects of his own history.

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Wars mythopoesis to amplify the cultural heritage of labor struggles. Indeed, Sleep Dealer is about new forms of labor and association. Rivera describes it as a “flash forward” on U.S. labor and immigration policy in which borders are closed, but cybernetically the United States continues to receive all the work without the workers (Marez 1). Though the film draws on the Star Wars storyline, it is an outgrowth of Rivera’s initial short film Why Cybraceros? (1997), itself a remake of a 1959 short-term agricultural labor program promotional film, Why Braceros? Rivera’s film is a critical retort to Bracero boosterism, it shows how short-term labor programs dehumanize and instrumentalize workers in the service of capital expansion in the North. Also set in a speculative future, the novel Lunar Braceros 2125– 2149 (Sánchez and Pita) moves the story of borderland migrant workers into the not so distant future of 2125, when braceros are required for lunar transport of toxic and other forms of waste from the earth. The braceros are also technologically proficient “hands-on workers who [can] adapt to changing lunar situations” and are “capable of solving unforeseen problems” (Sánchez and Pita 6). The novel, narrated by Lydia, recounts the past of a world that takes place in the future within “The Great Political Restructuring” that created the new nation-state of Cali-Texas is comprised of an integration of former northern Mexican states (Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, and Baja California) and former U.S. southwestern states (Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, and Nevada) and former U.S. states in the Pacific Rim (Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawai‘i). And in a critique of trade agreements that would consolidate U.S. economic hegemony, this new alliance emerges from “transnational agri-business corporations and the four big bio-techs, companies that controlled anything and everything that had to do with technology transfer, informatics and any kind of power generation, bio-fuel, nuclear or otherwise” (Sánchez and Pita 6– 7). Also the historical references suggest a circularity of history and inevitable return of issues besetting marginalized labor, including the persistence and expansion of coloniality, precarity, and the co-opting of political coalitions by corporate capitalism. For Marez, the dystopia of Sleep Dealer recalls agribusiness fantasies of complete automation and the elimination of workers. The corporate desire for mechanization and technological innovation signals a desire for labor control and discipline as much as it endeavors to eliminate the worker. Sleep Dealer imagines a different future for work, one that is not automated but in which the human is a resource for the automation of work. Human labor is not rendered useless or unnecessary; instead, corporations seek new ways of mining labor so that consciousness itself is commandeered and deployed through cybernetic networks. Rivera notes that this idea is about the intensifi-

Thus we can see directly here how a particular means of labor is transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine and his own labor power devalued as a result of this

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cation of alienation for racialized migrant workers: “In Sleep Dealer I focus on the impulse toward alienation that is inherent in the system of immigration: wanting work without the physical presence of brown bodies. I use the figure of the robot as a worker without a soul and body as [an] exemplary, glowing, incandescent distillation of this impulse” (Aldama 377). This alienation, the ceding of consciousness by powerful corporations, targets and impacts racialized populations in a manner congruent to and abetted by the drone strikes featured in the film. Drones epitomize the fear of this Robocop future, particularly one that is not remote controlled but automated and automatic. The automation of labor means coopting labor associated with brown bodies. The science fictional approach to labor and automation recalls the future world of Bladerunner (1982), in which work is performed by replicants who are defined less racially than by their place in a social order that privileges humans. The human-machine border must be more firmly established to the elimination or complete subordination of machine to human. The tests to delineate human from replicant recall the Turing test and center around questions related to memory and its attendant emotions. Memories are the most valuable human asset. In Sleep Dealer, memory itself is capitalized, accompanied by the capitalization of brown bodies. The border is a site of projections both past and present, an archeologically rich and highly mediated zone. The mainstream white-collar anxiety about automation is about the downgrading or elimination of positions. On the border, the twin fears of globalization and subsequent increased migration and computer automation results in a change in labor conditions. For example, in the 1982 film Borderline, a couple of buddy cop border patrol agents, once freewheeling cowboys in command of their borderland territory beat, are threatened with a reduction of their duties to that of a desk job, remotely controlling the technologies of border security like sensors and cameras. For those at the bottom of the labor market, work is not ceded by machines, but rather bodies become machines and labor is produced as machinic operation. The mechanization of the human body in a postglobalized world recalls the women of Maquilopolis (2006) who turn their factories’ labors into a choreographed performance. The worker’s relation to the machine is key to the Marxian critique of capitalism. Karl Marx describes the experience of automation in which the body is a “limb” of the machine, subordinated to it and subsequently devalued. The machine carries greater value by virtue of the worker’s ontological status as “capital”:

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transposition. Hence, we have the struggle of the worker against machinery. What used to be the activity of the living worker has become that of the machine. Thus, the appropriation of his labor by capital is bluntly and brutally presented to the worker: capital assimilates living labor into itself “as though love possessed its body.” (Marx 140)

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In the pre-digital era, the worker is replaced or devalued in relation to the machine. In speculative fictions, this relationship is collapsed; the worker is literally the machine insofar as the machine is capital. The racialized underclasses are capital— their bodies are the origin and their minds are the medium of capital. For Marx, the relation is one of infusion, “as though love possessed its body,” whereas science fiction, from The Matrix (1999) to Sleep Dealer, explores the human as capital whose body and consciousness are mined for their energies. Sleep Dealer examines this speculative collapse in terms of the relationship of the United States to the Global South more generally: in addition to workers in Mexico, there is a South Asian call center worker. It prophesies not simply the automation of work but something more dire, particularly for workers from the Global South. It forecasts the total commandeering of consciousness by digital networks run by corporations and secured by the violent state apparatus. In a literalization of Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonialism as colonizing minds, consciousness is quite literally colonized and mined as a natural resource. The storyline ostensibly grapples with nativism and imperial chauvinism in the demand of work without the worker. But it is also about the automation of racial capitalism, in which migrant workers from the Global South (in conditions very much like undocumented workers living in the United States) expend their life in labor without the entitlements of state belonging, including benefits, basic legal protections, labor rights, representation through taxation, and due process— in that they are subject to the death penalty via drone strike without due process. The film marks a frontier of capitalism in which racialized bodies in their totality, their energies and psychic capacities, are capital for the Global North. Sleep Dealer is an example of a number of interventions on the border as a future zone within science fiction— stories like Westworld take place in the “Old West” in a manner that thematizes proximity to the southern border and to Mexico and Mexicans (and this is even more overt in the novel Lunar Braceros). The borderlands are an archive of border histories and fictions. Sleep Dealer presents a different contribution to this archive, one in which border security is embedded in entertainment culture, and laboring bodies work not in or for media but as media. These bodies broker the fantasy of a

He uncovered the drone node and threw the faded code into the twitching matrix that it contained. At first it lay likely on the surface of the ultrafluid, appearing to imbibe none of its algorithms.

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borderless world while the same bodies enact the violence required to secure this world. This story brings forth neglected histories of labor, though for a contemplation of women’s or sexual dissident histories, we might look to Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (2001) or the collectively made documentary mentioned earlier, Maquilopolis. In Sleep Dealer, the military surveillance associated with the border is part of entertainment media while it extends to commercial laboring networks. Eventually, Memo and Rudy are able to work together to undermine the security regime protecting neoliberal capitalism. Rudy commandeers a military drone, enabling Memo’s village to regain access to the privatized water. The future is dystopic but not foregone. Along the border, drones function as an aerial control and protection of neoliberal capitalism. The security state is symbolized by and legible through the Predator drones deployed along the border. These camera-ready, allseeing, and covert recording machines fresh from Middle East war zones frame the migrant as an enemy of the state. The hypermobile and omniscient drone renders the migrant a permanent target. Though it is not the primary technology of security along the border, the drone is an emblem of surveillance culture, particularly for how it combines the domains of military, commercial, entertainment, and carceral-policing cultures while it seems drawn from a science fiction universe. Daniel Greene locates the cultural work of the drone in the anthropomorphism of “drone vision” or in “seeing like a drone” (234). When we see what the drone sees, we intuit its desires or see how it operates through the kind of “target rich” environment that it seeks (234). Drone vision signals the visual management of the Global South. Along the border these robots are a technology of sovereignty, an imperial optic that conflates alien, terrorist, enemy combatant, and migrant as equal targets of drone surveillance. The drone future is imagined otherwise in Ricardo Dominguez’s “Dronologies,” which features a science fiction reworking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” published in 1837. The autonomous and armed drone future has come to pass and these robots are now obsolete. The science fictional Dr. Heidegger is a “synth-bio” who seeks help in the final stage of his QF-4 experiment to resurrect zombie drones that run “lethal autonomy algorithms exceeding all human capacity” and were put to rest fifty-five years prior. The fictional interlude in the critical text captures the lapsed humanness of the obsolete technology as Dr. Heidegger reanimates the dead machinery:

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Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible; the crushed and dried networks stirred and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson. As if the drone node were reviving from a deathlike slumber, the slender systems and connections of power foliage became green, on, and there was the drone node of more than half a century lost looking as fresh as when GA [General Atomic] had first given it to Dr. Heidegger. It was scarce full blown for some of its delicate red security overrides curled modestly around its moist nano_bios. Within which, two or three switch codes were sparkling. (Dominguez 179–80)

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This work imagines a more complex anthropomorphism of the drone. The drone truly lives, not when it is imbued with life and animism, but when it is given death and, in dying, lives on even beyond death as the undead. In this way, Dominguez’s intertext calls upon both Heideggers, the scientist of the short story and the philosopher of critical discourse on technology. Dominguez captures, however unwittingly, the future logic of Heidegger’s treatise on technology, particularly in the latter’s prophesy of the inversion of being and nonbeing accorded human and nonhuman, in which human thought becomes machine-like, calculative and machines become human in their affective responses and engagements— as in Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the robots in Westworld. Dominguez plays up the ambiguities between human and machine and between fact and fiction. The effect is a confusion of modes that calls into question the conceptual transformation wrought by technology. He, along with fellow artist Alan Paul, staged a drone crash on the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) campus, recalling a similar crash off the coast of San Diego that temporarily shut down the border drone program. These staged events, which take place in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border and Tijuana, spectacularly evoke the moral, social, and political issues around drone use along the border— including the announcement of a fake panel discussion on “the topic of drone use on the U.S.-Mexico border” that would feature UCSD faculty and representatives from “U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security” (Dominguez 191). The crash was readily interpreted as actual, a perception abetted by the recurrent news media coverage of border drone crashes. In fact, drone operations, citing these crashes, are marked by excess, of affect and expenditure, thus exceeding actual security needs. Domestic defense along U.S. borders, of which the U.S.-Mexico border is paradigmatic, extends well beyond continental geographic borders as it emerges in all points of entry, including airports and seaports. The U.S. geo-

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Toward a Transfrontera-LatinX Aesthetic: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera” Latino Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2017, pp. 373– 80. CPB (U.S. Customs and Border Protection). Vision and Strategy 2020: U.S. Customs and Border Protection Strategic Plan. www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CBP-Vision-Strategy-2020 .pdf. Accessed Jan. 22, 2019.

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graphical border reaches one hundred miles inward beyond its limit so that border checkpoints appear as far inward as Falfurrias, Texas. The border expands, thickening and calcifying as the surveillance apparatus becomes more buoyant and flexible. The border is the future of security. The borderlands military security apparatus and its corporate supply chain exhibit their dominance over agribusiness, since the latter supports open borders and the free flow of underpaid labor from the south. As Todd Miller discusses, the border security apparatus dovetails with the carceral complex that includes hundreds of detention centers, many privately run, making big business of arresting, detaining, incarcerating, and deporting undocumented migrants (152– 53). Miller characterizes the system concisely as one energized by extravagant fears: “The border security market is in an ‘unprecedented boom period,’ to use the words of one recent forecast, and the more danger, real or perceived, the better business has become” (154– 55). The industry is fueled by the production of migrants as the objects of excessive fear. It creates security in the form of assurances of border protection and jobs in the border patrol industrial complex. In fact, CBP, under the Department of Homeland Security, is the largest federal law enforcement agency, employing thousands under its auspices. When we watch border security shows like Border Wars or Homeland Security USA, we are complicit participants in this system— we identify with and even desire the excesses of empire. We become part of this pervasive security apparatus and its future aspirations, as drones in an expanding hive. The drone future is archeologically layered. While it promises automation, particularly automated target recognition, it retains the mythos of the Old West and its conflicts. The Predator drones are emblems of border enforcement, extravagant signs of technological progress and efficiency that index cowboyesque border agents on the trail of outlaws. Together, human and machine enforce a regime of surveillance in which a racialized threat is targeted and classified as alien enemy or narco- terrorist. Predator agents and machines ultimately shape and control migration patterns. They shepherd border crossers toward dangerous borderlands desert and mountainous wilderness to face either death or defeat. Critical drone media interrupts this possible future, exposing the violence of the dronified empire and imagining transborder associations that resist the drone future.

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Dominguez, Ricardo. “Dronologies: Or Twice-Told Tales.” Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, edited by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 178– 94. Greene, Daniel. “Drone Vision.” Surveillance and Society, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 233– 49. Marez, Curtis. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Martin, Geoff, and Erin Steuter. Drone Nation: The Political Economy of America’s New Way of War. Lexington Books, 2017. Marx, Karl. The Grundisse. Edited by David McLellan. Harper and Row, 1971. Miller, Todd. “Border Patrol Capitalism: On the U.S.-Mexico border, the Border Security Industry Grows Alongside the Expanding Militarization of the Drug Wars” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, pp. 150– 56. Nixon, Ron. “Though Useful in War, Drones May Be Too Costly for Use Along U.S. Borders.” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2016, p. A15(L). U.S. History in Context, link .galegroup.com/apps/doc /A468680922/UHIC?u=viva_uva&xid=203fcd8d. Accessed Oct. 18, 2017. Paulson, Steve, interviewer. “The Meme of Our Time— Alex Rivera.” To the Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, Aug. 10, 2014, archive.ttbook .org/listen/78436. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. Rivera, Alex. Memorial over General Atomics // USA (aerial sculpture). 2012. Alex Rivera: Filmmaker/ Digital Artist, alexrivera.com/project/a-hex/. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. Rivera, Alex, and Angel Nevarez. LowDrone. Aerial sculpture, 2005, Lowdrone.com. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. Sánchez, Rosaura, and Beatrice Pita. Lunar Braceros 2125– 2149. Calaca Press, 2009.

Filmography

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Bladerunner. Directed by Ridley Scott, Warner Bros., 1982. The Border. Directed by Tony Richardson, Universal Pictures, 1982. Borderline. Directed by Jerrold Freeman, ITC Entertainment, 1980. Bordertown: Laredo. Created by Al Roker and C. Russell Muth, A&E, 2011. Border Wars. Created by Nicholas Stein, National Geographic, 2010– 15. Homeland Security USA. Created by Arnold Shapiro, ABC, 2009. Kingpin. Created by David Mills, NBC, 2003. Maquilopolis. Directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, California Newsreel, 2006. The Matrix. Directed by The Wachowski Brothers, Warner Bros., 1999. Mi Vida Loca / My Crazy Life. Directed by Allison Anders, Sony Pictures, 1993. My Family. Directed by Gregory Nava, New Line Cinema, 1995. El Norte. Directed by Gregory Nava, Cinecom International, 1983. Raíces de Sangre. Directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño. Azteca Films, 1978. Señorita extraviada. Directed by Lourdes Portillo, Xochitl Productions/Women Make Movies, 2001. Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera, Maya Entertainment, 2008. Star Wars. Directed by George Lucas, Lucasfilm, 1977. Traffic. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, USA Films, 2000. Westworld. Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, HBO, 2016– . Why Braceros? Council of American Growers, 1959. Why Cybraceros? Directed by Alex Rivera, 1997. YouTube, uploaded by Freewaves 3, Dec. 3, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr1eqKcDZq4. Accessed Mar. 10, 2019. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

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Chapter 13

TECHNO/MEMO The Politics of Cultural Memory in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer J. V. Miranda

You find yourself in a futuristic maquiladora. Wires connect a worker to a cyber network made up of high-tech equipment, telecommunication devices, and automated machinery. Against this mechanized background a worker carefully handles what appears to be an invisible object with measured movements. An oxygen mask obscures his face and renders him silent and expressionless. His robotic motions, and glossed-over eyes, leave you unsure if he is operating the machine or the machine is operating him. This man seems not-quite-human. Perhaps he is a cyborg? Or maybe even a zombie? But there is little time to process this masked figure as flashes of color take you into his mind. You are crossing over into a technological dreamscape. You begin to realize this dreamscape is activated by the man’s neural network— a network entangled with this cyber connection. It is at this point that you hear, in Spanish, the voice of Memo Cruz (the worker). He tells you that they call these factories “Sleep Dealers” because “if you work long enough, you collapse” (Sleep Dealer). Later you will learn that Memo virtually crosses the border (from Mexico into the United States) via this cyber connection in order to remotely operate a mechanized robot on a construction site. He is a migrant laborer. And it appears that the maquiladora of the future promises him nothing more than an extension and intensification of the present. This is the near-future world of director Alex Rivera’s science fiction film Sleep Dealer (2008).1 Since its release, Sleep Dealer has gained a cult following that Rivera credits to regular screenings at film festivals, critical praise, and scholarly attention.2 In just ten years, the film has gone from relatively unknown to being considered culturally significant for its treatment of genre fiction and its disturbing vision of immigration in the future (Rueda 334). For example, Lysa Rivera puts the film in dialogue with the history of Chicanx and borderland science fiction to argue that the film directly responds and critiques neoliberal policies post-NAFTA as an extension of colonial power structures under the premise of economic progress. Therefore, viewers are 249

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Figure 13.1 A migrant laborer, Memo Cruz, connected to a cyber network in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.

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“encouraged to decode this near-future dystopian” fiction though a colonial framework that pits the capital interests in the north against indigenous resistance (Rivera 426). William Anthony Nericcio and Thomas Prasch have also drawn on its use of sci-fi dystopian tropes to argue that the film disrupts and resists the constraints of genre. For Nericcio, the resistance displayed by the characters— as hackers who work within the system— relates to the way the film takes up the trope of a dystopian future “even as it remakes this tropic logic from the inside” (54). In other words, the repurposing of the trope becomes a way of disrupting the repetitive structure that defines the genre. Prasch, on the other hand, claims the film destabilizes conventions by relocating the sci-fi genre to an unfamiliar setting, specifically the Global South, and by finding its distribution in an independent film circuit (as opposed to popular sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars, which are produced for mass consumption) (56– 57).3 This focus on genre, specifically as a groundbreaking Latinx intervention, contributes to the growing interest in the film and is vital to understanding its aesthetic achievements. But as a Latinx speculative fiction that takes up the role technology plays in immigration, migrant labor, national security, and resource management, Sleep Dealer should also be considered for its critical treatment of culture and technology. Indeed, the film confronts one of the central paradoxes of modern technology— specifically, how technology is simultaneously the means through which humanity will realize its future even as it threatens to forever alter what it means to be human. In this way, the film pushes the

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viewer to examine this paradox as it relates to (im)migration and to those who are most vulnerable to the potentially destructive effects of technology. Addressing these effects, in her chapter in this volume, Camilla Fojas reads Sleep Dealer as a future world inhabited, regulated, and policed by robots (including drones), which act as a “technology of sovereignty.” Rivera himself connects the robot to the desire for control. In the case of Sleep Dealer, this desire for control is over what and who can and cannot be seen, which takes the form of migrant labor “without the presence of brown bodies” (Aldama 377). In providing a speculative narrative that imagines a technology capable of making this labor without presence possible, according to Andres Amerikaner, Sleep Dealer helps us better understand and “internalize technological change” as we reconsider our own relationship to technology (115). For Amerikaner, technology acts as a metaphor in Sleep Dealer that temporally “dislocates” the audience so that upon returning to the present, they will have a more acute perspective and be better able to confront exploitation (122). Building on Amerikaner’s point, this chapter explores the metaphorical, epistemological, and aesthetic implications of Rivera’s use of technology as it relates to cultural memory. This chapter will argue that Sleep Dealer imagines a future in which technology and memory are fused and entangled within the narrative, thus opening up the possibility for a “politics of cultural memory” to emerge.4 Central to this reading will be a rejection of technological determinism— which is often generically mapped onto dystopian and utopian narratives— and will instead follow subjects as they move with and through technologies while technologies move with and through them. In the case of Sleep Dealer, this means tracing the alienating effects of technology, such as those of the maquiladora, while also pointing out the persistence of cultural memory despite the violent dispossession and exploitation that is made possible by technologies of late capitalism. Cultural memory and technology, in this sense, do not stand in opposition. On the contrary, I hope to show how the persistence of cultural memory— which is the retention of a way of being— becomes entangled with technology, thus opening new pathways in which to imagine the expression and extension of Latinx cultural knowledge and production. Ultimately, this politics of cultural memory offers a crucial reminder that Latinx communities already have an existing cultural relationship with technologies, resources, and labor. The chapter will unfold in three sections. First, the discussion will turn to the psychic formations produced through the relationship between migration, modernity, and technology. Beginning with Daniel Venegas’s classic tale of migration, we will briefly contextualize Rivera’s narrative as it relates to modernity and the Bracero Program. For the protagonist, Memo, this

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will mean eventually becoming cyborg; or, in Rivera’s playful use of history, becoming cyber-bracero. Here, the focus will be on how technology both produces desire and acts as means for disciplining subjects. This section concludes with the suggestion that Sleep Dealers gestures beyond this technological determinism to embrace an epistemology that accounts for the entanglement of technology and cultural memory. Second, we will take a closer look at Rivera’s use of speculative technology as a metaphorical means for representing the intensification of exploitative labor practices as they arise from the antagonism between man and machine. Here, we consider the film in dialogue with Karl Marx’s “fragments on machines,” from his Grundrisse, in an effort to sketch the cinematic speculation on technological dispossession (or the role technologies play in dispossession). Of primary interest will be how technologies penetrate, move through, and appropriate natural resources as well as the physical body of the worker. In the latter case, we will see how technology directly assaults cultural and experiential memory. Finally, the chapter will conclude by addressing the tension between the aesthetics of filmmaking and the technological implications of this art form. To do this, I will look to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in order to ask if Sleep Dealer can be read through Benjamin’s emancipatory framework. For Benjamin, film can render visible the technological mediation of the subject that otherwise goes unnoticed in modern production and reproduction. In other words, cinema can teach us to read modernity at the sight of reproduction in order to imagine liberation from late capitalism. But when we trace cultural memory in Sleep Dealer, does it lead to emancipation? Or does Sleep Dealer, as a Latinx narrative and film, point toward the need for a new critical approach?

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Migration, Modernity, and Technological Desire/Discipline

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In Venegas’s fictional account of the migrant Don Chipote, which was serialized in Los Angeles’s Spanish-language newspaper El heraldo in 1928, the desire to leave Mexico for the United States begins with an informal conversation (Kanellos 1). Before this fateful conversation, we read that Don Chipote is a farmer “worn out from the daily grind” of agricultural work and struggling to feed his family after his crops have been devastated by the local population of “crows” (Venegas 21). Tired of “pok[ing] the ox’s ass,” a colorful metaphor of his lowly condition, Chipote is instantly receptive and easily persuaded by Pitacio who returns from the United States well dressed and speaking English (Venegas 21). Pitacio, seeking free food, tells Chipote that “the gringos appreciated me for what I was worth right from the get-go” and that he was well compensated for his labor (Venegas 22, 27). Upon hearing

Pitacio’s stories, Chipote’s dreams of “a harvest studded with glittering gold coins” become the dreams of going to the United States where he will make “himself a millionaire . . . before the cock crowed” (Venegas 22, 27, 30). As Venegas’s narrator points out, the “United States is full of these Pitacios,” who instead of telling the truth about the hardships and exploitation they experience in the United States, tell stories that rile up the desire of their countrymen (28). It is not long before Chipote sets out to transform himself from a Mexican farmer to a migrant laborer. His travels reveal a vast network of migrants and the means through which they survive and sustain themselves in the North. But when the promise of prosperity does not materialize, Chipote is left straying from his family and begins to lose touch with his Mexican culture. Chipote, with the urging of his family, eventually returns to his rancho where the “bitter adventure” of his travels would “unwind like a movie reel” (Venegas 160). That Chipote relates his story to modern cinema is telling since instead of returning to dreams of golden fields, he returns to dreams of the golden screen. With his desires stoked by stories of dignity, prosperity, and hope in the modern world, Venegas’s Don Chipote provides an important historical window into migration and how this became a cultural practice rooted in a desire for modernity. One example involves the stories told by transnational migrants and how these stories create a feedback loop of circulating information that contributes to dreams of leaving Mexico for the United States. This transnational population would increase significantly in the 1940s with the initiation of the Bracero Program, which formalized this feedback loop

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Figure 13.2 Memo hacking into a satellite that enables him to listen to conversations of maquiladora workers in Sleep Dealer.

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through national policies and arrangements. What had been primarily migrant knowledge and practices were now mediated by a bureaucratic and technical system. Building on the promise of migration, the program was premised on addressing the abusive practices suffered by migrant laborers by regulating that contracts guarantee competitive wages and that workers be provided adequate sanitary and free housing, affordable food prices, occupational insurance, and free transportation for returning to Mexico (Bracero History Archive). These contractual guarantees, which were often blatantly violated and ignored, were tied to a set of technical procedures such as registering at a recruitment center, undergoing screening processes, and being issued documentation (among others). The program, in other words, was designed to capture, regulate, enhance, and augment labor practices that were already occurring. In addition to expanding on existing knowledge and practices, the program offered a technical solution for managing U.S. anxieties and the fears associated with this transnational population. In fact, this workforce was screened before crossing the border, monitored during their stay, and returned once the work was done. Here the migrant was transformed into one of its modern iterations: “the guest worker.” But in adopting the Bracero Program, the United States also underwent a transformation. As the historian Deborah Cohen states, these policies “courted . . . those deemed ready for modernization” with the explicit goal that they would return to Mexico modern subjects (4). In other words, the United States was where modernity happened while Mexico remained premodern, and this geographical relationship was “built around human transformation from migration” (4). This process of modernization, through migration, reflects U.S. desires for a monitored, ordered, and disciplined migrant population that was willing to leave behind the past (which might include their families, homes, and way of life), embrace the future, and return when no longer needed. Sleep Dealer extends this historical context of migration by examining how desire and discipline continue to be determined by the entanglement of technology and cultural memory. We learn early on that Memo has a desire to move away from the family home that is largely driven by his fetish for technology. In a scene that echoes Chipote’s conversations with Pitacio, Memo taps into a satellite with a makeshift radio that allows him to overhear conversations between migrants and their families. These conversations demonstrate how the desire for migration is often produced and reinforced through storytelling. In one case, a woman describes how easy it was to find work once she was connected to the system. “I am already working,” she says (Sleep Dealer). Another man expresses amazement at advances in technological security, stating, “Your DNA is your password . . . anyone can connect”

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and “Tijuana has the fastest connections” (Sleep Dealer). These scenes speak to the continuation of an informal feedback loop operating within migrant networks, and for Memo, these conversations are accessed through technology while they simultaneously reinforce what he already believes about technology offering the means to becoming modern and venturing into the future. But if Memo sees technology and migration as the primary means for escaping the confines of his rural village, then he is blind to the discipline he will undergo in making this transition. Several early scenes between Memo and his father stage a conflict between the two men that touches on Memo’s lack of insight. We learn that his father remains committed to the transgenerational cultivation of a milpa, a complex set of agriculture practices that have been ongoing in southern Mexico for centuries. Memo sees this commitment as a lack of vision by his father who seems to be stuck in the past. This generational conflict positions the father as standing in the way of progress, since he refuses to accept a world fundamentally altered by technology. For Memo, he would need to break away from the father to move the family forward.5 This dynamic is complicated when Memo asks his father why they have not already left the milpa, and his father answers with a question of his own: “Well, let me ask you: is our future a thing of the past?” (Sleep Dealer). Slightly amused by the father’s paradoxical question, Memo laughs and says what his father proposes is impossible. This prompts his father to say, “We had a future. You’re standing on it. When they dammed up the river, they cut off our future” (Sleep Dealer). Unlike Memo, the father is able to account for the role technology plays in disciplining subjects to modern systems of regulation and economic exploitation while also making it impossible for them to continue their preexisting way of life. Or, put simply, technology is not only used to produce desires for a modern life but to discipline the modern subjects needed for capital exploitation. This exchange reveals the father’s nuanced challenge to the fetishization of technology. More importantly, Memo’s father does not reject speculation of the future. Instead, he suggests a complicated entanglement of cultural memory and ways of knowing and doing (or technology by another name) as a way of reframing what is possible. And although his father does not directly address modern technology, he embodies an epistemology whose technical features metaphorically cut across the past, present, and future. Here we can read the milpa, which remains a crucial agricultural practice in parts of Mexico and a defining feature of indigenous knowledge and life, as a metaphor for ongoing indigenous technology. Memo is incapable of understanding this connection to cultural memory, since for him his father’s way of life is discontinuous with the present. This leads him to say that his father “lived

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in his memories,” thus suggesting that his father could no longer imagine a future. But as the father made clear to Memo, epistemology is not separate from cultural memory. Therefore, Memo’s desire of becoming a cyber-bracero, of becoming modern, will mean undergoing the disciplinary process that will make him into a new subject. After all, and as Venegas pointed out long ago, moving from a preexisting way of life to the modern world forecloses the possibility of simply returning to a previous way of life since the psyche of the subject is altered and re-formed by this process. Even Memo’s father is shaped by his dreams of once fertile fields— a desire produced and associated with disciplinary processes of an agricultural way of life. Each in their own way, Memo, his father, and Chipote, point us toward an entangled epistemology made of culture, memory, and technology.

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Penetrating and Appropriating the Technologies of Capital

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To approach this entangled epistemology, we should note that technology often evokes a sense of futurity. The technological object, in this sense, acts as a metaphor of what is to come— it is, put simply, a presence that speaks of a destiny. But what if we consider technologies historically? Even more, what if we leave the high-tech spaces associated with modernity and turn to natural spaces such as those associated with “underdeveloped” ecologies and the human body? Here, too, technological wonders cut across and shape cultural practices. And, as noted above, a full index of these technologies would necessarily have to include indigenous techniques for securing and managing their resources (and their way of life) alongside modern technical practices and structures. For Memo, and his family, the technology most responsible for transforming the family’s way of life is a dam. The dam not only restricts the local river but makes it possible to privatize the primary source of water in the region. Therefore, and as a technological means for dispossession, the dam penetrates the environment in an act of violent appropriation that jeopardizes local farming practices that depend on the flow of water. Rivera intensifies this situation by creating a world where resource management is taken up by global corporations. Working in tandem with security firms, these corporations assure that natural resources remain commodities. When Memo and his family need water, they must travel to a high-security area of the dam where they are required to feed money to an automated vending machine to collect water. Despite this dispossession of resources and the potential loss of a way of life that comes about through the technological damming of the river, Memo embraces technology as a hacker whose pirate radio lets him enter an other-

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wise inaccessible global network (even if only crudely). In a narrative twist, it will be an interception of a security communication line— the same company, Del Rio Security, that secures the local dam— by his pirate radio that causes his family’s home to be identified as an “aquaterrorist” hideout. We soon discover that a rookie drone operator, Rudy Ramirez, from San Diego, California, was the one who noticed the intercept and has been scheduled to eliminate the threat. Rudy’s mission will be televised, on a program eerily entitled DRONES, the next day. Watching the program while visiting nearby family, Memo and his brother are shocked and terrified when they realize their home is the target, and they rush to save their family. But before they can warn their father, he is eviscerated by a precision laser from Rudy’s drone. Despite becoming a victim to the violence mediated by technology— both instantly in the form of a military drone and slowly in the form of the dam— Memo remains intrigued by the promise of technology and leaves home. The penetration and appropriation of natural resources made possible by the dam prefigures the neural implants known as “nodes.” It is not until Memo leaves his home to seek work in the North that this technology becomes more central to the story. The first person he meets on his journey is a young writer, Luz, who uses her nodes to digitally capture her interactions with Memo. She then takes these captured memories to create stories that she tries to sell through a content provider called TruNode. Eventually, Memo learns that Luz is a coyotek, a playful take on the present-day coyote who facilitates travel across the border, and she uses her connections and knowledge to implant Memo with nodes. This allows Memo to work in the United States remotely by plugging into a virtual cyber network where he controls a robot on the other side of the border. So while we follow Memo on a few occasions to a weaponized border wall, equipped with automated cameras and artillery, it is not the wall that ultimately closes the border (contrary to what recent U.S. rhetoric would have us believe). Instead, it is the ability of U.S. corporations and businesses to exploit migrant labor remotely via a cyber network that closes the border. From the outset, Memo makes clear his desire to connect to this cyber network, stating that with nodes he can connect his “nervous system to the other system . . . the global economy” (Sleep Dealer). Nodes, then, not only act as a way to commodify memory but also enable a mechanized system of transnational labor that no longer requires the physical crossing of borders. Here, the penetration of hardware into the bodies of Memo and Luz emphasize the biotechnical means necessary for creating mechanized forms of production and circulation. Marx, in Grundrisse, attempts to work through the antagonisms produced by such mechanized production, suggesting the agency of the worker increasingly becomes determined by automated

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Figure 13.3 Memo having nodes implanted into his arms by Luz, who is a coyotek (or futuristic coyote) in Sleep Dealer.

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processes. Marx posits an “automatic system of machinery” (italics in the original) as the ideal means of production in part because it creates the conditions for workers to be “cast merely as its [the machinery’s] conscious linkages” (692). Sleep Dealer positions Memo, and his fellow cyber-workers, as surviving within a similar system where working hours are virtually restricted— in both mind and body— to the conscious capacities necessary to operate robotic machinery across national boundaries. By rendering this bodily penetration explicit, the film imagines how technology might be used to intensify (and extend) the “technical composition” of present-day capital and the appropriation of the worker into an automated system. It is in this appropriation of the worker, as a conscious and social being, that Sleep Dealer pushes us to reconsider the role that memory plays in technological systems. Again following Marx, an automated system means the worker ceases to be seen as a source for “direct human labor” and instead becomes the source for “general productive power” by lending to the machine his knowledge and mastery over nature (705). In other words, it is the knowledge and memory of the worker— less so than his physical body— that is appropriated and turned to the purposes of capital accumulation. Memo and Luz, although in very different circumstances, find their knowledge appropriated by the virtual network and struggle with the loss of agency and self that comes from this labor. Luz warns Memo about this alienation while installing his nodes: “When you connect to the other side, your body hooks into a machine. It’s a two-way connection. Sometimes you control the machine. And sometimes the machine controls you” (Sleep Dealer). Luz herself

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experiences this loss of agency while attempting to narrate her memories. Her narration is regularly interrupted by TruNode software that detects her dishonesty and insists that she tell the truth about what she has experienced and felt. The machine, then, does not only appropriate the knowledge of the workers but shapes the social body of the worker through its redirection, repurposing, and reframing of their memory. To be part of the global economy (to connect), then, means risking that your memory will be appropriated and that your social sense of self will be altered by automated processes. Reading the film as a political critique of connectivity in the age of late capitalism, critics have suggested that Sleep Dealer gestures toward new articulations for creating collective agency and the formation of a commons. Fiona Jeffries argues that Rivera’s cyborg laborer challenges established notions of connectivity, which associate the ability to connect with participatory governance and capital accumulation, by showing how connection acts as “a site of exploitation, antagonism, and reappropriation of the communicative and material commons” (34– 35). According to Jeffries, then, Memo’s transition from a farmer to a cyborg laborer mirrors a transition from material to immaterial labor. Moreover, this transition provides the narrative momentum that will eventually lead Memo, Luz, and Rudy to connect and resist capital exploitation. By connecting everyone, following Jeffries, the virtual network creates a new class of workers capable of resisting capital through the creation of a virtual commons. Taking up this question of the commons, Luis Martín-Cabrera argues against reading the film as an endorsement of immaterial labor. Instead, he suggests that Sleep Dealer draws attention to the limits of immaterial labor by showing how remote labor may simply “reproduce forms of colonial exploitation and oppression rather than leading to automatic liberation” (590). Martín-Cabrera reminds us that immaterial labor cannot be separated from a colonial history of labor that remains bound to differences of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and ethnicity. Indeed, Memo’s transition is not simply motivated by a general move from material to immaterial labor but, as shown above, involves a cultural history made up of indigenous practices and migration between the United States and Mexico.6 This leads Martín-Cabrera to argue that reading the potential of Sleep Dealer requires acknowledging ongoing forms of oppression while also considering the possibility of liberation and a different future (603). While I find MartínCabrera’s argument convincing and Jeffries intriguing, I do feel they overlook the role of memory as a conduit that moves through culture and technology. For if the technical means of capital seeks to mediate, shape, and direct human experience, then transformation from human to cyborg, as well as from material to immaterial labor, must be considered as vying with existing ways of being. Rivera’s vision then must be considered in light of a

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culture memory that remains tied to a history of migration, indigenous knowledge, and Latinx experiences more broadly. Therefore, as the subject moves through the machine, so too does the machine move through the subject— a co-constitutive or fused epistemology emerges from a closer look at this relationship between man and machine. Here again, cultural memory cuts across the man and machine divide to show how this interpenetration produces ways of becoming that otherwise seem impossible. So whereas I agree with Fojas (this volume) that “together, human and machine enforce a surveillance regime” to violent effects, this relationship to technology also holds out the possibility of making otherwise impossible connections. This is especially evident in the story of Rudy, who finds Luz’s memories on TruNode, thus allowing him to vicariously learn about Memo through these externalized memories. This leads Rudy to begin doubting the system that justifies the violent penetration and appropriation of resources and bodies. Luz, Memo, and Rudy become connected through the transmission of experiential and cultural memory made possible by TruNode. What begins as a dispossession of Memo’s stories and interactions with Luz becomes the conduit through which the three characters come together. The externalizing of Luz’s memories of Memo moves Rudy to rebel and become an aquaterrorist. Each character becomes who they are by moving through technology while their memories move through the technology, thus shaping the machine in the process. Interestingly, in Memo’s case, this movement through technology begins with

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Figure 13.4 Robots controlled by Mexican laborers picking fruit in the United States in Sleep Dealer.

dispossession of his home and the loss of his father, but it ends with the potential of another form of dispossession that makes new alliances possible. Sleep Dealer, then, provides a cautionary note on how technologies enter our lives and bodies and directly assault our memories (cutting off ways of being in the world), but it also points toward the potential for memories to transmigrate through and appropriate technologies for new potentialities capable of extending cultural memory. Ultimately, the three characters will use their shared skills and knowledge of the system to appropriate a military drone and blow up the dam that threatens Memo’s family. Just as Rudy’s drone shoots the missiles that will destroy the dam, Memo remembers his father once throwing a rock at the dam. The explosion coincides with the rock hitting the dam. Memory and technology fuse at the moment of impact. As throughout, Rivera’s narrative moves through multiple technological sites and times to imagine what is possible if a cultural past once thought lost and gone is given a future.

Thus far, we have discussed how Sleep Dealer invites us to reconsider cultural memory as the narrative moves through an entangled epistemology and speculates on the technological future of modern capitalism. But does cultural memory ultimately lead to a liberatory reading of the film? The explosive climax of water flowing over a destroyed dam does suggest a release, a freedom from the constraints of a deterministic technology. Yet neither Memo nor Rudy decide (or are able) to return home, while Luz remains absent from the final scenes. In the end, Memo does seem to return to farming, only now his milpa will be in the border town of Tijuana where, he says, “Maybe there’s a future for me here. On the edge of everything” (Sleep Dealer). Initially, it seems that he has divorced himself from the cyber network that once promised him modernity. This return to the soil is reinforced by a time-lapse sequence of plants growing that appeared early in the film when he was thinking about his home in Oaxaca. Yet, Memo’s liberation is not certain. As he states, this “future with a past” can only be possible if he continues to “connect. And fight” (Sleep Dealer). This may simply mean he needs to connect to his past, but it also might as easily be read as the necessity to connect technologically to the cyber network in order to fight. While this is an important step, we would also need to acknowledge the limits of planting a milpa in Tijuana for attaining freedom from capital exploitation and modern technology. Shifting the focus from the narrative to the relationship between technology and film offers one way of approaching how memory might offer another way of thinking about film.

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Toward a Politics of Cultural Memory

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In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin relates the technology of film to modern capital production. He argues that the “mechanical equipment” used in the production of film “has penetrated so deeply into reality” that the “sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology” (233). With this striking image he foregrounds the natural beauty and wonder of the orchid as it stands against a technically composed landscape. Benjamin’s critique draws our attention to an environment so thoroughly mediated by the artifice of technological manipulation that immediacy itself becomes cherished, alienating, and fleeting. It is crucial to recall that he comes to this conclusion by reading film as a medium that erases the material traces of its production. Film, in this sense, reconditions our experience of immediacy through its technical reproduction of reality, thus altering how we experience the world. For Benjamin, always a thoughtful dialectician, this quality also points toward the revolutionary potential of film since it holds in tension the possibility for rendering transparent the very processes at work in the reproduction of capital. It is film, therefore, that is capable of instructing us in how to read and challenge the technical composition of time and space within the paradigm of modern capitalism.7 But does Benjamin’s image have the same impact today? As our immediate reality has become increasingly penetrated and appropriated by technological devices, the isolation of the orchid seems to be a mere reflection of how we experience “nature” in the world today. This is further compounded by ever smaller mechanical devices, now augmented by computing, that not only penetrate our reality but work their way into our bodies (as noted above). And this is done with surgical precision.8 Of course, this was the rhetorical force Benjamin’s image sought to convey: an indication that film reproduces reality with such acuity that our present can feel at turns precious and impoverished, boring and spectacular, living and dead. What has changed is not so much how we read the image but the context in which we find ourselves. So perhaps film does render production transparent in order to better analyze and confront mechanical reproduction. But what we confront now is the realization that our realities have become technological; and, more to the point, that we ourselves always were becoming technological. In light of this increasingly mediated reality, Benjamin’s claims about the potential of film and technology should be reconsidered. If Sleep Dealer tells us something about this potential of film today, this chapter has argued that this message would necessarily involve the profound influence of cultural memory and its relationship to technology. Indeed, as Rivera himself points out, “Latino immigrants use technology to mediate distance and divisions” and that advances in technology have made it possi-

Figure 13.5 Performing manual labor remotely via a cyber network produces a hallucinogenic state in Sleep Dealer.

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ble for him to visualize “liminal spaces and experiences that immigrants and many others embody” (Aldama 374). Moving with and through technology, Latinx culture imagines and produces worlds where possibilities emerge despite the national and institutional desires to render their bodies invisible. The conflict that arises in respect to this desire is over memory. For it is the living labor of the migrant that pulses through the machines that produce and gather our goods, and it is the epistemological knowledge that their care work extends to new generations. That there are capital forces that seek to erase their presence is not surprising, but these are conditions that shape and make necessary a politics of cultural memory. If this politics is to move beyond technology as a means for grasping (re)production, then what does cultural memory tell us about the potential of film? Certainly, this question must remain open. So instead of posing an answer, let us return to maquiladora where we started and to the migrant worker Memo. He explains that hallucinations result from the exhaustion and tedium of virtual labor. And with a flow of nebulous images and transitions, we are pushed further into his waking dream. Visually we sense his disorientation. It is not difficult to imagine getting lost in this cyber network— pulled between spaces, lost in the in-between. Are we ourselves lost and disoriented? It is images that pull us back in time. In flashes, Memo’s thoughts begin to take form. He seems to be transmitting himself to us through a visualization of his culture. Then he says, “But sometimes, I’d forget where I was. And everything came back to me” (Sleep Dealer). In an instant, we are soaring toward his home. He is no longer only being transported from a maquiladora to the

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United States via a cyber network but from a maquiladora to Oaxaca via a living memory. We are left questioning: how can being wired, disoriented, and hallucinating make him recall home? Why does feeling lost push him into the past? Has a new relationship to cultural memory emerged from this technological connection? And if so, how do we forget the present in a way that makes it possible for our past to have a future?

Notes 1.

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5.

The title, “sleep dealer,” references A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe, an essay and photojournalism collaboration between John Berger and John Mohr, which traces European migration in the 1970s. The text reads: “Those who let out the most miserable rooms to migrant workers are called sleep-dealers (marchands de sommeil)” (90). For more on Alex Rivera’s choice to use this term, see Carroll. In an interview with Frederick Luis Aldama, Rivera indicates that he does not think Sleep Dealer has “ever fully found its audience” but that the film had a “really strong festival run. And teachers, professors, and scholars across the country have studied and taught the film, keeping it alive now for over 10 years” (Aldama 377). For a closer look at the geographical setting of the film see Carvey et al., who have also pointed out the significance of setting a science fiction film in the Global South. As they note, imagining the future from “economic geographies” from the Global South works to disrupt and contest the geography of knowledge production that privileges the Global North and reproduces the logic that dismisses the margins (873). The aim here is not to rehearse the body of philosophy that exists on technology, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. More important for our purpose is the work of Bernard Stiegler. In the first three installments of his Technics and Time, Stiegler outlines a co-constitutive relationship between the “human” and “technology” by suggesting that the externalization of memory (or the process of technological-becoming) constitutes what it means to be human. Building from this premise, Stiegler argues in Technics and Time 2: Disorientation that modern technology, specifically as it relates to late capitalism, is disorienting since it seeks to totalize the exploitation of memory; or as he puts it, the aim is to program “all essentials, rhythms and memories, suspensive techniques, styles, and idiomatic differentiations” (8). While Technics and Time underlies my reading of Sleep Dealer, it is necessary to point out that Stiegler’s framework should be put into conversation with specific cultural histories since it assumes Western philosophical discourse. As the opening scene of the film shows, the modes, intensities, and effects of modern disorientation by technology differ based on local as well as global circumstances. Absent from this trope of father and son is the agency and desires of the women in the family who remain voiceless and who only appear in the background. The film does momentarily disrupt this patriarchal framework when Memo meets Luz, a struggling

6.

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Mexican writer, on his way to Tijuana. Her knowledge of the city and access to technology give her some agency over Memo who is naïve and depends on her to make (quite literally, as we see later) the connections he needs to work. Unfortunately, Luz begins to receive less attention in the film when Memo makes contact with Rudy, the drone operator, who he later learns was responsible for killing his father. It is Memo and Rudy, men from opposite sides of the U.S-Mexico border, who forge a transnational bond and take up the final scene in the movie. For example, Memo’s work consists of remotely controlling a construction-bot, thus reinforcing the division of labor based on gender. Luz, on the other hand, is a writer who benefits from the abilities often stereotypically associated with women such as inviting interaction, listening carefully, and attentiveness to emotions. The other primary character, Rudy, also reinforces these gender norms as a drone operator whose military background makes him an ideal security employee who seems primed to cope with the violence this work entails. Rodolphe Gasché reads Benjamin’s theory of film through this didactic function, stating that cinema “provides the means for mastering” technology since it reveals the second nature— not immediate and authentic— produced by “the emancipation of technology from ritual” (30). Put simply, film deepens apperception through a combination of enhanced visibility and tactile awareness. In comparing the cameraman to a painter, Benjamin draws an analogy of these figures to a magician and surgeon, stating, “The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself. . . . The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body” (233). The cameraman, here, acts as the surgeon who cuts into reality with tools designed for direct intervention and precision.

Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Toward a Transfrontera-LatinX Aesthetic: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera.” Latino Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2017, pp. 373– 80. Amerikaner, Andres. “Xerox Men: Technological Tropes in U.S. Latino/a Displacement Literature.” Symploke, vol. 25, no. 1– 2, 2017, pp. 113– 23. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968. Berger, John, and John Mohr. A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe. Richard Seaver Book/ Viking Press, 1975. Bracero History Archive. Center for New History and Media, 2018, braceroarchive.org. Accessed May 10, 2018. Carroll, Amy Sara. “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s Undocumentary Poetics.” Social Identities, vol. 19, no. 3– 4, 2013, pp. 485– 500. Carvey, Altha, et al. “Imagining the Future from the Margins: Cyborg Labor in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” GeoJournal, vol. 80, no. 6, 2015, pp. 867– 80. Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Gasché, Rodolphe. “The Deepening of Apperception: On Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Film.” Mosaic, vol. 41, no. 4, 2008, pp. 27– 39.

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References

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Jeffries, Fiona. “Cyborg Resistance on the Digital Assembly Line: Global Connectivity as the Terrain of Struggle for the Commons in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Journal of Communications Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 1, 2014, pp. 21– 37. Kanellos, Nicolás. Introduction. The Adventures of Don Chipote; or, When Parrots Breast-Feed, by Daniel Venegas, Arte Publico Press, 2000, pp. 1– 17. Martín-Cabrera, Luis. “The Potentiality of the Commons: A Materialist Critique of Cognitive Capitalism from the Cyberbraceros to the Ley Sinde.” Hispanic Review, vol. 80, no. 4, 2012, pp. 583– 605. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books, 1973. Nericcio, William Anthony. “Latina/o Dystopias on the Verge of an Electric, Pathological Tomorrow: Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Review: Literature of Arts and the Americas, vol. 48, no. 1, 2015, pp. 48– 54. Prasch, Thomas. “Aquaterrorists and Cyberbraceros: The Dystopian Borderlands of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, edited by Jakub Kazecki et al., Scarecrow Press, 2013, pp. 55– 66. Rivera, Lysa. “Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction after NAFTA.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2012, pp. 415– 36. Rueda, Carolina. “The Everlasting Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s Visionary Mind and Fantasy Nightmares in Present Times.” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 333– 48. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford University Press, 1998. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Baker, Stanford University Press, 2008. Venegas, Daniel. The Adventures of Don Chipote; or, When Parrots Breast-Feed. Translated by Ethriam Cash Brammer and introduction by Nicolás Kanellos, Arte Publico Press, 2000.

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Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera, Maya Entertainment, 2008.

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Chapter 14

DIGITAL RASQUACHISMO Alex Rivera’s Multimedia Storytelling, Humor, and Transborder Latinx Futurity Jennifer M. Lozano

Filmmaker and digital content creator, Alex Rivera, is best known for his 2008 cult science fiction film, Sleep Dealer. Notable for its innovative filmmaking techniques and a thought-provoking depiction of a “virtual” immigrant Latinx labor force, Sleep Dealer caught the attention of various audiences and received awards at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival. At the same time, Sleep Dealer is only one fraction of Rivera’s multimedia oeuvre, which begins in 1995 and includes short films, websites, memes, music videos, and art installations. Scholarly interest in Rivera’s work, however, largely focuses on Sleep Dealer and rarely considers the feature film in conjunction with his other digital work.1 Like Sleep Dealer, Rivera’s larger body of work thematizes and develops new ways of representing and thinking about globalization, immigration, technology, and Latinx experiences and futurity. This chapter proposes that a full consideration of Rivera’s oeuvre and its distinct digital interconnectivity shows his work to not only thematize the future from a Global South perspective but to model ways for artists to manipulate media landscapes and preconceived notions of Latinx identity and experience through a technique of digital rasquachismo.2 Using this technique, which builds on earlier theories of a rasquache sensibility, Rivera uses multimedia platforms for non-teleological, networked storytelling, promotion, and distribution; he uses a variety of digital tools in ways that mock established genres, styles, and conventions; and he uses these techniques in a self-conscious way that is legible to interested viewers. By bringing into focus Rivera’s dynamic, networked rasquachismo, we can also better understand the full implications of Sleep Dealer’s complex and often ambivalent interest in the political possibilities of a transborder Latinx “connection” through technology. Specifically, when considered through a perspective of digital rasquachismo, the simplistic idea of “connecting” in solidarity through technology is mocked while the rasquache work of resourceful repurposing and revising is foregrounded in 267

order to account for the ways technology (and, thus, futurity) already narrates and mythologizes the borderlands and a Latinx experience.3

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The idea of technology-enabled nodes, or nodos, to connect people and ideas across distance, time, and difference is prominent in Sleep Dealer. In fact, exploring the role of technology in forging transborder connections animates most of Rivera’s creative content. It is apt, therefore, that the metaphor of networked, technologically enabled nodes that communicate in multiple directions also structures Rivera’s multimedia creative landscape. Ironically, criticism and reviews that touch on Rivera’s work outside of Sleep Dealer tend to focus on the development of a particular aesthetic style or thematic through line that is most fully elaborated in his feature film (Carroll; Lewis; Marentes). In doing this, more attention has been given to Rivera’s short films that predate Sleep Dealer— namely, Papapapá (1995) and Why Cybraceros? (1997), as well as its accompanying mock industrial website, Cybracero (cybracero.com). The former is Rivera’s first short film created during his time at Hampshire College and uses a mix of early 1990s, video game-esque computer-generated imagery (CGI) and documentary/mockumentary conventions to tell the parallel journeys of his father’s immigration from Lima, Peru, to the United States and the “migration” to the United States of the pre-Columbian potato— an indigenous vegetable of Peru (Aldama 374– 76). Why Cybraceros? similarly mixes conventions and genres by incorporating CGI with archival footage from the mid-twentieth-century Bracero Program to create a faux promotional video for “cybracero” labor— Rivera’s dystopic idea of a technology-enabled virtual Latinx labor force that never crosses the U.S.-Mexico border.4 In the words of the short film’s female narrator, the cybracero program provides “all the labor without the worker.” In these short films, we can see Rivera’s interest in using the tools and ideas of technology— typically out of reach for populations of color— to represent (both materially and thematically) the experiences of Latinx immigrants in poignant and satirical ways. Amy Sara Carroll’s essay on the “undocumentary poetics” of Rivera’s short films and Sleep Dealer identifies the significance of Rivera’s networked storytelling, or what she calls its “nodal fragmentation” that “rehearse[s] an alter-globalization in a future ‘five minutes from now’” (498). Largely focusing on Rivera’s filmic work, however, limits our understanding of his networked, dynamic digital rasquache storytelling and the effects it seeks to deliver by reaching diverse audiences through different media platforms and by mixing and assembling a variety of generic

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conventions. To better understand Rivera’s digital rasquachismo, it is first instructive to consider the aesthetic and political moves of rasquachismo and the way that his work preceding Sleep Dealer engages these by creating multimedia nodes in a connected, rhizomatic, and recursive storytelling practice. From this perspective, these multimedia nodes are as important to Rivera’s storytelling as the film itself and the work that follows it. “Rasquachismo” was first explained by Chicanx art scholar Tómas YbarraFrausto and has been an animating force in Chicanx and Latinx art and culture.5 Simply put, rasquachismo is an attitude and quality that can inhere in objects and places and that emerges as “a visceral response to lived reality” from working-class and marginalized people (Ybarra-Frausto 5). Important features of rasquachismo are its irreverent mixing and “making do” with the available resources at hand in a way that “debunks conventions and spoofs protocol,” as well as its preference for “communion over purity” (YbarraFrausto 5– 6). Rasquachismo values resourceful and often humorous intermixing that connects people and ideas through everyday symbols and practices (e.g., surfing the web, pop culture aesthetics, low-quality graphics, video games, etc.). A good place to consider the digital rasquachismo of Rivera’s storytelling is with his Why Cybraceros? / Sleep Dealer creative nexus. As I have mentioned, Why Cybraceros? can and has been seen as a project where Rivera tested his ideas and aesthetic for representing borders, virtual labor, and Latinx immigrants, but this assessment is incomplete and overlooks other multimedia storytelling nodes that do more than develop thematic concerns. More recently, Debra Castillo’s 2014 article “Rasquache Aesthetics in Alex Rivera’s ‘Why Cybraceros?’” begins to consider the interactive, relational, and nonlinear quality of Rivera’s creative content. In this essay, she focuses on Why Cybraceros? and Rivera’s similarly titled “mock-industrial” website that extends the fiction of virtual immigrant labor and for many years housed the short film for viewing and downloading. Important for Castillo is understanding the significance of the short film within the context of Rivera’s other short mockumentaries and documentaries co-housed on his website and, particularly, the evolving Cybracero website. As she explains, Rivera has described his creative style as rasquache, and Why Cybraceros? is an excellent example with its mix of rough CGI, repurposed archival footage, and mockumentary conventions (Castillo 9). On its own, these practices are indicative of Rivera taking the Chicanx working-class style to digital realms by using accessible digital tools to create and distribute his work while also upending genre and aesthetic expectations. But digital rasquachismo extends also to the way the everyday materials Rivera uses interact and defy conventions in their online environment over

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time. In the case of the Cybracero website and Why Cybraceros? short film, Rivera juxtaposes the more esoteric genres of short film and documentary with the accessible, everyday ubiquity of the industrial/career (outsourcing) website. As a feature of the Cybracero website, Why Cybraceros? gained a wider reception network including viewers who may be supportive of the ideas otherwise presented critically in both pieces.6 Moreover, rather than abandoning the project of the Cybracero website as his ideas found new life in the making of Sleep Dealer, Rivera has maintained this multimedia node by revising and repurposing the website. As Castillo explains, the website, first imagined as “Remote Labor Systems, Inc.” and now viewable as “Cybracero Systems,” has undergone at least three revisions that incorporate and respond to current events since its inception in 2000 (7– 9). The revisions also update the website to maintain aesthetic consistency with familiar industrial/outsourcing websites and speak to Rivera’s commitment to use and repurpose everyday digital media to build his digital rasquache storytelling network (Castillo 15). Today the Cybracero website no longer houses the short film Why Cybraceros? and instead provides a link to Sleep Dealer with a tongue-in-cheek “note” that the film “is an inaccurate and undeservedly critical portrait of our pioneering business model and is not representational of our business.” From this nineteen-year perspective, it is evident that Rivera’s work has seized the affordances of digital technology that allow him to make and intermix relatively low-cost short films and websites that can be revised and recontextualized quickly to reach different audiences and emphasize different projects. This view also begins to showcase the way that Rivera’s work is often nonlinear, interactive, and recursive in ways that both advance and push back on Web 2.0 conventions.7 For instance, Rivera’s approach to storytelling across different media platforms (websites, films, art installations) or “convergence culture” and his remixing and repurposing of different media in his creative content are clearly indicative of the influence of Web 2.0 on his work (Jenkins). At the same time, Web 2.0 content often has a short life-span on the internet.8 Older web content that is no longer actively “spreadable” (as much of Rivera’s content on the Invisible Cinema and Invisible America sites are) is not often deemed the most valuable (Jenkins et al.). On the contrary, Rivera uses web platforms to either repurpose or redistribute older content. Thus, although Why Cybraceros? is no longer housed on the Cybracero mock website, it now exists on several other web platforms including YouTube, Rivera’s Invisible America and SubCine websites, and his own artist website (alexrivera.com). Rather than archiving his earliest work as a static moment on his aesthetic trajectory, Rivera revisits and recirculates this material in the service of his larger project of providing a multimedia, interactive dig-

Figure 14.1 A screenshot of Rivera’s mock Cybracero Systems website shows the tongue-in-cheek “note” regarding the “undeservedly critical” film Sleep Dealer many years after its release.

ital rasquache landscape for representing a Latinx experience and futurity that is directly engaged with technology. Moreover, this digital rasquachismo denaturalizes a teleological understanding of “the future” as devoid of the so-called developing or Third World and its inhabitants, as well as rural and agricultural communities— a prevalent conception of the future in the popular imaginary (Townsend).9

The vast majority of Rivera’s work can be understood as participating in the digital rasquache media landscape just described. While a few of his short films have been picked up by larger distribution networks, such as his awardwinning documentary The Sixth Section (2003) and The Borders Trilogy (2002) (both part of PBS’s POV documentary series), as well as A Robot Walks into a Bar (2014) (also incorporated into a PBS series called FutureStates), most of Rivera’s work remains web-based. In fact, a careful examination of Rivera’s artist website will ultimately send interested readers toward his diverse creative content that tilts heavily toward satirical news, memes, and short films that respond to current political concerns for Latinx people in the United States. For instance, from Rivera’s website, readers are directed to access his work from four different subcategories: Films, Websites, Installations, and Music Videos y Mas. When readers click on the link for Papapapá in the film section, however, it opens on another website called Invisible Cinema, which is part of Rivera’s website Invisible America and also accessible from the “Websites” menu. On the Invisible America website, readers gain access to an array of satirical news pieces and memes such as the one

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The Developmental Impulse and Futurity

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below of former Arizona governor Jan Brewer and to what appears to be the inner workings of Rivera’s digital rasquache practice that makes use of a variety of digital tools to create multiply accessible, often humorous, political content. For here we also find a list and links to Rivera’s films, many of which have already been listed on his main website but now exist alongside more obscure titles such as Las Papas del Papa (1999), Conspiracy Club for Men (2000), Apparitions on Tortillas (1997), and Latinos on TV (1997), among others. Again, from this perspective we can see Rivera not only creating dialogue among his creative content but also proudly showcasing the different low-budget media formats that enliven his oeuvre. Instead of removing these pieces from his creative content, Rivera embraces and celebrates them as part of his Latinx experience with technology and witty Figure 14.2 Rivera’s “Bullchete” meme of forresourcefulness. mer Arizona governor Jan Brewer (superimImportantly, Rivera’s digital posed on the film poster for Robert Rodriguez’s Machete [2010]) is but one example of rasquache approach also intervenes the many memes and satirical news pieces in the mechanisms of distribution for housed on Rivera’s Invisible America website his work. Specifically, the Invisible that showcase his digital rasquache practice. America and Invisible Cinema websites link to SubCine (subcine.com), the website for the collective of Latinx filmmakers that Rivera co-founded to self-distribute Latinx films (Lewis). Composed of sixteen filmmakers, the SubCine collective publishes and promotes a catalog of Latinx films for self-distribution to address the lack of resources for Latinx people in the film industry. As Rivera explains, “If the studios don’t develop a rich and diverse Latino cinema, then I will” (Lewis). In true rasquache fashion, Rivera does not wait to engage in creative production until the drastically unequal inclusion of Latinx people (at every level) by the media industry is corrected. Instead, he creates new material and circulation methods utilizing web-based tools that are readily at hand. Moreover, his transparency about this aspect of his work also helps to denaturalize the developmental narrative of technology and “progress” as following a de facto linear trajectory from so-called primitivism to modernism to futurity and that is deeply rooted in the marginalization and oppression of people of color.

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SubCine and the Invisible America and Invisible Cinema websites resist a teleology of development with regard to Rivera’s work. While Rivera’s artist website showcases Sleep Dealer first in its rotation of still images, and it is the first title to appear in the list of Rivera’s “Films,” the deeper into the website, the more horizontally his work is presented. Interestingly, the Invisible America and Invisible Cinema websites remain relatively static after the inclusion of Sleep Dealer and provide (in combination with the other sites) a self-conscious coexistence of Rivera’s past, present, and future work. In this way, a new viewer to his website might arrive there based on his more recent music videos made with popular musicians such as Aloe Blacc and La Santa Cecilia but ultimately find the flattened out, networked array of multimedia content on the Invisible America or Invisible Cinema websites. The SubCine website also provides an alphabetical, nondevelopmental representation of the films by artists in the Latinx collective. Finally, Rivera’s inclusion of his DVD special feature “Before the Making of Sleep Dealer” on his website under the “Films” section affirms his critical interest in the flexibility and recursivity of digital rasquachismo. As he highlights in his narrative voiceover to the feature, the DVD supplement is unique in that it showcases what went on before the making of Sleep Dealer and not during the making of the film as is more typical. Rivera explains that this emphasis is deliberate due to material and political restrictions surrounding the making of the film. In his own words, the extra feature emphasizes “before” because “one: we don’t have a lot of footage of the of actual ‘making of,’ and two, because I think it’s interesting to share stories about what was done to get this project off the ground . . . on what I put together to get the support to make this crazy film happen” (“Before”). Rivera warns that artists often make the mistake of waiting to have access to all the “right” support and technology before beginning their creative endeavors rather than using what is already accessible to them. The recursive quality of “Before the Making of Sleep Dealer” itself disrupts the linear unfolding of creative work and can be watched in any sequence and from any of the many hyperlinked paths. Since completing Sleep Dealer, Rivera’s work remains diverse and prolific and unlike any other Latinx artist working today. He has completed another short film, the aforementioned A Robot Walks into a Bar; a second installation project, Memorial over General Atomics (Rivera); and a series of music videos for artists of varying musical backgrounds and mainstream visibility. Given the diverse media formats and genres that Rivera continues to work with, he remains committed to denaturalizing ideas about Latinx immigration, globalization, and technology through multimedia storytelling. Each of these projects, while utilizing different digital media and reaching different audiences, furthers his interest in focalizing Latinx perspectives,

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mocking or critiquing the status quo, and the possibility of technology (and how we narrativize technology) as a resource for activism. Of particular interest are Rivera’s collaborative music videos because of their abilFigure 14.3 The vacant gaze from a Latino ICE officer ity to connect disparate au(played by undocumented actor Isaac Barrera) in diences and stakeholders on the music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “ICE/El Hielo,” the topic of immigration and directed by Alex Rivera, crystalizes the painful struggle for an inclusive Latinx solidarity. human rights. In collaboration with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Rivera helped produce several music videos including La Santa Cecilia’s “ICE/El Hielo” and Aloe Blacc’s “Wake Me Up.” Both of these videos speak to Rivera’s digital rasquachismo because of their unique combination of reality, fiction, and “from below” perspective. 10 In these videos, the featured actors are undocumented immigrants who are portraying many of their real life experiences in a fictionalized narrative format. These actors, quite literally, are using everything they have— their bodies, their experiences, their connections— to create these digital artistic accounts. And still, the videos do not romanticize the possibilities for solidarity and resistance. Notably, the struggle for connection and solidarity is depicted in these videos through the purposely vacant countenances of those who object to the undocumented immigrants’ presence— especially poignant coming from the Latino U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in “ICE/El Hielo.” The limits of solidarity, perhaps even more jarring within one’s own ethnic group, are explored in both this music video and in Sleep Dealer and add complexity to more simplistic genealogical understandings of Latinx identity. At the same time, the popularity of the Blacc song and the viral reception of Rivera’s collaborative video with La Santa Cecilia speaks to the communal impulse of rasquache and to Rivera’s own desire to make Latinx futurity a concern and interest for everybody (Rohter).11 Rivera’s work continues to explore the multimedia storytelling nodes he has created and to work in partnership with others to piece together a digital rasquache language of Latinx futurity. This understanding of Rivera’s digital rasquachismo is no less applicable to Sleep Dealer and can, in fact, help us better understand its often ambivalent depiction of solidarity through technology and its implications for gender, storytelling, activism, and a transborder Latinx identity.

The notion of “a future with a past” is a guiding phrase of the unfolding plot in Sleep Dealer and also in Rivera’s networked and recursive digital rasquache project that I have detailed across his multimedia career. Sleep Dealer begins as a generational story of the young and curious Memo Cruz who feels at odds with both his “remote” geographic location and with his father’s insistence on the significance of connecting to place and labor in the forging of a collective future. Memo’s family is engaged in the traditional practice of working a milpa but has had this way of life threatened by a multinational corporation that has privatized the local water supply. To maintain this livelihood, Memo’s family must pay an exorbitant price to repurchase the water that the company has siphoned off and transported away from the village’s natural source. This exploitative practice, of course, parallels the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-inspired labor practices taking place at the virtual labor factories, or “sleep dealers,” on the U.S.-Mexico border that siphon the energy of Latinx laborers to support U.S. industry on the other side of the border while leaving the workers socially and politically vulnerable and without connections to family or home. Oblivious to this macro narrative, however, Memo desires to join “the future,” which for him is represented by the node technology that enables workers to “connect” to “the global economy” in the sleep dealer factories (among other, less explored, connections). Moreover, he is exasperated by his father’s desire to maintain the family’s milpa and with the elliptical question he poses to Memo: “Is our future a thing of the past?” But as the film unfolds and Memo considers who gets to have a future and who, alternatively, is rendered perpetually “past,” his father’s question and Memo’s counter-notion regarding the possibility of “a future with a past” drive the film’s plot and thematic interest. Memo’s character must consider how one might imagine a future that does not exclude certain people or places and that is cognizant and reflective of the knowledge and wisdom of the past without succumbing to appeals to authenticity or being overly nostalgic about the past.12 For Memo, that process begins when his father is “mistakenly” killed by a U.S.-backed, privately operated drone that intercepts and interprets Memo’s amateur cyberhacking as “aquaterrorist” activity. In classic immigrant narrative tradition, the protagonist’s internal conflict begins with and parallels his journey to the border in search of a better life. An awareness of rasquachismo and Rivera’s digital rasquache oeuvre, however, can help us understand some of the complex ways that the film is imagining Latinx perspectives and engagements

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A “Future with a Past”: Undoing the Myth of Progress through Burla in Sleep Dealer

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with technology and futurity, without reinscribing the same developmental narratives of progress that it seeks to critique. A key feature of digital rasquachismo is its recursive, repurposed storytelling that engages in mockery, or burla, of the dominant ideology. We see this in Rivera’s overall creative content and the way individual multimedia storytelling nodes are rarely retired but repurposed and redeployed in ways that, in a sense, defy conventions of Web 2.0 as well as the imbrication of technology with a teleological notion of progress. Similarly, Rivera repurposes different genres and aesthetic conventions in Sleep Dealer to “undo” narratives of progress that undergird notions of both futurity and pedagogy in Western modernity.13 This work is most apparent through Rivera’s use of visual symbolism that upends our expectations of science fiction (SF) and what the future should look like. As Rivera explains in an interview, “We’ve only seen [through SF] the future in Los Angeles, in New York, London, but we’ve never seen the future of Mexico City or Bombay or Jakarta. . . . The future belongs to everybody, right?” (Guillen). Thus, the rural, Mexican setting for this film— captured through a stereotypical gritty, yellow-tinged lens— is paramount for Rivera’s challenge to the dominant imagination that figures the future as an urban, gleaming “First World” environment or, at a minimum, one seemingly removed from markers of the natural environment and its attendant physical labor. That the film takes place almost entirely in Mexico— toggling between Santa Ana del Rio (Oaxaca) and Tijuana— amplifies Rivera’s point about the significance of otherwise marginalized spaces for depicting the future. As Camilla Fojas (this volume) poignantly reminds us, “The border is the future as much as it is the past of the Western lore of the United States. The southern frontier engages both temporalities across diverse narratives and imaginaries about the border and migration.” Moreover, by remixing in generic features of documentary film, Rivera calls into question the familiar way of apprehending “Third World” spaces as mere objects of study. The result is a representation of “the future” that is so jarringly incongruous that it is often humorous and reflective of Latinx people’s creative engagement with technology and futurity in spite of their marginalization. By setting the film in the very near future, the film is able to humorously juxtapose the recognizable coexistence of “progress” and lack of progress as equal parts of the future. One particularly rasquache depiction of Latinx futurity shows Memo’s family in a clichéd, dusty, rural Mexico, replete with “primitive” trappings, while also showing the high-tech U.S. security systems and flat-screen TVs that pepper the otherwise “underdeveloped” landscape. In this early parodic scene, Memo’s mother is shown wearing a peasant-style blouse and skirt while cooking tortillas for the family in a rustic, outdoor kitchen. Meanwhile, her sons watch U.S. reality television on the flat-screen

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TV that hangs on an adjacent wall. On one level, the stereotypical rustic images highlight a very real disparity in the distribution of global wealth that is likely to persist; on another level, through their excessiveness and juxtapositions, they ridicule the persistence of such stereotypical images that are not wholly representative of contemporary Mexican life.14 Moreover, as Memo’s daily life in Santa Ana unfolds and, later, as he migrates to Tijuana— “the city of the future”— sexism and gender relations appear to be just as entrenched and unprogressive as ever. More complex, perhaps, than parody, rasquache humor blatantly and pleasurably draws attention to the strange contradictions it foregrounds. As in the example described above, rasquachismo simultaneously critiques the untruth (Mexico does not homogeneously look so stereotypically “past”) and the truth (there is a disparity in wealth distribution), creating a humorous tension. Carroll affirms this polyvocal aesthetic in her article on Rivera’s “undocumentary poetics” by focusing on the way his work disrupts the conventions of documentary (e.g., combining myth with realism, fiction with documentation) and its “truth finding” impulse to challenge “the naturalness of narratives of free trade, modernization, and progress” through humor (387). The rasquache aspect of this aesthetic is its delight in the legible process of recombination, recursivity, and renarrating, or, as she explains it, making visible the “circuitry of bordering as a conceptual practice” (498). No longer isolated to a fixed, “true” location or people much less genre or aesthetic style, the breath of “the border” and bordering (of water, people, ideas) and its technologies are disbursed in everyday iconography and activities (watching TV, cooking, reality television). Like the iconic rasquache toilet bowl turned garden pot, the juxtapositions in Sleep Dealer are funny because they show the underbelly of globalization from the perspective of the everyday while still showcasing the resilience and creativity of those who exist there. The push and pull of labor relations and politics that are usually erased from images of “progress” or the future are suddenly visible, and not from an anthropological, “object of study” perspective but from a pleasurable, defiant one. The rasquache remixing in Sleep Dealer also creates an interpretive complexity that complicates the film’s commentary on technology and its ability to facilitate political solidarities. If the film is pleasurably humorous while still presenting a haunting, all too recognizable depiction of post-NAFTA labor exploitation and alienation, how might viewers reconcile these different imperatives? In his work on rasquachismo, Ybarra-Frausto explains that rasquachismo is “witty and ironic but not mean-spirited (there is sincerity in its artifice)” (8). Again, consummate with its polyvocal tendencies toward revealing a truth and untruth (and delighting in the humor of their proximity), a rasquache aesthetic is not wholly mocking or negating. One example

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of the film’s “sincere artifice” is its low-budget but cohesive production. Created on a paltry $2.5 million budget, Sleep Dealer executed its SF vision by using every cost-cutting work-around possible (“Alex Rivera Speaking”). The production team used stock photos or long-exposure digital photographs that Rivera had taken when cost prohibited on-location filming (“Before”), used mirrors to replicate more space and actors in the factory scenes, and even “farmed out” 450 visual effects shots to “students, volunteers, contractors and videogame designers” (Thompson 83). Importantly, as Christopher Gonzalez explains, one of the main reasons people of color have not had success working in SF is because of the cost prohibitive resources required to access its visual language. Thus, Rivera and the production crew faced the challenge of making an SF film that could legitimately dialogue with the SF tradition, while remaining on a restricted budget.15 By combining the lowbudget production tech with the film’s remixing and repurposing of often trite, over-the-top generic conventions, however, the overall rasquache style is cohesive with these production limitations rather than in spite of them. The low-budget production techniques are a part of Sleep Dealer’s consistently rasquache aesthetic and practice that sincerely makes do with the existing resources, while mocking the status quo. More central to our understanding of the film’s commentary on technology and activism, the “sincere artifice” of rasquachismo also leaves room for moments that break free from stereotypes, allegories, and mythology writ large. These moments offer sincere glimpses into the effects of globalization and late capitalism in a post–Chicano Movement, postnational era. For instance, Sleep Dealer revises the traditional immigrant narrative by having Memo’s immigrant journey not actually culminate in his immigration to the United States. Instead, Memo remains on the Mexican side of the borderlands, as so many actually do, and Rivera shifts the emphasis of the immigrant narrative away from the origin/host country binary to a more expansive understanding of “the border” as a network of transborder communities. The fluidity of the border is further showcased in the virtual transportation of the immigrants’ labor to remote locations in the United States such as New York or Los Angeles.16 This effect is even more poignant given the post-NAFTA maquiladora phenomena of the U.S.-Mexico border where Mexican migrants perform low-wage work for U.S. companies without ever leaving Mexico. Finally, the intra-ethnic tensions instigated by borders and explored in the film via Memo and the Mexican American drone operator, Rudy, echo profoundly with our own dystopic reality and complicate the possibility of a truly transborder Latinx solidarity and resistance. In the overall hodgepodge of rasquachismo, however, these moments are as fleeting as Memo’s own nostalgic flashbacks to his time in Santa Ana del

Rio, both interrupting the march step of “progress” and dragging the “Third World” into the future. The plot resolves with an over-the-top drone fight sequence that occurs after Rudy defects from his private security job and enacts retributive justice by using drone technology to destroy the dam that has kept the water privatized in Santa Ana del Rio. Even more, the film facilitates this spectacular ending with a trite romantic betrayal involving Memo, Luz— an aspiring writer and Memo’s love interest— and Rudy. Wracked by guilt, Rudy desires to offer his assistance and solidarity to Memo’s family, and Luz provides the only way— at least in the heteronormative, sexist language of the film— for him to connect with Memo. Luz sells her “stories” about Memo to Rudy via TruNode, the virtual memory market, so that he can meet and solicit his assistance to Memo at the market he frequents. Memo is predictably angry with Luz for her “betrayal” but eventually allows Rudy, with Luz’s help, to develop a plan to right the wrongs in Santa Ana del Rio. The recourse to the romantic betrayal and the Star Wars-esque battle sequence to resolve the film’s central conflict leaves little ambiguity regarding the film’s lapse into familiar SF (developmental) narrative conventions, only repurposed with an activist mindset. After all, how can a viewer simply believe in the ability of technology to liberate Memo’s family when the protagonist’s very desire to access this technology and the “future” has been met with exploitation at every turn? When screening this film in a classroom, the retributive fight scenes cannot help but elicit chuckles from students. Yet, at the same time, students are interested in exploring the relationships and underlying questions that the film provokes such as, What might facilitate transnational solidarity? What is the relationship between gender, race, technology, and political activism? Between storytelling/art and direct action? Sleep Dealer uses the things that it mocks through its rasquachismo such as progress, futurity, staid gender roles, and overly simplistic solidarity to get viewers to take up the question of futurity on their own. In this way, the film avoids the trap of presenting an all-encompassing or “truthful” solution while provoking thought on a realistic situation and the role of storytelling, technology, and “connecting” for imagining an inclusive and transborder Latinx future.

While the film’s plot resolves itself through over-the-top explosives and romance, it concludes with a more pensive reflection on the work of transborder future building and what it might mean to “connect” through technology and resist the seemingly all-powerful forces of globalization and “progress.” In the final scenes, we see that Memo and Luz have settled in the borderlands

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To Connect. To Fight—Exploring a Latinx Transborder Future

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space where they will work their own milpa, quite literally remixing the symbology of the past with the space of the “future.” Although Memo has successfully, if temporarily, “liberated” his family from the yoke of the water company, he and Luz do not return to this place of origin and instead will face the everyday and often glum reality of border living. Likewise, Rudy cannot return to his family in the United States and is shown boarding a bus to the interior of Mexico where he will create a new life and new future for himself. In a sense, Rudy fulfills what Memo begins at the start of the film when he is shown tinkering with bits and pieces of technology for political resistance (indicated by a quick reference to R. Dominguez’s Hacking for Beginners)— what ultimately gets Memo’s father killed.17 Moreover, Rudy’s reverse migration to Mexico after his own cyberhacking confirms this connection between the Mexican Memo and Mexican American Rudy. However, the connection between Memo and Rudy has not been linear but facilitated through a network that includes Memo’s dad and, of course, Luz. As Fojas (this volume) explains, “The power of the commoner, member of the commons, and migrant workers emerges in historical forms of collectivity and association— that is, not through mediated forms or digital networks.” As this network of storytelling, mediated at times by technology, comes into focus, it becomes clear that the story of each character has been a node in a digital rasquache project of creating an expansive, transborder “future with a past.” The altered futures of Memo, Luz, and Rudy are not the end result of the big explosion and fireworks of romance but part of a string of networked connections facilitated by the technology at hand and, most importantly, resourceful repurposing— from both the subjects in the film and from Rivera and the production crew. Like many of the multimedia storytelling nodes in his digital rasquache oeuvre, Sleep Dealer affirms Latinx engagement with technology and futurity in everyday practices. Through more obnoxious encounters with surveillance technology to virtual communication technology to living and coping with transborder ghosted identities and realities to needing to create networks of relationships from scratch through whatever means available— Latinx people do not exist absent the markers of and ingenuity associated with technology. The burla of rasquachismo helps bring to light the false narratives of both a linear, teleological understanding of technology and progress, as well as the notion of Latinx Third World “primitivism.” Technology does not always have to be leveraged toward a new, more “progressive” future that does away with its immediate predecessor but can connect us laterally for more expansive networks that aren’t bound by nation, linearity, or static notions of past/future, beginning/end. This network Rivera creates is Memo’s “future with a past,” and it is a collective story of Luz, Memo, his family, and Rudy— or of greater/global Mexico.

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It should be noted, however, that although Rivera’s film goes a long way in bringing critical awareness to issues of technology and progress, the border, and globalization, the gender and sexual politics of Sleep Dealer are troubling. After all, the male protagonist may only access and engage transborder connection through technology when mediated by a woman and, particularly, through a heterosexual relationship. Any gestures toward male-male connection in the film (including one with very clear homoerotic overtones) are promptly foreclosed. Moreover, it is Luz’s work with TruNode that attempts to alter the mythology of technology to accommodate empathetic cross-gender, cross-class, cross-nation connectivity. At every turn, however, her efforts are foreclosed and co-opted to reinscribe male dominance of technology and political activism. As Carroll explains, Luz can readily be seen as “Sleep Dealer’s iteration of Malinche (Hernán Cortéz’s controversial indigenous translator, lover, and colonial bridge)” (494). Unlike Malinche, however, Luz does not have the abilities of a translator. To the contrary, Memo takes over this role as translator through his ability to narrate and interpret the events of the film. Sleep Dealer, according to Rivera, is supposed to represent an uploaded memory from Memo (Orihuela and Hageman 178). Read this way, the film demonstrates the need for women in heterosexual relationships to perform emotional and cognitive labor that can then enable men’s homosocial and revolutionary acts. While it is possible to interpret the gender dynamics in the film as part of Rivera’s rasquache mocking of developmental narratives (including romance), it still comes at a high cost to Latinas who are already among the most vulnerable and exploited. Further, this reliance on a masculine/feminine divide regarding technology and political activism drastically limits the models of alternative kinship and solidarity that the film otherwise depicts as crucial to resisting the neoliberal economization of all relations and resources. If we are to follow my argument regarding Rivera’s digital rasquache oeuvre, it is possible to anticipate revised and repurposed iterations of Sleep Dealer’s creative material that will more fully address the role of gender and sexuality in Latinx political activism. As only one (albeit important) multimedia storytelling node in Rivera’s larger creative network, we must be willing to read the text not as a pinnacle of transborder Latinx futurity or as the legible code to Latinx solidarity. To the contrary, digital rasquachismo provides a self-conscious multimedia model for exploring these issues in ways that defy the former impulse, as well as grapple with the access, promotion, and distribution restrictions that Latinx artists often face, especially in the realm of SF. Moreover, digital rasquachismo seeks to connect people and engage them in Latinx future making. As Rivera explains in an interview, there is no reason why the language of SF cannot also be the language of Latinx experience and for these stories to gain mainstream interest (Aldama

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377– 78). This impulse has led Rivera to continually work in the language of SF and to revisit his multimedia work. Although he has moved on to different projects, Rivera still gives interviews and lectures that center on Sleep Dealer. The film was even rescreened in L.A. in 2014 after Sundance’s #ArtistServices helped make Sleep Dealer available via digital subscription and activist groups started promoting the film— an unusual distribution trajectory (Montgomery). Moreover, when asked recently about what he is currently working on, Rivera disclosed that he is working on a TV series based on the ideas from Sleep Dealer (Aldama 377). Rivera’s digital rasquache project is entering a new media, seeking to connect with new audiences, and expanding the idea of Latinx engagement with technology and futurity in different and multiple directions.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

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Two exceptions are Amy Sara Carroll’s 2013 essay that considers the “undocumentary poetics” of Rivera’s oeuvre up until Sleep Dealer (absent his memes, installations, and several websites) and Debra Castillo’s 2014 article on the multimedia life and aesthetics of Rivera’s short film Why Cybraceros?. The phrases “digital rasquache” or “digital rasquachismo” are not currently in scholarly parlance to my knowledge. Here, both my and Rivera’s interest in the mythologizing of technology is a direct intellectual descendant of Donna Haraway’s work in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Bracero Program is the largest U.S. “guest worker” program that operated from 1942–64 and brought several million Mexican laborers to perform the least desirable agricultural labor in the United States (“The Bracero”). Rivera’s short film Why Cybraceros? is based on a real promotional video from 1959 produced by the Council of California Growers to support Bracero labor entitled “Why Braceros?” The original film is in the public domain and part of the Prelinger Archive accessible online (Castillo 11). Tómas Ybarra-Frausto is a leading theorist and historian of Chicanx studies and his work has been instrumental in defining and promoting Chicanx art. Although his scholarship has influenced the larger field of Latinx studies, I use the term Chicanx to describe his work in order to honor its particular historical and political moorings. A similar response reportedly took place when Rivera fielded a call from a journalist interested in the new technology presented on the Cybracero website. The conversation with Rivera ultimately resulted in the publication of an article about the technology offered by the “company” in the Los Angeles newspaper La Opinión in April 2004 (Townsend). The article is no longer available online.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17

Web 2.0 references the move from understanding and using the internet as a static tool for accessing information to the more social and participatory engagement with the internet that includes social media, blogs, wikis, memes, etc. (Jenkins). Blogs, for instance, have an average age of 11.10 months (Papacharissi). The idea of the “developing” and “developed” world very clearly speak to the “developmental” or teleological narrative that informs the dominant construct of time and futurity. Also emerging from his work with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network are his videos of Manu Chao’s “‘Clandestino’ in Arizona” and Ana Tijoux’s “‘Shock’ in Arizona,” as well as a short promotional video that previews the journalist Maria Hinojosa’s documentary Lost in Detention (“Maria Hinojosa”). La Santa Cecilia won a Grammy award for Best Latin Rock album in 2014, which featured their hit song “ICE/El Hielo” (Rohter). Blacc’s song “Wake Me Up” was the number one song around the world in 2013. In an interview, Rivera explains that his work is critical of nostalgia and the spatial dimensions of temporality that, as he explains, tend to regard the “first world [as] the future; third world [as] the past” (Decena and Gray 134). Of course, nostalgia is often the other side of the coin of progress and development. Carroll’s article explores this mixing and repurposing as part of Rivera’s “undocumentary poetics.” According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 78 percent of Mexico’s total population lives in urban areas (“Urban Population”). It took Rivera over ten years to acquire the limited funding that he used to make Sleep Dealer (“Alex Rivera Speaking”). This flexibility of the borderlands is something that Rivera has explored throughout his work including Papapapá, The Sixth Section, and The Borders Trilogy. The brief allusion to “R. Dominguez” gestures to the groundbreaking work and activism of Ricardo Dominguez, associate professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California San Diego and co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT). The EDT was responsible for developing virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (“Ricardo Dominguez”).

Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Toward a Transfrontera-LatinX Aesthetic: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera.” Latino Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2017, pp. 373–80. “Alex Rivera Speaking at Platform Summit 2014.” YouTube, uploaded by Platform, Nov. 19, 2014, www .youtube.com/watch?v=eHPsmfLdiUs. “Before the Making of Sleep Dealer.” YouTube, uploaded by Alex Rivera, Oct. 22, 2012. www.youtube .com/watch?v=MfKx1AL06j0. Blacc, Aloe. “Wake Me Up” (video). Directed by Alex Rivera, La Panda Productions, 2013. YouTube, Oct. 22, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_o6axAseak.

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References

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“The Bracero Program.” UCLA Labor Center, University of California Los Angeles, 2014, www.labor .ucla .edu/what-we-do/labor-studies/research-tools/the-bracero-program/. Accessed June 4, 2018. Carroll, Amy Sara. “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s Undocumentary Poetics.” Social Identities, vol. 19, no. 3– 4, 2013, pp. 485– 500. Castillo, Debra A. “Rasquache Aesthetics in Alex Rivera’s ‘Why Cybraceros?’” Nordlit, vol. 31, 2014, pp. 7– 23. Chao, Manu. “‘Clandestino’ in Arizona” (video). Directed by Alex Rivera, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, 2011. YouTube, uploaded by NDLONvideos, Nov. 28, 2011, www.youtube .com/watch?v=Gbd7JvN2blw. Decena, Carlos Ulises, and Margaret Gray. “Putting Transnationalism to Work: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera.” Social Text, vol. 88, no. 3, 2006, pp. 131– 38. Gonzalez, Christopher. “Latino Sci-Fi: Cognition and Narrative Design in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 211– 23. Guillen, Michael. “Q&A: Alex Rivera, ‘Sleep Dealer.’ ” SF360, May 14, 2008, www.sf360.org/page /11194. Accessed June 6, 2014. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, Routledge, 2000, pp. 291– 324. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, et al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York University Press, 2013. La Santa Cecilia. “ICE/El Hielo” (video). Directed by Alex Rivera, Universal Music Latino y Arju Productions, 2013. YouTube, Apr. 8, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNJviuYUEQ. Lewis, Kevin. “Celebrating and Preserving the Latino Experience—His Own Way.” IDA: International Documentary Association, www.documentary.org/magazine/celebrating-and-preserving-latino -experience-his-own-way. Accessed Jan. 23, 2019. Marentes, Luis. “The Sci-Fi World of Filmmaker Alex Rivera.” Latino Rebels, June 23, 2014, www .latinorebels .com/2014/06/23/the-uneven-sci-fi-world-of-filmmaker-alex-rivera/. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019. “Maria Hinojosa Talks about Her Documentary ‘Lost in Detention.’ ” YouTube, uploaded by PresenteOrg, Oct. 12, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl_RJyEK2Co. Montgomery, David. “Alex Rivera’s Lost Cult Hit ‘Sleep Dealer’ about Immigration and Drones Is Back.” The Washington Post, July 7, 2014, www.washingtonpost .com/news/arts-and-entertainment /wp/2014/07/07/alex-riveras-lost-cult-hit-sleep-dealer-about-immigration-and-drones-is-back /?utm_term=.05c5aaf55f07. Orihuela, Sharada Balachandran, and Andrew Carl Hageman. “The Virtual Realities of US/Mexico Border Ecologies in Maquilapolis and Sleep Dealer.” Environmental Communication, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 166– 86. Papacharissi, Zizi. “Audience as Media Producers: Content Analysis of 260 Blogs.” Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, edited by Mark Tremayne, Routledge, 2007, pp. 21– 38. “Ricardo Dominguez.” University of San Diego Visual Arts, visarts.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/ricardo -dominguez.html. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019. Rivera, Alex. Memorial over General Atomics // USA (aerial sculpture). 2012. Alex Rivera: Filmmaker/ Digital Artist, alexrivera.com/project/a-hex/. Accessed June 4, 2018. Rohter, Larry. “Thinking Outside the Borders.” The New York Times. Mar. 4, 2014, www.nytimes.com /2014/03/05/arts/music/la-santa-cecilia-a-band-with-a-message.html. Thompson, Patricia. “Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies.” American Cinematographer, vol. 89, no. 4, 2008, pp. 80– 83. Tijoux, Ana. “‘Shock’ in Arizona” (video). Directed by Alex Rivera. National Day Laborer Organizing Network/National Immigrant Youth Alliance/Puente Movement, 2012. YouTube, uploaded by NDLONvideos, July 10, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkvgAXkd7yM.

Townsend, Madeline. “Filmmaker Alex Rivera Challenges the Borders of the Imagination.” Panoramas Scholarly Platform, University of Pittsburgh, Oct. 20, 2016, www.panoramas.pitt.edu/art -and-culture/filmmaker-alex-rivera-challenges-borders-imagination. “Urban Population (% of Total).” The World Bank, 2016, data .worldbank .org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL .IN.ZS. Accessed May 2, 2015. Ybarra-Frausto, Tómas. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1989, pp. 5– 8, icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc /845510/language/en-US/Default.aspx. Accessed May 23, 2018.

Filmography

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Apparitions on Tortillas. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 1997. Invisible Cinema, www.invisible america.com/apparitions.html. Accessed June 4, 2018. The Borders Trilogy. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 2002. Alex Rivera: Filmmaker/Digital Artist, alexrivera.com/project/the-borders-trilogy/. Accessed June 4, 2018. Conspiracy Club for Men. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 2000. Invisible Cinema, www.invisible america.com/conspiracy.html. Accessed June 4, 2018. Las Papas del Papa. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 1999. Invisible Cinema, www.invisible america.com/laspapas.html. Accessed June 4, 2018. Latinos on TV. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 1997. Invisible Cinema, www.invisibleamerica .com/latinosontv.html. Accessed June 4, 2018. Machete. Directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez, 20th Century Fox, 2010. Papapapá. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera, 1995. Invisible Cinema, www.invisibleamerica.com /papapapa.shtml. Accessed June 4, 2018. A Robot Walks into a Bar. Directed by Alex Rivera, Carlos Garza and Pin-Chun Liu, 2014. YouTube, uploaded by FutureStatesTV, Aug. 4, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOz1cMu7hZQ. Accessed June 4, 2018. The Sixth Section. Directed by Alex Rivera, Alex Rivera and POV/American Documentary, 2003. The Sixth Section, www.sixthsection.com/. Accessed June 4, 2018. Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera, Maya Entertainment, 2008. Why Cybraceros? Directed by Alex Rivera, Freewaves, 1997. YouTube, uploaded by Freewaves 3, Dec. 3, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr1eqKcDZq4. Accessed June 4, 2018.

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Chapter 15

EXTRA TERRESTRES AND THE POLITICS OF SCIENTIFIC REALISM Matthew David Goodwin

Science Fiction Film in Puerto Rico There have only been a handful of science fiction films set in Puerto Rico. The first examples appear in the 1960s with a number of B-movies. Roger Corman, a director known for his fast and cheap method of filmmaking, was on location in Puerto Rico for a brief time in 1960. One of the three films he made during this time, Last Woman on Earth, is a postapocalyptic science fiction film in which a wealthy American goes to Puerto Rico on vacation with his wife and lawyer. The opening scene takes place at a cockfight, prefiguring a fight that will take place between the American and his lawyer over the woman. A catastrophic event happens while the three are scuba diving, depleting Earth’s atmosphere of oxygen. It seems that everyone else on the island dies. The three essentially have their own island with all Puerto Ricans gone. As the lawyer states, “Could it be much easier? The lush island of Puerto Rico. A lush villa. And a whole life to be nothing but a lush in.” The island of Puerto Rico appears, like it does for most American tourists, a beautiful place without Puerto Rican agency. Another example is the film Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) directed by Robert Gaffney. In this story, Martians come to Puerto Rico with the intention of kidnapping women in order to repopulate their society. The U.S. Army blows up the Martian spaceship, saving the day and the defenseless population. These B-movies primarily make use of what the American directors as well as much of the American public perceive to be an exotic location. These are American stories with a primarily American cast but with a beach and jungle backdrop. As an added bonus for these directors, they were able to have this exotic location within a territory of the United States, avoiding any legal or political obstacles faced when making a film in a foreign nation. Finally, and most importantly, at least for Corman, they were able to take advantage of “certain tax laws” that made it cheaper to film in Puerto Rico (Corman). In addition to these B-movies set at the beach and jungle, there have been a couple of contemporary science fiction films and television shows that 286

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are set at the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory. These shows typically are space alien narratives that make use of the fact that Arecibo has been actively involved in numerous Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects over the years. In The X-Files episode “Little Green Men” (1994), which is set at the observatory though not filmed there, Mulder has arrived to Puerto Rico looking for evidence that the observatory has received messages from aliens. The one Puerto Rican character, Jorge, is depicted as childlike in his innocence and honesty, and also in his lack of familiarity with technology, apparent when Mulder chides him for touching a button on the computer. After Jorge dies seemingly from simply seeing the aliens, he becomes valuable to Mulder as mere physical evidence, with Mulder even wanting to ship him back to FBI headquarters. Also of note is the film Contact (1997), which is set and filmed at the visually striking and enormous telescope. There are no Puerto Rican characters present; nevertheless, a similar condescension as Mulder’s is expressed by the character played by Matthew McConaughey who is writing a book about “how technology affects Third World cultures.” The telescope, as well as the presence of the American scientists, is seen in these films as a kind of exception to the general backward nature of the nation. Like the movies from the 1960s, what is valued about filming science fiction in Puerto Rico is the landscape and the exoticness of Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans are depicted as not being equipped to deal with the technology that surrounds them. The first Puerto Rican science fiction film, Extra Terrestres (2017), which was written and directed by the filmmaker Carla Cavina, diverges sharply from the previous science fiction films set in Puerto Rico. There are no American tourists or scientists in this film, and there are no beach or jungle scenes. It was filmed primarily in Coamo, in the hills of southeast Puerto Rico, with a Puerto Rican cast, and filled with familiar elements of Puerto Rican culture, from El Meson restaurant to pitorro (an illegal yet beloved Puerto Rican moonshine). Unlike previous science fiction films in Puerto Rico, the United States is not depicted as the source of science and technology, or even military might; rather, it is a force of economic and colonial oppression. The Arecibo Observatory, which has, after all, been primarily funded and run by universities in the United States, though mentioned, is not shown. Importantly, the political connections that Puerto Rico has to Latin America and Spain are emphasized, rather than its connections to the United States. The giant telescope that does appear in the film is situated on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and the central couple, one person from Puerto Rico and the other from Venezuela, meet at a university in Spain, not in the United States. This shift, along with the fact that there are two characters from Venezuela and one character from Cuba, points to the general pan-Latinidad of the

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film. The film is not only an independent film because it is funded and made outside of Hollywood but also because it has completely broken with the Anglo-centered legacy of science fiction film in Puerto Rico.

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As Above, So Below

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Extra Terrestres has four overlapping plot lines. The central plot is the story of Teresa Díaz’s return trip to Puerto Rico after having been absent for seven years. She is traveling from the Canary Islands, where she lives with her partner, Daniela, with the purpose of inviting her family to attend their wedding. When she arrives to the family home, she stalls in her purpose when faced with the problems that her father, Arcadio Díaz, has with his chicken factory, Pollo Mi Tierra. The second major plot line has Teresa assisting Arcadio when the factory is under attack by Tydue (Tyson Foods + Perdue), which is more closely aligned to the United States. Tydue sabotages Pollo Mi Tierra in addition to attempting to change the laws about the sale of chicken that would enable them to import inexpensive frozen chicken from the United States and then sell it cheaply in Puerto Rico. The third plot line revolves around the scientific work of Teresa and Daniela, who are investigating a supernova (a star that has exploded) in the Andromeda Galaxy. In the final scene, the light of the supernova reaches Earth and becomes visible in the Earth sky. And the final plot line involves Teresa’s nephew Andrés, his scientific experiments, and his creation of a gadget that enables him to journey to outer space and witness the supernova first hand. The four plot lines intertwine to highlight the parallels between cosmic events and earthly events. At the heart of Extra Terrestres is the coming-out story of Teresa, and the emotional resonance of the film arises from her fear about opening up to her father who is deeply conservative. She is so afraid to tell the family that it takes Daniela coming to Puerto Rico to force the confrontation. Once Arcadio meets Daniela, he openly opposes their union and nearly disowns Teresa. The anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that Teresa has been gone so long, which is expressed in an early scene in which Teresa is taking a taxi from the airport, a traditional “taxi turístico,” showing her separation from both the culture (she is practically a visitor to the island) and her family (since they are not picking her up). Only at the end, after many revelations of family secrets, does the father finally come around to accepting Teresa and her fiancée. A final montage of wedding photos shows the entire family together in celebration. Throughout the film, there are a variety of connections made between the lives of the family and the cosmos. The central image of the extraterres-

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trial, which is present in the title of the film, is first used by the brother when Teresa returns home. He jokingly asks, “Are you back to experiment on us earthlings?” The reference to invading and probing aliens points to her being an astrophysicist, as well as expressing her absence from Puerto Rico. It is next used in a more derogatory way by the father, Arcadio, who calls Andrés an extraterrestrial. The connotation here is simply one of strangeness, extreme strangeness, as Andrés is always doing science experiments under the kitchen table and interacts very little with the family socially. Arcadio then adds that Teresa and indeed the entire family are extraterrestrials, meaning that he believes himself to be the only normal, practical, and hardworking one in the family. These uses of the term extraterrestrial are a metaphorical connection between personal characteristics and space aliens. But there is another more literal connection that is made by Andrés, who says from under the table, “We are stardust. Product of the nuclear fusion of hydrogen, carbon, and iron.” The idea is that humans are made of the dust that is shot out of stars when they become supernovas and explode. If we all are made of stardust, then we are all from outside the earth, all extraterrestrials, all space aliens. Ironically, Arcadio was right that they are extraterrestrials. This scientifically accurate yet poetic sentiment is also expressed in the epigraph of the film: “Miramos las estrellas con ojos de estrella” (We see the stars with eyes made of stars). Another way that the lives of the characters and the cosmos are connected is through a particular process of revelation. It is not only Teresa who goes through the experience of coming out; in fact, every character has some kind of secret. The father and brother Junior have affairs, the sister Andrea loves a mechanic who is not acceptable to the wealthy family, and the mother secretly sings boleros in a bar called La Casa Pa’ Rockial, the name of which provides a cover for her since she can say that she is going to church, “la parochia.” Like Teresa’s relationship with Daniela, these are all ongoing events— it’s just that they are not known to the other family members. The revelation of these things can be violent; for example, Arcadio nearly kills the sister’s boyfriend once he is discovered. Nevertheless, the revelations eventually lead to acceptance and more honest relationships. The various comings out of Teresa and her family are paralleled by the cosmic events that Teresa and Daniela are researching, in particular their detection of a new supernova. While in Puerto Rico, Teresa and Daniela discover a new X-ray source coming from the Andromeda Galaxy. It turns out to be an entirely new supernova that was not known by science before: a cosmic secret. And like the family secrets, a supernova is a dramatic and explosive event. At the end of the film, when the father accepts his two daughters as they are, and with the partners

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they have chosen, and everything is out in the open, the family all together sees the new supernova as it appears for the first time. The story depicts the process of coming out, its potential for violence, and ultimately its beauty. These parallels and connections between the cosmic and the earthly are demonstrated visually by the computer-generated outer space scenes that serve as transitions between scenes throughout the film and that connect the macro- and microcosms. At times, the parallel is made obvious, as when Teresa and Andrea are discussing Jupiter, and then the planet itself is shown. The images of space also show the direct connection that the characters have to the supernova. In the opening sequence of the film, there is a computergenerated scene of a fiery star (which seems somewhat unstable), then the shot zooms out, moving through space until reaching all the way down to the Canary Islands where Teresa and Daniela are looking through a telescope. And then at the end of the film, Andrés’s journey to the supernova is shown, moving from his position on Earth and zooming all the way to the star as it explodes, bringing the connection between the stars and earth full circle.

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Mad Science

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For the scientists in Extra Terrestres (Teresa, Daniela, and Andrés), the cosmic and the earthly are intertwined on a daily basis. However, there are two very different depictions of scientists in the film. The character of Andrés comes from a particular legacy, that of the mad scientist. This kind of scientist, so common in science fiction, was formed by works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man. The mad scientist is an “overreacher,” someone who goes beyond current science practices and envisions new ways of using technology (Haynes 67). The work that Andrés does is very much consistent with the work of a mad scientist who develops projects outside of accepted science and who goes beyond what others are capable or willing to do. In fact, there is a specific reference to Frankenstein when, while at dinner with the family, he takes the different pieces of a chicken and puts them together in the form of a whole chicken. He then takes his homemade electrical prod and tries to reanimate the chicken. Furthermore, Andrés has all of the traditional characteristics of a mad scientist. Andrés is a genius, made clear when he demonstrates to his aunt that he has an advanced knowledge of astrophysics. In addition, he is shown to be methodical and relies on math for his experiments. Like many mad scientists, he does his work in secret (Weingart et al. 284). His work areas are his room and under the kitchen table, where he spends much of his time doing experiments on his ant farm. Apart from his chicken reanimation project, though, his primary experiment involves extrapolating out from the work of Einstein

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(a picture of Einstein hangs in his room). His plan is first shown in a conversation with Teresa when he asks, “How can I transform into light? To travel to a star like a message on an electromagnetic wave.” Later, using Teresa’s phone to make calculations and a notebook to draw diagrams, he constructs a device and a satellite dish, converts himself into light, and projects himself into outer space. Assuming that he does in fact achieve this feat, it would be one of the most important discoveries in human history. A device that could transform matter into energy and beam it into space would effectively allow humans to explore the entire universe. Andrés’s work contrasts sharply with the work of Teresa and Daniela, who are trained scientists who work together researching the Andromeda Galaxy. They are relatively healthy and happy as individuals and as a couple, and they are shown a number of times being excited together about discoveries. In terms of their work, they are involved in what seems to be an established research project supported by institutions; specifically, monitoring the data from their telescope on Tenerife. In other words, they are depicted as real people doing realistic science work. In comparison to other science fiction films with scientist characters, these two are pretty nonthreatening in part because they are simply observing the universe. Their discovery of an unknown supernova is new, but it is within the realm of accepted science. While they are simply observing the universe through an external tool, a telescope, Andrés is fundamentally changing human nature. This kind of mad scientist is the kind that society is most afraid of, because they are changing who we are as a species, affecting the nature of life through “prolongation, improvement, manipulation, expansion, and termination of life” (Weingart et al. 286). Ultimately, Andrés turns himself into data, into something that can be sent like a message through space. At the beginning of the film, Teresa and Daniela are collecting data from Andromeda, and at the end of the film, Andrés becomes data and sends it back. Beyond the typical characteristics of the mad scientist, the ethical implications of the mad scientist’s work are often questionable, sacrificing others for the sake of science, as they desire fame and fortune, and as they turn to violence and domination. Andrés, though, is just a child and has none of these motives. His one moment of violence is when his mother tries to stop him from reanimating the chicken and he shocks her to push her away. She has gotten in the way of his science. Andrés may lack empathy with people, as the director indicates that she conceived of him as having Asperger’s Syndrome (Cavina). In other respects, though, he diverges from the ethics of the typical mad scientist. As a scientist, he has a blackboard calendar in his room that he uses to count the days it takes for the chicken factory to fatten up the chickens and kill them. His measurements show his questioning of the cruelty

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of the chicken killing process. All of this is in the context of a discussion of vegetarianism with Teresa, in addition to the fact that he has a pet chicken named Pulsar who he clearly cares about. Ultimately, when Andrés is in the hospital, he reports to Teresa that he saw the supernova as “beautiful.” This is an important transformation in terms of his character development since it runs against his dominant way of dealing with the world through science and mathematics. It may be that Andrés is working in the legacy of mad scientists, but he also has a pretty strong ethical and aesthetic response to the world that is fostered by his family and Teresa in particular.

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Scientific Realism

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The presence of this positively depicted mad scientist figure certainly pushes this film into the direction of science fiction. However, the key aspect of Extra Terrestres that makes it science fiction is that Andrés creates a new gadget, a “novum.” According to Darko Suvin, the presence of a novum is the single “necessary condition” of science fiction (65). It is something different from the world of the author and reader that is nevertheless scientifically possible. However, it is important to note that Andrés’s gadget is only at the center of one of the four plot lines that make up the film. That is, the story is not just about science; it is also very much a family drama. In addition, the world depicted in the film is meant to be a contemporary and realistic portrayal of Puerto Rico, as opposed to a radically different future or a fantastic alternate world. The world of the film is the same as our world— it just has this new matter-to-light transformation machine. This is science fiction, but it is a particular kind of science fiction, a subgenre we can call “scientific realism.” In scientific realism, there is a primary realist story, which contains a marvelous, and yet scientifically possible, event that is finely interwoven with the realist story (a paradigm film from the United States would be Another Earth [2011]). This concept of scientific realism as a genre is inspired by magical realism. Just as magical realism is a subgenre of fantasy, scientific realism is a subgenre of science fiction. Frederick Luis Aldama describes magical realism this way: “This is a form of writing where the narrative makes no distinction nor discriminates between events that defy the laws of nature (in physics or genetics, for instance) and those that conform to the laws of nature” (142). For example, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, an intergenerational family drama unfolds, but there are also these marvelous moments in which something unnatural occurs, such as when a line of blood seems to have agency as it travels through the town on the way to the Buendía house (68– 69). A scientific realist story is like magical realism in that there

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is some marvelous event; however, it is a marvelous event that is depicted as conforming to the laws of nature. These two genres are quite distinct, being fantasy and science fiction, but a narrative nudge one way or the other can change them into one another. For example, a scientific realist version of One Hundred Years of Solitude could have nanobots direct the blood down the street, or it could be that a human has been genetically modified so that their blood contains part of their consciousness. In these cases, the event is still marvelous and unexpected, but it would be scientifically explainable. Or in Extra Terrestres, it could be that even though Andrés creates this matter transformation device and attempts to use it, the spirit of an ancestor actually guides him into space. The connecting point between magical realism and scientific realism is the marvelous nature of the event that can in one narrative be scientifically possible and scientifically impossible in another narrative. Put another way, science is just magic by another name, and vice versa. And though the marvelous is more often associated with magical realism, science has its own version of the marvelous, as when new discoveries and inventions shock us with their ingenuity. Behind this connection between magical realism and scientific realism is ambiguity. What exactly is the line of blood in One Hundred Years of Solitude? It doesn’t seem to be the result of a magic spell or of a divine source. More than anything, it is a narrative device rather than a question of metaphysics. That is, the marvelous event in these genres is simply part of the life of the characters. Likewise, in the scientific realism of Extra Terrestres, the marvelous event occurs by means of science, but there is no real discussion of why it happens. The moment when Andrés travels to space is even ambiguous in terms of whether and how it happened. It could be that he imagined or hallucinated it, or it could be that he really figured out how to turn matter into light and project himself into space in order to observe a supernova happen. There is evidence supporting both possibilities. Andrés does seem to have a grip on the science, and he certainly demonstrates technical skills that would make his journey possible. On the other hand, when he presumably is taking the trip to space, it seems his body does not disappear. Since his body is not shown as leaving, if he does travel to space, it would be his mind that travels. However the actual event is conceived, it is, at the end of the day, at least theoretically possible to convert matter to light, and so even with the ambiguity, the event still has its basis in science. Even if Andrés doesn’t actually travel to space, he does in fact create a new gadget through science that could potentially send him to outer space. What is conspicuous about magical realism and scientific realism is the imbalance of realism and the marvelous element. Realism makes up the majority of the narrative and the marvelous element makes up a small percentage. In

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terms of magical realism, this imbalance makes the marvelous moment even more unbelievable and striking than other kinds of fantasy narratives since there is no overarching suspension of disbelief being asked of the viewer. That is, if viewers already have accepted that the fantasy world of a film is the case, then particular marvelous events will be perfectly believable in that world. This difference can be seen in two scenarios, where one is innocently walking down the street and out of nowhere a ghost appears, and where one sees a ghost in a haunted house. Scientific realism has a similar effect. Watching characters on Star Trek beam themselves to another planet is unsurprising, but watching a young boy in a scientific realist film beam himself into space is almost unbelievable. In addition, the imbalances of realism with magic or science have different cultural implications. In magical realism, it is magic, myth, and religion that are shown to be integrated into daily life, while in scientific realism, science is depicted as forming part of the cultural life. Because of the integration of some marvelous events in magical realism, some theorists have argued that magical realism confirms U.S. readers’ ideas about a primitive Latin America, while at the same time other theorists claim that it provides a counternarrative to imperial discourse (Faris 116). Both of these interpretations are possible, and made possible by the interweaving of realism and magical events. Likewise, scientific realism can set up multiple interpretations; for example, that the marvelous science in Extra Terrestres advocates scientism or that it is an expression of Latin American agency. In either case, though, what is important in terms of gaining awareness of this genre of scientific realism is that science is shown in the film to be an important part of Latin America, a perspective sorely needed in a context where magical realism has been the genre lens through which Latin America has appeared to Anglo America. Producing a scientific realist film is particularly important in Puerto Rico because it shows how science is intertwined with daily life in Puerto Rico, even though it is not seen by the United States that way. Puerto Rico is an island of scientists, and Teresa, Daniela, and Andrés are all a source of scientific innovation: the first two in terms of discovery, while Andrés has a unique ability to create new technologies to meet his needs. In the films set in Puerto Rico discussed in the beginning of the chapter, the United States is the source of technology and science. However, in Extra Terrestres, the United States is just a source of brute force, having the raw power to economically push around Puerto Rican businesses. It does not have better scientists or better technology. The previous science fiction films set in Puerto Rico were entirely created from the perspective of the colonizing force of the United States. Extra Terrestres, however, has taken an important step in using scientific realism to show the truth about Puerto Rico and its science power.

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature. Routledge, 2013. Cavina, Carla. Personal Interview. May 31, 2018. Corman, Roger. “Director Commentary.” Last Woman on Earth. Directed by Roger Corman, Retromedia, 2006. Faris, Wendy B. “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism.” Janus Head, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002, pp. 101– 9. García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Avon Books, 1971. Haynes, Roslynn D. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Signet Classics, 2000. Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979. Weingart, Peter, et al. “Of Power Maniacs and Unethical Geniuses: Science and Scientists in Fiction Film.” Public Understanding of Science, vol. 12, no. 3, 2003, pp. 279– 87. Wells, H. G. The Invisible Man: Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells. 1897. Dover Publications, 1934.

Filmography

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Another Earth. Directed by Mike Cahill, Artists Public Domain, 2011. Contact. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, South Side Amusement, 1997. Extra Terrestres. Directed by Carla Cavina, Pulsar Films, 2017. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. Directed by Robert Gaffney, Futurama, 1965. Last Woman on Earth. Directed by Roger Corman, Filmgroup, 1960. “Little Green Men.” Directed by David Nutter. The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, season 2, episode 1, Ten Thirteen Productions, Aug. 28, 1995. DVD.

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PART V Superheroic Latinxs

Chapter 16

LATINX- MEN Logan’s Undocumented Voices Speak Jorge Santos

James Mangold’s 2017 superhero western Logan follows its titular hero across Mexico, the United States, and eventually Canada on a quest to shepherd Laura, an undocumented Mexican girl, to “Eden,” a safe haven for runaway mutants in “El Norte.” Through the character Laura and her strategic use of both silence and voice, Logan updates the civil rights allegorical schema of Marvel Comics’ X-Men franchise to address the plight of the undocumented migrant.1 The film follows an embittered and sickly Logan, also known by his superhero codename Wolverine, now working as an Uber driver in El Paso, Texas. Logan hides his aging mentor, Charles Xavier, also known as Professor X, from U.S. authorities in an abandoned smelting plant just south of the U.S. border with Mexico. Eventually, Logan is approached by a Mexican nurse named Gabriela Lopez, who crosses the border to pay the aged and long-retired superhero to protect her adopted mutant daughter, Laura. The film reimagines Logan not as a hero but as a “coyote”— a smuggler who helps desperate individuals cross the border separating Mexico from the United States. Furthermore, Logan addresses problematic representations of undocumented migrants in popular culture, particularly in the superhero genre, and refuses to limit such characters to little more than gangbangers or victims. Logan’s use of either silence or Spanish to interrupt a majority Englishlanguage film redirects the viewers’ attention to the way language actualizes characters and allows them to speak back to stereotypical depictions of the undocumented as either violent or voiceless.

Challenging the “Cholo” The film opens by invoking one of the more pernicious anti-Latino, and increasingly anti-immigrant, stereotypes in popular culture— that of the violent gangbanger, or “cholo.”2 While the cholo stereotype arises out of a larger history of racialized Latinx representations, it has begun to “speak” for the undocumented through its increased presence in popular culture.3 Fittingly, 299

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these characters’ voices are heard before they appear in the film. As Logan sleeps off his long night of driving a cavalcade of rich, white Texans into Mexico for work or play (mostly play), he is accosted by a group of fairly stereotypical thugs who attempt to steal his limousine’s rims. Their appearance is preceded by Spanish-language rap music blaring from their van as the thieves speak to each other in an audible, but incomprehensible, affected Spanglish. Their visual appearance confirms the stereotype their associated soundscape (the rap music, the urbanized diction) implies— gold chains, topbuttoned plaid shirts, slicked-back hair, and brown skin. They fire on Logan with a shotgun before we hear any comprehensible dialogue, as their violence speaks for them. Marked as Mexican (or, at the very least, Mexican American) in appearance, accent, and place (just beyond the U.S. border with Mexico), these cholos speak in clichéd urban slang as Logan eventually struggles to fight them off, establishing both the protagonist’s propensity for violence and his declining ability to enact said violence. When we finally hear their voices clearly, they spit Spanish curses at the presumed-dead Logan— curses that go untranslated by subtitles, potentially othering these familiar clichés. Initially, the use of language to preface character, coupled with the film’s choice not to translate its Spanish dialogue, seems to do little more than summon the sorts of racialized meanings figures like the cholo represent. Ultimately, however, it will use those tactics to undermine those very stereotypes. Still, in light of the national discourse concerning undocumented migration and criminality at the time of the film’s release in 2017, the very presence of these unnamed and interchangeable gangbangers might initially trouble the viewer.4 One could read these characters as doing little more than expressing the Trump administration’s constant, and largely unfounded, handwringing over migrant criminality and their propensity for gang violence— typically though the invocation of the notorious MS-13 gang.5 David Crow also noted these parallels: “Logan, whether inadvertently or not, is the perfect X-Men movie for the Age of Donald Trump— a time period increasingly looking grimmer than anything Oscar Isaac threatened in last summer’s ostensible Apocalypse film.” But why would a film that adapts a comic book about marginalization and oppression in the United States uncritically include the problematic, and potentially racist, caricatured figure of the cholo? Perhaps an answer lies, in part at least, in the fate of these characters. After all, Logan dispatches them rather viciously under the sickly neon lights of an El Paso strip mall. Their bloody and wholly unromantic demise, coupled with their erasure from the narrative from this point forward, suggests a rather pointed corrective. By dispatching them in the opening scene of the film, Mangold signals to its viewer the elimination of this troublesome figure from its representational schema and effectively silences the trope.

In many ways, Logan’s deployment of the cholo/gangbanger stereotype indicts a superhero comics’ culture that has often leaned on this problematic figure in order to represent Latinx characters, particularly urban males. While non-cholo Latinx characters exist in both major publishing houses— Marvel and DC— many such caricatured figures nonetheless proliferate superhero comics, typically as nameless, stock urban antagonists.6 Even when these characters are used as templates for protagonists themselves, they often fall into the trappings of these same problematic representations. Take, for example, DC Comics’ Jaime Hernandez, a.k.a. the Blue Beetle, for their New 52 reboot in 2011. When inner-city youth Jaime discovers an alien tech suit that grants him superhuman abilities, he must still do battle with the gangs of his local neighborhood, essentially distinguishing Jaime as heroic simply for not being a cholo (unlike his fellow Latinxs). As Frederick Luis Aldama notes, “With a few exceptions, these urbanized Latinos are one way or another locked into vigilante profiles. The urban Latino superhero performs superheroic deeds to fight urban crime— especially street-level drug dealing” (34). Consider, also, the case of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and the character of Chato Santana. Chato, a reformed ex-gangbanger by the name of “El Diablo,” joins a team of supervillains to save the world from a mystical threat. Chato is depicted as a fairly straightforward stereotype, from his white tank top and teardrop tattoos to his use of outdated, well-worn slang. Even his powers, which allow him to generate and wield massive flames, can be read as invoking an ethnic stereotype— that of the fiery Latino— since he can only access his powers when he loses control of his emotions. And while these characters are often given some semblance of a backstory to individualize them, they nonetheless pivot around the all-too-familiar trope of the cholo gangbanger that Logan unceremoniously exterminates. Logan’s work to reconstruct an emergent Latinx stereotype— that of the victimized undocumented migrant— proceeds with higher degrees of both bombast and subtlety.

Logan quickly replaces the problematic figure of the cholo with another that is itself politically loaded— that of the socially silenced, undocumented border crosser. Centering its narrative on series of border crossings— from Mexico to the United States and from the United States to Canada—Logan participates in an emerging corpus of U.S. film and fiction that depicts the experience of the undocumented migrant. This element of the narrative positions the film as a borderland fiction, a crucial facet of the film’s undocumented allegory fully explored by Danielle Alexis Orozco’s “Laura Kinney as X-treme Niña: Monstrosity and Citizenship in Marvel’s Logan” (this volume). In her

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Representations of the Undocumented in Superhero Storyworlds

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chapter, Orozco explicates the manner in which the “monstrous” figure of Laura navigates a neocolonial borderland via a plethora of intersectional strategies and thereby confronts the brutality of neo-imperial patriarchy. Drawing from such borderland and Latina theorists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Lorgia García-Peña, Orozco closes her chapter by reflecting on what the character of Laura portends for future representations of Latinas in Hollywood film and mainstream media. My work here theorizes Laura, as well as the other protagonists, as undocumented characters that challenge the pernicious stereotypes that permeate the borderland fictions in the same cultural venues that Orozco interrogates. As Fabrice Schurmans outlines in his study on the representation of “illegal migrants” in contemporary film, borders are typically metaphorical as well as geographic, representing “the demarcation between the legally acknowledged citizen and the officially nonexistent subject (132).” The fictional universe in which the X-Men operate is ideally suited to represent this sort of sociopolitical exploration. After all, the characters that populate the pages of the X-Men comics (or in this case, film reels) must continuously cross the geographic and metaphorical borders that Schurmans theorizes. Originating in September 1963, the X-Men series of comics chronicles the plight of “mutants”— humans born with extraordinary abilities often coupled with a distinctive nonhuman appearance— who are segregated and oppressed by normative human society. While functioning as a civil rights allegory at the time of its initial publication, the X-Men line of comics has since expanded to serve as Marvel’s catch-all comic for all issues of marginalization. In the specific case of Logan, it is particularly well suited to dramatize the “demarcation between the legally acknowledged citizen and the officially nonexistent subject.” The film is set in 2029, when mutant birthrates have declined so sharply that nearly all mutants have disappeared from human society— in a sense, they are literally nonexistent. Given that all the mutant characters in Logan are marked by their ability to either hide from the government or to successfully cross borders in order to elude its grasp, the film dramatizes the paradoxical choice of all undocumented in the United States. One may choose to flee and risk exposure to the very forces one seeks to escape. Or, as Logan chooses at the beginning of the film, hide and effectively render yourself “nonexistent.” However, concealment always necessitates silence, a silence the film breaks. Schurmans’s study suggests that the proliferation of undocumented characters in film draws our attention the emergence of a “new subgenre” of representation in recent years in response to increased political attention (132). Amy Cummins, in her study on the representation of the migrant figure in young adult (YA) fiction, suggests the same, arguing that “the increase in YA novels on this topic demonstrates rising public concern” (57). And as

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Alberto Ledesma highlights, “Fictional accounts of immigrant experiences have been present in many of the short stories, dramas, and novels produced in Mexico and the American Southwest since the United States defeated Mexico in 1848” (“Undocumented Crossings” 67).7 Yet as the debate around undocumented migration has regained greater prominence in U.S. political discourse, Marta Caminero-Santangelo notes, “It is arguable that there is no population more silenced in the face of debates that most directly affect them than the undocumented” (449). And despite recent interest in their lives, Ledesma notes that there are few literary spaces “where undocumented immigrant stories are routinely offered by the protagonists of those stories themselves” (“Undocumented Crossings” 92). Sadly, comic book storyworlds, particularly those of titan publishers Marvel Comics and DC comics, have lagged woefully behind both film and YA literature in effectively representing the lives of undocumented migrants. Still, such characters have begun to appear in major superhero titles in both Marvel and DC’s respective universes. In September 2017, only a week after the current administration decided to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected from deportation children who were brought to the United States by undocumented parents, DC’s Action Comics #987 featured Superman rescuing migrant workers from white supremacist violence. There is a pop culture narrative that interprets Superman himself as an undocumented immigrant (he certainly did not come through Ellis Island when he debuted in 1938). Yet the actual undocumented immigrants in Action Comics #987 are depicted as completely devoid of agency or voice— the only dialogue uttered is a feeble “Gracias a dios” when Superman blocks the bullets fired at the migrant workers he is rescuing (Jurgens and Bogdanovic). As is often the case, Marvel Comics outpaces DC on issues of representation, particularly with the character of Joaquin Torres. In Sam Wilson: Captain America #1 (Spencer and Acuna), published in October 2015, its titular hero rescues a group of undocumented immigrants crossing the Arizona border into the United States from the villainous Serpent Society. The resulting storyline features the debut of Torres, who was brought into the United States as a six-year-old. As a child, Torres is captured crossing the border, experimented on in an immigrant detention center, and rescued before joining Captain America as his partner, “The Falcon.” While the character of Torres addresses many of the problematic depictions of the undocumented as voiceless victims, the X-Men series (also under the Marvel Comics umbrella of titles) has not. This is particularly surprising— even disappointing— when one considers how many of the X-Men series’ most iconic characters, such as Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Sunspot, and Banshee, are immigrants. Logan fills this gap. It should perhaps

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come as little surprise that the film’s initial trio of mutant heroes are all immigrants themselves— Logan, who is Canadian, as well as Charles Xavier and Caliban, both of whom are British. J. Garcia also noted the parallels between Logan and the immigrant experience: The themes are there. Logan is an immigrant struggling not because he is nefarious or illegal or unwilling to do things the right way. In fact, the system is actively set up against him. No one will deny this. Logan is other and because he is other people fear and shun him. Society purposely makes things hard for him like it makes things hard for undocumented immigrants not allowing them to drive, not allowing them to go to college at a reasonable price, not allowing them to serve their chosen country if desired, etc. There is even an argument to be made that Logan is himself an undocumented immigrant, as canon to his fictional character biography is his escape from a Canadian governmental facility where he was experimented on before crossing into the United States to join the X-Men. It is highly unlikely that Logan stopped to fill in the proper paperwork beforehand or bothered to take a passport photo. However, Logan’s response to the dearth of undocumented agency in the pages of the comics that inspired its story goes beyond such themes. The undocumented characters in the film command narrative and moral authority once the cholos have been eliminated.

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Logan immediately replaces the image of the cholo with a more nuanced register of voices: first with Gabriela Lopez, who sets the plot into motion, and later with her adopted mutant daughter, Laura. In the scene immediately following his confrontation with the cholos, Logan attends the funeral of one of his Uber customers (even the funeral suggests an end to this troubling stereotype). He is approached by Gabriela, a nurse from Mexico City who begs Logan to shepherd Laura to Canada where she will be safe from her pursuers. When Logan initially refuses, fearing that the trek from Texas to Canada would expose him and Xavier, Gabriela code-switches into Spanish: “¡Necesito un héroe! ¿Qué en coño te pasó? ¿De qué te escondes?” (I need a hero! What the fuck happened to you? What are you hiding from?; my trans.). As with the cholos in the previous scene, Gabriela’s Spanish is left untranslated by subtitles. While in the previous instance this produced an othering effect, here the untranslated Spanish takes on a sense of narrative authority, as

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Gabriela’s insistence ultimately drives Logan to accept her mission. The film’s initial focus on Gabriela only reinforces this effect, as her voice commands not only authority but empathy, when we discover Gabriela’s motivations later in the film. Linking the two voices via the use of untranslated Spanish effectively replaces the cholo with the more nuanced and sympathetic figure of Gabriela.8 Of equal measure is the tone and content of Gabriela’s Spanish as opposed to her English (she and Laura are completely fluent in both). When Gabriela speaks English (which she does for the majority of the film), she supplicates Logan for assistance. However, her aggressive use of Spanish implies both agency and authority, one linked to the performance of her Mexican cultural/national identity through her use of Spanish. Ultimately, the quest claims Gabriela’s life but not before she reveals to Logan that Transigen, the corporation that hired her to care for Laura, has been creating mutants from cloned cells used to impregnate young Mexican girls. Gabriela’s refusal to be silenced sets the entire plot in motion when she helps all these young mutants escape before they are either turned into weapons to be sold to the highest bidder or euthanized for refusing to comply. Unlike Gabriela, Laura employs strategic silences to resist the proscribed racialized meanings language often conjures for the undocumented, reconfiguring silence as an expression of agency rather than as evidence of its absence. When Laura first appears in the film, she does not speak— inverting the manner in which the cholos first appear. In fact, she remains mute for the majority of the film. Initially, Logan and Xavier presume that Laura simply does not speak English and attempt to communicate to her using a form of broken Spanish that the film uses for comedic effect. After Gabriela is killed by their pursuer, Transigen’s cyborg mercenary Donald Pierce, Laura continues refusing to speak, leading other characters in the film to assume she is mute. Pierce reinforces this assumption, referring to Laura as a “special mute” roughly halfway through the film— it is only later that one realizes that “mute” does not refer to Laura’s silence but is rather a form of genetic slur for the word “mutant.” This aspect was reinforced by the film’s marketing, as the character of Laura does not speak in any of the trailers released ahead of its debut in March 2017. While Laura’s muteness might initially be read as a metaphoric form of undocumented silence— that perhaps she has been robbed of her voice— the film quickly dispenses of such easy (and problematic) disability metaphors. Rather, Laura’s silence is figured as resistive and strategic, itself a form of agency. Initially, Laura’s silence can be interpreted as the silence necessary to remain concealed— after all, she crossed the border into the United States without documentation and is attempting to do so again as she flees to Canada. In his autobiographical essay on his own experiences as a formerly undocumented American, Ledesma describes

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his own deliberate silence at the behest of his father at school as a survival strategy, writing that “if only we all waited and kept our mouths shut, things would get better” (“On the Grammar” 416). Like Ledesma, Laura keeps her “mouth shut,” seemingly in the hope that her silence might improve her dire situation. In particular, for both Ledesma and Laura, silence is motivated by a fear of capture and removal. Going further, Ledesma contends that all forms of language— both verbal and written— transformed into a form of spoken silence, as his syntax contorted around anything that could be read as revelatory of his thenundocumented status:

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After many years of reflecting on the nature of this silence, I have come to the realization that there is no specific phonology to undocumented immigrant grammar, only a complex syntax that determines its structure. This grammar is one punctuated by strategically deployed silences, pauses in speech that are as predictable as the human need to have a subject present with every predicate. (“On the Grammar” 417)

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For Laura, these “strategically deployed silences” permeate the majority of the film. And while Laura’s silences are strategic, so are her outbursts. The first time Laura speaks opens act three of the film. After a devastating attack led by Pierce and his Transigen cyborg compatriots, Xavier is killed and Logan severely wounded. Laura is able to escape with Logan and drives him to a local urgent care clinic for assistance. Logan thanks Laura for saving his life, to which Laura replies, “De nada” (You’re welcome). Initially Logan is shocked and angered, demanding to know that if Laura could speak the entire time, why hasn’t she? Like Gabriela, Laura’s Spanish dialogue goes untranslated by the film, although in this instance it works to characterize Laura as generally defiant of linguistic norms. As David Betancourt observes, “The Spanish spoken in Logan is given even more power due to the lack of subtitles on the screen while Laura is speaking. Either you understand what she’s saying or you don’t— which is part of the point. Laura doesn’t care if you don’t understand; she’s going to express herself the way she wants.” While this moment is played for laughs, the viewer also recognizes that Laura’s silence was selfimposed and clearly strategic. The film also suggests that Laura’s silence is more than simply a survival mechanism; it is also a subtle subversive tactic that allows Laura to claim both agency and authority. Immediately after discovering that Laura can indeed speak, Logan erupts and demands to know why Laura hasn’t spoken to him for the entire journey. Laura responds by berating Logan in Spanish, exclaim-

ing, “¡No te voy hablar si mi insultes, si mi grites!” (I won’t speak to you if you insult me and scream at me; my trans.). Here, the film figures Laura’s silence as not just a necessary survival skill but a silent chastisement of a culture that would only respond with vitriol. Spanish, then, works not only to claim linguistic agency in the scene, since Laura can understand Logan but not vice versa, but also positions Spanish as the language of moral authority— not unlike Gabriela’s opening scene in which she demands Logan answer for his cowardice. As if to reify the unspoken accusation that speaking Spanish only prompts demeaning responses from English speakers, Logan ironically responds to Laura’s rebuke by demanding she return to silence: “What? OK, shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Laura responds by demanding that Logan complete the mission with which he has been tasked, to which he quickly but resentfully acquiesces. Laura’s decision to speak is accompanied in the film by a role reversal as well, as Laura takes command of the pair’s journey to El Norte. By the time Laura also reveals that she can speak English, demanding that she be allowed to drive for the remainder of the journey, Logan (who is severely injured at this point), simply acquiesces, ceding his agency and authority to Laura.

The Language of Commodification While the voices of the undocumented in Logan function as expressions of agency, resistance, and authority, the film does consider the manner in which language can likewise strip its characters of those qualities. As the trio of Logan, Laura, and Xavier flee Transigen, it also comments on the nature of undocumented silence as a result of the commodification, and subsequent dehumanization, of migrant labor. As Schurmans observes,

Cynthia Carvajal goes further, highlighting the fact that much of the destruction meted out on mutants for the sake of the neoliberal goals of commodity and capital are enacted specifically on characters of color, particularly the young Mexican girls who must carry the mutant children to term: “In this metaphor, the mutant children of color are products. They’re productions

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In these films the migrant exists only as a commodity whose use value is measured by his or her labor power, and whose worth lasts only for as long as their bodies can be exploited anyway. Thus, it is no coincidence that almost every film in the corpus includes one sequence where the migrant’s worn-out or bruised body is highlighted, because that is when its status as a disposable commodity stands out the most. (141)

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of neoliberalism which allows them the privilege of economic freedom, the right to own, use, and dispose of their property.” Transigen makes the commodification of mutant/migrant lives plain. Dr. Zander Rice, the lead scientist at the corporation, compels Gabriela not to think of the mutants he has created as children but as “things.” Donald Pierce, the cyborg tasked with retrieving the mutants Gabriela helps escape, refers to them as “patents” and says that their euthanizing is nothing more than a “business decision.” Further, the film reveals, Transigen is responsible for the decline in mutant birth rates in 2029, having discovered a method of controlling the mutant population for the purposes of experimentation and profit. The character of X-24 reinforces the film’s language of commodification; he is a nameless but otherwise exact clone of Logan himself who Dr. Rice uses as his personal attack dog and speaks to as if he were Rice’s pet. The figure of X-24 is a voiceless, cloned commodity who can recover from his injuries almost instantly due to the incredible healing powers he inherited. The powerful X-24 is juxtaposed with the original, the now ragged and rapidly deteriorating Logan. While the film does show a few quick images of the experiments on both Laura and X-24 (from the point of view of Gabriela), Logan represents the commodification of the “migrant’s worn-out or bruised body” primarily through its titular protagonist. The film repeatedly showcases the damage Logan’s adamantium-laced (a powerful but fictional metal) skeleton and claws have caused to his body. Logan is consistently seen as broken down and dying, scarred, oozing pus, and coughing up blood. We regularly see his wounds open but not bleeding, as he is kept barely alive by his diminished healing powers. The repeated images of Logan’s broken body work to remind readers of not only the hero’s past but also the fate of Laura/X-23 should he fail to help her escape and be similarly commodified. Dedicated followers of the X-Men film franchise recall that Logan is also a progeny of Transigen’s mutant experiments in creating mutant “weapons” for black market sale. The repeated sight of Logan’s ravaged body is linked to the plight of the undocumented through Laura, who is later revealed to have powers similar to Logan’s— that she is, in fact, Logan’s cloned daughter. And while the film reminds its viewers that Laura is essentially Mexican— cloned in utero from Logan’s cells inside the body of a long-dead poor Mexican girl (whom we only glimpse)— the real threat to her body comes not from MS13 or economic despair. Rather, it is her commodification at the hands of a U.S.-based corporation that drives her urgency to flee to Canada. In this regard, the film refigures the United States as essentially one continental-wide border, stretching from south Texas to North Dakota, that the film’s heroes must cross in order to claim agency and avoid the dehumanizing fate of labor commodification at the hands of a U.S.-based corporation.

In this context, the most powerful exercise of Laura’s voice/agency comes immediately after she reveals that she can speak at all. When Logan hesitates to follow through with his mission due to the death of Xavier, as well as the severity of his own injuries, Laura responds with the names of her friends, fellow mutants also on the run from Transigen with whom she hopes to reunite. Laura repeats the names “Jonah, Gideon, Rebecca, Delilah, Rictor,” yelling over Logan until he submits to her demands. By repeating the names of her fellow mutants, Laura insists on their individual identities and humanity and resists the dehumanizing language of commodification employed by the likes of Dr. Rice and Pierce and represented by the figure of X-24. The words themselves bear no specific linguistic association— they are the same in English or in Spanish. Yet, the inflection of Laura’s Spanish accent nonetheless informs the scene, reminding the reader of the children’s Mexican national origins. Laura’s voice forces the viewer to attend to the humanity at the core of the film’s undocumented allegory. In this sense, Laura herself is the heart of the film, as she represents many of the disparate narrative impulses the film either pursues or refutes. Like the cholos, Laura is violent, as she uses her powers to, in a manner of speaking, answer her pursuers. Unlike the cholos, however, her violence is contextualized as a response to the violence of her oppression rather than a base, felonious impulse. Like Gabriela, she uses Spanish as a way to enact her agency and claim narrative and moral authority. Yet unlike her adopted mother, her silence often speaks louder than her words. Finally, like Logan, Laura visually represents how the political and narrative silencing of the undocumented reduces them to little more than commodities. Her strategic use of language reminds us that undocumented voices arise from corporeal bodies, too often concealed or pursued, and at always at risk. And if Logan can be understood as a representation of the undocumented, then Laura is a Dreamer— a colloquial term for undocumented Americans brought to the United States as children.9 And like the Dreamers, who have grown increasingly visible and vocal, Laura will have her say.

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Logan was nominated in 2017 for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, drawing liberally from the comics Old Man Logan and X-23. However, the most significant adaptation comes in the form of Laura/X-23, who was reimagined as Mexican specifically for the film adaptation. In the original comic, she is still a clone of Wolverine but of unspecified ethnic origin—which means she is considered an Anglo character by default. Laura is essentially race-bent (an internet term for changing a character’s racial identity) for the film. Given the controversies surrounding other race-bent characters, such as Spider-Man or Heimdall, it comes as a surprise that

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reimagining Laura as Mexican was met not with vitriol but with praise. I can only conjecture as to why, but the X-Men’s reputation as an essentially racial metaphor (at least in its origins) must inform reactions to the film. However, this does not explain why the studio chose to hide this information in its marketing—unless they simply feared potential backlash from fans. When viewers first encounter Donald Pierce, the cyborg mercenary in pursuit of Logan and Laura, he dismissively refers to Logan’s victims as “three dead cholos on a pullout at fifty-four.” A note on terminology: when I refer to the Latinx communities at large, I use the term “Latinx.” When referring to a specific individual(s), I use the appropriate gender form of either Latino or Latina. Since so many of the stereotypes, particularly the cholo, refer to specifically cisgendered male characters, I felt this nuance reflected that reality. The current president famously opened his 2015 presidential campaign by claiming that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting” (www .washingtonpost .com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-donald-trump -announces-a-presidential-bid/?utm_term=.fe028c9f2d7f ). In many ways, the invocation of the cholo stereotypes quietly answers back to these charges by dispatching the notion with extreme (x-treme?) prejudice. Never mind the fact that MS-13 operates largely in the Central American countries of El Salvador and Honduras and not Mexico. But the specificity of Latinx national or ethnic origins has never been much of concern either for this administration or popular culture at large. For an excellent, extensive, and exhaustive overview of the various forms of representations of Latinx diversity across a variety of decades, titles, and fictional universes, consult Aldama. Latinx literary traditions and the history of Mexican cinema have been increasingly interested in themes beyond immigration to the United States to the specific experiences of the undocumented. For more, see Ledesma (“Undocumented Crossings”) and Ricalde. Logan disbands the masculine, cholo stereotype in favor of a more dynamic, vocal, nuanced female register of voices (Gabriela, Laura) that express their authority through Spanish and silence, which end up being two related languages of resistance in the film. While the gender commentary implicit in this choice fell out of the purview of this study, exploration of these dimensions of the film’s use of voice is certainly warranted. “Dreamers” refers to potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), a failed bill initially introduced into Congress

in 2001 that would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and went to school here. Famously, Charles Xavier (who allegorically represents that other dreamer— Martin Luther King Jr.) dreams of a future where mutants and humans can coexist. While the dream may not have had Dreamers in mind, it certainly applies.

References Aldama, Frederick. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. University of Arizona Press, 2017. Betancourt, David. “An Outburst in Spanish Is ‘Logan’s’ Most Surprising Moment.” The Washington Post, Mar. 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/03/07/an-outburst-in -spanish-is-logans-most-surprising-moment/?utm_term=.70a98069dd64. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Documenting the Undocumented: The Life Narratives of Unauthorized Immigrants.” Biography, vol. 35, no. 3, 2012, pp. 449– 71. Carvajal, Cynthia. “Immigrant Is the New Mutant— A Look at Logan (2017) and Neoliberalism.” Thinking Race, May 9, 2017, thinkingraceblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/09/immigrant-is-the-new -mutant-a-look-at-logan-2017-and-neoliberalism/. Accessed June 17, 2018. Crow, David. “Logan: A Perfect X-Men Movie for the Age of Donald Trump.” Den of the Geek, May 24, 2017, www.denofgeek .com/us/movies/logan/262194/logan-a-perfect-x-men-movie-for-the-age -of-donald-trump. Accessed June 17, 2018. Cummins, Amy. “Border Crossings: Undocumented Migration between Mexico and the United States in Contemporary Young Adult Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 57– 73. Garcia, J. “Logan— An Immigrant’s Story.” Medium.com, Apr. 20, 2017, medium.com/literary-analyses /logan-an-immigrants-story-a429aa1392e0. Accessed June 17, 2018. Jurgens, Dan, and Viktor Bogdanovic. Action Comics #987. DC Comics, Sept. 2017. Ledesma, Alberto. “On the Grammar of Silence: The Structure of My Undocumented Immigrant Writer’s Block.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 85, no. 3, 2015, pp. 415– 26. Ledesma, Alberto. “Undocumented Crossings: Narratives of Mexican Immigration to the United States.” Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture, edited by David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek, University of Arizona Press, 1998, pp. 67– 98. Ricalde, Maricruz Castro. “Popular Mexican Cinema and Undocumented Immigrants.” Discourse, vol. 26, no. 1, Winter 2004. pp. 194– 213. Schurmans, Fabrice. “The Representation of the Illegal Migrant in Contemporary Cinema: Border Scenarios and Effects.” Translated by João Paulo Moreira. RCCS Annual Review, vol. 7, Oct. 2015, pp. 132– 50. Spencer, Nick, and Daniel Acuna. Sam Wilson: Captain America #1. Marvel Comics, Sept. 2015.

Filmography

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Logan. Directed by James Mangold, 20th Century Fox, 2017. Suicide Squad. Directed by David Ayer, Warner Bros., 2016.

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Chapter 17

LAURA KINNEY AS X-TREME NIÑA Monstrosity and Citizenship in Marvel’s Logan Danielle Alexis Orozco

In an abandoned smelting plant along the U.S.-Mexico border, a young girl quietly eats a bowl of cereal. She is alone. While she finishes her breakfast, she keeps her eyes trained on a surveillance video revealing that a group of men— clad in black uniforms with heavy artillery— are approaching the building. She knows that these mercenaries have been sent to capture and kill her. As she hears the door to the building open, she calmly puts her spoon down. The men file in, guns at their shoulders, and find her. The young girl says nothing in response to their arrival and stares into her cereal bowl. One of the men moves toward her with a pair of metal handcuffs. He flashes her a wicked smile as she turns to face him. Her stare is hard, yet serene. Within seconds, she decapitates him. Outside, more armed men await her. Walking outside with her backpack slung across one shoulder, she carries the severed head on her hip. Stopping in front of their leader, Donald Pierce, she tosses the man’s dismembered head into the desert sand. The men respond in a frenzy of fury and fear and load their guns. Hearing this, the girl extends her knuckle claws, ready to fight. Through this scene, the girl— Laura Kinney (also known as X-23)— displays her “mutinous” abilities against the men who seek to disarm her. As I will argue, this crucial sequence and her position as a young Latina mutant girl prove significant due to the history surrounding the violence and exploitation of women on the border. In this chapter, I analyze the eleven-year-old mutant, Laura, and her most recent configuration in the Marvel blockbuster film Logan (2017). In their analyses of Logan, some critics have addressed Hugh Jackman’s performance or the Western tropes of the film (see Gleiberman; Nayman). However, more analysis about the young protagonist of Laura has yet to emerge. Perhaps one of the most critical interventions has been by Jorge Santos in “LatinX-Men: Logan’s Undocumented Voices Speak” (this volume). In his chapter, Santos discusses how the characters in the film— Logan, Charles, and Laura— represent the struggles of the undocumented immigrant in an era of rampant xenophobia as they grapple with the deployment of voice 312

and silence. Moreover, he understands Laura as a Dreamer1 and specifically analyzes how she uses the Spanish language in transgressive ways to enact agency, claim moral authority, and reflect a sense of humanity for those concealed undocumented Americans. I build on this analysis by focusing on the character of Laura (Dafne Keen) and how she is able to enact power in violent moments. She uses her embodied experiences as a young, feminized, Latina to confront the brutality of capitalism as it exists on the U.S.-Mexico border— a system fueled by neocolonial patriarchy. That is, as I argue, she uses her intersectional identity to navigate the systemic violence of the borderlands. In what follows, I will provide context for the film, its implications given the history of the border, and how this complicates the Latinx cinematic filmscape. Indeed, such context is necessary in that it will show how the film is engaging with specific historical narratives surrounding the border. The film itself begins along the border of El Paso, Texas, in the year 2029. No new mutants have been born for twenty-five years, and the remaining X-Men are living out their days near Ciudad Juárez in an abandoned smelting plant (Logan). Among them are Dr. Charles Xavier (Professor X), an ailing nonagenarian with deadly psychic seizures, and an aged James Howlett (a.k.a. Logan, or Wolverine) who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border to provide daily limo services to El Paso’s wealthy elite. The adamantium in his body that gives him his superpowers has been slowly poisoning him, and his healing abilities have significantly decreased; in short, Charles and Logan are slowly dying.2 There seems to be little hope for the X-Men and a future that includes mutants. However, this futility changes when Charles and Logan meet the young and mysterious Laura. The film reveals that she was born and has been raised in a research lab in Mexico City and that the facility is owned by an American

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Figure 17.1 Laura prepares for battle in Logan. She defends herself multiple times against Pierce’s men throughout the film.

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company called Alkali-Transigen. This detail highlights how commodities are produced and consumed across international borders, and the film shows how the American company takes liberties with its Latinx subjects; Laura, like many of the other mutant kids born there, undergoes secret experiments deemed illegal in the United States and Canada (Logan). She is conceived and born with Wolverine’s mutant genes, and she experiences violent experimentation as researchers install adamantium blades into her body. Escaping with a nurse named Gabriela Lopez— a woman who has become a mother figure to Laura— the young mutant is pursued by Donald Pierce and his dangerous mercenaries who have been hired by the company to kidnap, detain, and kill her. In assisting the young Laura, Gabriela searches out Logan and petitions his help. She asks him to take Laura to a sanctuary on the North DakotaCanadian border called “Eden,” where other escaped mutant children are congregating before crossing to safety. At first, Logan is reluctant to help, but after Gabriela is violently tortured and murdered by Pierce, the trio embark on a journey across the United States toward the northern haven. Even though she is only eleven years old, Laura’s character is confronted with many painful and traumatic experiences for her age. Her body endures violent experimentation, she witnesses the torture of her friends, and she experiences the death of her mother figure, Gabriela. Yet, she survives these devastating circumstances due to her identity. Physically, she is much like Logan; as his clone, she can be destructive and violent— ripping open the throats of mercenaries who intend to harm her despite the fact that she is a child. She is seemingly monstrous through the brute force of her knuckle claws, hyperspeed, and acute agility. Emotionally, she is complex: she is full of distrust and rage, and she lashes out at Logan. She gives him hateful stares,

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Figure 17.2 (Left to right) Laura, Charles, and Logan on a pit stop during their road trip across the United States.

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ignores him, and even yells at him. However, she is not just the aggressive figure that she first appears to be. As she gets to know and trust Charles and Logan, she demonstrates that she is smart, thoughtful, resourceful, responsible, and empathetic. When talking about his inspiration for the character, screenwriter Scott Frank says he felt that she “should be feral but also super-intelligent” (McKittrick). Even if there have been previous renditions of Laura (also known as X-23) in Figure 17.3 Laura dressed as a typical comic books, the film presents an alter- eleven-year-old. nate version of the character. Moreover, her position as a young Latina is especially significant given that she must negotiate the complexities of her gender and race in her travels across multiple borders. Her journey is one filled with violence where she must often defend herself and her body in order to survive— even if in the most brutal ways. Nevertheless, as an eleven-year-old girl, she demonstrates that she is highly independent and intensely powerful. In effect, the film’s inclusion of Laura generates not just a future for mutants within the storyworld of the cinematic narrative but also a future for young Latinas like Dafne Keen in the Hollywood film industry. Yet, according to some viewers, the film still seems to represent some contradictory messages regarding voice, language, and Latinas. In fact, Laura does not speak until more than an hour and a half into the film (Logan); her tense silence causes Charles and Logan to believe that she is mute. When Laura does talk, she speaks in Spanish, her native tongue. Her muteness was impressed upon the character by the filmmakers who wanted to keep her as silent as possible (McKittrick).3 While this issue suggests that the Latina voice is occluded, I would like to offer a more nuanced reading of the film that imagines a sense of power for Laura. Even if the film is not perfect in its representation of Latinas in that it hedges on reproducing certain stereotypes about them, I argue that it moves toward providing a more complex portrayal of young Latinx subjects.4 Although Laura is temporarily muted, I consider how her voice functions as a “light shone through her veil of silence” (Anzaldúa 45). She ultimately finds her voice through all of the trauma she has experienced. Her silence further demonstrates how she simultaneously negotiates her race and gender under systems of neocolonialism and patriarchy. Although the majority of this chapter will offer an analysis of Laura as a fictional character, I

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will conclude by pivoting to the image of Keen and further reflect on how the Hollywood industry imagines possibilities— as well as pitfalls— for Latinas in mainstream media. To demonstrate how the character of Laura negotiates the violence of the borderlands, I employ the intersectional and theoretical frameworks of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Lorgia García-Peña. As seen in Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s edited collection, This Bridge Called My Back, the “theory in the flesh” speaks to the ways that women of color move and engage with the worlds they occupy (19). Moreover, theory in the flesh can specifically attest to the embodied experiences of Latinas who occupy the space of the borderlands. While Anzaldúa sees the U.S.-Mexico border as a fixed boundary that creates “una herida abierta,” an open wound (Anzaldúa 25), GarcíaPeña contextualizes the border as a geopolitical space that travels with the migrating subject.5 In other words, the violence encountered on the border morphs into a pervasive force preventing the migrant subject from obtaining full citizenship rights (García-Peña 4). For women, this violence plays out on the body as the female subject who occupies the space of the border is denationalized (denied access to sociopolitical engagement), dehumanized (through maquiladora labor), and dismembered (via the Juárez feminicidios [femicides] that targeted young women and girls). In such an oppressive neocolonial space as Juárez, women and girls have few options available to them in terms of becoming “political actors” (Schmidt Camacho 256). That the film takes place on the El Paso border near Ciudad Juárez is significant as Laura experiences violence. However, even if she is hyperviolent, she embodies the idea of “working with what you have, whatever you have” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 58). In essence, Laura must work with the skills she has in order to survive, including her intellect, empathy, and even her rage. She effectively becomes a rendition of Anzaldúa’s “Shadow-Beast”— a concept I will discuss later. Through her liminality, she challenges a neocolonial and patriarchal hegemony that threatens to oppress young women and girls in borderlands. Furthermore, Laura occupies the contradictive position of El Nié. This diasporic concept refers to a space García-Peña defines “as neither here nor there” and as an uncomfortable and painful position that makes the subject bleed (173). While García-Peña’s research primarily pertains to Dominicanidad, I extend García-Peña’s concept of El Nié to suggest that Laura, as a Mexicana, also occupies this liminal space.6 It is from the harrowing space of El Nié that the subject can “emerge as an agent of his or her own histories and identity/ies, finding hope, harmony, and even bliss within this very uncomfortable space of contradiction” (García-Peña 9). Throughout the narrative of the film, Laura’s character grows due to her liminal subjectivity as she works with Logan and Charles to travel across the United States. Although

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she experiences anger in reaction to pain and trauma, she also demonstrates compassion through her emotional bonds with Logan and Charles. Through Laura’s positionality in El Nié, the film imagines hope for the future as the group migrates to the relative safety of Eden near the North Dakota-Canadian border. Yet, Laura cannot escape the violence of the U.S.-Mexico border, as neocolonial violence follows her through its presence within her body. Indeed, Laura’s origin story is intimately tied to the socioeconomic and political context of the U.S.-Mexico border. More specifically, the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the borderlands is a critical historical narrative that the film engages with.7 Fernando Romero describes the inception of NAFTA and its enduring influence, writing that “although the maquiladora program along the border began in the 1960s, the implementation of the NAFTA in 1994 was the driving force behind the booming nature of the present day’s multibillion dollar industry” (99). He further discusses how “maquiladora companies, taking advantage of lower operation costs in Mexico, manufacture and assemble products in Mexico using American components to later export their final products duty-free into the U.S.” (99). The contradiction of American goods being produced abroad, only to be exported back to the United States, highlights the violence of the maquiladora system as low-wage workers bear the brunt of backbreaking labor for a fraction of the cost. Camilla Fojas expands upon NAFTA’s exploitative conditions and cites that “Mexico was the target of a destructive and violent form of capitalism . . . that lured multinational corporations seeking undervalued and flexible workers, loose environmental and labor laws, and tax incentives” (40). As a result, “The borderlands experienced the violent outcomes and waves of neoliberalism in a manner that is contrary to, for example, NAFTA’s stated aims of creating economic equity across the main signatory nations, Canada, the United States, and Mexico” (Fojas 40). The enduring violence of this economic policy has rippled across North America from Mexico to Canada. The film reflects this tension as the characters experience difficulty in escaping the destructive powers of neocolonialism. As agents of capitalism, Pierce’s men pursue Laura in their efforts to possess and contain her before they dispose of her, forcing Laura and her friends to cross multiple borders. Because of globalization, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a space that renders women, in particular, as vulnerable subjects. The rise of cartel violence, women’s labor organizing in response to narcotraficantes (drug traffickers), and government negligence “in the face of a rising toll of murders and disappearances had already become the reputation of Ciudad Juárez” (Hennessy 5). The city, which is located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and across the border from El Paso, Texas— the same geographical space where the film begins— has seen anywhere between three hundred and six hundred

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women murdered since 1993, with thousands still missing (Hennessy 18). The bodies of these young women were mutilated, and many have shown signs of sexual violation and marks of ritualized torture (19). The female victims of these violent crimes were overwhelmingly young and poor, and the majority were women who worked in the maquiladora factories (19). Many of these “poor girls and women of color” were migrants from surrounding rural colonias who came to the border to obtain work (Schmidt Camacho 259). While the maquiladoras thrived off women’s cheap labor— a workforce that they considered to be potentially “docile” (Hennessy 8)— women faced increasing incidents of sexual abuse and domestic violence as they “push[ed] up against the limits of a deeply patriarchal gender system” (20). The lack of response to the rising violence from the local government and state authorities highlights the denationalization of women in a neocolonial state fueled by capitalism, where women are seen as commodities who should produce profit rather than exist as human beings. Laura inhabits this same violent space as a young Latina. As women’s civil rights are denied to them, their bodies encounter and absorb the violence of an open market that devalues their economic contributions. Rosemary Hennessy details how the economic value of Mexican women and their social devaluation become key factors in their violent objectification, writing that “although young women were initially considered the ideal workforce for the maquiladora industry, this economic value did not translate into public value, the value that endows a subject with benefits, access to resources, and justice” (21). She adds that ultimately, their “economic value is premised on the devaluation of their bodies and their designation as members of an unskilled, quick-turnover, disposable workforce” (21), or bodies that “can be easily discarded as they are consumed” (Schmidt Camacho 265). Consider the Mexican government’s response to the murders, as only a “few of the perpetrators have been caught, and few preventive measures have been pursued” (Hennessy 19). In addition, “The official handling of the brute evidence of bodies found in pieces in the desert or of women and girls . . . has been a study in irresponsibility and neglect, a jumble of pretexts, alibis, and contradictions or, worse, inaction and orchestrated silence” (19). As an object used only for production and consumption, the woman’s body is seen as disposable— unfit for work benefits or social justice. In response, government officials used a rhetoric that displaced blame from the perpetrators onto the women and girls with the idea that these victims “got what they asked for because they were out in the streets, where they did not belong” (21). This rhetoric demonstrates how state violence and patriarchy have been complicit in the denationalization of women’s rights and the dismemberment of women’s bodies in a city that was experiencing the neoliberal ripples of NAFTA.

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This economic policy accelerated trade but perpetuated the marginalization of women and children of color who provided a steady labor force. The film refers to these historical tensions through Laura’s birth in a research facility in Mexico City and her migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. Given the systemic brutalization of subaltern Mexican girls and young women in a violent space such as Chihuahua (Schmidt Camacho 259), the voice that Laura has is strained. Anzaldúa writes about this silencing, stating that the dark-skinned Mexicana “has been silenced, gagged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century. For 300 years she has been a slave, a force of cheap labor, colonized by the Spaniard, the Anglo, by her people” (44– 45). Laura is subject to the lab’s racialized and feminized violence as the researchers see her and the other Latinx mutant children as less than human and as “things running around with patents” (Logan). Her silence works in response to the centuries of violent oppression that have kept her a colonized subject. Furthermore, Alicia R. Schmidt Camacho’s work on the feminized and denationalized Mexican subject connects back to García-Peña’s concept of El Nié in that “denationalized people occupy sites of contradiction in the current regime of global capitalism and international politics. Their fragile agency arises from the complex routes . . . by which capital moves and demands labor” (258). Created in a space that is neither here nor there, Laura and her body absorb the violence of commodification through her birth at the AlkaliTransigen facility and through her mutant transformation. Moreover, the violence of the border lives within her as she travels with the X-Men, while Pierce’s men along with Alkali-Transigen pursue her to rectify their “business mistake . . . an R & D deal gone bad.” Here, her body is not only marked as an object but as a tainted one. However, the violence against Laura and her young feminized body begins in the Alkali-Transigen research facility. After crossing the border into the United States, the X-Men stop at a gas station. While Laura rides a coinoperated kiddie machine, Logan and Charles watch a video made by Laura’s nurse, Gabriela. Gabriela bears witness to the atrocities of the lab by documenting the illegal activities of the Alkali-Transigen company. In the video, Gabriela details how the medical facility in Mexico City is owned by an American company, revealing how the United States is inherently tied to international systems of labor exploitation. While the Alkali-Transigen lab is located in the interior of Mexico, Laura’s migration to the border highlights how violence travels with the Latinx subject. Next, Gabriela documents the living conditions of the mutant children, who live behind bars in cage-like structures; all of them were born inside the lab and have never been outside. She notes that the children “have no birth certificates, no names, except the

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ones that we have given them.” Here, Gabriela is like the labor organizers in Juárez who confronted the violence of the border by naming the injustice done to women— in contrast to government officials who perpetuated the feminicidio by their inaction.8 Gabriela continues her documentation and pans around a hospital room that contains an infant incubator, a tray with metal tools, and an empty bloody chair. Her voice-over plays over the carnage as she says that these children “were raised in the bellies of Mexican girls. Girls no one can find anymore.” This scene conjures up the disappearances of the young women and girls in Juárez, and the image of the bloody chair is a chilling reminder of their dismemberment within a capitalist system. That the children’s fathers “are semillas genéticas . . . special seeds in bottles” further illuminates the harsh separation between a patriarchal neocolonial state and the feminization of labor.9 The scientists of the lab use old genetic codes of missing or deceased mutants to reproduce new mutants, but the researchers are separated from the women and children who also live and work in the facility. The mutant children, including Laura, experience further dehumanization as their bodies are marked as commodities. When the nurses try to throw a birthday for one of the children, the head physician— Dr. Zander Rice— pulls one of the nurses aside and chastises her: “We do not call them ‘baby’ or kiss boo-boos. Don’t think of them as children. Think of them as things with patents and copyrights. ¿Comprende?” The Anglo doctor’s emphasis on regarding the children as material objects rather than people and his ironic use of Spanish indicates the brutal nature of a neoliberalist state influenced by colonial logic. Anzaldúa writes about this struggle, saying as Latinx subjects, “we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, [and] on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language” (84). In this scene, Dr. Rice enforces the violence of this rhetoric as he pressures the nurses to dismiss and forget the humanity of the Latinx children. It is men like Donald Pierce and Dr. Rice, and not the female nurses, who dehumanize the children. Thus, the film creates a narrative that suggests capitalist enterprises are linked to patriarchy while feminized labor is connected to ideas of liberation. However, the movie also refers to the gendered violence of the border. Like the women and girls from the maquiladoras, these children are not seen as human. They are undeserving of labor rights and social justice and are merely seen as laborers that produce products to be consumed. The products they produce are their extraordinary superpowers. While the mutant children are available for consumption, they are easily discarded once they are deemed less useful— or as having less economic value. Gabriela films the children in padded cells as they train and use their

powers for violent and destructive means. As the young boys and girls use their mutant abilities against armed soldiers, Gabriela remarks, “This is a business. They are making soldiers. Killers.” The next scene reflects how corporations and the state enact violence onto the bodies of young women and girls as the scene transitions into an aerial shot of Laura’s mutation surgery. As she lies unconscious in a medical chair, masked researchers install adamantium into her young body. A close-up features the blades in her bloodied knuckles in the foreground concurrently revealing her sleeping figure in the background. This moment demonstrates the vulnerability of female subjects in neocolonial spaces and how physical violence is enacted upon the body. Yet, while these children are trained to be actors of violence, they become more difficult as they age because they do not want to fight. The video features footage of the kids as they self-harm, including Laura who cuts herself and a young mutant who commits suicide. The children’s labor produces this contradiction of selfhood; as the children grow, they are at a crossroads of identity, trying to discover who they are.

Figure 17.5 A close-up of Laura while she sleeps during the grisly surgery.

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Figure 17.4 Laura’s surgery, during which adamantium blades are put into her hands and legs.

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However, they are suppressed by the Alkali-Transigen company, which only wants to exploit their superpowers for monetary gain. Gabriela speaks to this contradiction, stating how “a soldier who will not fight is useless.” In response to the children’s rebellion, the researchers develop a newer, more vicious model, X-24— another clone of Wolverine, but one that contains no emotion. In effect, the children are rendered obsolete, and the research facility is told to shut down, meaning that figures like Donald Pierce are tasked with managing and controlling the children as the nurses are forced to put the young mutants to sleep. This scene features some of the most marginalized workers— Latina women and Latinx children— as they face the violence of white oppressors like Pierce who seek to maintain neocolonial dominance through detainment and genocide. Locating agency in spaces like this is difficult. These systematic murders of the mutant children, like the feminicidio of Juárez, show how Mexican women and children suffer abuse under international divisions of labor and how the body dissolves into “constituent parts: head, hands, arms, breasts, trunk, and legs” (Schmidt Camacho 283). Laura’s surgery reminds the viewer how the body, especially that of a young Latina, remains vulnerable to this dismemberment. The nurses respond to this genocide by organizing a plan for the children to escape to Eden. This refuge, they believe, is where the children can be relatively safe from state-sanctioned violence. The organization of the female nurses mirrors the action of “women’s movements [who] have had to develop political strategies for taking their demands for rights to international political organizations and human rights agencies” (Schmidt Camacho 259). Even if women campaign for international recognition and “voic[e] the unspeakable in public” (Schmidt Camacho 272) by speaking on behalf of the deceased, the film demonstrates how violence still affects the bodies of these women and children who migrate to and across the U.S.-Mexico border, as exemplified by Gabriela’s death at the hands of Pierce. Similarly, Logan refuses to help Gabriela until she offers him money. It is the prospect of monetary gain that allows him to finally recognize her. Gabriela, like the female victims of Juárez, experiences exploitation by Logan, and her desperation shows how her voice is strained within a capitalist system. Meanwhile, her murder by Pierce symbolizes a vicious attempt by authorities to repress political agency. Gabriela’s death further reveals the enduring consequences of a neocolonial state that devalues feminized labor. Yet there are important moments of power for Laura in the film. As I described earlier, the mercenaries respond to Laura with a mixture of fear and revulsion in one of film’s most striking scenes. Her decapitation of one of Pierce’s men, an actor of state violence, ultimately signals a reversal of the brutalization enacted on young women in neocolonial spaces like the border.

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It is Laura— identified as a “child” by Charles, a “girl” by Logan, and a “baby” by Pierce— who now does the dismembering. In effect, this shows how the men in the film view her in distinct ways. Charles sees Laura as a child who needs protection because “the world is not a safe place to live in” (Anzaldúa 42). Logan views Laura as somewhat of a nuisance, and consistently leaves her to her own devices. Thus, Laura quickly develops a strong sense of independence. In effect, Wolverine— as Laura’s biological father via Laura’s conception with his DNA— symbolizes an absent father and an aging patriarchy that has waned in its influence. Despite all of this, Laura provides Charles and Logan with physical and emotional support. Laura is not simply reactive to her environment; there are also moments in the film when she demonstrates her intellect, resourcefulness, and empathy. As she gets to know Logan and Charles through their travels across the United States, she begins to provide care for them. When Logan needs to find a new car, Laura stays with Charles in a hotel room and watches old films on television with him. Logan leaves her in charge of administering Charles’s medication. When the two are attacked by Pierce’s men and Charles has a seizure, Laura crawls on the floor toward Charles to give him his medication as Wolverine incapacitates and kills Pierce’s men. When Laura lifts the pen up to Logan, he takes it and gives it to Charles; the seizure stops. Getting up, Laura slashes a surviving mercenary before moving to take Charles’s hand into hers, much to the surprise of Logan. This moment is the first time in the film when she displays affection and compassion. Her powers for empathy are further revealed by Charles. Leaving the hotel, the trio get back on the road and continue their journey. While chastising Logan for using profanity in front of Laura, Charles tells Logan about Laura’s powers. He says, “By the way, Laura’s foot claws are the obvious result of her gender, you know. . . . In a pride of lions, the female is both hunter and caregiver. . . . She uses her front claws for hunting . . . and the back claws defensively. Thus ensuring their survival.” While Charles is talking, Laura takes off her sunglasses and listens carefully to Charles. She blinks carefully, her face relaxed as she takes in his information. These details suggest that she understands and absorbs the totality of her environment. Charles’s description also alludes to the fact that while she can be violent, she also does so to protect herself and the people she cares about. Even if this might seem to be a moment when Laura slides into a subservient position where she services men, I see this as an opportunity for Laura to express her powerful abilities as a hunter and a caretaker— as a “monstrous” mutant but also as a compassionate human. She is not just a “hot-blooded” Latina, but a young girl who can think, act, and eventually speak for herself. Furthermore, her connection with Logan grows stronger after Pierce murders Charles.

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Perhaps Pierce resembles the biggest threat to Laura as he stands in for a vigorous capitalist bent on exploiting her superhuman abilities. Anzaldúa writes about how women encounter the predatory male subject: “Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey” (42). All of the men in Laura’s life try to protect her at some point in the film. Even if Laura is a potentially vulnerable subject, she showcases many moments where she does not need protection due to her powerful mutant abilities. Pierce fears this power as she approaches him during the smelting plant scene with her knuckle claws extended. He tells her, “Laura, honey, you wanna stay where you are” and “No, no.” Not only is she ready to defend herself but is set to do battle with her neocolonial oppressors. Ultimately, the white male subject is afraid of the Latina’s power, as Anzaldúa argues. She writes, “Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us)” (Anzaldúa 39). The supernatural figure is Othered for their (un)divine difference. Moreover, the woman is seen as “carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear” (39). The woman, through her carnal and beast-like nature, is registered as something to be feared. Seeing Laura, the embodiment of the supernatural and nightmarish other, Pierce ducks behind cover of his men, fearful of the “awe-ful” power of the Shadow-Beast. According to Anzaldúa, the Shadow-Beast has a nature that is terca (stubborn). She writes that it “refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-

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Figure 17.6 Laura approaches Donald Pierce with her knuckle claws extended.

imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet” (Anzaldúa 38). Laura embodies this Shadow-Beast during the smelting plant sequence when she is pinned to the ground by two men who mount her and tell each other to “hold her down.” This brief scene is disturbing in that Laura’s body is physically vulnerable, and the language alludes to potential sexual assault. The men begin to drag her off, restraining her arms while she lets out roars of rage. It is here that she activates her foot claws and stabs the men to death, effectively disarming her attackers.10 Like Anzaldúa’s Shadow-Beast, Laura refuses constraint and physically acts against the order of Pierce’s mercenaries. While she uses the tools of her oppressors to defend herself, moments like this reveal her power within a system seeking to control and possess her. If Laura negotiates these violent spaces, she also engages with the uncomfortable space of El Nié. One of the main characteristics that defines Laura is not her mutant superpowers but her muteness. Anzaldúa writes about this silence among Latinas and how the Latina feels petrified in her own culture with “her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (42). Although silence may be seen as a weakness, I argue it is a form of strength as El Nié creates a sense of power. Anzaldúa and Moraga historicize this gendered and racialized silence. For three hundred years, the woman has been invisible and “she was not heard. Many times she wished to speak, to act, to protest, to challenge. The odds were heavily against her. She hid her feelings; she hid her truths; she concealed her fire; but she kept stoking the inner flame” (Anzaldúa 45). Even if faceless and voiceless, the Latina learned how to cope, how to “measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom . . . daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally; call a friend (whatever that person’s skin, sex,

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Figure 17.7 Laura defends herself against Pierce’s men who try to pin her down.

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or sexuality)” (Moraga xl– xli). Laura resembles this struggle as she becomes familiar with Charles and Logan during their road trip to Canada. Laura weighs what should be said and what should not be said. Laura’s voice is first heard late in the film after she drives Logan to the hospital.11 This action in itself demonstrates compassion and also striking independence given that Laura is only eleven years old. While this moment showcases how Laura— even if she is young— has the capability to provide emotional and physical support for Logan, it also demonstrates how she has orchestrated her silence. After thanking her for saving his life, she responds with a quiet yet measured, “De nada” (You’re welcome). He pauses, asking her with rising annoyance, “You can talk? . . . What’s all this bullshit been for the last two thousand fucking miles?” At this point, Laura fires back in her native tongue, telling him how this trip with him has been “shit” since all he does is yell at her. However, the film does not offer subtitles to translate what she is saying to Logan. When she speaks, her voice is rendered silent for an English-speaking audience. Nevertheless, Laura is finally able to voice her frustrations against Logan’s brusque behavior. This signals a power shift for marginalized young women and girls on the border in that Laura exercises her voice, talking back to Logan’s frustrated quips. That she is honest also demonstrates her trust of him. She pushes for Logan to complete the journey to Eden because, as she says, “Aquí esta mi familia” (Here is my family). When he resists and tells her, “I am not taking you to North Dakota,” she glares at him, silently and decisively, before punching him in the face. After she begins to recite the names of her friends who have made it to Eden, Logan reluctantly accepts the challenge in a huff. Here, Laura successfully exerts power in a potentially violent space where Logan threatens to overwhelm and dominate her. Even if there are no subtitles to reveal what she is saying, Laura assumes power in this moment. Here, Laura’s actions to help Logan receive medical attention also demonstrate her

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Figure 17.8 Laura takes the wheel when Logan is too tired or weak to drive to Eden.

complexity as the film explores her compassion rather than simply featuring images of her hyperviolent struggle. Toward the end of the film, she even identifies with Logan when he tells her he has hurt people, to which she responds, “I’ve hurt people too.” Overall, she negotiates the tools of silence and voice in order to exert power as well as to express herself in complex ways. Even so, Laura’s race and ethnicity are also significant given that the filmmakers cast Dafne Keen to play the role of Laura. Keen is of Spanish and British ancestry and speaks fluent English and Spanish (Fletcher). Her liminal position also surfaces within the storyworld since Logan does not realize she is a Latina until she speaks. Although her passing as a white female may afford her certain privileges, she is still subject to instances of gendered racism. In This Bridge Called My Back, Moraga and Anzaldúa write about girlhood for women of color and how colorism is learned from an early age: “We are born into colored homes. We grew up with the inherent contradictions in the color spectrum right inside those homes: the lighter sister, the mixed-blood cousin, being the darkest one in the family” (3). Here, girls are trained early on to value lighter skin over darker complexions. The hierarchy of skin pigmentation, as it happens in the home, becomes more distinct over time and “it doesn’t take many years to realize the privileges, or lack thereof, attached to a particular shade of skin or texture of hair” (3). Moving outside the home, women of color who are lighter may experience more mobility, as exemplified through Laura’s own sense of travels. However, even if lighter-skinned women of color have traveled easier, “all of us have been victims of the invisible violation which happens indoors and inside ourselves: the self-abnegation, the silence” (3). Although she is white-passing, Keen— as Laura— reveals these tensions of gendered racism and colorism that pervade cinema and TV screens. While some may see Keen’s casting as an example of how media privileges light-skinned actresses who do not have noticeable accents, I suggest that this decision demonstrates how in reality, gente (people) come in all

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Figure 17.9 Laura implores Logan to help her finish the journey to Eden, despite his protests.

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shapes, colors, and sizes. Though Keen, as a Latina performer, finds ways to navigate the issue of colorism through her representation of the strongwilled Laura, she still struggles with the violence of patriarchal silencing as seen through the filmmaker’s decisions to keep her as silent as possible (McKittrick). Operating against colorism, Moraga and Anzaldúa encourage “light-skinned or ‘passable’ Third World women to put themselves on the line for their darker sisters” (3). This is something that Keen, through her role as Laura, lives up to as she paves the way for more young Latinas to break into mainstream films. Even if the film industry has a tendency to control, erase, or silence the voice of Latinas in major Hollywood roles, Keen as Laura puts a pin on the map for Latinas in mainstream culture as viewers can now imagine the presence of Latinas in comics-based films. Representation can only continue to grow from here. Of course, Laura’s representation exists within a larger discourse of Latina women in popular film, television, and media. Myra Mendible discusses how fetishized images of the Latina body have circulated and created fictitious narratives about the feminized Latina subject— making the body of the Latina a commodity as it is produced for profit. The Latina and her body are subject to the violence of globalization as her body is taken apart, packaged, exported, and resold to American audiences under the neoliberal guise of multicultural inclusivity (Mendible 12– 13). As a result, stereotypes of the Latina seep into the popular imagination as the Latina is portrayed as “hotblooded, tempestuous, hypersexual” (Mendible 1). Indeed, Laura is a hotblooded individual. However, this is due to the conditions in which she was raised. Overall, the film explores how she engages with oppressive systems of neocolonial violence— enforced by misogyny— as she is represented as both “monstrous” and empathetic. The challenge, then, for media professionals who wish to represent Latinidad when they are providing “marketable visions of Latinness” is to engage “in an antithetical process of rejecting and promoting stereotypes” (Mendible 13). Mendible raises the problem that Latinas, despite increased visibility in media, still face social, economic, and political challenges as they are seen as second-class citizens in U.S. society. She writes how young Latina girls “are overrepresented in high school dropout and teen pregnancy rates, while foreign-born Latinas account for a majority share of low-wage factory or domestic jobs” (Mendible 15). Addressing popular images of Latinas and providing complex representations of them “involves not just a deconstruction but also an excavation— a disinterment of bodies less docile” (17). These are the stakes when Latinas are featured in cinema, television, and popular culture. Laura, through her complex liminality, provides one example of how

Figure 17.10 Laura in Eden as she contemplates the future.

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popular film can engage with problematic stereotypes of Latinas in new and innovative ways. So, how does the Latina voice herself in the face of systemic oppression— a violence that threatens to render her docile and silent, to dismantle her agency, and colonize her body through dismemberment? How can she locate power in a world that devalues her social, political, and economic contributions to society— a world that makes her a second-class citizen? In a film that is filled with male dominance, white supremacy, and capitalist violence, Laura demonstrates how feminine autonomy happens through moments of power. As a Latina, she must navigate the violent spaces of neocolonialism and patriarchy. Through her liminal position as a woman of color, she must negotiate moments when she will act and speak when confronted by men who seek to control and possess her. In these oppressive spaces, Laura— as a young Latina figure— faces contradictions of identity. As a migrant who experiences the effects of a neoliberal market, she is positioned between Mexican, U.S., and Canadian borders. Ultimately, Laura embodies the borders of El Nié as she reconciles the different parts of herself: child and adult, woman and girl, human and mutant, stereotype and subversion. From this place, she can begin to understand herself in a world that only sees her as a monster. But from this liminal and monstrous position, she revolts against neocolonial patriarchy as she uses her embodied experiences to inform her ways of engaging with her surroundings. This marks the creation of a new practice— a New Mestiza consciousness in which the Latina “is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. . . . She learns to transform the small ‘I’ into

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the total Self ” (Anzaldúa 104– 5). Like the New Mestiza, Laura is vulnerable, but she surrenders ideas of safety in her travels across borders. Her body is always under attack, but she has moments of power when she draws on her intellect and her compassion— and yes, her anger— to construct meaning. By the film’s conclusion, she develops a voice that “overcome[s] the tradition of silence” (Anzaldúa 81). Even if the film is named after Logan and ends on an image of his grave, the film still has a large focus on Laura.12 Moraga and Anzaldúa argue that ultimately, Laura, as a Latinx subject, has “learned to live with these contradictions” (4). Embodying contradictions and liminal spaces, Laura offers a complex and radical representation of Latinidad. Furthermore, the words of Anzaldúa suggest a future for Laura: “Like old skin will fall the slave ways / of obedience, acceptance, silence . . . we’ll move, little woman. / You’ll see” (225). Laura, as a mobile Latina girl— a little woman— embodies the autonomy of young women as they occupy and move across the liminal space of the borderlands.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

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4.

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“Dreamer” refers to those children of migrants who receive protection and aid due a federal government program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) created back in 2012. Because of their undocumented status, Dreamers must often campaign for visibility in the workplace and inclusion in education to maintain their livelihoods. For a contemporary breakdown on DACA and Dreamers, please see Walters. Logan has healing powers that allow him to be experimented on with adamantium blades. His ability to regenerate diminishes as a result of the adamantium, which has been installed into his bone structure and poisons his body. Meanwhile, Charles suffers from seizures that have the potential to paralyze humans and mutants within his immediate surroundings if he does not receive special medication. When asked about earlier versions of the script where Laura had a more significant speaking role, Scott Frank said, “I felt like she should be mute for as long as we could keep her that way” (McKittrick). Though previous renditions of X-23 are also silent in comic books, her silence as a Latina is striking given how the Hollywood film industry has a pattern for marginalizing women of color (see Hayek). To some, she resembles a trope implying that the Latina is “hot-blooded,” temperamental, and has uncontrollable urges (Mendible 1). She also approximates the “Dark Lady” stereotype, where her “cool distance is what makes her fascinating to Anglo males. In comparison with the Anglo woman, she is circumspect and aloof where her Anglo sister is direct and forthright, reserved where the Anglo female is boisterous, opaque where the Anglo woman is transparent” (Berg 76).

5.

Her work provides a genealogy of the “Archive of Dominicanidad” and traces how a discourse of Dominican nationalism has been shaped according to a disavowal of blackness on the island of Hispaniola. She employs the term “contradiction” to explain the “violence, exclusion, and the continuous control of racialized bodies” (García-Peña 13). 6. While Moraga and Anzaldúa primarily analyze U.S.-Mexico relations, García-Peña’s intervention invests in analyzing border politics between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the United States. 7. NAFTA opened trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. 8. Women’s organizations like Nuestra Hijas de Regroso a Casa (Bring Our Daughters Home; nuestrashijasderegresoacasa.blogspot.com) and Casa Amiga (www.casa -amiga.org.mx) provide statistics to the community about the murders and resources for those families who have been affected by the violent crimes. 9. Semillas genéticas: Genetic seeds taken from deceased or disappeared X-Men. 10. The foot claws are a genetic variation from Logan’s DNA and were enhanced by the medical procedure that Laura underwent when adamantium was put into her body. 11. Logan has sustained heavy injuries after a crucial fight with X-24, who kills Charles in his pursuit of Laura. Laura, seeing his diminished powers, steals a car and drives Logan to a clinic. 12. Laura turns the cross on his grave onto its side to resemble an “X.” This conjures up the images of the crosses that have been erected in the desert to commemorate the Juárez victims. The crosses “require us to find new ways for thinking about rights from the vantage point of young girls and migrant women, whose new mobility . . . challenge existing relations between women’s bodies, the state, and global capital” (Schmidt Camacho 284).

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed., Aunt Lute, 2007. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. 7th ed., University of Texas Press, 2015. Fletcher, Rosie. “Logan Director Explains Thrilling New Trailer.” Digital Spy, Feb. 17, 2017, www .digitalspy.com/movies/a819368/logan-director-james-mangold-breaks-down-violent-new -trailer-wolverine-x-men-movie/. Fojas, Camilla. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture. University of Illinois Press, 2017. García-Peña, Lorgia. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Duke University Press, 2016. Gleiberman, Owen. “Berlin Film Review: ‘Logan.’ ” Variety, Feb.  17, 2017, variety.com/2017/film /festivals/logan-review-berlin-film-festival-1201990143/. Hayek, Salma. “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.” The New York Times, Dec. 13, 2017, www .nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein .html. Hennessy, Rosemary. Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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References

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McKittrick, Christopher. “Myth vs. Man: James Mangold and Scott Frank on Logan.” Creative Screenwriting, Mar. 3, 2017, creativescreenwriting.com/logan/. Mendible, Myra. “Introduction: Embodying Latinidad: An Overview.” From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture, edited by Myra Mendible, University of Texas Press, 2007, pp. 1– 28. Moraga, Cherríe. “La Jornada: Preface, 1981.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 4th ed., SUNY Press, 2015, pp. xl– xli. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., SUNY Press, 2015. Nayman, Adam. “Logan.” Sight & Sound, vol. 27, no. 4, Apr. 2017, p. 85. Romero, Fernando. Hyperborder: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and Its Future. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Schmidt Camacho, Alicia R. “Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 255–92. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ncr.2005.0030. Walters, Joanna. “What Is Daca and Who Are the Dreamers?” The Guardian, Sept. 14, 2017, www .theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/04/donald-trump-what-is-daca-dreamers.

Filmography

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Logan. Directed by James Mangold, Marvel Entertainment/20th Century Fox, 2017.

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PART VI Pixelated Browns

Chapter 18

VERY ¡MACHO! Sonic Legacies of Mexican Animated Villains Sara Veronica Hinojos

Dis is just gonna to take uno momento. I am throwing a big cinco de mayo pari. And I am going to need two handred of your best copcase decorated with the Messican flag. — EDUARDO PEREZ/EL MACHO, VOICED BY BENJAMIN BRATT, DESPICABLE ME 2

Despicable Me 2 premiered July 3, 2013, and earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. The sequel to Despicable Me (2010) follows the life of Gru (Steve Carell) as he balances life as a new dad with being the world’s greatest ex-villain. Although the film lost both awards, it did gross over $970 million worldwide and was the second-highest grossing animated film of 2013. In 2015, the franchise continued their successful branding by creating an animated feature dedicated to the yellow sidekicks of both Despicable films titled Minions (2015). The popular minion craze notwithstanding, my interest in Despicable Me 2 rests on its least advertised yet most controversial character: Eduardo Perez/El Macho (hereafter, El Macho), voiced by Peruvian and German actor Benjamin Bratt, is the Mexican luchador villain in the film. I argue that this representation of an animated Mexican male, geared toward children all in the name of “family fun,” surfaces historical racist tropes from the 1800s. The reappearance of the Mexican animated villain trope in the presumed era of “post-raciality,” where race does not matter, is what Fredric Jameson theorizes as simulacra. Simulacra replaces reality; in this case, a representation of a Mexican man as devious, mustached, and adorned with a sombrero becomes the image of Mexican men in mainstream media. The contemporary representation of mainstream Mexican animated villains are stripped of their historical structure and significance and marketed as family entertainment. Even though they are animated, these representations contribute to negative anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States. El Macho’s controversy covered in mainstream entertainment news, such as the change in the voice actor, was not about his stereotypical Mexi335

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can villain persona, a Mexican character who since early Western films has socialized viewers (Berg).1 The character’s original voice actor was Al Pacino, who dropped out of the project six weeks before the film premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (Amidi). Pacino’s departure from the project might explain why in promotional materials (film previews and movie posters) there was no mention of El Macho or the plot of the film. The production was nearly finished and the animation aspect was “locked,” meaning that the visuals were complete and no major changes were permitted on the film (Beam). Producers not only had to find a replacement but animators also had a challenging task and a larger concern. They had to fit someone else’s voice to the already completed computer-animated work. Never before had a task so difficult been tackled in the animation world (Debruge). The talents of the film’s sound engineers and directors plus the time to complete said tasks were remarkable. The final product is considered seamless. While the technological aspect has garnered plenty of attention, I focus on the visual and sonic choices made by the film’s creators that resurfaced a historical trope. My primary concern that guides this chapter’s arguments is the reliance on an accented Mexican male as an animated villain. In this chapter, I focus on the accented voice and provide a phonetical transcript to highlight the forced and performed “accent” of El Macho. The transcript provides a visual linguist “accent” that resonates with two historical examples of Mexican animated male characters: Warner Bros.’ Speedy Gonzales (1953– 99) and Frito Lay’s Frito Bandito (1967– 71).2 Both of these characters were voiced by legendary voice actor Mel Blanc and are examples of “brown voice” performances. A brown voice performance is the racialized performance of a Mexican vocal “accent.”3 My approach to animated film is not concerned with the effects of children viewing or reading racialized, queer, or sexual messages in animated films or the hidden labor of global production (Lippi-Green), though, indeed, these two strands of study within studies of computer animation are crucial in understanding the animated genre. Instead, as a means of decoupling Western associations made between sight and knowledge, my method privileges the ear and focuses on the relationship between the sonic and visual on-screen (Kheshti). Specifically, I analyze how and why the accented racial voice, in many ways, is required for the visually villainous, large, fat digital body of El Macho; both the voice and fat body work to communicate similar connotations of excess. Voice-overs racialize and gender the nonmaterial animated body in relationship to historical representations of Otherness. The current trend of adding digital interactive components to products for smartphones, tablets, and future screen technologies to come positions animation, according to Suzanne Buchan, as able to “increasingly influence our understanding of how

we see and experience the world visually” (1). Despite the technological differences that have transformed the process of creating animated film, from hand-drawn and photographic stills to computer animation, techniques for racializing characters with sonic markers of race and ethnicity have stubbornly stayed the same.

There are many educational gains from watching “cartoons,” or animated film, with family, particularly when parents engage and explain to children what they see occurring on-screen. Research indicates that benefits are most evident when content is age appropriate since emotional material should be easily digested. The pleasures of sharing emotions and quality time spent as a family contribute to knowledge and language development (Wright et al.). Animated films are “masterful inventions, giving perfect form to thought and feeling” (Goodwin 146); therefore, they show their viewers visual forms of dealing with difficult topics. On the other hand, scholars have also argued that audiences experience troubling effects of media regarding their language, culture, community, or about marginalized communities (Koslow et al.; Mastro and Tukachinsky, “Influence”; Mastro and Tukachinsky, “Cultivation”). In a similar vein, my analysis considers how all viewers are socialized to racial, gendered, and linguistic assumptions about “authentic” people of color, specifically Mexican men. Studies show that people of color continue to be underrepresented in the media, are marginalized when shown, and/or play minor roles compared to their white counterparts (Klein and Shiffman 164). When people of color are included on-screen, they are often portrayed in stereotypical roles (Mastro and Behm-Morawitz; Klein and Shiffman). In fact, Mastro has found that viewers of television, even with the limited representation of Latinxs as sex objects, criminals, and comics, learn to have negative judgments not only about the characters on-screen but Latinxs in society; furthermore, it lowers the self-esteem of Latinxs themselves (Mastro; Mastro et al.; Mastro and Kopacz; Mastro and Tukachinsky, “Influence”). Although cartoons are framed as an innocent entertainment pastime for families, they can convey historical stereotypes masked as animated characters. As Nicholas Sammond states, “American animation is actually in many of its most enduring incarnations an integral part of the ongoing iconographic and performative traditions of blackface” (5). Racial difference was visually and sonically represented through blackface. For instance, big, red smiling lips; big, round white eyes heavily contrasted with black skin; and grammatically incorrect versions of African American Vernacular English

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Animation and Race

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(AAVE) together created troubling racial and ethnic stereotypes (King et al., “Animated” 395; Bloomquist, “Minstrel”). The construction and analysis of a stereotypical sound is overlooked because it is easier to see race than it is to “hear” race (Stoever-Ackerman). Therefore, a linguistic minstrelsy continued in the construction of “blackness” in animated film (Bloomquist, “Minstrel”). Creators and animators must grapple with attributes like race, gender, and language and take into consideration if they have pushed social boundaries “too far.” The very essence of animation provides movement to characters and inanimate objects. In creating a fictional character, animators choose whether to re-create a racist and stereotypical historical legacy in animated film. Some critics believe the genre is inoffensive and meant as “good family fun” that in some way allows more flexibility in its presentation of race, gender, and language. The bodies on-screen are computer generated; therefore, they are considered dematerialized and assumed to not be taken seriously. Although the characters are virtual, however, they are materialized through sonic and visual characteristics linking them to physical bodies (Chung 27). As viewers, “we sense them [animated characters] as alive. We sense them as moving, as active” (Eisenstein 55). This relationship to characters on-screen is not conscious; this viewpoint stems from watching a body in movement within a narrative storyline in the space provided by film (Flaig 12). Characters are drawn and given movement through animation; however, they come alive through an actor’s voice that stems from a human body. The synchronous sound, sound that matches the movements on-screen, makes it clear whose voice belongs to what body (Sammond 179). Bloomquist’s study on the use of AAVE in animated film from Dumbo (1941) to Shrek (2001) analyzes the use of minstrelsy in the construction of racially coded characters. Bloomquist’s research on contemporary voiceovers traces how they are racialized and anthropomorphized characters through historical acting tropes like the “Zip Coon,” “sambo,” and “mammy.” In the animation world, Bloomquist argues, there has not been much progress in terms of providing well-rounded or diverse views of black culture as other genres of film have achieved. Even though the contemporary animated characters do not visually signify minstrel characters, the voice assigned to black characters continues to portray them as childlike through stereotypes. Moreover, Bloomquist states that black actors’ participation in lending voices to animated characters continues to reinforce historical stereotypes. These stereotypes may not necessarily be visual representations of blackface but signify racism through the vocal performance. For example, in Dumbo (1941), the flock of crows speak in jive slang, and in The Jungle Book (1967), King Louie the Orangutan and monkeys all speak in jive slang. Other examples include The Little Mermaid’s (1989) Jamaican-accented crab Sebastian, Mulan’s

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(1998) comic-relief sidekick Mushu, Donkey from Shrek (2001), and Marty the Zebra from Madagascar (2005). Bloomquist affirms that “not only is it disappointing that so many other negative stereotypes remain completely intact for child audiences today, but it is equally troubling that despite the gains African American actors have made in traditional films . . . we have yet to see the development of positive new Black character types in animated film” (Bloomquist, “Construction” 20). Some of the animated characters listed above are not supposed to be representative of a racial or ethnic group. Actors of color who lend their voices are expected to perform the aural stereotype; therefore, the animated character is racialized. Famous actors and musicians voice animated characters and thus conceptualize for viewers the human body and the animated body existing at once. In Despicable Me 2, the animated character was a Mexican villain from design; therefore, the character needed a Mexican voice. The perpetual “bad guy” is racialized next to white heroes in film and in animation; however, this particular Mexican villain is not your traditional sombreroed, mustached, bandolier-wearing Mexican but instead a mustached luchador, or a more contemporary Mexican villain. El Macho’s voice, originally cast to be performed by Al Pacino, resonates with historical practices of white performers mimicking stereotypical “authentic” performances of people of color. Because Pacino left production late in the process due to alleged creative differences, actor Benjamin Bratt voiced the character in a false Spanish-inflected English. Since the animation was already completed, Bratt’s voice needed to match the same mouth movements. Bratt, therefore, transformed El Macho into his own racialized creation. The racialized animated creation can slip into a controversial space of collapsing and reinforcing sonic legacies of Latinxs through voice acting, particularly when the voice actor is from the same ethno-racial group as the animated fictional character. The performance of racialized voices in animated films surfaces issues of the politics of representation just as casting for a live-action film or television series does. As Eric Lott states, “Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of Black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return” (5). Based on my research, every use of the vocal performance of a Spanish-inflected English, or brown voice, is an example of brownface. In the animated world, voices are characterized as the souls of the characters; they give viewers sonic relationships to fictional characters and complicate the relationship between the texture of the voice, the voice actor, and the animated representation on-screen (“Despicable Me— Featurette”). But before I analyze El Macho’s voice and the computer-generated body, a brief history of the Mexican villain as stereotype will help establish the significance and importance of this character.

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Sounds of Villainy

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The Mexican villain in Despicable Me 2, a luchador by the name El Macho, is not your typical Western bad guy adorned with a sombrero, bandolier, or scruffy beard; however, they share similar characteristics. The most famous portrayal of a Mexican animated villain belongs to Frito Lay’s Frito Bandito. In Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema, Chon A. Noriega provides a history of the infamous character and the Chicanx media activists who succeeded in getting Frito Bandito off the air.4 Noriega reminds us of the social significance and signification of Frito Lay’s bandit. He was described as “‘unshaven, unfriendly, and leering’ . . . [and] stole Anglos’ corn chips at gunpoint” (Noriega 35). Frito Bandito was brought to life by the voice of one of the most famous and memorable voice actors, Mel Blanc. Frito Bandito was created during a time in U.S. history when public debates were taking place about Mexican populations and Mexican American civil rights, which were seen as a threat. But before Blanc gave life to Frito Bandito, he voiced another Mexican character that is arguably seen as a villain and a leader of Mexican mice against the mischievous Sylvester the Cat, Speedy Gonzales. Both of these vocal performances are examples of brown voice, yet each performance had different representational purposes based on the social, historical, and political context of Mexicans in the United States at the time they were created. Speedy Gonzales made his debut in 1953 in Cat-Tails for Two as the fastest mouse in all of Mexico with his famous tag line “¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!” In his original aesthetic, Speedy wears a red T-shirt, has black short hair, his top two front teeth protrude over his bottom ones, and one is yellow in color. His aesthetic changed, to his now commonly recognized look (figure 18.1), two years later when he appeared in Speedy Gonzales (1955), though his short and stocky upper body remained the same. The seven-minute, self-titled animation received an Academy Award in 1956 for the Best Animated Short Film. Attention given to this film by the Academy is an ironic form of public regard considering the so-called wetback decade that took place from 1944– 54 in the United States. The “wetback decade” saw an increase of anti-immigrant sentiment during the release of this animated short (Vargas 287). Speedy Gonzales’s voice is a performance of brown voice popularized by Mel Blanc. The multiple forms in which Speedy’s Spanish is presented as both funny and linguistically botched cast ideas of Mexicans as illiterate and linguistic failures. In Speedy Gonzales, Mexican mice attempt to cross the suggested U.S.-Mexico border (labeled as “International Boundary” in the film) in attempts to enter a cheese factory. The Mexican mice are unsuc-

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cessful because Sylvester the Cat eats the mice that cross over and spits out their sombreros as a sign of defeat and intimidation. The mice recruit Speedy Gonzales to help them cross the border to the cheese factory. When the mice speak to each other, their language is best described as Spanish gibberish.5 At the end of the film, Speedy meets Sylvester and outwits him in order to get cheese for the rest of the mice. Speedy concludes the animated short by stating, “I likes this pussy cats fellow. Is silly.” Speedy’s tag line, “¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!,” Spanish gibberish, use of a plural verb (“likes”) and a plural noun when not needed (“cats”), and deletion of a pro- Figure 18.1 Speedy Gonzales’s aesthetic noun (“is silly”) contribute to notions of since 1955 (Speedy Gonzales). Mexicans as linguistic failures. This representation of Mexicans’ inability to master English or Spanish displays them as unattractive citizens, therefore solidifying their “forever foreigner” status in the United States. Additionally, this aural representation of Mexicans— not being able to master the English language and speaking Spanish gibberish— adds to the notion of Mexicans refusing to learn English and refusing to let go of their “backward native tongue”; therefore, it marked multiple generations of Mexicans unwilling to assimilate. Although Speedy is bilingual, his accented and grammatically incorrect English, or brown voice, keeps him outside of the national narrative. Mel Blanc also voiced a lesser-known Mexican villain, Frito Bandito, who was a mascot for Fritos corn chips from 1967 to 1971. Frito Bandito had a stocky upper body with bandoliers across his chest and pistol holders with pistols in them on the side of his belt. One of the commercials for Fritos begins with a “wanted poster” of Frito Bandito on an easel with the word “magician” at the bottom (CineGraphic). Frito Bandito is animated yet accompanied by a human female model, presumably a magician’s assistant, on the right-hand corner of the screen. The assistant begins to clap, followed by a louder round of applause by the audience. In this commercial, Frito does not need his pistols to steal chips; however, they are still located on his belt, alluding to representations of Mexican men as violent and dangerous. Instead, he tricks the audience into giving him all of the corn chips.

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Not only does Frito steal the corn chips but the consumer turns into a Mexican bandit with a simple mustache— as displayed in the commercial when a young boy eats the chips— similar to Frito’s. Frito is heard pronouncing words “trick” as “treek,” “gracias” as “grassy-as,” and says “the Frito Bandito makes the magic. I turn your Fritos corn chips, Figure 18.2 Clip from Frito Bandito commercial into my corn chips” as “the Frito voiced by Mel Blanc (CineGraphic). Bandido make the majeek. I turn your Fritos corn cheaps, into my corn cheaps.” Frito’s use of Spanish-inflected English and the incorrect verb (“make,” not “makes”) contribute to mainstream notions of illiteracy and not mastering the English language. Frito’s linguistic “accent” and visual aesthetic were used to show qualities of a thief. The use of an animated Frito with a real-life model and hands that appear at the bottom of the screen adds to the reality of Frito. This suggests the possibility of Frito living among people, outside of the animated world, thereby connecting him to the eight million Mexican bodies that were in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s because of the 1965 Immigration Act (U.S. Census Bureau, “1960 Overview,” “1970 Overview”; Rodriguez 148). It has been suggested that Frito was used to diminish the gains of the Chicano civil rights movement and provide commentary on dominant anxieties about Mexican laborers (Noriega 39). While Mel Blanc provides listeners with two examples of animated brown voice (Speedy Gonzales’s laughable and incoherent English and Spanish brown voice and Frito’s dangerous and sneaky brown voice), Noriega reminds us that during the 1960s and 1970s, the image of the Mexican bandit was used in various advertisements, not just for Frito Lay. In fact, the image of the Mexican bandit had long been used in the United States before Speedy Gonzales and Frito Bandito were conceived. Juan J. Alonzo researches the representation of Mexican male identity and focuses on representations of “badmen” and “bandits” in Western literature and film in the United States (2). In the stereotype’s repetition of the mustached Mexican bandit with a sombrero, bandoliers, and pistols, it establishes “truths” about Mexican men (Alonzo 3). According to Alonzo, this figure has been in existence since 1840s conquest fiction, and its longevity has lasted on the screen mostly due to the 1910 Mexican Revolution (3). Mexican revolutionary heroes adorned with mustaches, pistols, and sombreros, in mainstream U.S. representations, allude to outlaw, criminal,

violent, vigilante Mexicans who destroy their own country and attempt to enter the United States. The image of Mexican men as villains is a part of U.S. celluloid history. The visual image of the Mexican bandit was materialized in the silent “greaser” films and continued in Western film genres to the present. The “greaser” was created “out of need for the Anglo-American to define himself as the morally and physically dominant inhabitant of the Texas territory and the West” (Alonzo 24). However, the bandit we all recognize, according to Alonzo and Berg, is the bandit influenced by the Mexican Revolution (Alonzo 15; Berg 8). The reason the visual image of the bandit has continued is that it holds a “narrative economy” that requires no introduction (Alonzo 46). A narrative economy in film and media refers to a visual storyline that communicates cheaply and quickly to viewers (Kolker 95). The recurrent Mexican bandit lives in the U.S. imaginary because it requires few props— like a mustache, sombrero, and bandoliers— for viewers to be transported to a violent and dangerous Mexico (Alonzo 46). Not only does the narrative economy include a visual aesthetic, but I argue also includes a Spanish-inflected English that is grammatically incorrect. In Western films, viewers can hear an aural difference between the bandit and the hero. The importance of this “old” recognizable stereotype lies in its reappearance that reinforces both historical and contemporary beliefs about Mexican sexuality, gender, and race (King et al., Animating 38).6 The Mexican bandit has had surface changes, like the visual aesthetics of the character, but the brown voice of the villain remains.

El Macho resurfaces historical tropes of historical Mexican villains in Despicable Me 2. In this film, viewers are reintroduced to Gru, his minions, and his adoptive daughters, Margo, Edith, and Agnes. Gru is considered one of the best super villains, but in this film he has retired from his job to be a fulltime dad to his daughters. In the film, Gru is taken out of retirement to help the Anti-Villain League (AVL) capture a suspect who has stolen an entire laboratory that produces the dangerous PX41 serum from the Arctic Circle. Gru is assigned a partner, Lucy, from the AVL to help find the culprit. At the end of the film, Lucy and Gru marry, and Agnes, the youngest daughter, is thrilled that she has a new mom. The film excels in representing a diverse family structure, concerns of fatherhood, and preteen dating (Sharkey; Wilson; Chen). The film makes reference to current trends of online dating by having Gru’s daughters develop a social media profile for Gru to encourage courtships and possibly find a new mom. The second storyline of the film involves the discovery of who the culprit is and capturing him.

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Viewers meet El Macho in a cupcake store at the mall where Lucy and Gru are undercover. Below is a transcript of their first encounter with him. El Macho’s fat and jolly body enters the shop. The audience sees El Macho’s balding head with a comb-over that is attached to his mullet hairstyle and a goatee that adorns his face. El Macho wears a long-sleeved, red silk shirt (not buttoned all the way to the top), revealing a gold chain necklace and an emblem of the letter “E” that hangs from the chain.

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[28:07] (1) El Macho (EM): Ah-low? [From behind the counter of a cupcake display case, Gru and Lucy frantically try to act normal and hide the periscope they were looking through while spying on potential owners of mall shops who might have stolen the PX41 serum. Lucy jumps on the counter, crosses her legs, and sips from a cup of coffee, while Gru stands behind the counter and stares into a spoon.] [28:11] (2) (EM): Buenos dias, my frrrends. I am Eduardo Perez, owner of Salsa y Salsa (3) rest-a-rant across the mall. Now open for brek-fast. And jew are? (4) Gru (G): Gru, and this is Lucy, and we are closed. (5) EM: Dis is just gonna to take uno momento. I am throwing a big cinco de mayo

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Figure 18.3 Cupcake shop scene with El Macho voiced by Benjamin Bratt (Despicable Me 2).

In the transcript above, I only highlight El Macho’s accented language because it is my topic of investigation. In the script for the film, before El Macho speaks, it states that El Macho’s dialogue should be read “in falsetto,” a false sound in a high pitch, which Benjamin Bratt does not perform (Paul and Daurio). El Macho’s character required an unusually high-pitched fictitious voice, which contributes to the feminization of Mexican men in response to discourses of “machismo” (discussion of “macho” to follow) and adds to stereotypical notions of sounding fat.8 However, Bratt’s robust, full-bodied brown voice stereotypically matches the size and race of El Macho. Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) also speaks in a forced-sounding Transylvanian “accent,” an “accent” created by Carell. Chris Meledandri, producer of the first Despicable Me (2010), states, “Carell started to play with different vocals that involved accents, and he came up with one that lands somewhere between Ricardo Montalbán and Bela Lugosi” (“What Do”). Meledandri’s description of Gru’s voice notes qualities of sounds that are reminiscent of two specific people rather than regions or a country of origin. Because “accents” are linked to social identities and geographical socializations, Gru’s “accent” linked to

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(6) pari. And I am going to need two handred of your best copcase decorated with the (7) Messican flag. It looks something like dis . . . Eya! What do you think? [He pop opens his red long-sleeved shirt to reveal a tattooed Mexican flag on his hairy chest.] (8) (G): Look away. (9) Lucy (L): Ooo, wow, wow. (10) (EM): Anyway I have to go. Ez all settled. I’ll pick them up next week. Have a (11) good day. Come by if you get a chance. OK? [28:57: El Macho steps out. Gru releases a sigh of relief, and El Macho steps back into the cupcake shop.] [29:02] (12) (EM): And welcome to the mall fam-e-lee. [El Macho smiles, and his facial gesture pauses while Gru gasps. Gru pictures El Macho’s face in a luchador mask while the background of the scene is filled with flames and we hear strumming of Spanish guitars. El Macho walks out of the store and Gru whispers . . .] [29:13] (13) (G): El Macho.7

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“non-origins” privileges his white animated body and allows him freedom not accessible to El Macho. This animated text is therefore interesting on a linguistic level not only because of El Macho’s brown voice but also the film’s inclusion of various accented performances. Analyzing this film through “accents” and language politics is also beneficial in part because the yellow minions have their own language that is not subtitled, yet the other characters understand what the minions say. There are also other instances in which we hear accented sound and in which the characters make overt references to differences heard in spoken sound. For example, there is a potential culprit in the mall named Floyd (voiced by Ken Jeong) with “Asian”-accented English, the director of the Anti-Villain League (AVL) has a British “accent,” El Macho has a son named Antonio with an accented English with hints of Spanish, and Lucy mentions that she is practicing an Australian “accent” when she hears that she is being transferred to the Australian AVL office. Therefore, the film’s inadvertent focus on vocal differences could be seen as teaching viewers about linguistic acceptance; that is, until one particular scene: on a romantic date, a woman tells Gru that she can help him get rid of his “accent” and encourages him to physically work out. Gru’s body in the film is not muscular and can be described as “apple-shaped.” This scene suggests that Gru’s body type along with his Transylvanian “accent” is a combination that can be fixed in order to make him more sexually desirable. While El Macho speaks with an “accent” and has a fatter body than Gru, there is no mention from other characters of “fixing” his body or brown voice. However, Gru is seen as someone who has the potential to be desired romantically by the opposite sex. As Davé notes about Indian “accents,” the continual representation of brown bodies in brown voice keeps viewers believing that brown bodies are undesirable bodies for citizenship because of the color of their skin and sound of their voice. The inclusion of various types of accented English in a film targeted for children is notable because it teaches viewers about linguistic diversity; however, accents are mocked, marked as different, and correctable, even for Gru, a white man. In our first encounter with El Macho, his greeting in line (1), a simple “Hello” turns into “Ah-low” and instantly racializes him sonically. Bratt’s performance of brown voice is not grammatically incorrect, as Mel Blanc’s performances are; instead, Bratt’s brown voice relies on Spanishinflected English pronunciations. For example, in line (2), the word “friends” is pronounced “frrrends,” and in line (3), the words “restaurant,” “breakfast,” and “you” are spoken as “rest-a-rant,” “brek-fast,” and “jew.” Although Bratt’s vocal performance differs from Blanc’s, both voice actors’ aural embodiment of Mexican animated characters serve to racialize Mexican men in the United States as linguistic outsiders and less than desirable citizens. In line (5), Bratt’s

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use of the mock-Spanish “uno momento” is used to mimic how nonnative Spanish-speaking people believe Spanish is spoken. Mock Spanish, when spoken by white monolingual speakers, Jane H. Hill argues, functions as a covert reproduction of racism. The use of mock Spanish reveals a “dual indexicality” whereby white monolingual speakers are praised for their speaking abilities and historical Spanish-speaking communities are harassed for speaking Spanish (Hill 683). In contrast, the use of mock Spanish by Bratt functions as a subtle jab to white monolingual speakers and inverts the stereotypical sound that white monolingual speakers hear. Evidence of Bratt’s jab is most apparent when comparing the script of the film with the final product because the use of mock Spanish was not part of the original script— Benjamin Bratt’s influence in the film changed the delivery of some lines. The script that Bratt read stated, “This is just gonna take un momento”; however, Bratt vocalizes “uno momento” instead, a form of mock Spanish (Paul and Daurio). There is no denying that El Macho’s Mexican identity, tattoo, restaurant name, and enthusiasm for his Cinco de Mayo “pari” loudly signify Mexicanness (Alamillo). The red silk shirt, gold chain, and restaurant are markers of El Macho’s middle-class financial stability. His fat, excessive body is matched by his excessive enthusiasm and “larger than life” personality that is reflected in the texture of his brown voice. El Macho’s fat, racialized body on-screen is the opposite of what R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt consider “hegemonic masculinity.” El Macho’s jolly personality on a fat body connotes an undisciplined and out-of-control body. Because El Macho’s body is not muscular, he represents laziness and unintelligence, but most importantly, his body poses an ethnic/ racial threat to muscularity. Despite his large physique, he continues to disguise himself as “El Macho” and maintains his evil duties as a villain. However, El Macho’s Mexican fat body can also be read as a threat to the United States and reproduces white middle-class anxieties of obese bodies as lazy, lacking of self-control in bodily desires, and consuming too much physical space (Monaghan). Specifically, Mexican immigrant bodies who are represented in mainstream media as “using and stealing” U.S. resources, which is reflected in El Macho’s successful attempt to steal the PX41 and all of Gru’s minions by converting them into indestructible monsters. Here, the historical bandido qualities are transposed to that of a luchador. In the scene following the one described above, viewers are introduced to what a “macho” is. It has no dialogue from El Macho but instead features a scene from the past with a voice-over by Gru. Gru describes El Macho as ruthless, dangerous, and very macho and says that he pulled off heists by using only his bare hands. When Gru says, “And as the name implies, very

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macho,” the visual we see is El Macho in a cantina, squeezing rattlesnake venom into a shot of tequila. He takes the shot, puts the glass into his mouth, chews it, and eats it. He puts money on the counter and uses the rattlesnake to pin down the cash by exposing its fangs. He turns around, and we see his long, black, straight hair as he walks through a brick wall instead of using the saloon door. Viewers find out throughout the film that El Macho stole the PX41 serum in order to turn Gru’s yellow minions into purple indestructible monsters in order to take over the world. El Macho meets his end after he drinks the serum and turns into a hairy, purple monster, although his mullet and goatee do not change, so that classed, negative connotations continue to racialize his body visually. Gru zaps him with a lipstick taser, and Dr. Nefario (Gru’s assistant) shoots him with a fart gun. When he falls to the ground, he is treated like a wild animal who has been shot, as the minions in safari hats pose for a picture next to the large, hairy purple body lying on the floor. El Macho’s failed strength at the end of the film reflects his weakened masculinity. Here, the animation, as a form, represents and contains Mexicans as safe, comical, and without serious political recognition. The luchador villain El Macho is exposed, confirming Gru’s speculation about his villain identity. The villain’s identity as a luchador comes to a surprise for Mexican viewers, however, who understand the cultural and political significance of a man wrestling in a mask. The luchador villain never fights or even wrestles in the film. El Macho’s mask signifies a luchador, but the historical and political significance of the disguise is lost. Mexican wrestling began in the 1930s and was made popular by the 1940s by working-class families (Greene 54). In the wrestling world, there are rudos (tough guys who break the rules) and técnicos (who wrestle by the rules and whose moves are more complex). In the world of lucha libre, there are no villains. They also never, ever reveal their non-luchador identity. “Lucha libre” literally means “free struggle.” Heather Levi notes that “lucha libre resonated with the widely held and fundamental philosophy of the Mexican popular class: life is struggle” (344). Clearly, in the translation to mainstream animation, all of the core elements that make Mexican wrestling unique are completely erased and commodified. The only object that remains is the style of luchador mask that El Macho wears. Lucha libre in U.S. popular culture has been simplified to only a mask, stripped of its political origins, and its transition into the mainstream has been used against working-class Mexicans because the cultural importance is erased in mainstream U.S. representation. The embodiment of El Macho was completed with the use of Benjamin Bratt’s performance of brown voice. In press junkets for Despicable Me 2, he reflected on his performance as El Macho, mentioning that in his traditional

work (in live-action television and film), he had always been coached that less is more. But as he implied, in animation, more is more, and he enjoyed being “outrageous and larger than life” (“Benjamin Bratt Talks”). Part of the comedic punch in animations, especially for this character, is “the exaggerative movement [that] originates in an unconscious humour, one that leads them into adventures beyond graphic consistency or character-based intention, beyond sense altogether, which is precisely the comedy of their movements, their nonsensical, frenetic shifting across forms, shapes and places” (Flaig 12). Therefore, the inclusion of humor in animated film is simply intended to make the viewer laugh for the sake of laughing. However, I argue that the linguistic “accents” that disregard national origin and represent vocal placeholders for mocking Spanish-speaking communities in this film are more problematically used for laughs. Bratt’s fascination with voice-acting work speaks to being encouraged to perform excess. Bratt describes El Macho as a person who has let himself go, referring to his fat body, and admits that the performance was liberating, since he enjoyed playing the “Latin flair” that he projects. When asked about bringing El Macho to life, Bratt stated that he was impressed with Steve Carrell’s ability to create Gru with his “peculiar accent” and said, “In general to any native speaker when you massacre the language with a bad accent like I sometimes do in the film, it’s hilarious” (“Benjamin Bratt and Miranda Cosgrove”). Viewers are made aware of his conscious attempt to try to be humorous in some of his brown voice choices. In any comedic work, however, there is a possibility of reaffirming stereotypes, or the potential to move away from it (Timmerman et al. 171). Bratt’s

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Figure 18.4 El Macho voiced by Benjamin Bratt (Despicable Me 2).

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description of massacring the language with a bad “accent” is part of the humor of playing El Macho, and his entry into the animated film does slip between a thin space of collapsing and reinforcing historical sonic representations. Here, Bratt provides symbolic commentary on how white performers have played Latinx roles in his own performance of brown voice minstrelsy in Despicable Me 2. Mel Blanc’s variety of brown voice and Benjamin Bratt’s brown voice performances have different qualities and were used for different purposes; however, the performances were all used to racialize and make fun of Mexican men in the United States. Voicing animated characters is an intricate process not only in the labor animators provide but also how the voice will sound through the nonphysical/ physical digital body. Animation also has a racist history because it adopted minstrel forms of entertainment that are clearly present in current animation through visual and sonic markers. Animation additionally concerns itself with movement. El Macho physically moves on-screen, but the character also is able to move across international digital boundaries because he lives and owns a restaurant in the United States in the plot of the film. El Macho as a product is also exported to other countries through global distribution of the film. The affective relationship created by listeners with the character is contentious because of how Mexican male characters continue to be depicted with an accented English and their consistent portrayal as “bad guys.” It seems that Mexican male representation in animation has come a long way, yet similar characteristics continue to appear— for example, a Mexican revolutionary villain to a luchador villain. El Macho’s brown voice is one example of the political and contradictory meanings of voicing an ethnic/racial character.

Notes 1. 2.

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Berg argues that the character of “el bandido” appeared in silent films as early as 1914, as part of a film genre known as “greaser” films. Speedy Gonzales cartoons have not aired in the United States since 1999. Cartoon Network reruns other Warner Bros. animated films (for example, other Looney Tunes episodes) but stated that Speedy Gonzales’s message was outdated (“Speedy Gonzales”). My use of the term “brown voice” is influenced by Shilpa Davé’s theorizing; however, in her analysis, “brown voice” references the vocal performance of Indian “accents.” I agree with Davé when she states that South Asian and Latinxs are ambiguous groups in the United States, and therefore their “accents” and performance racialize these communities regardless of citizenship status or generation. The performances of brown voice (Indian “accents”) are overlooked and underestimated in their significance, in addition to the brown voice associated with the sonic construction of

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Mexican people. From here on, my references to brown voice relate to Mexicans, unless noted otherwise. My use of “Chicanx” is to emphasize the specific role Mexican American media activists had, during the historical time period in question, to express their concern for the animated character and successful removal of Frito from all promotional materials. When the mice speak, in attempts to recruit Speedy for their cause, some of the words in their dialogue are distinguishable; for example, English words like “pussy cat” and “cheese,” Spanish words like “solamente,” “gringo,” and “probablemente,” and an Italian word, “grosso.” In their Spanish exchange, “probablemente” is used as “problem” instead of “probably” (a Spanish-English false friend word) to describe their problem with Sylvester. King et al. (Animating) discuss stereotypes in general and why studying them is relevant. I am applying their statement to highlight the importance of the “Mexican villain.” After this scene, Gru recounts how he knows Eduardo Perez is “El Macho.” Perez’s villain name, El Macho, a stereotypical racialized and gendered term with Spanishlanguage origins, denotes males of an animal or plant species. The term also gestures toward patriarchy because it is used to describe women who display stereotypically male behavior. In the English language, the word “macho” has historically been used against working-class Latino males and working-class Latinx culture to “explain” social constraints of working-class Latinas and their lack of social progress (González-López and Gutmann). “El Macho,” therefore, speaks volumes about the negative connotation and mainstream view of working-class Latinxs. In other words, this character is representing the term “macho” for viewers. Typically, “sounding fat” includes a high-pitched voice in order to feminize fat bodies and deem them not masculine, or lacking the ideal mainstream masculinity that men should possess.

Alamillo, José. “Cinco de Mayo, Inc.: Reinterpreting Latino Culture into a Commercial Holiday.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction Vol. 33, edited by Norman K. Denzen, Emerald Books, 2009, pp. 217– 38. Alonzo, Juan J. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film. University of Arizona Press, 2009. Amidi, Amid. “Once and For All, Al Pacino Proves the Worthlessness of Celebrity Voice Actors.” Cartoonbrew, July 10, 2013, www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/once-and-for-all-al-pacino -proves-the-worthlessness-of-celebrity-voice-actors-85592.html. Beam, Christopher. “Once More, With Less Pixelation!” Slate, May 29, 2009, slate.com/news-and -politics/2009/05/what-does-the-director-of-an-animated-movie-do.html. “Benjamin Bratt and Miranda Cosgrove on Despicable Me 2 Behind the Scenes.” YouTube, uploaded by POPSUGAR Entertainment, July 1, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCWcW4C7KSU. “Benjamin Bratt Talks about Playing a Villain and Being a Father | Despicable Me 2.” YouTube, uploaded by BlackTreeTV, June 27, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRScU6WBLBk. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. University of Texas Press, 2002.

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Bloomquist, Jennifer. “The Construction of Ethnicity via Voicing: AAE in Children’s Animated Film.” The Oxford Handbook on African American Language, edited by Sonja Lanehart et al., Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 1– 28. Bloomquist, Jennifer. “The Minstrel Legacy: African American English and the Historical Construction of ‘Black’ Identities in Entertainment.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2015, pp. 410– 25. Buchan, Suzanne. “Introduction: Pervasive Animation.” Pervasive Animation, edited by Suzanne Buchan, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1– 21. Chen, Sandie Angulo. “Despicable Me 2.” CommonSenseMedia, July 1, 2013, www.commonsense media.org/movie-reviews/despicable-me-2. Chung, Hye Jean. “Kung Fu Panda: Animated Animal Bodies as Layered Sites of (Trans)National Identities.” Velvet Light Trap, vol. 69, Spring 2012, pp. 27– 37. CineGraphic. “Frito Bandito TV Commercial 60’s.” Online video clip. YouTube, Dec. 13 2009, www .youtube.com/watch?v=_jfthrlClew. Accessed May 31, 2018. Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829– 59. Davé, Shilpa S. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film. University of Illinois Press, 2013. Debruge, Peter. “How Replacement Villain Became Unlikely Hero in ‘Despicable Me 2.’ ” Variety, July 3, 2013, variety.com/2013/film/news/despicable-me-2-el-macho-1200504833/. “Despicable Me— Featurette: ‘Making Of ’-Illumination.” YouTube, uploaded by Illumination, Jul. 7, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtczO1VqLAI. Eisenstein, Sergie. Eisenstein on Disney. Translated by Alan Upchurch and edited by Jay Leyda, Methuen, 1988. Flaig, Paul. “Life Driven by Death: Animation Aesthetic and the Comic Uncanny.” Screen, vol. 54, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 1– 19. González-López, Gloria, and Matthew C. Gutmann. “Machismo.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005, pp. 1328– 30. Goodwin, George M. “More Than a Laughing Matter: Cartoons and Jews.” Modern Judaism, vol. 21, no. 2, 2001, pp. 146– 74. Greene, Doyle. Mexploitation Cinema: A Critical History of Mexican Vampire, Wrestler, Ape-Man, and Similar Films, 1957– 1977. McFarland and Company, 2005. Hill, Jane H. “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist, vol. 100, no. 3, 1998, pp. 680– 89. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Kheshti, Roshanak. “Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture Industry.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, pp. 711– 31. King, C. Richard, et al. “Animated Representations of Blackness.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2010, pp. 395– 97. King, C. Richard, et al. Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Klein, Hugh, and Kenneth S. Shiffman. “Race-Related Content of Animated Cartoons.” Howard Journal of Communication, vol. 17, no. 3, 2006, pp. 163– 82. Kolker, Robert Phillip. Film, Form, and Culture. 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2002. Koslow, Scott, et al. “Exploring Language Effects in Ethnic Advertising: A Sociolinguistic Perspective.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 20, no. 4, 1994, pp. 575– 85. Levi, Heather. “Masked Media: The Adventures of Lucha Libre on the Small Screen.” Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph et al., Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 330– 72. Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. Routledge, 1997. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Filmography Cat-Tails for Two. Directed by Robert McKimson, Warner Bros., 1953. Despicable Me. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment, 2010.

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Mastro, Dana E. “A Social Identity Approach to Understanding the Impact of Television Messages.” Communications Monographs, vol. 70, no. 2, 2003, pp. 98– 113. Mastro, Dana E., and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. “Latino Representation on Primetime Television.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1, 2005, pp. 110– 30. Mastro, Dana E., and Maria A. Kopacz. “Media Representations of Race, Prototypicality, and Policy Reasoning: An Application of Self-Categorization Theory.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 50, no. 2, 2006, pp. 305– 22. Mastro, Dana E., and Riva Tukachinsky. “Cultivation of Perceptions of Marginalized Communities.” The Cultivation Differential: State of the Art Research in Cultivation Theory, edited by Michael Morgan et al., Peter Lang Publishers, 2012, pp. 38– 60. Mastro, Dana E., and Riva Tukachinsky. “The Influence of Media Exposure on the Formation, Activation, and Application of Racial/Ethnic Stereotypes.” Media Effects/Media Psychology, edited by Erica Scharrer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 295– 315. Vol. 5 of The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies by Fabienne Darling-Wolf et al. Mastro, Dana E., et al. “The Cultivation of Social Perceptions of Latinos: A Mental Models Approach.” Media Psychology, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, pp. 347– 65. Monaghan, Lee. “Big Handsome Men, Bears and Others: Virtual Constructions of ‘Fat Male Embodiment.’ ” Body and Society, vol. 11, no. 2, 2005, pp. 81– 111. Noriega, Chon A. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Paul, Cinco, and Ken Daurio. “Despicable Me 2 (2013).” Writers Guild Foundation. 2013. Film script. Rodriguez, Clara E. Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood. Smithsonian Books, 2004. Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Duke University Press, 2015. Sharkey, Betsy. “Review: ‘Despicable’ Sequel Takes a Refreshing Risk with Grown-up Themes.” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2013, www.latimes .com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn -despicable-me-2-20130703-story.html. “Speedy Gonzales Caged by Cartoon Network.” Fox News, May 28, 2002, www.foxnews.com/story /speedy-gonzales-caged-by-cartoon-network. Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York.” Social Text, vol. 28, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59– 85. Timmerman, David M., et al. “Humor, Race, and Rhetoric: ‘A Liberating Sabotage of the Past’s Hold on the Present.’ ” Rhetoric Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2012, pp. 169– 87. U.S. Census Bureau. “1960 Overview.” www.census .gov/history/www/through_the_decades/over view/1960.html. Accessed Apr. 19, 2016. U.S. Census Bureau. “1970 Overview.” www.census .gov/history/www/through_the_decades/over view/1970.html. Accessed Apr., 19, 2016. Vargas, Zaragosa. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton University Press, 2005. “What Do the Critics Say?” Impact Internet Services, www.impactservices.net.au/movies/despicable me.htm. Accessed Mar. 25, 2019. Wilson, Natalie. “Feminist Film Analysis 101: A Case Study of ‘Despicable Me.’ ” Ms. Magazine Blog, Aug. 23, 2010, msmagazine.com/blog/2010/08/23/feminist-film-analysis-101-a-case-study-of -despicable-me/. Wright, John C., et al. “The Relations of Early Television Viewing to School Readiness and Vocabulary of Children from Low-Income Families: The Early Window Project.” Child Development, vol. 72, no. 5, 2001, pp. 1347– 66.

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Despicable Me 2. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment, 2013. Dumbo. Directed by Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, and Ben Sharpsteen, Walt Disney Productions, 1941. The Jungle Book. Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, Walt Disney Productions, 1967. The Little Mermaid. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures/Walt Disney Feature Animation, 1989. Madagascar. Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, DreamWorks Animation/PDIDreamWorks, 2005. Minions. Directed by Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin, Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment, 2015. Mulan. Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, Walt Disney Pictures/Walt Disney Feature Animation, 1998. Shrek. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, DreamWorks Animation/PDIDreamWorks, 2001. Speedy Gonzales. Directed by Friz Freleng, Warner Bros., 1955.

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Chapter 19

THE BEST MEXICAN IS A (DAY OF THE) DEAD MEXICAN Representing Mexicanness in U.S. Animated Films Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez

The success, in a very short period of time, of Reel FX Studios’ The Book of Life (2014) and— especially— Disney Pixar’s Coco (2017) may suggest a turn of the tide as far as the representation of Mexicanness in animated films is concerned. Critical and popular acclaim data suggest a high degree of satisfaction with both movies. Margaret Gallardo noted that The Book of Life “did well on its opening weekend, starting Oct. 17[, 2014], in particular in the Hispanic markets. In El Paso, the movie surpassed all expectations and ‘overperformed’ by 136 percent.” As for Coco, on November 28, 2017, the website Rotten Tomatoes rated it 96 percent fresh (Cavna), and anecdotal evidence of audience members’ approval of that film includes dreamer Carlos Aguilar,1 who praises how Coco “captured Mexican traditions and idiosyncrasies,” and Andrea Pulido, who “felt proud to see the portrayals of loving, hard-working Mexican families, as did her relatives spanning several generations in Michoacan” (both cited in Puig). Maira García sums up the feeling well when she states that many Americans of Mexican descent, like herself, “were overcome with emotion upon seeing a depiction of a family and household that closely resembles our own.”2 In terms of critical accomplishments, The Book of Life won an Annie, a World Soundtrack, and an Image Foundation Award. Coco, in turn, has garnered more than ninety awards, including two Oscars and a Golden Globe. For viewers familiar with earlier animated films, the contrast between the older movies and these two is indeed striking, and few people would dispute the fact that The Book of Life and Coco are, by far, the best two films about Mexico and Mexicans released in this particular format. At the same time, some critics and viewers are also likely to be wary of the current level of enthusiasm for these films, not unlike the one enjoyed by movies like Disney’s Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), considered brilliant 355

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and dazzling when they were first released but exposed since then for their multiple shortcomings in their depiction of Latin America. In this chapter, my intention is both to celebrate what The Book of Life and Coco do for representing Mexican(nes)s in animation and to analyze in detail some of those more problematic issues. My somewhat ambiguous title is intended to point in those two directions, acknowledging the fact that these two Day of the Dead films are the most nuanced portrayals of Mexican(nes)s in animated movies thus far, but also decrying the failure of animated studios in presenting more varied images of Mexico and Mexicans. In the process, I also intend to take these studios to task for their apparent inability to engage with Mexicans in the United States, an ever growing segment of their market that is nonetheless unable to truly see itself on the animated screen.3 Like most of their forerunners, The Book of Life and Coco take place south of the border, constructing Mexico as always forever foreign and not as the southern half of a vibrant transnational web of cultural, economic, social, and family relations that transcends geopolitical boundaries. To better situate Coco and The Book of Life in the chronological/cultural sequence of animated films about Mexico and Mexicans, a very brief consideration of that history may be of use. In fact, the presence (and absence) of characters of Mexican descent in animated films for children is part of a conflicted history of representing ethnic/racial Otherness.4 Though they were a common fixture in early silent films and talkies (see Keller 14, for example), Mexico and Mexicans did not appear in U.S. animated films until the World War II era, in the full-length feature The Three Caballeros, and only as a result of complaints against the Disney studios when Saludos Amigos managed to skip that country in its depiction of Latin America.5 Both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros were a direct result of the Good Neighbor policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.6 The policy aimed to accomplish two main goals: first, worried by the inroads made by Nazi Germany in Latin America, the Roosevelt administration wanted to foster stronger ties with Latin American countries in order to secure their support for the allied cause; in addition, at least as far as films were concerned, that turn toward Latin America was also a search for new markets that could compensate for the lost revenues in war-torn Europe. For those reasons, it comes as no surprise that Saludos Amigos should be premiered in Brazil (six months before making its debut in the United States) and The Three Caballeros in Mexico, a strategy that Disney Pixar has followed in the case of Coco, first shown in Mexico City as well. The Three Caballeros introduced children and families to the Mexican republic in a tourist-oriented way. Guided by a rooster named Panchito Pis-

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toles, Donald Duck and the Brazilian parrot José Carioca get to visit Acapulco, Veracruz, Mexico City, and other visitor-friendly areas, in all of which Donald keeps falling in love with the beautiful señoritas who appear to be eager to meet and greet the foreigner. The gun-toting, happy-triggered Panchito is one of Disney’s most stereotypical characters, combining the images of the violent bandit, the macho, and the Latin lover.7 Except for the brief appearance of a Mexican dog in Lady and the Tramp (1955),8 Mexican characters disappeared from the animated big screen until the 1990s, though Mexicanness was amply represented in cartoons in the intervening period, most notably through the successful and controversial Speedy Gonzales.9 Then, the 1990s signaled a definite turn to ethnicity in animated children’s films, a strategy that had social, financial, and audiencerelated reasons in the multicultural turn-of-the-century USA. Still, Disney— the most prolific and revered animation studio— managed to represent virtually every other ethnic group before focusing on Mexicans, from Creole Caribbeans in The Little Mermaid (1989) to Polynesian peoples in Moana (2016), and virtually every other major national/ethnic group in between. Even the dwellers of nonexistent civilizations (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 2001) were represented before Disney (through the recently acquired Pixar) finally came around to focusing on Mexicans in Coco.10 Other studios fared no better, and only DreamWorks animated (pre-Hispanic) Mexico during this period in The Road to El Dorado (2000) before Reel FX Creative Studios released The Book of Life.11 All in all, then, the history of representing Mexico and Mexicans in U.S. animated theatrical feature films (smaller parts notwithstanding here and there) is restricted to The Three Caballeros, The Road to El Dorado, The Book of Life, and Coco:12 a tourist travelogue, a pseudo-historical movie,13 and two films about the Day of the Dead, released only three years apart from one another. Seen from a different angle, and using different metrics, such representation amounts to a meager 361 minutes in the eighty-two years since animated theatrical full-length features debuted with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.14 It is also worth noting that no U.S. animated film has yet presented an extended portrayal of Mexican Americans or Chicano/a/xs,15 a significant omission given current population figures, the historical presence of people of Mexican descent in this country, the average age of people of Mexican descent in the United States, and their movie-watching habits, which suggest children’s films should find in them a particularly receptive and sizeable target audience. DreamWorks’ Turbo (2013) moves in that direction, featuring two recognizable Chicano characters (the brothers Angelo and Tito López),

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but their portrayal remains trapped in residual stereotyping (their taco truck/ stand occupation, for example), and the film centers on the snail characters, not so much on the brothers. Zooming in on the present century, once the fifty-five-year absence of Mexican main characters and themes began to be mitigated by the computeranimated films of the past two decades, it is remarkable to observe that the presence of Mexicans in animated children’s movies is largely dominated by the representation of dead people: an ancient civilization in The Road to El Dorado, on the one hand, and the numerous deceased characters featured in both The Book of Life and Coco, on the other. It seems that, as far as children’s animation is concerned, the best Mexican is indeed a (Day of the) dead Mexican, and that is where this analysis turns next.

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“What’s with Mexicans and death?” asks one of the detention students in The Book of Life when the story they are being told takes a tragic turn for some of its protagonists. Meant partly as a joke, one that would resonate with Mexican and non-Mexican audiences alike, the question begs rephrasing when considering the field of children’s animation: “What’s with dead Mexicans and Hollywood?” one might ask instead. Is it just an unfortunate coincidence that two animated Day of the Dead movies were released just three years apart from one another, or is that thematic choice somehow related to other general trends in representing Mexican(nes)s in film? One way of answering that question would be to observe that— when it comes to representing Mexicans— animated Hollywood has always resorted to the trope of distance: ancient Mexicans are preferred to those in our present times, and south of the border Mexicans appear in far greater numbers than those in the United States. As if to further emphasize the idea of distance, then, an additional ontological dimension is added in The Book of Life and Coco, making deceased Mexicans much more numerous on-screen than those alive. Temporal distance played an obvious role in The Road to El Dorado, set in the sixteenth century, but The Book of Life and Coco are also grounded in the past to a large extent. The former has an early twentieth-century feel to it, though it is said to take place after the Mexican Revolution of 1910– 20, probably between the late twentieth century and the present. The latter reaches back several generations in the representation of dead characters. Further historical depth is suggested through the clever combination of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern architecture in the towers that dot the landscape of the land of the dead.

Go Write Your Own Stories: Jorge R. Gutiérrez and The Book of Life Director Jorge R. Gutiérrez’s filmic interest in the Day of the Dead began with his 3-D animated short Carmelo (2000), winner of a 2001 student Emmy Award and shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Carmelo also featured Gutiérrez’s fascination with bullfighting and a story told through animated puppets, much as it is in The Book of Life. According to Mandalit del Barco, Gutiérrez “tried pitching [Carmelo] as a feature to all six major studios” to no avail.17 Gutierrez then worked on television, and he created the series El Tigre (shown on Nickelodeon for one season in 2007– 8) prior to writing and directing The Book of Life, thus far Gutiérrez’s most compelling representation of Mexico and Mexicans. Film producer Guillermo del Toro, for

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Geographic distance is even more apparent in all of the Mexican-centered animated films, since none of them takes place in the United States. Characters in some of these full-length features are allowed to cross the bridges that separate the dead from the living, but it seems as if an invisible wall somehow prevented them from crossing the international border between Mexico and this country. Even in Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico, the only animated film that explicitly depicts the U.S.-Mexico border, the traffic only moves from north to south. Finally, ontological distance manages to place Mexicans in a suspended state of sorts in which their historical depth is paradoxically rendered moot by virtue of their transgenerational coexistence; that is, by making alive and dead characters from multiple generations interact with one another as if chronological time did not exist. This brings these films peculiarly close to previous stereotypical images of Mexico as an atemporal place with a rich past, a dormant present, and no visible future (the land of a mañana that never arrives). The fact that both The Book of Life and Coco take place in the recurrent time of calendar-based festivities further contributes to de-historicizing time and to making Mexicans appear as distant from the present. Adopting for our own purposes James Baldwin’s critique of Carmen Jones, one could argue that— through these various types of distancing effects— Hollywood animated movies succeed in representing Mexicans in ways in which “the spectacle of color is divested of its danger” (48) by refusing to show present-day, alive, next-door Mexicans, and by giving us, instead, foreign, dead Mexicans from the past and/or inserted in the cyclical time of festivities.16 With this context in mind, I will explore next how The Book of Life and Coco go about representing Mexican(nes)s, prior to analyzing other elements in these films that compound the effects of distancing just noted.

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one, celebrated the aesthetics of The Book of Life as grounded in the Mexican Baroque (del Barco), and cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz praised it for its cultural authenticity, as quoted in del Barco: “‘I— along every other Latino, pretty much— were outraged and shocked when Disney tried to copyright the term ‘Día de los Muertos,’ or Day of the Dead,’ said cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz. By contrast, he said, 20th Century Fox’s new film by Gutiérrez and Del Toro is much more grounded in the culture.” Gutiérrez explained the genesis of The Book of Life as follows in an interview: “I didn’t see [Latinos] in television cartoons, but I also didn’t see them in animated feature films. That’s why we made ‘The Book of Life’” (Martinez; brackets in the original). Thus, as if answering a directive from his own character, the Candle Maker, Gutiérrez’s task was one of telling his own stories to partially fill the void of Latino/a/x characters in animated films. The Book of Life is set in the fictional Mexican town of San Ángel, spanning an indeterminate number of years, as the main trio of characters grow from childhood to young adulthood. Manolo and Joaquín compete for the love of the somewhat independent and nontraditional María.18 Joaquín is the son of the local military hero, and Manolo comes from a long line of bullfighters whose exploits he is expected to follow. Unbeknownst to all of them, the lords of the afterworld, La Muerte and Xibalba, have cast a wager as to who would be the one to win over María. Xibalba runs the dreary land of the forgotten, while La Muerte lords over the vibrant, colorful land of the remembered. The plot gets complicated through Xibalba’s maneuvering schemes, and the film then becomes somewhat convoluted for some viewers (Scheck), but the framing device that creates a story within the story (a museum guide explains the story of San Ángel to a group of schoolchildren) allows Gutiérrez to offer frequent cultural and plot explanations. The main cultural elucidation in the film concerns the significance of the Day of the Dead itself, and viewers are exposed to several ideas connected to it, in particular the belief that the deceased are allowed to visit the land of the living during the celebration, at least for as long as someone among the living remembers them. Once they are completely forgotten, the departed literally vanish, which is represented visually in the film as a sort of crumbling down into atoms that are swept by the wind. An unsigned review in Mexico’s El Universal suggests that The Book of Life evokes the 1960 film Macario, directed by Roberto Gavaldón and based on a story by B. Traven, among other intertexts that Mexican audiences (at least) should be able to recognize (“Presentan”). The Macario motif of the candles that represent human lives is indeed repeated in Gutiérrez’s film, and the Candle Maker explains it to Manolo and two of his dead relatives. However, as its frame makes explicit, The Book of Life is primarily directed to

A Film to Remember: From Muerto Mouse to Coco Coco, for whose promotion no expenses appear to have been spared, is the nineteenth animated Pixar studio movie, and one of the first to be produced since Disney acquired that company. Directed by Lee Unkrich and co-directed by Adrian Molina (who started out as a scriptwriter for the film), Coco boasts the largest, most diverse cast of Latino/a/x talent ever assembled for an animated film. This includes Daniel Arriaga, as character set designer, Nick Rosario, as directing animator, and Gael García Bernal, Anthony Gonzalez, Benjamin Bratt, and Edward James Olmos (among others) in voices,

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non-Mexican audiences, presumed in need of frequent cultural clarifications anytime the film deviates from what it considers recognizable. Mexicanness in this film is therefore grounded on typical and even stereotypical images already familiar to viewers of Hollywood films: a rural setting, churros, bandits, priests and nuns, mariachi musicians, bullfighters, cantinas, and inept military forces, among others. It is only in the less familiar areas of death and the afterlife that the film shines in its visual complexity and nuances. The land of the remembered is presented as a symphony of colors and sounds, accessible through a marigold bridge. There, Manolo gets to meet several generations of ancestors, and he is also subjected to a seemingly impossible task as a means to return to the world of the living. The party-friendly atmosphere of the land of the remembered then gives way to a set of daunting scenarios that resemble a video-game aesthetics, as Gutiérrez caters to a cross-generational audience. Manolo’s eventual success restores peace and balance to both the world of the living and that of the dead, though not without some strife, and the film ends on a somewhat conventional note (at least as far as San Ángel is concerned). The closing frame, however, involving the schoolchildren and the museum guard and guide, opens up the film to a new ontological dimension as the otherworldly identity of the latter is revealed to the children and to the viewers. To accomplish its ambitious, animated introduction to the Day of the Dead, The Book of Life boasts a multicultural cast of voice actors that include Mexican and Chicano/a/x talent (Diego Luna, Kate del Castillo, Cheech Marin, Hector Elizondo, Plácido Domingo, and Danny Trejo, among others), Latino/a/xs (including Zoe Saldana and Carlos Alazraqui), and others (like Channing Tatum, Christina Applegate, and Ron Perlman). Except for some occasional Spanish words, the entire film is in English, at times even accented English, as if these Mexican characters had to be further marked as foreigners (in their own land).

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as well as a broad array of external consultants (some of them unpaid) whose presence in the studio was presented as “a first” since Pixar had never allowed outsiders into their creative midst (see “In a First”). These consultants were hired to compensate and atone for several early blunders, the most famous of which was Disney’s already mentioned attempt to trademark the phrase “Day of the Dead,” then the working title for the film. Even cartoon artist Lalo Alcaraz, one of the earliest and fiercest critics of “Day of the Dead” through his Muerto Mouse cartoon, was brought in, in the studio’s attempt to be attentive to the voices of cultural insiders. Set in the fictional Mexican town of Santa Cecilia, Coco is an intense, emotional movie about the Rivera family of shoemakers, a trade one of their ancestors started as a way to put an earlier musical past behind them. Other than young Miguel, the film’s protagonist, everyone in the Rivera clan seems content to be part of the thriving family business, but a mutigenerational ban on music has Miguel wishing he could be different from the rest of his kind, a musician rather than a cobbler. It is in his quest to become a performing artist that Miguel begins to discover hidden facts about his family history, especially once he gets to interact with his deceased ancestors and with other inhabitants of the land of the dead. In the process, Miguel’s views on family bonds change, as he learns about the sacrifices, love, and failed opportunities that his ancestors had to make, experience, and lament as they balanced individual and family destinies.19 Miguel is also able to test and be a witness to the cherished belief that the dead continue to exist in their own realm for as long as someone remembers them. This explains a sort of class system operating in the land of the dead, based on how many people remember a particular soul. Santa Cecilia’s local glory, Ernesto de la Cruz, is at the top of that particular hierarchy, as the iconic face and voice of Mexican music. Less famous musicians like Héctor and Chicharrón, on the other hand, barely survive on the lower depths of the land of the dead, with the latter even vanishing in front of Miguel’s (and the viewer’s) eyes once he ceases to be remembered. When Miguel eventually learns that Héctor is his ostracized and despised great-greatgrandfather, the question of survival after death is literally brought home for him: since his great-grandmother Coco (Hector’s daughter) is the only person alive who remembers Héctor, Coco’s senility threatens to speed up Héctor’s disappearance. The final segment of the movie, when Coco’s mind revives as Miguel sings her a special song that Héctor composed for her when she was a child, must be one of the most compelling portrayals of a senile elder in animated films. Coco has also received accolades for its attention to details, which results in a more complex and nuanced depiction of Mexicanness than ever before. Reviewers have highlighted such elements as the Mexican national soccer

team uniform worn by one of the Riveras, the substitution of grandma’s original wooden spoon by a chancla, the multiplicity of regional dresses worn by dancers, the choice of a Xoloitzcuintle dog as Miguel’s animal companion and guide,20 and multiple other elements that suggest that the movie was made without cutting the usual corners that give other films a certain ersatz Mexican appearance, at best.21 Also, as previously discussed, audiences have responded enthusiastically, with a degree of recognition and identification never registered before. All of these accomplishments and breakthroughs notwithstanding, the film (especially in the historical sequence it forms with The Book of Life) raises some troubling questions when it comes to representing Mexican(nes)s, which I intend to analyze below. In order to do so, I will interrogate some of the main claims that directors, producers, reviewers, and even audience members have made about these two films.

In its many promotional materials, from press releases to extra features in the Blu-ray/DVD packages, Coco is frequently presented and celebrated as a love letter to Mexico (Pierleoni). Everyone interviewed in the DVD/Blu-ray bonus features, for example, appears to be sincerely taken by Mexico, its landscapes, its foods, its cultures, and its population. These include people of Mexican descent, as well as those from other ethnic/national backgrounds. Coco is thus presented as a tribute to Mexico that directors and producers hope Mexicans will recognize as authentic and true. Voice actor Gael García Bernal strongly agrees with that sentiment: “Pixar was able to make a great Mexican film. Everyone in Mexico is watching this movie and saying, ‘Cabrón, this is like if we had done it ourselves.’ It feels like it was made in Mexico” (quoted in Aguilar). Nice as this proposition sounds, when one judges it from a more critical perspective, Disney Pixar’s benevolent enterprise seems fraught with issues of agency, subjectivity, and discourse. A love letter inevitably confers authorial voice to the sender, construing the addressee as an object (of admiration, adoration, etc., but an object nonetheless). As such, a filmic love letter (especially one from one country to another) is always inevitably a heterological enterprise, in which the represented are never allowed to represent themselves (García Bernal’s “like if ” notwithstanding). This lack of agency is further compounded by issues that affect subject construction and discourse, which may explain why, in the U.S. version of the film, these Mexican characters who live in a fictionalized Mexico speak largely in English, not in Spanish, and even at times (e.g., when Miguel’s grandmother confronts the mariachi at the plaza) in a slightly accented English, which seems entirely unnecessary.

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Love Letters Can Never Replace the Loved One’s Diary

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The language of the film is clearly that of the letter sender, not that of the addressee, even if there is a Spanish-language version of the film available.22 Coupled with the issues of distancing outlined in an earlier section, this love from afar becomes inevitably suspect, and it should make audiences wonder whether or not U.S. Mexicans and their resolute efforts to maintain and transform some of their ancestral cultural practices are also part of that love.23 Do Disney and Pixar love Mexico and Mexicans only as long as they live south of the border? If not, why did they not include U.S. Mexican characters in the film, considering the fact that transnational families are rather numerous, even in the personal cases of those people of Mexican descent who participated in making the film?24 The decision not to depict U.S. characters of Mexican descent appears to have been made as the film was in its early stages of development. According to Jake Coyle, director Lee Unkrich first wanted to make a movie about “a Mexican-American boy who travels to his family in Mexico for the first time,” but that idea was soon discarded for reasons that Coyle does not explain. The paradoxical result is that Mexicans from Mexico are represented in the film from the outside while the numerous U.S. people of Mexican descent involved in crafting that representation are unable to portray themselves.

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A Research Trip Can Only Go So Far

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As if to anticipate and preempt the kind of criticism that I just offered, the Coco team painstakingly explains how team members traveled to Mexico, were hosted by local families, and immersed themselves in the culture, while in the process taking thousands of photographs and drawing countless sketches. In the bonus materials accompanying the Blu-ray/DVD package, we see members of the team tasting the foods, downing the drinks, visiting the sites, and conferring with several gracious hosts. Team members also inform viewers that they took many artifacts and crafts with them back home, even some Xolo dogs. This is exactly the same strategy employed by the Disney team when researching Latin America in the 1940s. Like love letters, however, research trips tend to objectify the studied for the benefit of the student. Eventually, regardless of how many local details are captured on paper or on camera, the gaze remains controlled by the visitor, who processes, interprets, and then crafts the ensuing products. This explains, for example, why alebrijes are part of the land of the dead in Coco when, in fact, they are not connected to the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico (perhaps I should add yet, for reasons that will become apparent below).25 In the Blu-ray/DVD bonus features, Unkrich justifies such a move, appealing to a sense of creative freedom, and there is no question that the alebrijes are essential, not accessory, to the

plot of the film.26 Regardless, the decision proves that the researcher (always) reserves the right to creatively use research materials and findings in ways that the researched might have not anticipated or even approved. As mentioned, public relations materials for Coco have also made clear that for the first time in the studio’s history, external consultants were brought in to guarantee that the movie was accurate and respectful in its depiction of Mexican culture. The consultants, we are told in some of the most triumphal claims about this film’s authenticity, “saved the movie” from the perils of cultural appropriation and stereotyping (see Díaz). Yet, in a surprisingly candid evaluation of this particular strategy and its results, Unkrich relativizes the role of the consultants: The director admitted to the fact that making Coco has been a learning process from the start but they really hit their stride when they put together a group of cultural consultants. It was the first time on any Pixar movie that outsiders were allowed into the studio’s creative process. . . . These meetings with the consultants and Latino community didn’t lead to any major changes to the story, Unkrich said[; however,] they were responsible for many small tweaks that increased the movie’s connection to Mexican culture. (“In a First”) Though the devil is commonly said to be in the details, reducing the role of consultants to providing “small tweaks” does nothing but exacerbate the questions of agency, discourse, and subjectivity already considered, and it may not be such an efficient firewall against stereotypes either, as we will see next.

Producers, reviewers, and numerous audience members on both sides of the border have gone on record stating their satisfaction with the way in which these two films, especially Coco, present Mexican culture in a respectful, free from stereotypes manner. Disagreeing with that ostensible critical consensus appears to be difficult, then, if not altogether perilous for the dissenting voices.27 I will not question the fact that these two films do a much better job than previous ones in presenting Mexican culture and festivities (one only needs to compare their Day of the Dead celebration with that in Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico or with Cinco de Mayo in Despicable Me 2); but it is also obvious to me that they remain trapped in the folkloric time of festivals/festivities and in the stereotypical portrayal of bandidos (The Book of

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Music to Whose Ears? Repetition Begets Stereotypes

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Life), Latin lovers (both films), bullfighters (The Book of Life), and musicians (both films) as intrinsically characteristic of Mexico, especially rural Mexico, which is (here and elsewhere in animation) preferred to its urban settings. Moreover, many of those images are not associated with minor characters but with the films’ protagonists: The Book of Life’s Manolo, destined to be a bullfighter like all of his male ancestors, strives to be a musician, and so does Miguel, in Coco, eschewing the profitable family shoemaking business. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a musician or a bullfighter, of course. The problem arises when all male Mexican film protagonists are depicted as aspiring musicians, or as being bullfighters, bandidos, military men, and taco vendors. As Charles Ramírez Berg (18– 19) suggested, repetition (and lack of alternative images) generates and normalizes stereotypes, and I claim that such is the case in Coco and in The Book of Life. The latter is populated by characters in traditional and/or stereotypical roles (priest, nuns, mariachis, bullfighters, military men); even the initially nonconforming María, who is sent to study abroad and experiences a degree of independence, reverts to the confining role of wife at the end of the movie. Coco, in turn, presents becoming a musician as the most exciting career young Miguel could aspire to, in the process caricaturizing his family’s successful shoemaking business as some kind of oppressive, soul-crushing activity. The presence of these repetitive outcomes invites us to think about alternative plots that could have been used for these films to tell comparable stories without succumbing to the stereotypes. Consider, in that light, the story of Germán Vázquez, credited with designing and making the white guitar featured in Coco, and himself part of a multigenerational family of Mexican craftsmen, a sort of Miguel in the world of traditional luthiers. Vázquez migrated to the United States undocumented some twenty-five years ago, bringing with him the traditional craft of guitar making he had learned in his native Paracho, Michoacán (“Así cambió”). Eventually, Vázquez became a U.S. citizen, and he opened a guitar shop in Los Angeles. Remembering his border-crossing odyssey, Vázquez is quoted affirming that the story of his life “es algo como de película” (is like something out of a movie; my trans.) (“Así cambió”), and he compares himself with Coco’s protagonist’s Miguel.28 Still, Coco focuses not on this talented Mexican craftsman who had to overcome multiple obstacles to become a successful businessman and citizen of the United States (a traditional American dream story in itself ). Instead, it centers on Miguel, who refuses to be part of his family’s successful business in Mexico to attempt to become an entertainer instead. In the documenting of the making of Coco,29 Paracho and guitar making are presented in a transnational light, one in which someone (Vázquez) can follow his family trade while asserting his own individuality by setting

shop across the border. In that sense, Vázquez’s real-life experiences could have offered a viable alternative storyline for Coco, one that was never used (or ever considered, as far as I have been able to document), since the film remained anchored in the national (not transnational) imaginary. But what if fictional Miguel (like real-life Germán Vázquez) had continued the family business, not in Santa Cecilia, but in Los Angeles instead, perhaps catering to a Chicano/a/x customer base hungry for Mexican-inspired crafts? What if he had adapted his family’s ancestral shoemaking skills to the tastes of the Mexican community north of the border? A result could have been that the movie would have featured hard work and business acumen in a far more positive light than it actually does, presenting its protagonist as someone comfortable in and mastering the economy of (transborder) artisanal labor, not that of entertainment. It could have also focused (at least partially) on the Chicano/a/x-Mexican American community, taken place in a recognizable present, and reflected on the meaning of Mexicanness here and now (not in a somewhat distant land/past). I am aware that some readers may consider this criticism pointless or frivolous (it is, after all, their movie and their talent, not mine), but I would like to justify and ground my discursive strategy in the kind of alternative scenarios that Chicano novelist Alfredo Véa’s characters devise in the novel Gods Go Begging as a sort of decolonial type of thinking that allows them to transcend their minoritized status as cannon fodder in the Vietnam War.

By rethinking history in those mental “what if ” scenarios, Véa’s characters learn the logic of challenging what is commonly accepted as natural; that is, the mantle of normalcy with which hegemony legitimizes itself. Thus, while in Vietnam, Sergeant Jesse Pasadoble invites his army comrades to spend dull moments in between military hostilities to, as he says, play “a game of suppose” (99). Suppose Hernán Cortés and his men “had been blown far off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead of Veracruz” (113) is one of his prompts. Another asks men to imagine if there will ever be Mexicans in space (109). As his comrades ponder the ramifications of such hypothetical states of affairs, they are also able to envision and construct unconventional views of history, which in turn allows them to recognize the mechanisms of oppression built around the official stories. Applying this type of thinking to the story of Germán Vázquez, suppose someone like Vázquez was the protagonist of Pixar’s love letter to Mexico and Mexicans (or the father of the protagonist, for that matter). Suppose that

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Let’s Play a Game of Suppose: Or, the Critical Role of Alternative Scenarios

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he opened the kind of shoemaking business I outlined above in Los Angeles, Tucson, San Antonio, or San Francisco; that in catering to the Mexican community in the United States, he actually became a prominent member of that community; that he studied for and received a master of business administration or a master of fine arts degree to further enhance the creative aspects of his business. What if his main ordeal was not to cross into the land of the dead, or to go around his family’s wishes to become a musician, but to cross the U.S.-Mexico border unharmed, perhaps reunite and team up with some north-of-the-border relatives? (An immediate advantage: English-speaking Mexicans would sound natural in that film!) Suppose that this potential protagonist, this successful immigrant, discovered that— much like the rebozo in Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo— the shoes (or the guitars) could actually be a symbol of his transnational story/heritage. Suppose he could be part of an exhibit bringing attention to the plight of border crossers, with shoes representing their toil, frequent death, and hard-won successes. Some may argue that topics like these are not fit for children’s/family animation, but the social context suggests otherwise since the experience of more and more Latino/a/x families involves separation before or after crossing the border, including the increased arrival of unaccompanied minors while Coco was being produced and released and, since its premiere, the forceful separation of children from their parents under the immigration policies of the Trump administration. Children’s literature, moreover, has dealt poignantly and beautifully with some similar issues in the recent past, facilitating (among other things) the kind of bibliotherapeutic healing that Patricia Sánchez and Maité Landa study (73– 78). Duncan Tonatiuh’s Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote (2013), for example, highlights in symbolic, yet highly recognizable terms the reasons for and perils in crossing the border; Pat Mora’s Tomás and the Library Lady (1997) deals with the formative early years of Tomás Rivera, a U.S. Mexican success story who started life as a migrant farmworker; and Amada Yrma Pérez’s My Very Own Room / Mi propio cuartito (2001) focuses precisely on transnational family members supporting one another in creative and empowering ways. Less formulaic stories, like the ones in the “supposes” I suggest (or in the books for children just mentioned), have the advantage of circumventing potentially stereotypical images that, like those of the musicians in The Book of Life and Coco, are tainted by a history of repetition and typecasting. The fact that the only two Mexican young protagonists of animated films in the 2010s would want to be musicians aligns itself more with the stereotypes of the past than with the complex stories of today’s Latinidad. Suffice it to point out that the first ever depiction of Mexicans in the world of animation,

the 1944 original theatrical release poster for The Three Caballeros, already sported Panchito Pistoles playing the guitar. For a long time, likewise, children’s literature about Mexico and Mexicans was full of “love letters” in which they were presented as wanting to become bullfighters (Vavra’s Felipe, the Bullfighter), as trapped in the folkloric time of “singing with guitars on sunny doorsteps” while history passed them by (Marshall, A New Mexican Boy 10), or— most commonly— as rural simpletons whose biggest aspiration was that of owning a burro.30 Now that the tables have been truly turned around in the field of children’s literature, when books about Mexican and Chicano/a/x children and families are not only diverse and socially relevant but also, in many cases, written by Chicano/a/xs and Mexicans, is it too much to ask for equally diverse and socially relevant animated films?

We Love You Too! The Uglier Side of Admiration and Respect

A film which reportedly set out to be an offering of friendship toward Latin America adopts the reverse as its core premise. Latin America fetes Donald Duck, showering him with birthday gifts and hosting his visits to Bahia and Mexico, much as, in relation to the film’s production, Latin Americans hosted Disney and his team and much as, in relation to the film’s reception, Latin America was offered up as ready host to Donald Duck’s successors, the American tourists. The perverse dialectic of economic aid, which rewards the donor while impoverishing the recipient, is replicated (one is tempted to say prophesied) here. (38) Perhaps unwillingly, Coco may have written the most recent page in the same perverse dialectic denounced by Burton, as Unkrich and his team rep-

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In its own promotional materials, The Three Caballeros was described as Walt Disney’s gift to Latin America. Here was a talented individual (and his animating team) who, thanks to his government’s efforts to win a war, all of a sudden became enamored with Latin America and wanted to pay homage to it. He/they did some research, traveled around, took pictures, drew sketches, and— once back home— put their creative talents together to manufacture that gift. Yet, as Julianne Burton pointed out, the awkward part of that homage resides in the fact that, in the film, Donald Duck is the one who actually receives presents from his Latin American “friends,” not the other way around. According to Burton,

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licated Walt Disney’s strategies, and they ended up effecting the same kind of unbalanced exchange of gifts: while Mexico offered them access to traditional cultural practices and artisanal crafts, Pixar reciprocated with a manufactured, large-scale commercial package that unleashed some of the ugliest consequences of the tourist-based economy of dependency that The Three Caballeros first represented. Thus, what started as a paean to the Day of the Dead in Mexico, a tradition that those involved in the making of Coco seem to be honestly fascinated with, has resulted in several documented transformations in the cultural and economic life of (parts of ) that country. In Paracho, for example, the traditional guitars that had been manufactured for generations have all but disappeared, as the same artisans who used to make them are now working endless hours to produce “Coco guitars” (“Así cambió”). The town itself is said to be thoroughly decorated with papel picado,31 transforming its traditional appearance into that of a mini-thematic park of sorts, a mix between the same old Paracho of always and the fictional Santa Cecilia, and “the city even erected a statue of an enormous white guitar” (Corchado). While the villagers’ business acumen and seize-the-day mentality may be celebrated as entrepreneurial savvy, it appears as if Paracho’s economy and image were now dependent on its (perhaps short-lived) Disney Pixar connection, rather than on the traditional, “authentic” Mexican essence that so enamored Unkrich and his team. In Mexico City, in turn, PPG COMEX financed the painting of thirty murals inspired by Coco. Ten urban artists from the TUYI Collective created the murals, which were visible from November 2017 (when Coco was released in Mexico) to January 2018. Though described by PPG COMEX director Gilberto Alcaraz as “a great opportunity to graphically show the values, traditions and colors that identify and give life to our culture” (“PPG’s”), they can also be seen as overt promotional material for the film, especially considering their limited time-frame existence. The country that sponsored the famous and original Mexican muralists of the twentieth century seems to be fostering now public paintings that depict not the history/culture of Mexico but the Disney Pixar version of it, thereby exemplifying how easily a love letter can be turned into a recipe for Disneyfication.

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Remember Me? Déjà vu and Its Effects on Cultural Representation and Audiences When Coco became “the biggest film in Mexican history” (Cavna) and a blockbuster in the United States and elsewhere (Grater; F. Pérez), a somewhat awkward interrogation of its connection with The Book of Life timidly began. To a certain extent, Christopher K. Connor’s review of The Book of Life

anticipated the problem when it stated (with an almost ominous, yet vague wording), “For an animated feature, ‘The Book of Life’ provides an entertaining and, for now, fairly unique look and feel” (my emphasis). After the release of Coco, three years later, Steve Rose spelled out the main concerns about the connections between both movies:

There are indeed uncanny coincidences between both films; in addition to those pointed out by Rose, one could add the visual treatment of the complete disappearance of those who are forgotten, the initial scenes at the cemetery, the marigold bridge to the land of the dead, and even the colorsaturated look of the land of the remembered in both films. Arguably, the casting of Diego Luna in The Book of Life and of Gael García Bernal in Coco contributes to this effect, since both actors were catapulted to international fame by their joint appearance in Y tu mamá también (2001), and they have become somewhat of a team appearing together in other films like Rudo y cursi (2008) and Casa de mi padre (2012). For the viewer who has watched The Book of Life and Coco in their original sequence of release, these and other coincidences produce an effect of déjà vu that may easily render the familiar formulaic, as if the representation of certain cultural elements necessitated a particular, specific treatment. Coco seems to vaguely reflect on this very idea when it makes cheerful fun of Frida Kahlo’s penchant for the repetition of certain images (her own, in the first place, and then those of monkeys, fruits, and other natural elements). But while in Kahlo’s art repetition produced a specific style, in film the recurrence of images ends up producing stock material or stereotypes, as Berg indicated. Perhaps at a more cynical (or soul-searching) level, Coco may also be reflecting on the matter of appropriation and repetition in its own storyline, in which Ernesto de la Cruz becomes famous and achieves major national success by appropriating Héctor’s songs. In that context, the phrase “remember me” takes on an additional meaning beyond obvious references to the song composed by Héctor and

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There are only a few problems with Coco. One involves The Book of Life, another colorful, animated fantasy steeped in Mexican culture, taking a trip to the land of the dead, with a guitar- playing hero and skeleton ancestors. That was released in 2014, and made by predominantly Mexican talent, including director Jorge Gutiérrez and actor Salma Hayek.32 The stories are different enough, and the development periods long enough, to dispel suspicions of direct plagiarism, but it’s a little unfortunate that the Disney behemoth should have eclipsed the homegrown effort.

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appropriated by de la Cruz, or to the beautiful idea of keeping a deceased person alive in memory. It also seems to account for the process by which repetitive images become a visual grammar of sorts that viewers internalize and reuse when a similar context triggers or evokes them. Rubén Navarrete Jr. may be right when he points out and celebrates the fact that nobody plays a housekeeper or a gangbanger in Coco (part of the visual grammar of Latinidad that Hollywood has created over the years), but it remains to be seen how the noted déjà vu effect in Coco and The Book of Life may generate comparable formulas: will a future movie reviewer have to congratulate her/himself for not finding guitar-playing heroes and skeleton ancestors in upcoming releases? The announced project of a sequel to The Book of Life (Romano) can only complicate that forthcoming scenario, as it suggests that animated films about the Day of the Dead are far from over. The question of repetition and intertextual coincidences also brings to this analysis the presence of trans-genre referents that, though likely not recognizable to younger viewers, may nonetheless play a role for adult audiences. The Book of Life and Coco have been praised for popularizing in the United States Mexican views on death and dying that revolve around the importance of honoring and remembering those who have passed. While this may be new in the realm of children’s animation, the concepts themselves had known wider circulation in the United States through literary texts such as Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which, like Coco and The Book of Life, invents a Latin American fictional locale to play with the very same cultural conundrum of specificity/universality also engaged by the films. The final paragraph of The Bridge of San Luis Rey could have easily served as a coda for either The Book of Life or Coco, and the continuous popularity of Wilder’s text suggests that some in the audience might not have been as ignorant about these ideas after all:

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“Even now,” she thought, “almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” (148) Like the connection to Macario, discussed above, this is the kind of repetition that opens up the films to new layers of signification, rather than an-

choring them in clichés or stereotypes.33 Viewers who are capable of making these associative references are not reacting to triggers that result in uniform and expectable responses; on the contrary, they walk out of their viewing experience with the feeling that they have contributed to producing meaning that for other members of the audience may not have been available.

As that last assertion illustrates, The Book of Life and Coco are complex, multilayered texts that may mean and do different things for different viewers. Anyone who has watched these films among other spectators has probably witnessed strong emotions and reactions. In Tucson, Arizona, on Coco’s local opening day, I saw many Latino/a/xs laughing, weeping, sobbing, and even cheering some of the characters, and throughout this chapter I have cited data on other recorded responses. A more detailed analysis of audience responses to these films is yet to be published, but some of the connections that viewers may make between the films and their own lives are not difficult to predict. For example, although some reviews have celebrated Coco for not making overt references to the political climate in the United States or to U.S.-Mexico border issues (“Closet Conservative”), I cannot help but wonder how many immigrants in the United States who cannot go visit relatives in Mexico or elsewhere (or whose relatives cannot cross into the United States) must have made precisely those kinds of connections when witnessing Héctor’s plight at the border checkpoint in the land of the remembered.34 So far, as noted throughout this chapter, most of the documented audience responses point toward the area of identification. Latino/a/x audiences were eager to encounter quality portrayals of Mexican(nes)s in children’s films, and both The Book of Life and Coco deliver in that respect, though through different aesthetics and to a different extent. One review of Coco gives a good sense of what that film (and, I would add, The Book of Life) has meant for Latino/a/x audiences: “We’ve been getting [Mexico] wrong for so long that it has changed cultural perceptions” in the United States, says Frederick Luis Aldama, who teaches about Latin American culture in literature and film at Ohio State University, referring to the reliance on stereotypes in film and popular culture. “Getting it right really matters,” he says. “There’s a chance that it can humanize your neighbors.” (Eulich)

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Cultural Specificity, Repetition, and the Merchandising of Culture

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I agree that both The Book of Life and (especially) Coco are very effective at getting the details and the feel of the land right, which has been more than enough for audiences and reviewers to embrace them with gusto. Latino/a/ xs have also appreciated the effort to recruit and feature Latino/a/x and Mexican talent in voices, costumes, scripts, music, and many other departments involved in the making of both films, including directing (The Book of Life), co-directing (Coco), and producing (The Book of Life). But I also contend that the level of enthusiasm about both films may need to be curbed. As I have tried to demonstrate, both films may be free from some of the most pervasive stereotypes about Latino/a/xs (the maid, the gangbanger), but they are nonetheless reproducing other stereotypical images (the bandido, the macho, the Latin lover, the rural Mexico setting, the cantinas, the privileging of the entertainment industry— musicians, bullfighters— over the more productive segments of the economy, etc.). As I have also shown, both films confirm Hollywood’s unwillingness to depict U.S. Mexicans, even as it courts and acknowledges them as an important segment of the audience. It is not just that both movies take place south of the border but also that— for all their emphasis on family— they still refuse to acknowledge that many Mexican families are transnational, and that they have members on both sides of the border. Coco and The Book of Life prefer to cling to the fiction of a self-contained, rural Mexico from which no one departs and to which no one returns or contributes remesas (currency remittances). In 2017, the alleged setting of Coco, and in the late twentieth century to early twenty-first century in which The Book of Life probably takes place, this is not only unrealistic but also a calculated choice, pregnant with ideological meanings; among them, a viewer of these films could easily conclude that culture and traditions belong only south of the border, as if communities in the United States did not celebrate Day of the Dead and/or maintain many other Mexican beliefs and customs in spite of strong societal pressure to forget them. This refusal to depict Mexicans in the United States (this particular type of amor de lejos) ends up compromising the cultural specificity and the kind of accuracy with which both studios wanted to represent Mexicanness.35 The most obvious field in which this occurs is language. Somewhat tongue in cheek, Laura Emerick brought this problem up in an early review of The Book of Life: “The movie’s narrator informs us that Mexico ‘is the center of the universe’— a land where they apparently speak fluent English. A few Spanish expressions are tossed in occasionally to reduce the film’s overall SoCal ambiance” (7). In turn, Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, who voices Héctor in Coco, noted that “the story is supposed to actually take place in Spanish because it’s in Mexico, so it’s a strange game” (Aguilar). Octavio Solís, an ac-

claimed Chicano playwright and consultant for Coco, clarifies the issue: “The original idea was to have the characters speak only in English with the understanding that they were really speaking in Spanish. . . . But for us, language is binary, and we code-switch from English to Spanish seamlessly” (Ugwu). Solís’s “we” can easily point to members of the U.S. audience, to consultants, and to some of those involved in the making of Coco and of The Book of Life, but it cannot apply to their characters. Solís’s ability to accept that Mexican nationals could sound like U.S. Latino/a/xs does nothing but exacerbate the conspicuous absence of the latter on the screen. Cultural specificity is also tested when Mexican traditions and practices are presented as representative of Latino/a/xs as a whole. For Benjamin Bratt (the U.S.-born son of a Peruvian Quechua mother and the voice of Ernesto de la Cruz in Coco36), that is the case with the Disney Pixar blockbuster:

Bratt does not define what “Latino culture in general” may mean for him, but it is obvious to anyone familiar with the different Latino/a/x cultures that the rites involved in honoring and remembering the deceased, just to stay within the thematic field of these films, differ greatly from Oaxaca to Cuba, to pick just two referents. The synecdochic attempt to make one part of the rather complex Latino/a/x group stand for all others entails well-known political advantages, but it cannot serve as a yardstick to measure the kind of cultural “accuracy” that these two films allegedly sought to achieve. On the contrary, any generalizing attempt of this kind resurrects the ghosts of cultural appropriation, repackaging, and merchandising of culture that had so greatly affected The Three Caballeros. Much as in that film Latin America ended up offering itself to the United States as a gift (as Burton suggested), the metonymical attempt to make Santa Cecilia and its inhabitants represent U.S. Latino/a/xs at large can only serve to displace the cultural/ geographical original referent (the Mexico that Unkrich and his team visited and researched) and to substitute it by its Disney Pixar simulacrum. This, in turn, allows for a shift toward merchandising, as we saw in the examples of Paracho’s recent transformation and in the promotional murals painted throughout Mexico City. The original supplier of cultural artifacts

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“What I’m really excited about is that although the story takes place in Mexico, [it’s] also on some level representative of Latino culture in general and American Latino culture, which you recognize is as American as anything else,” Bratt told a reporter. “Latino culture is as American as apple pie. As American as chips and salsa. So the film celebrates that fact on some level.” (Navarrete; brackets in the original)

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(Mexico) is now bombarded with the repackaged (mostly Coco) materials, as are Latino/a/xs and others in the United States who are offered toys, clothing, jewelry, et cetera, available from the Disney Store as tokens of an artificial Mexicanidad/Latinidad.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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12.

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13. 14. 15.

“Dreamer,” in this context, refers to a U.S. Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act beneficiary. García provides additional examples of comments submitted by New York Times readers as well. On the significance of family, or familia, in this context, see Aldama. According to Jake Coyle, Latino/a/xs accounted for 23 percent of frequent moviegoers in the United States and Canada. (See note 15 for a discussion of my use of “Latino/a/xs.”) The bibliography on this subject is growing. For the most comprehensive studies, see Byrne and McQuillan (focused on Disney films) and King et al. La Prensa, from San Antonio, Texas, both recorded these concerns and dismissed them, reassuring readers that Mexico would be featured on a second Latin American animated Disney film (“Disney hará”). For more on this context, see Cartwright and Goldfarb 174–76. As noted by Julianne Burton (36– 41), however, The Three Caballeros frequently indulges in ambiguous sexual situations that contest traditional masculinities. For the significance of this appearance, as well as for further details on the history I am just delineating here, see Martín-Rodríguez (From Good Neighbors). On Speedy Gonzales and the representation of Mexicanness, see Nericcio (chap. 3). This list does not include smaller parts in other films like Planes, Despicable Me 2, and Turbo, some of which I will discuss in this chapter. Warner Bros. released Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico in 2003 (the first Day of the Dead animated full-length movie), but as a direct-to-video film, this title was never shown in theaters. I am leaving out of this list a film that I believe represents Mexico and Mexicans allegorically (but not in an explicit manner) in the context of immigration fears in California in the early 1990s: The Lion King (Disney, 1994). For details on how this movie represents Mexican(nes)s, see Martín-Rodríguez (“Hyenas”). For more on history and/in The Road to El Dorado, see Martín-Rodríguez (“Reel Origins”). The total number of minutes is actually lower, since The Three Caballeros is not devoted entirely to Mexico, and neither is El Dorado. In this chapter, “Chicano/a/x” refers to U.S. people of Mexican descent, and “Latino/a/x” to U.S. people of Latin American descent. The labels “Chicano” and “Latino”

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

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16.

have undergone multiple transformations as a result of critical and popular challenges to their ability to truly represent the people they have come to designate. Chicanas and Latinas first called attention to the fact that they did not see themselves represented in a term ending in the masculine ending “-o.” Alternative labels such as Chicana/o, Latin@, and other variations were proposed. More recently, additional word endings have been adopted to account for alternative sexualities and subjectivities, with “Chicanx” and “Latinx” becoming widespread terms in the present. These attempts at gender and sexual inclusiveness, however, have produced some unforeseen issues, among them the fact that terms like “Chicanx” and “Latinx” erase the Spanish-language ending, thereby undoing decades of the proud reclamation of that language by Chicano/a/xs and Latino/a/xs. My preference, in that context, is to use the terms “Chicano/a/x” and “Latino/a/x,” which visually represent the successive labels and challenges mentioned, thus preserving the history of the term while maintaining visible its Spanish root. It is also worth keeping in mind that inclusiveness and disenfranchisement are socio-historical (rather than just grammatical) processes, and that non-grammatically-gendered terms like “American” or “Puerto Rican” are not necessarily more inclusive than grammatically gendered labels. Even in Turbo, as noted by Kat Chow and Karen Bates, every time Tito needs to come close to any kind of people in power, he seems to feel the need to disguise his ethnicity through a pair of (distancing) hipster glasses: “Once he went all Clark Kent, walked like a white guy . . . all of a sudden, he became visible.” According to Laura Gómez-Urizar, “The Book of Life was originally optioned by DreamWorks Animation, but never went beyond development because of ‘creative differences.’ ” Both Melissa Starker and Josh Terry question the representation of gender in this film. Starker speaks of its “regressive view of gender roles” (3E), while Terry claims that the filmmakers’ “determination to make Maria more of an independent spirit than a damsel in distress too often comes in the form of telling dialogue than in visual demonstration.” For an insightful, detailed consideration of the question of family and ethics, see John D. Riofrio’s chapter in this volume. The Xoloitzcuintle is a Mexican, hairless dog of non-European origin associated with multiple religious and folk beliefs. See Aguilar for details on these and other cultural nuances in Coco. Interestingly, the Spanish-language version uses a more formal register of Mexican Spanish than the English-language version (in which Spanish words and sentences are used often). It seems as if the producers thought they could get away with an occasional risqué Spanish expression in the English-language version but not so in the Spanish-language one. For example, when Héctor reveals to Miguel that he used to play gigs with Ernesto de la Cruz, the child replies (in the English-language version)

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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36.

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with the euphemistic “no manches,” whereas in the Spanish-language version of the film, his answer is the far more proper “no inventes.” It could be argued that this difference may also point toward a characterization of U.S. Mexicans (the ones who could best negotiate the English-language version’s code-switching) as belonging to a lower sociolinguistic stratum than their counterparts in Mexico. Riofrio (this volume) expands on the significance of Day of the Dead festivities in the United States. See interviews in the bonus features of the Blu-ray/DVD package. Alebrijes are a type of Mexican folk art consisting of colorful crafted figures of fantastic animals. For what is worth, these alebrijes (though much more colorful) are somewhat reminiscent of the animatronics in the pyramid scene of Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico. For a sustained consideration of one of those dissenting voices (blogger Azul), see Riofrio (this volume). Most of the aspects of Vázquez’s life as an undocumented border crosser are left out of English-language newspaper articles (e.g., Corchado). See the bonus features of the Blu-ray/DVD package. For examples, and further elaboration of this point, see Martín-Rodríguez (“Chicano/a Children’s Literature,” especially pp. 19–24). A decorative craft made by cutting and perforating paper. Hayek played no part in this film. I have no space to consider other such intertextual connections in this chapter, but one of the most intriguing ones might be Luis Buñuel’s 1950 Mexican film Los olvidados, a chronicle of destitute children in the slums of Mexico City, which viewers may invoke when taking in Pixar’s depiction of the spaces inhabited by the almost forgotten in Coco. In a separate critical piece, unpublished as of this writing, I have also analyzed the connections between these two animated films and the Classical myth of Orpheus. For more on border crossing in/and Coco, see Riofrio (this volume). “Amor de lejos” (love from afar) is part of a Mexican proverb that deems it to be a fool’s love. Bratt has voice acted in other children’s films, including Despicable Me 2 (where he plays the very stereotypical character El Macho) and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (in which he voices the very non-stereotypical Manny).

References Aguilar, Carlos. “The Cast of ‘Coco’ on Who They’d Love to Hang Out with in the Land of the Dead.” Remezcla, Nov. 20, 2017, remezcla .com/features/film/pixar-coco-interview-gael-garcia-bernal -edward-james-olmos-benjamin-bratt/. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Familia.” Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, Routledge, 2019, pp. 56– 66.

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“Así cambió la vida de un pueblo en México tras el estreno de ‘Coco.’ ” El País, Jan. 12, 2018, elpais .com/cultura/2018/01/12/actualidad/1515767417_379524.html. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, 1984. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. University of Texas Press, 2002. Burton, Julianne. “Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America.” Nationalisms and Sexualities, edited by Andrew Parker et al., Routledge, 1992, pp. 21– 41. Byrne, Eleanor, and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. Pluto Press, 1999. Cartwright, Lisa, and Brian Goldfarb. “Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Education Films for Latin America” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, Routledge, 1994, pp. 169– 80. Cavna, Michael. “After Early Misstep, Pixar Guided ‘Coco’ to Cultural Authenticity.” The Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2017, p. C3. Chow, Kat, and Karen Grigsby Bates. “Do Racing Snails Drive Racial Stereotypes in ‘Turbo’?” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed, July 20, 2013. NPR, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013 /07/20/203678380/racing-snails-drive-racial-stereotypes-in-turbo. Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. “Closet Conservative Movie Review– Disney/Pixar’s ‘Coco.’ ” Bookworm Room, Nov. 29, 2017, www .bookwormroom.com/2017/11/29/conservative-movie-review-disney-pixar-coco/. Accessed Apr. 16, 2018. Connor, Christopher K. “Animated ‘Book of Life’ Found Entertaining.” The Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury, Oct. 29, 2014, themercury.com/features/animated-book-of-life-found-entertaining/article _c7e313f6-5754-5bb4-aec9-f76d9ff45c5b.html. Corchado, Alfredo. “‘Coco’ Is Music to the Ears of Mexico Town of Guitar Makers.” Dallas News, Mar. 2, 2018, www.dallasnews.com/news/mexico/2018/03/02/coco-music-ears-mexico-town-guitar -makers. Accessed Mar. 7, 2018. Coyle, Jake. “In ‘Coco,’ Pixar Journeys to Mexico and Beyond the Grave.” AP News, Nov. 20, 2017, www.apnews.com/1df8cd75c55d4a1abc8dbffa039a6a14. del Barco, Mandalit. “Animated ‘Book of Life’ Celebrates Día de los Muertos.” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed, Oct. 14, 2014. NPR, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/10/14/356045103 /animated-book-of-life-celebrates-d-a-de-los-muertos. Díaz, Tony. “Lalo Alcaraz Discusses Coco— The Pixar Film He Helped Save.” soundcloud.com/tony -diaz-727211483/lalo-alcaraz-discusses-coco-the-pixar-film-he-helped-save. Accessed June 12, 2018. “Disney hará una película con tema y música mexicanos.” La Prensa, Sep. 27, 1942, p. 10. Emerick, Laura. “Day of the Dead Tale Alive with Color.” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 17, 2014, p. 7. Eulich, Whitney. “Pixar’s Day-of-the-Dead film ‘Coco’ Aims to Shake Up Image of Mexico.” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 21, 2017, www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2017/1121/Pixar-s-Day -of-the-Dead-film-Coco-aims-to-shake-up-image-of-Mexico. Gallardo, Margaret. “Rhythm of ‘Life’: Diego Luna Celebrates Mexican Culture in New Animated Movie.” El Paso Times, Oct. 31, 2014, advance.lexis.com/api/document?collection=news&id=urn: contentItem:5DGW-P5G1-DYNS -3409-00000-00&context=1516831. Accessed Mar. 6, 2019. García, Maira. “‘Coco’ Was the Story of My Life: Readers Share Reactions to Pixar’s Film.” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/movies/coco-mexico-audiences-react -pixars.html?partner=IFTTT. Gómez-Urizar, Laura. “Love, Death and Guillermo del Toro.” Latino Hollywood Examiner, Aug. 6, 2014. NewsBank, infoweb.newsbank .com/apps/news/document-view?p=AWNB&docref=news /14F8CC711D1ECDB0. Accessed Mar. 6, 2019. Grater, Tom. “‘Coco’ Storms UK Box Office on £5.25m Debut.” Screen Daily, Jan. 22, 2018, www .screendaily.com/news/coco-storms-uk-box-office-on-525m-debut/5125777.article. Accessed Jan. 23, 2018. “In a First for Pixar, ‘Coco’ Had People Outside Studios As Part of Creative Process.” Animation Xpress, Nov. 20, 2017, www.animationxpress.com/index.php/latest-news/in-a-first-for-pixar-coco -had-people-outside-studio-as-part-of-creative-process.

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Keller, Gary D. Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook. Bilingual Press, 1994. King, C. Richard, et al. Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Marshall, Helen Laughlin. A New Mexican Boy. Holiday House, 1940. Martinez, Kiko. “The Director of ‘The Book of Life’ Grew Up Thinking Skeletor Was a Dia de Muertos Superhero.” Remezcla, Oct. 20, 2014, remezcla.com/features/film/film-director-of-the-book -of-life-grew-up-thinking-skeletor-was-a-dia-de-muertos-superhero/. Accessed Mar. 12, 2019. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. “Chicano/a Children’s Literature: A Transaztlantic Reader’s History.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, vol. 23, 2006, pp. 15– 35. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. “From Good Neighbors to Bad Hombres: Latino/a/xs in U.S. Films for Children.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified Mar. 17, 2019. Microsoft Word file. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. “Hyenas in the Pride Lands: Latinos/as and Immigration in Disney’s The Lion King.” Aztlán, vol. 25, no. 1, 2000, pp. 47– 66. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. “Reel Origins: Multiculturalism, History, and the American Children’s Movie.” The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Caroline Levander and Carol Singley, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 280– 302. Mora, Pat. Tomás and the Library Lady. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Navarrete, Rubén, Jr. “‘Coco’ Proves Latinos Are Best at Telling Their Own Stories.” The Fresno Bee, Dec. 4, 2017, www.fresnobee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article187636553.html. Accessed Jan. 7, 2018. Nericcio, William Anthony. Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America. University of Texas Press, 2007. Pérez, Amada Irma. My Very Own Room / Mi propio cuartito. Children’s Books Press, 2001. Pérez, Francisca. “La historia del chileno que llegó a Pixar y trabajó en la película Coco.” Culto, Apr. 7, 2018, culto.latercera.com/2018/04/07/la-historia-del-chileno-llego-a-pixar-trabajo-en-la -pelicula-coco/. Pierleoni, Francesca. “‘Coco’, un homenaje de Pixar a cultura mexicana [sic]: Film convertido involuntariamente en el más ‘político’.” ANSA Noticiero en español, Nov. 20, 2017, www.ansalatina .com/americalatina/noticia/espectaculos/2017/11/20/llega-coco-homenaje-de-pixar-a-cultura -mexicana_4bd08fa4-ed75-4277-9aba-f227fdce47b7.html. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017. “PPG’s COMEX Brand Creates Murals to Mark Disney-Pixar’s ‘Coco’ Movie.” Business Wire, Nov. 21, 2017, www.business wire.com/news/home/20171121005701/en/PPG%E2%80%99s -COMEX -Brand-Creates-30-Murals-Celebrate. Accessed Apr. 12, 2018. “Presentan The Book of Life, filme con toque muy mexicano.” El Universal (Mexico), Apr. 4, 2014, archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/espectaculos/2014/pelicula-the-book-of-life--1000823.html. Accessed Mar. 12, 2019. Puig, Claudia. “Latino Artists and Cultural Leaders Weigh In on How ‘Coco’ Got It Right.” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 22, 2018, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-coco-latino-culture -20180222-story-html?platform=hootsuite. Romano, Nick. “The Book of Life 2 in the Works with Original Director.” Entertainment Weekly, June 16, 2017, ew.com/movies/2017/06/16/book-of-life-sequel/. Rose, Steve. “Coco: The Pixar Film That Defies Donald Trump’s Anti-Mexican Rhetoric.” The Guardian, Jan. 15, 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/15/coco-the-film-that-defies-trumps -anti-mexican-rhetoric. Sánchez, Patricia, and Maité Landa. “Cruzando Fronteras: Negotiating the Stories of Latino Immigrant and Transnational Children.” Multicultural Literature for Latino Bilingual Children: Their Words, Their Worlds, edited by Ellen Riojas Clark et al., Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 69– 82. Scheck, Frank. “‘Book of Life’ Celebrates Death: Gorgeous Visuals Compensate for Familiar Storyline.” Beaver County Times, Oct. 17, 2014, p. C11. Starker, Melissa. “The Book of Life— Style Trumps Substance in Animated Love Story.” The Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 17, 2014, p. 3E. Terry, Josh. “Classic Themes Get a Visual Flair in ‘Book of Life.’ ” Deseret News, Oct. 16, 2014, www .deseretnews.com/article/865613282/Classic-themes-get-a-visual-flair-in-Book-of-Life.html. Tonatiuh, Duncan. Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote. Abrams, 2013.

Ugwu, Reggie. “How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious.” The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/movies/coco-pixar-politics.html. Vavra, Robert. Felipe, the Bullfighter. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967. Véa, Alfredo, Jr. Gods Go Begging. Penguin, 1999. Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Harper and Row, 1986.

Filmography

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Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, Walt Disney Pictures 2001. The Book of Life. Directed by Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Reel FX Creative Studios, 2014. Carmelo. Directed by Jorge R. Gutiérrez, YouTube, 2000, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA7SI6q6YvY. Casa de mi padre. Directed by Matt Piedmont, NALA Films, 2012. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Sony Pictures Animation, 2009. Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar, 2017. Despicable Me 2. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, Illumination Entertainment, 2013. Lady and the Tramp. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, Walt Disney Productions, 1955. The Lion King. Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, Walt Disney Pictures, 1994. Macario. Directed by Roberto Gavaldón, Clasa Films Mundiales, 1960. The Little Mermaid. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Los olvidados. Directed by Luis Buñuel, Ultramar Films, 1950. Moana. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures, 2016. Planes. Directed by Klay Hall, Walt Disney Pictures, 2013. The Road to El Dorado. Directed by Don Paul and Eric Bergeron, DreamWorks Animation, 2000. Rudo y cursi. Directed by Carlos Cuarón, Cha Cha Cha Films, 2008. Saludos Amigos. Directed by Norman Ferguson et al., Walt Disney Pictures, 1942. Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico. Directed by Scott Jeralds, Warner Bros., 2003. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Directed by David Hand, et al., Walt Disney Productions, 1937. The Three Caballeros. Directed by Norman Ferguson et al., Walt Disney Pictures, 1944. Turbo. Directed by David Soren, DreamWorks Animation, 2013. Y tu mamá también. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 20th Century Fox, 2001.

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Chapter 20

(RE)ANIMATING THE DEAD Memory, Music, and Divine Justice in Coco John D. “Rio” Riofrio

The storytelling arts endure, in part, for their ability to lift us from suffering— not as escape, but rather as a means for reimagining our lives and experiences. Storytelling can, and does, offer us ways to see and interpret our experiences differently and thus to live our lives differently. Disney Pixar’s 2017 film Coco is storytelling in animated form that speaks to the potential of storytelling to shape our perceptions of daily life. In this chapter, I build on and expand Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez’s chapter herein by discussing and analyzing how Coco goes beyond the traditional Disneyesque platitudes about the importance of family. Using remembering/forgetting as a framework through which to consider social relations writ large, I argue that Coco issues an urgent call to (re)conceptualize society around our responsibility to family, self, and others. Coco, co-written and co-directed by Pixar stalwart Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, has been an unmitigated commercial and critical success.1 As a relatively recent film, Coco has yet to gain sustained scholarly attention.2 Rotten Tomatoes, for example, a website that collects and aggregates the critiques of hundreds of established film and television reviewers, offers us a clear sense of the general reception of Coco. A huge preponderance of the reviewers wrote glowing reviews, some of which focused on the efforts of the filmmakers to create a film about Mexicans that was magical but also rooted in reality. Much was made of the six-year creative process that included multiple research trips to Mexico. Seeking to better understand the nuances of Mexican life, these research trips put the filmmakers in close contact with Mexican people, Mexican music, and Mexican customs (see, e.g., Ugwu). By contrast, the handful of negative critiques have tended toward vague assertions about the film that fail to engage it in meaningful ways. Tim Grierson of Screen Daily, for example, writes that “‘Coco’ is sweet and sentimental without being particularly engaging,” while Adam Graham of The Detroit News asserts that “despite its efforts, Coco can’t rise above mid-tier Pixar.” Neither reviewer offers a substantive analysis of the film, and neither 382

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reviewer makes an effort to specify what they see as the film’s shortcomings. This is the general tone of the few critical reviews of Coco with one notable exception. A blogger who goes by the name Azul offers an insightful, thought-provoking critique that I plan to address later in this chapter. For the moment, however, it is enough to say that I find myself in line with the many, many reviewers who see Coco as an inspiring, timely, and, ultimately, moving cultural intervention. Part of my ebullient and enthusiastic support for Coco has to do with its arrival at a crucial moment in U.S. history. Latinx3 communities have long had a vexed and complicated history with the rest of the United States.4 Indeed, the complexities and ambiguities of this relationship precede the very existence of a “United States.” The predictable, cyclical xenophobia that accompanies similarly predictable economic downturns transforms immigrants and “foreigners” into scapegoats while simultaneously demanding allegiance to a narrative that casts the United States as a melting pot of opportunity marked by tolerance and generosity. The last two decades of prejudice toward Latinx migrants is no exception and bears many of the same markers of suspicion, intolerance, and open hostility that have been an undeniable aspect of the United States’ ambivalent relationship to its largest minority group.5 However, it is also true that the 2016 election of the United States’ forty-fifth president revealed a hostility that has differed in both scope and virulence. The discourse against Latinx populations has risen to a level of disdain and disregard not seen since the time of Operation Wetback.6 Moreover, it remains patently clear that the campaign and subsequent election of Donald Trump has had a profound impact on the reception of Latinx communities throughout the United States. The presidential campaigning that began in 2016 has been closely linked with a startling rise in incidents of antiimmigrant violence and hatred, and multiple news outlets have reported on studies that demonstrate a clear connection between xenophobic discourse in Trump’s speeches and tweets and a subsequent rise in anti-Latinx and anti-Muslim hate crimes.7 It is this sociopolitical moment— of aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric and action— that forms the backdrop for the arrival of the film Coco. The importance, then, of Coco as a cultural artifact does not rest simply on the fact that it is a beautifully crafted, emotionally stirring film about a family working through its complicated dynamics. Coco is a beautifully crafted, emotionally stirring film about a Mexican family working through its complicated dynamics. This is not a small detail. In a historical moment that disparages Latinx communities by dismissing them as “rapists,” “murderers,” and “illegals,” Coco asserts their nobility, their capacity for love and loyalty; indeed, their very humanity.

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Coco takes place in a small town in Mexico and tells the story of Miguel Rivera, a twelve-year-old boy born into a family of shoemakers who dreams of being a famous musician. The catch, however, is that Miguel’s great-greatgrandmother, Mamá Imelda, abandoned by her musician husband and forced to make a living as a single mother and a shoemaker, outlawed music in her household, a tradition passed down through the generations and enforced with affectionate ferocity by Miguel’s grandmother. In a magical turn of events, Miguel ends up in the land of the dead where he befriends Héctor, one of the many “forgotten” souls who populate the land of the dead. Héctor comes to understand that Miguel must return to the land of the living before sunrise or risk being trapped there forever. In a desperate bid for redemption, Héctor agrees to help Miguel find his hero, the world-renowned musician Ernesto de la Cruz, whom he believes holds the key to his safe return to the land of the living.8 Although Coco features a male hero, the film is populated by strong female characters and foregrounds ideas about independence and interdependence as well as the importance of respecting the elderly. Crafted with the extraordinary attention to detail that has come to characterize Pixar’s artistic vision, Coco is a story about complex family dynamics, the tension between responsibility to self and responsibility to others, and an entertaining meditation on our collective responsibility to memorializing the dead. Coco, of course, is not alone in taking up these themes. More surprisingly, it is not alone in using the Day of the Dead as the vehicle for addressing these issues. Two films in particular are worth pointing out: the 2013 short film Dia de los Muertos and the full-length animated film The Book of Life (2014). Although the constraints of this chapter prohibit me from engaging these films in the way that I’d like, both films deserve full critical treatment as each in their own way posit important arguments about family, memory, and cultural relevance.9 More immediately germane to this discussion, however, is the fact that the Day of the Dead is clearly experiencing a moment of ubiquity, significance, and relevance. Media scholar Regina M. Marchi has pointed out that, although the current historical moment has seen a vigorous burgeoning interest in the Day of the Dead that brings with it a certain cultural cache, this interest is not without its misconceptions. She writes,

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Although assumed to be a timeless ritual that has been seamlessly passed down within Mexican families since precolonial times, it is actually a relatively recent tradition for many Mexicans. Festivities in the United States . . . are also recent. They comprise a syncretic mix of both Latin American Indigenous practices and Roman Catholic spiritual traditions that have been reconfigured

by Chicanos and other U.S. Latinos to transmit messages of cultural identity and political expression. (1) Marchi draws attention to the way in which contemporary representations of the Day of the Dead have helped to propagate mistaken assumptions about the celebration as exclusively Mexican and “timeless.” Instead, Day of the Dead is a cultural celebration that extends far beyond Mexico into various primarily indigenous communities in Guatemala, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Marchi’s research indicates that the “timelessness” of Day of the Dead celebrations experienced a significant push in the post-revolution period of Mexican history. The proliferation of Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States is notable both because of its commercial effect but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of its cultural impact. While Day of the Dead– related art and products are increasingly becoming sought-after items, the larger significance of the holiday rests on the ways in which it has functioned to stimulate a broader Latinx identity. According to Marchi,

Although mistakenly assumed to be exclusively Mexican, Day of the Dead celebrations, with their traditional focus on honoring and memorializing the dead, have come to resonate far beyond the Chicanx communities that first brought them to the United States. Instead, these celebrations have become one more way in which disparate Latinx communities— some with dramatically different historical patterns of inclusion and with dramatically different historical relations to the United States— come together to form an identifiable, if somewhat inchoate, cultural identity. Put more concretely, Day of the Dead has accrued a coherent meaning even among disparate Latinx communities. This meaning, however, is neither straightforward nor patently obvious. Like many similar cultural representations, interpretations of the significance of the Day of the Dead are highly contested. Marchi’s work emphasizes the fact that, historically speaking, embracing a folkloric, ritualistic past has always been both fraught and potentially paradoxical. For Marchi, drawing a

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Although Chicano artists in California adopted and reconfigured Día de los Muertos rituals of southern Mexico as a way to honor Chicano and Mexicano identities, many Day of the Dead celebrations began to expand their focus in the 1980s and 1990s, celebrating a pan-Latino, rather than strictly Mexican, identity, as California became home to vast numbers of immigrants from other parts of Latin America. (4)

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lineage that runs directly from pre-Columbian iconography and rituals to modern, contemporary Day of the Dead practices has, as she puts it, “both positive and negative consequences” (29). These popular representations, often engaged with the best of intentions, can bring unexpected, negative consequences. In particular, representations of Latinxs’ folkloric traditions, rooted in the past, often result in the erasure of Latinxs’ practices that reflect their status as modern, contemporary communities. Moreover, there are two risks involved in using traditional Mexican folklore as the basis for family entertainment. The first is that the rampant commercialization of the Day of the Dead runs the risk of turning Coco— and the cultural inheritance at the heart of Day of the Dead celebrations— into yet another quaint and charming opportunity for Disney to “make a buck” by ignoring the intellectual and spiritual significance of the culture itself. The second has to do with the way in which traditional forms of culture, when misused, can become reductive “types” that do more harm than good. Seen in this light, Unkrich and Molina’s choice to feature mariachi music in their film enacts precisely the potential dichotomy that exists within all recognized, folkloric cultural forms. Coco’s use of mariachi music is “risky” because as a well-established, perhaps even stereotypical, representation of Mexican culture, mariachi music has frequently been satirized and even denigrated. This use of a well-known, albeit potentially stereotypical form like mariachi, risks taking a vibrant, diverse conglomeration of distinct cultural communities and transforming them into a monolith, and what’s worse, a potentially denigrated monolith. In this scenario, Mexico— with all its inherent diversity, beauty, and contradictions— becomes an exaggerated mariachi joke. This is exactly how the blogger Azul interprets Disney’s decision to use mariachi music as the film’s focal point. She writes, “When I heard this movie was a musical I was excited, but buyer beware— this movie has musical numbers but is not a musical at all. The only styles of music covered and [sic] the same old mariachi stuff and one banda song. In a country with huapango, marimba, son Jarocho, etc they did the one style everyone knows and a single Norteño song. How is this covering any new ground?” It is my sense that Azul’s critique here is born out of a general sense of disappointment that then shaped how she interpreted the film as a whole. Like Azul, I questioned the decision to use mariachi music as the focal point. However, further research led me to reconsider my initial reaction. Although one could dismiss this as clever marketing, the makers of Coco released several short documentarystyle clips on YouTube offering viewers a look at what went into the making of the film. One of the more engaging clips is a thirteen-minute short film, “Coco: The Music of Coco,” that directly addresses some of Azul’s concerns. It details the filmmakers’ attempts to accurately reflect the diversity of Mex-

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ican music by incorporating musical forms as varied as banda music from the Oaxaca region, marimba music, “trio” style music (noted for its use of guitar and vocal harmonies), and música norteña, as well as various incidental music utilizing traditional Mexican instruments including the quijada, or “donkey’s jaw bone.” Beyond this wide range of musical styles, Unkrich and Molina make the decision to use son jarocho for one of the key moments in the plot: Miguel’s debut as a musician with the song “Poco Loco.”10 Therefore, I disagree with Azul’s critique of the music on two fronts: the music in Coco is more varied and more representative than she gives the film credit for, and I believe that Azul’s interpretation of mariachi music as that “same old mariachi stuff ” misses the mark. Mariachi music is essential to the spirit of the film for two reasons. The first is that, for better or worse, it has come to represent Mexico in clear and identifiable ways. The association of Mexico with mariachi music is real. Unkrich and Molina, however, do not make light of mariachi music. It does not become, at any point, the subject of a joke, nor does mariachi music get employed for cheap laughs. Instead, in their hands, mariachi is a musical form that has depth and meaning to Miguel and to his fellow citizens. This brings me to my second point about mariachi music. As Marchi reminds us, although cultural forms can be representative in productive ways, they also bear the risk of being interpreted as “anti-contemporary or anti-modern,” or worse, openly denigrated. Mariachi music is no different in this regard, and although there are examples of it being treated with a lack of respect,11 I would argue that, more substantively, mariachi music has recently become an important form of cultural and social activism. In the two years since Trump’s campaign and subsequent election, Mexicans (and Latinxs more broadly) have been subject to consistent attacks ranging from the physically violent to the rhetorically denigrating. Two recent, noteworthy incidents summarize this dynamic well. In the 2018 campaign for Georgia governor, state senator Michael Williams made the news for transforming his gubernatorial campaign bus into the “deportation bus.” Williams’s campaign ad introduced the bus along with his promise to “fill this bus with illegals and send them back to where they came from.” Although his extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric led him to a last-place finish in the primary, activists took his xenophobic message seriously and organized a group of mariachis to meet Williams at his campaign stops (“Michael Williams”). The second incident was much more significant in that it both featured and was the result of a video that went viral. The video showed a man, who would later be identified as New York City lawyer Aaron Schlossberg, berating the Spanish-speaking employees of a local restaurant and threatening the manager with a phone call to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

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to have all of the employees deported (“Lawyer”). After several videos surfaced of the news media confronting Schlossberg regarding his racist views, activists organized a group of mariachi musicians to play outside his New York apartment. The video shows a large group of protestors chanting “sí se puede”— a chant long associated with Latin American and Latinx social and political activism— until they eventually join the mariachis in singing one of Mexico’s most famous songs, “Cielito lindo” (“Mariachis”). The video is surprisingly moving and made all the more remarkable by the central role that mariachi music plays in urging and uniting the crowd in their collective resistance to anti-immigrant racism and xenophobia. Although Azul’s observations about the filmmakers’ choice of music is not the most urgent of her critiques, I have addressed it in detail because it signals, in my mind, how even a thoughtful and well-considered critique can sometimes miss the mark.12 As the one notable exception to the body of reviews that dismiss Coco without engaging it in substantive ways, Azul’s critique of Coco merits further attention. Her critique— which runs the gamut from a sustained analysis of several potentially problematic issues in the film to sharp, quick observations about ways in which she found the film disappointing— demonstrates a notable understanding of the lives of Latin Americans and U.S. Latinxs.13 Specifically, I will engage with two points of critique that I found deeply thought provoking and that ultimately enabled me to come to a more comprehensive understanding of Coco as a timely and important cultural intervention. Azul makes important assertions about the film’s use of immigration and border control as well as a line of critique that takes the film to task for its depictions of social class and the startling lack of what Azul labels “divine justice.” I will lay out both of her observations and then engage with them together rather than separately because I think that my assertions about the film’s accomplishments are interwoven with regard to how they conceptualize both the issue of border control and the issue of divine justice. Early on in the film, we learn that the living are separated from the dead by a bridge made entirely, and magically, of cempasúchil (Mexican marigold) flowers. The dead are subject to a process that, as Azul rightly points out, is eerily similar to contemporary practices of border control. If the living have not placed the deceased person’s photograph on an altar, or ofrenda, the deceased are unable to cross back into the land of the living. This offers Azul an opportunity to make what is, perhaps, her most substantive critique of the film. She writes, The dead have immigration agencies and policies. There is literally no other way to interpet [sic] it—what else is an entire

bureacratic [sic] system that controls movement at a border? It’s immigration. The DEAD HAVE IMMIGRATION. It feels heavy to type that and it was a moment of horror— to hear a theater laughing at jokes that were playing out in people’s everyday lives, a lot of them their fellow country men, and one of them specifically sitting in that theater. Was nobody really seeing this, and was I going insane? Large parts of the scene in this crossing point where [sic] played to laughter, but it felt so sinister—because, even in death apparently, life would be the same; we would be constrained by a system that allowed certain folks to enter or forcibly keep them out, and spirituality and magic aided in this.

Class, and social hierarchy exist in the Coco after life. There are interesting ways this point could have been tackled—this whole idea of a capitalist after life, where the rich and the poor exist in very contrasting ways. It could have been a moment to turn bootstrap ideology on its head, or to explore how power dynamics affect our souls (afterall [sic], it is souls that exist in the Coco world, they just happen to be skeleton shaped), but Disney/Pixar were not the ones to tackle said territory. Instead we are shown what happens to those in this section of the afterlife—after being regaled to living in slums because of their family’s unwillingness or inability to put their picture on an altar (this is also never

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While most reviewers, including this one, have focused on the joy that the film brings and the many stirring scenes of familial love and emotional connection, Azul zeroes in on the shock that comes with the realization that a children’s film about Mexican people utilizes border control not only as a plot device but also as a source for humor. She is absolutely correct in asserting that the very existence of a border control in the land of the dead seriously undermines any possible notions of divine justice or the reward that comes in the afterlife. This notion of Disney’s afterlife as flawed because of its continuity with the injustices of real life is played out dramatically in its representation of the unfortunate fate of the “forgotten.” In one particularly poignant scene, we witness Héctor’s friend Chicharrón, who has long lived in the povertystricken neighborhood of the forgotten, suffering “the final death,” a process wherein the forgotten deceased feels spasms of pain before finally dissolving into a fine powder and simply blowing away, forever. Azul takes Coco to task for not delving into the implications of this final death and for representing the world of the forgotten as a slum:

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explored), souls dissapear [sic]. Miguel gets to witness first hand through a character sputtering, moaning in pain and vanishing before his very eyes, a moment that is disturbing and violent. When Miguel asks “Where did he go?” a question that could be examined, the answer he receives is “No one knows.” This is never mentioned again in the movie.

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Azul is right; Disney could have used the afterlife as a way to critique the social values that we’ve created around social class. It might have been an opportunity to unravel the narratives around economic success and poverty that inhere in our collective gospel about society as inherently meritocratic. But as Azul makes clear, the film doesn’t do any of this. A part of me wants to acknowledge that this is a children’s film, and that perhaps we do more harm than good when we hold children’s entertainment to such lofty standards. But that sentiment doesn’t really do us much good. We know that the inverse is true; we know that children’s entertainment, and specifically Disney’s, can be highly problematic because of the power it wields in shaping our collective beliefs.14 Moreover, it’s both appropriate and even necessary to hold all entertainment accountable for the belief systems they propagate or reinforce. That said, it is my contention that Coco does, in fact, offer a subtle critique of precisely the kinds of dynamics that Azul sees as missing. I agree that Disney might have explored other options that excluded the use of border control imagery and that Unkrich and Molina might have opted to present both the “final death” of the forgotten, as well as the neighborhood of the forgotten, in ways that are more egalitarian and equitable. However, it is my contention that the film’s use of both of these images was fortuitous if not necessarily fully developed. It seems likely that Unkrich and Molina did not see the use of the border as questionable, and this is, without a doubt, problematic. However, I would argue that the inequality portrayed by both the border apparatus that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead and the choice to represent the forgotten as living in slums, or favelas, ultimately function to highlight the enormous stakes inherent in the decisions we make about who to remember and how. These decisions about who, why, and how we memorialize are at the very center of Coco’s emotionally charged project. One of the central themes of the film is the tension between one’s duty to family/society and one’s duty to a sense of self. A more expansive way to say this might be to suggest that Coco explores the tension between one’s duty to others (family, friends, and society) versus one’s duty to self (individual goals, aspirations, and desires). The film explores this tension alongside the issue of memorialization through the exposition of various essential binaries. Some of

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these binaries are visual while others become manifest in the interactions of characters that exist in opposition to one another. Throughout the course of the film, for example, Ernesto de la Cruz is repeatedly characterized as being brave enough to have followed his dream of stardom at the expense of his many relationships. When we are led to believe that Ernesto is Miguel’s greatgreat-grandfather, he immediately becomes a model for the difficult choices that one has to make in pursuit of a dream. In the world of the film, Ernesto models for Miguel the price, and reward, for eschewing family in favor of a relentless, but also honest, pursuit of self. Héctor, meanwhile, comes to inhabit the role of Ernesto’s binary opposite. Their differences are many and significant: while Ernesto represents the lavish luxury of the remembered and adored, Héctor represents the poverty and the pain of the forgotten. Although Azul’s critique of the continued existence of social class in the afterlife is perceptive, I think it misses the fact that this social hierarchy fulfills an important ideological function. The social hierarchy that follows the characters into death establishes the enormity of our collective decision to honor some while condemning others to oblivion. That the film refuses to consider what happens after the “final death” is, in my mind, a natural, tragic extension of our collective refusal to consider the full consequences of the ease with which we forget some people in life and in death. Seen in this way, Héctor and Ernesto become parallel (grand)father figures to Miguel who offer him competing models of self-determination while offering us stark images of the consequences of our determination to remember some and forget others. We can see the remarkable job the film does of indicating this difference visually and sonically by looking more closely at Ernesto and Héctor’s individual performances of the film’s primary musical theme, “Remember Me.” We are introduced to “Remember Me” early in the film in a montage sequence that narrates the trajectory and eventual stardom of Ernesto de la Cruz. Describing the song as Miguel’s “all-time favorite,” the montage cuts to a scene of Ernesto’s performance; it is a showcase of individual success and fame. Accompanied by a full orchestra and an army of elaborately costumed female dancers, illuminated by a single, adoring spotlight, Ernesto stands in the middle of the stage, arms spread to a theater full of indulgent fans. Full of vibrant colors and exploding pyrotechnics, the stage is designed to resemble the steps of a Mayan temple topped by a brightly lit sugar skull and an enormous cathedral bell. The resemblance to a temple/cathedral is no coincidence, for as Ernesto croons “Remember Me” to the audience, the message is clear: this is his song, and the stage has been set up to remind the audience of how wonderful, how larger than life, he is. The song and the performance are big and flashy, and we, the audience, are meant to worship at the feet of Ernesto, the singular individual.

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Figure 20.1 Worshipping at the temple of Ernesto: “Remember Me”!

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Figure 20.2 The glow of fame and adoration.

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Héctor’s performance of the same song could not be more different. His scene, which comes in the final third of the film, tells us the real story behind Ernesto de la Cruz’s most famous song. Composed by Héctor for Coco, who is both his little girl and Miguel’s great-grandmother, “Remember Me” was never Ernesto’s song at all and certainly was never meant to be performed as a burlesque ritual of self-aggrandizement. Absent the lights, the stage, and the performer’s outsized ego, the diffuse light of the loving connection between a father and his small child replaces the harsh, insatiable glow of fame’s spotlight. Instead of singling out the performer as an individual distant from his audience, distinct from everybody else, Héctor’s lullaby to Coco posits music as a means to forging a lasting, poetic bond. “Remember Me” performed as Héctor intended it highlights the function of music to shorten distances by bringing loved ones together across generations and across the boundaries between the dead and the living.

Figure 20.3 “Remember Me” sung to an audience of one.

The marked difference in the emotional feeling of both versions of “Remember Me” is paralleled by the stark, visual demarcation that exists between the homes of the remembered and those of the forgotten. The scene in which Miguel steps into Ernesto’s tower for the first time is emblematic. The tower, where Ernesto holds his yearly party on the Day of the Dead, is like his stage, a temple to his insatiable ego. Miguel, like the rest of us, is star struck, surrounded— and even seduced— by the overwhelming evidence of Ernesto’s greatness. The lavish colors, the crowds of people, and, most importantly, the many movie screens all bear testament to Ernesto’s celebrity and thus his importance. Miguel’s tour of the tower is a joyful affair as he basks in the glow of Ernesto’s fame and charisma. This joy, however, takes a turn when Ernesto eventually guides him to an enormous room, a great hall, festooned by the gifts of remembrance, a literal memorial created for Ernesto by his adoring fans. Instead of reveling with Ernesto in the excesses of his fans’ adoration, Miguel’s tour is tainted by the earlier experience of having gone with Héctor

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Figure 20.4 Music, love, and family.

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Figure 20.5 Ernesto’s temple to Ernesto.

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Figure 20.6 The “temple” of the forgotten.

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down into his home, a kind of favela of the forgotten. We, as viewers, would be right to pay attention to how the film juxtaposes these two worlds. As Héctor and Miguel descend into the favela, a careful viewer might notice that they are descending the broken steps of a run-down, abandoned temple. The visual parallel is striking. Whereas Ernesto’s stage and his home are alive with color and constant motion, the temple of the forgotten is battered and broken: no lights, no color, no movement. This darkness is all the more potent when we realize that the twinkling lights in the background are the distant glow of the portion of the city inhabited by the remembered. The juxtaposition of light and dark become emblematic of the enormous gulf that exists between the remembered and the forgotten. It is here, when we stop to consider Ernesto’s home alongside the hovels of the forgotten, that the film’s subtle message becomes sharper and more urgent. Ernesto’s adoring fans, with their collective penchant for celebrity worship, create and sustain Ernesto’s gaudy, excessive temple. Likewise, our

Figure 20.7 “All of this came from my amazing fans in the land of the living. They leave me more offerings than I know what to do with.”

collective disregard for the nobodies of the world—the flawed, unacknowledged songwriters, the simple people devoted to their families instead of fame— creates and sustains the favelas of the forgotten. The stunning, visual difference of the two homes serves as a powerful reminder that our choice, to remember some while forgetting others, matters. This is as true in death as it is in life. And so, rather than being a fatal flaw, I would argue that there is something powerful, and real, about the line of continuity that Coco chooses to draw between the land of the living and the afterlife. Whereas the juxtaposition between Ernesto and Héctor is important but also obvious, Coco cleverly misleads the audience into believing that Miguel’s great-great-grandmother, Imelda, also functions as the opposite of Ernesto. Coco’s opening scenes, played out evocatively on papel picado, tell the story of Miguel’s great-great-grandmother and her resiliency in the face

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Figure 20.8 Where the forgotten go to await their “final death.”

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of abandonment by her musician husband.15 The focus on her strength and dedication to her daughter and her family paint a picture of a woman exclusively devoted to others. As the film develops, however, we come to the uncomfortable realization that she and Ernesto are, in subtle ways, cut from the same cloth (or paper, if you prefer). In her case, the fevered commitment to family that she demonstrates becomes, paradoxically, an oppressive regime of individualism. Although Mamá Imelda’s rejection of music is created out of a sense of loyalty to family, it becomes a social project that stifles Miguel’s right to express his love for his family in his own way. The rigidity of the framework offered to Miguel— marked by, on the one hand, the ruthless individualism of Ernesto, and, on the other hand, the ruthless sacrifice of self embodied by Mamá Imelda’s demand for familial loyalty— leave him no room to be both himself and a member of the Rivera family. In one of the film’s key moments, Miguel is startled to learn that Imelda, who is the root of his family’s entrenched disdain for music, sings beautifully and, even more surprising, has abiding memories of music as a source of joy. Moved by her voice, saddened by the seemingly irreconcilable rift within his family, and also overwhelmed with desperation at his desire to simply be himself, Miguel shouts, “I don’t want to pick sides! Why can’t you be on my side? That’s what family is supposed to do, support you!” The film forces us to acknowledge that Ernesto and Imelda, though wildly different, represent a polarized binary of social values that has trapped both Miguel and the rest of his family. Miguel’s refusal to “pick sides” has broader, more significant implications because it suggests a rejection of the social demand to be this or that, to choose one way over another. I would argue that the film extends its critique of oppressive binaries into the choices we make about who does and does not earn the right to be remembered. Héctor’s looming final death, (dis)embodies the notion that our duty to the deceased (and by extension the living) should not be taken lightly. Imelda’s anger, while justified, crosses a line when she decrees that Héctor, along with music, are to be forgotten, forever. Héctor’s mistake, of having chosen to pursue the selfish dream of musical success over family, condemns him to an oblivion that his family sees as both just and deserved. Miguel’s time among the dead, however, teaches him that Héctor is as noble and deficient as everyone else in the Rivera family. Miguel learns, in other words, that our responsibility to the dead does not rest in memorializing only the good but rather in coming to terms with the flawed nature of humanity. As the film works its way to the climactic encounter between Ernesto and the Rivera family, Miguel asserts that Héctor has been judged unfairly and entreats Imelda with a line that resonates far beyond the small drama of the Rivera family. He says, “You don’t have to forgive him, but we shouldn’t forget him.” Imelda’s anger with Héctor, a grudge

that has lasted throughout her whole life and her whole death, confirms the continuity between the world of the living and the world of the dead. But it also confirms the fact that Coco is filled with characters who are as imperfect in death as they were in life. For Azul, this is, perhaps, the film’s most egregious and unforgivable flaw. Addressing here the plot twist that reveals de la Cruz as fabulously wealthy and morally corrupt in life and death, Azul excoriates Coco for constructing a world wherein social hierarchies continue into the afterlife:

At the risk of repeating myself, I think Azul’s critique is both valid and perceptive. Unlike the multitude of reviewers who either refused to engage the film seriously or offered glowing, unquestioning commendations of the film’s emotional payoff, Azul draws our attention to a magical world that sadly replicates much of what is wrong with our current world. Her critique focuses on the film’s refusal to construct an afterlife that satisfies and solves all of the social problems that exist in the world of the living, in our world. I have a different interpretation. Although I am willing to concede that Coco’s message might be made too subtly, I remain convinced that it is both there and valuable. I contend that what Coco accomplishes in not making the world of the dead a panacea for all of the living world’s problems is to place emphasis on the responsibility of the living for creating the world that we want to see mirrored in the land of the dead. In other words, the responsibility for memory, equity, and love rest solely in the hands of the living; we won’t, we can’t, be saved by the dead. It is a cliché to speak of films as “heartwarming” or as “tearjerkers,” but review after review of Coco have gestured at the power of the film’s ending. They are correct in pointing out that, besides being entertaining, Coco is a beautiful, tender film. As the film nears its conclusion, Miguel, having been granted his family’s blessing, returns to the land of the living fully cognizant of the fact that Héctor has run out of time. Coco, Héctor’s adorable little girl, is now an old, wrinkled great-grandmother whose failing memory will soon consign her father to the final death of the forgotten. Miguel races home and, in a quiet voice breaking with emotion, sings “Remember Me” to Coco.

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In a world where divine justice exists—the one religion always insists on—De La Cruz would have never had a mansion in the afterlife, never had material comfort, and yet, here he is, living the best and most grandest life IN SPITE of being an evil, lying, murderous man. What does this say of the hierarchy of fairness to those who suffer here, if they are to be poor and trampled on after death too?

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Figure 20.9 Miguel rescues Coco, Héctor, and the whole family.

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Rejecting Western notions of the dead as residing in a distant past, one that must be forgotten in order for the bereaved to live fully in the present, Miguel brings Héctor back to life, makes him real and present for the aging Coco.16 The effect is magical and profoundly moving. The intimacy of their moment echoes the lost moments between Coco and her father and, like it or not, we the audience are moved to tears. Miguel’s family rushes in to chastise him for his behavior and his disappearance only to discover that they have stumbled into witnessing a miracle. A kind of child-Orpheus, Miguel sings the simple lullaby to Coco and brings her back from the haze of forgetting that has marked her aged life. Miguel’s family looks on in reverent silence as does the audience. We are reminded of the videos that have sprung up across the internet and show us the dementia-ridden elderly seemingly brought back to life by the music of their youth (see, e.g., “See Why”; “A Mind”). In the lyrical but honest world of Coco, this is what divine justice looks like. For me, the brilliance of the film is the way in which it establishes a firm, even militarized border between the land of the living and the dead and then gives us the means by which to dissolve that border, to render it less firm and less powerful. As we quietly absorb the film’s gentle insistence that we have a responsibility to ourselves and others— the living and the dead, those who are on this side and those who are on that side— we come to the difficult realization that the strong, determined women of the film are as flawed in their thinking as the callow, selfish men. It is, instead, the film’s child protagonist who shows us how to reach across the seemingly impossible divides. As the character of Frida Kahlo says in the film, “Ah, ah, ah. The alebrijes of this world can take many forms. They are as mystical as they are powerful.”17 Miguel—leading us from Ernesto’s selfish, overwrought temple through the shabby, run-down remains of the favela of the forgotten— is that

Figure 20.10 Miguel’s family witnesses a miracle.

alebrije. His love of family, of music, and of self becomes a guiding force that enables us to reinterpret our duty to the dead but also to the living. For death, in Coco, does not produce a magical solution to a world that allows some to be remembered— often for vacuous, superfluous reasons— while others are consigned to a life, and a death, of forgetting. Seen from the perspective of our young spirit guide, we come to the startling conclusion that the divinity in “divine justice” does not spring from an otherworldly source. It does not “come from above,” or even “from below” or “from the hereafter”; its source is us the living, and the time for remembering and for divine justice is now.

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Boxofficemojo.com lists Coco as the thirteenth most successful film of 2017. Although it failed to break into the top ten grossing films of the year, it was beat out by the usual proliferation of summer superhero films like Spider Man, Wonder Woman, Justice League, and the unstoppable Star Wars franchise. Aside from having grossed more than $209 million worldwide, Coco was well received by critics around the world, earning it an enviable 97 percent score on the Rotten Tomatoes website. By way of further comparison, Star Wars: The Last Jedi—which, at more than $620 million, was the highest grossing film of 2017— earned a score of 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Two recent publications, however, suggest that this may be changing. In his wideranging entry on “Familia” for Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts, Frederick Luis Aldama suggests that with Coco “Disney might have finally gotten the Latinx family right” (63). By contrast, Martín-Rodríguez (this volume) acknowledges the film’s glowing reception while also offering two sharp, valuable critiques. He argues that, in addition to trafficking in the time-worn stereotype of the Mexican mariachi, Coco is representative of “Hollywood’s unwillingness to depict U.S. Mexicans, even as

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it courts and acknowledges them as an important segment of the audience.” For Martín-Rodríguez, this unwillingness to represent U.S. Mexicans indicates that “for all [its] emphasis on family— [Coco] still refuse[s] to acknowledge that many Mexican families are transnational, and that they have members on both sides of the border.” I respectfully disagree with Martín-Rodríguez’s point about the mariachi and will address it in more detail later in this chapter; however, I do find his contention about the invisibility of U.S. Mexican families in the film to be astute and convincing. Furthermore, I agree with his assertion that this oversight weakens the film, although I suspect we differ in our sense of how critical a flaw this is. The briefest of commentary here on my use of “Latinx.” Like many, if not all, Latinx scholars, I have struggled with the appropriate nomenclature in reference to people of Latin American descent living in the United States. Having passed through the grammatically correct “Latinos,” I too have made efforts at inclusivity by using “Latino/a,” “Latin@,” and, now, “Latinx.” Ultimately, all three labels offer sincere attempts to foreground the contributions of Latinas to “Latino” studies. The last five years, however, have witnessed the use of Latinx, a term that echoes the grassroots designation “Latino” favored by the more activist branch of “Hispanic studies” that also offers the added benefit of being inclusive of all gender designations. There are many excellent texts that deal with Latinxs’ complicated history with the United States; however, a solid starting point would be Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. For a sustained analysis of the shift in anti-Latinx discourse in the post 9/11 era, see Riofrio. Initiated in 1954 as a response to the 1942 Bracero Program that recruited Latinx labor from Mexico and Puerto Rico, Operation Wetback was a governmentsponsored deportation of primarily Mexican laborers. Named after the racial slur that had long been used as a way of referring to Latinx migrants who were presumed to have crossed illegally into the United States by swimming across the Rio Grande in Texas, Operation Wetback was notable for its blatant racism and anti-Latinx aggression. We know that in the immigration raids that took place, many Latinxs who had come to the United States to assist during the wartime labor shortage were summarily deported without the benefit of legal proceedings. Furthermore, the deported included many Latinx people who at the time were U.S. citizens. See, for example, coverage by The Washington Post (Williams), The Daily Beast (Weill), and the Southern Poverty Law Center (Beutel). The character of Ernesto de la Cruz is an amalgamation of two of Mexico’s most famous actor/singers, Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante, both of whom make cameo appearances in the film. In 2013, while studying at the Ringling College of Art and Design, Lindsey St. Pierre, Ashley Graham, and Kate Reynolds created and released a film project entitled Dia de los Muertos (as of June 27, 2018, their film was available on YouTube and had

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garnered well over fourteen million views). The short film is an elegantly crafted short story about a little girl who, on the Day of the Dead, is pulled into the world of the dead for an afternoon of frolic with a friendly skeleton. Marked by upbeat music, bright colors, and an atmosphere of both fantasy and wonder, Dia de los Muertos ends with the touching scene of the little girl coming to the realization that the skeleton that has been guiding her through the festivities is her own deceased mother. Their touching reunification ends, however, on a happy note as the daughter reenters the world of the living convinced that her mother remains with her in one form or another. Jorge R. Gutiérrez’s film The Book of Life (2014) is, by contrast, a huge, commercially successful Hollywood production. Like Coco, it too uses the Day of the Dead as an entry into a discussion about the difficulty of balancing individual desires with familial duty. Although wildly different in style, The Book of Life, like Coco, is an animation tour de force. Opting for a visual style that combines the doeeyed aesthetic of Japanese chibi anime with the exaggerated aesthetic of a show like Nickelodeon’s Ren and Stimpy as well as Gutiérrez’s own particular style in his series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, The Book of Life stands in stark contrast to the lush hyper-realism of a Disney Pixar production. Although it’s unclear how much stylistic influence co-producer Guillermo del Toro had on the finished product, The Book of Life offers viewers an interpretation of the land of the dead that is fantastic in every sense of the world and that also ties in with del Toro’s own predilection for the outlandish and the magical as witnessed in his own films Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Son jarocho is a regional style of music from the Veracruz region of Mexico. It combines distinct musical styles from indigenous cultures as well as musical elements and instruments from Africa and Spain. One clear and unfortunately notable example of this kind of denigration was the controversy that surrounded the San Antonio Spurs NBA team when they hired the accomplished eleven-year-old mariachi singer Sebastian de la Cruz to sing the national anthem (“Young NBA”). Although the genre conventions of critical essays often demand a kind of impersonal “distance,” I want to say just a few words about Azul’s critique of Coco. I think it is honest, insightful, and brave. It is the last of these that I think is worth highlighting. Addressing, publicly, the concerns raised by a Disney movie is never easy work. Audiences and fans of Disney can be hyperdefensive about any critique of the films, or the company, because of the intimate connection that Disney often has with their (our) childhood. Reading through the comments and reactions to Azul’s post on Coco made this dynamic crystal clear. Moreover, while I find that I don’t agree with all of her points, I think the work is timely, smart, and important. One of the aspects of Azul’s critique that I found helpful was that way it connects Coco to a long line of previous Disney films. For example, she interprets the smashing of Miguel’s guitar as a trope of “parental strife” seen in films like The Little Mermaid

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and Cinderella. Azul also places the skeleton Héctor among an identifiable Disney “type” by invoking other well-known male characters like Aladdin, Simba, and Nick Wilde. Among the other “minor” observations Azul makes are (1) the fact that Disney chose to tell a story about Mexico instead of highlighting one of the other fascinating cultures of Latin America, many of which, unlike Mexico, have not been the subject of a large-scale cultural production, and (2) the lack of any black or dark brown characters. I support both of these observations. Given the enormous cultural and racial diversity within Mexico, the decision not to represent this wide range of phenotypes calls to question the full commitment on the part of the filmmakers to accurately represent all of Mexico. More significantly, it is just another example of Hollywood’s ongoing erasure of blackness. With regard to Azul’s first point about the decision to make another film about Mexico, I find myself somewhat torn. I think she is right to say that this film could have focused on any of the many underrepresented Latin American cultures, but I also understand that all films are now made with international markets in mind and that Mexico is perhaps the most important Latin American market. Finally, to reiterate a point made in the introduction, I think that Coco is a beautiful, well-intentioned film. I remain convinced that Disney’s decision to make this kind of film about a Mexican family is, in and of itself, a significant and valuable undertaking. See, for example, important and valuable critiques of Disney like that of Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, M. Keith Booker, Rosina Lippi-Green, and, of course, the now-infamous volume by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. Papel picado, or “cut paper,” is a traditional Mexican folk art that features elaborate, festive designs cut into pieces of colored tissue paper. It is hung in homes and in public spaces during important holidays like Easter, Christmas, and the Day of the Dead. I am indebted to Glennys Howarth whose work on the boundaries between life and death inspired much of my thinking. In particular, her argument that we, the Western world, are beginning to reject the long-imposed notion that healthy grieving means rewriting our biographies without the presence of our deceased loved ones, “moving on,” as it were. Instead, she argues that the loss of a loved one is really the loss of self, and that we have developed many subtle techniques for keeping the dead “with us” in ways that allow us to write a better, healthier story of grieving and of recovery. Alebrijes, brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures, are treated as animal spirit guides in the film.

References “A Mind Roused by Music.” YouTube, uploaded by World Science Festival, Feb. 2, 2015, www.youtube .com/watch?v=RcbddBfoaG4. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Familia.” Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, Routledge, 2019, pp. 56– 66.

Filmography The Book of Life. Directed by Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Reel FX Creative Studies/20th Century Fox, 2014. Cars. Directed by John Lasseter and Joe Ranft, Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2006. Cinderella. Directed by Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2017.

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Azul. “Shame on Disney/Pixar: Observations on Coco.” A Guide to Belonging Everywhere: Adventure, Whimsy & Puppies for Everyone, Nov. 7, 2017, happycosmopolite.wordpress .com/2017/11/07 /shame-on-pixar-observations-on-coco/. Accessed May 11, 2018. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films. Praeger, 2010. Beutel, Alejandro. “How Trump’s Nativist Tweets Overlap with Anti-Muslim and Anti-Latino Hate Crimes.” Southern Poverty Law Center, May 18, 2018, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/05/18 /how-trump%E2%80%99s-nativist-tweets-overlap-anti-muslim-and-anti-latino-hate-crimes. “Coco: The Music of Coco.” You Tube, uploaded by On the Set, Apr. 6, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch ?v=73qjdB9OUCw. Accessed Apr. 21, 2018. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. Para leer al pato Donald: Comunicación de masas y colonialismo. 1972. 2nd ed., Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2010. Giroux, Henry A., and Grace Pollock. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Updated and expanded ed., Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Viking Press, 2000. Graham, Adam. “Review: Convoluted ‘Coco’ Tries Too Hard to Entertain.” The Detroit News, Nov. 21, 2017, www.detroitnews .com/story/entertainment/movies/2017/11/21/movie-review -convoluted-coco-tries-hard-entertain/107918508/. Accessed June 13, 2018. Grierson, Tim. “‘Coco’: Review.” Screen Daily, Oct. 20, 2017, www.screendaily.com/reviews/coco -review/5123436.article. Accessed June 13, 2018. Howarth, Glennys. “Dismantling the Boundaries between Life and Death.” Mortality, vol. 5, no. 2, 2000, pp. 127– 38. “Lawyer Who Ranted at NYC Restaurant Identified as Aaron Scholssberg.” YouTube, uploaded by Inside Edition, May 17, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN__M-3sl6Y. Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2011. Marchi, Regina M. Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon. Rutgers University Press, 2009. “Mariachis Serenade @ Latin Party At Racist Aaron Schlossberg’s House 5/18/18.” YouTube, uploaded by Sandi Bachom, May 18, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC_Fb1vJAMw. “Michael Williams Deportation Bus Met by Mariachi Band.” YouTube, uploaded by Sojourner2317, May 19, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYLokMxZJto. Riofrio, John D. Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Search for Social Justice in Latin(o) America. University of Texas Press, 2015. “See Why This Story about Music Brought Anchor to Tears.” YouTube, uploaded by USA Today, Feb. 12, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KriZZhRjr7g. Ugwu, Reggie. “How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious.” The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/movies/coco-pixar-politics.html. Weill, Kelly. “Hate Crimes Spiked After Trumps Anti-Muslim Tweets, Study Finds.” The Daily Beast, May 14, 2018, www.thedailybeast .com/hate-crimes-spiked-after-trumps-anti-muslim-tweets -study-finds. Williams, Aaron. “Hate Crimes Rose the Day after Trump Was Elected, FBI Data Show.” The Washington Post, Mar. 23, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/23/hate -crimes -rose-the-day -after-trump-was -elected-fbi-data-show/?noredirect=on&utm_term= .4e7f8570c75f. “Young NBA Finals Singer Sparks Racist Firestorm.” YouTube, uploaded by ABC News, June 14, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7MNBBlv19.

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Dia de los Muertos. Directed by Lindsay St. Pierre, Ashley Graham, and Kate Reynolds, Ringling College of Art and Design, 2013. YouTube, uploaded by TheCGBros, Aug. 15, 2013, www.youtube .com/watch?v=jCQnUuq-TEE. Justice League. Directed by Zack Snyder, Warner Bros., 2017. The Little Mermaid. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Pan’s Labyrinth. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Picturehouse, 2006. The Shape of Water. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2017. Spider Man: Homecoming. Directed by Jon Watts, Sony Pictures, 2017. Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Directed by Rian Johnson, Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Wonder Woman. Directed by Patty Jenkins, Warner Bros., 2017.

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Chapter 21

“THERE IS NO ‘I’ IN TROLLHUNTERS” Gendered and Collective Heroism in Guillermo del Toro’s Multimedial Saga Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou

In an age where streaming and other technologies make content readily available worldwide, disrupting both geopolitical borders and those of ethnic and cultural identities that are already experiencing tension due to the rapid demographic changes our societies are facing, how do we think of Latinx ciné and audiovisual production? What are we to make of the Latinx mobilization of genres such as fantasy and horror when they have been and continue to be mobilized to further marginalize sexual, racial, and ethnic minorities? As Sara Veronica Hinojos discusses in her chapter in this volume, how can we understand the racial and ethnic markers whose presence in mainstream children’s media tend to morally and socially marginalize Latinx characters as unruly, uncivilized, and laughable? In the following pages, I address these and other questions through the Netflix series Trollhunters (2016– ), in which the characters created by Guillermo del Toro retake themes and aesthetics from his previous films and engage in collective actions that reframe paradigms of masculinity, specifically through the figures of the hero and the heroine. Beginning as a book project written in collaboration with Daniel Kraus, Trollhunters became a Netflix series produced by DreamWorks Animation, the same studio that produced the film How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and its subsequent series, DreamWorks Dragons (2012– 18).1 In its transformation, the story evolves from a dark tale about monsters hiding under the beds of teenagers and child-eating trolls to a bildungsroman TV series nuanced by the lived realities of contemporary global youth: single working parents, multicultural societies, and anxious masculinities and heroic femininities, all coexisting within an explicitly Latinx-marked space. Taking into account the global medium that Netflix as a streaming platform encompasses, this chapter focuses on the ways in which Latinidad is represented on- screen through the presence of del Toro’s filmic legacy— specifically the ethical messages embedded in his monster and child characters— interwoven and updated in the series, particularly in the 405

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refashioning of masculinities and femininities anchored in constant communal and collective action. In moments that code these characters, spaces, and situations as Latinx, the series constructs a gendered ethic of care, support, and heroism. This ethic is generated by affectively charging situations experienced in contemporary young adult lives: high school relations, teenageparent relationships, background inclusion of Latinx politicians, and comingof-age experiences. The split between contemporary suburban reality and the magical troll world existing underground serves as a parallel instance of affective reeducation, where the high school functions less as a marker of a genre (in the style of another Netflix success, Stranger Things) and is recoded as a space where the characters develop an ethical reconfiguration of heroism as a team effort. Similar to the Hellboy film franchise, this reconfiguration happens through a process of becoming— as opposed to a hero who is in essential terms— and is made explicit through visual parallels between the educational space of the high school, inhabited by Latinx individuals, and the world of monsters, where this affective reeducation is enacted. In the multimedia representations of young adult novels, TV series, children’s books, comics, and magical encyclopedias, the characters coexist in a community where monsters and twenty-first-century humans come together with new social pacts that reconfigure their relations with each of their worlds; in this way, both monsters and humans learn from each other and change, reshaping their gendered subjectivities of hero, heroine, and sidekicks by challenging social norms. Del Toro’s Trollhunters anchors itself in the geography of contemporary Southern California, where the human and monster characters interact in a landscape both geopolitically referential and fantastic. The politics of representation are made explicit in these constant encounters between “monstrous Others” and “human Others” who appear on-screen marked by a strong Latinidad: accent, spoken Spanish, Mexican food and its preparation, political organization, family bonds, and the Latinx punk-rock scene of Southern California. In conversation with Hinojos’s chapter (this volume) on the sonic legacies of racialized villains domesticated through their thick accents, del Toro and his production team mobilize a racialized performance of sonic and visual Mexican identity that uses humor to shatter negative stereotypes of racialized citizenship. While monsters may serve as the visual representation of the Other, fully excluded from the social order, characters such as Claire Nuñez or Tobias Domzalski come together to form this alternative social order existing outside the paradigms of normativity. In this way, what marks the series Trollhunters as unique in its media ecology is the ways in which the various characters negotiate their otherness in relation to each other and construct open and inclusive societies where the real monsters are revealed

to be essential and founding members of new societies and not simply Others to be tolerated in marginalized spaces.

Throughout his filmic career, Guillermo del Toro has mobilized the figures of monsters as ways to engage with the Othering strategies that order and hierarchize our sociopolitical realities. In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), where monsters unfold into friends and enemies, mentors and evil incarnate, the director initiates a nuanced and firmly ethical approach to the representation of monsterhood in which the fantastical creatures become potential creators of alternative societies in the face of dangerously violent realities, such as fascism. As Juan Carlos Vargas has suggested, fantasy, a genre usually mobilized as a way to represent an affective reality disconnected from that of the viewer, is mobilized by del Toro as “a means of the radical confrontation of fantasy and reality in which history is also present” (187). In this way, for del Toro, the aesthetics and norms of the fantastical genres become strategies through which to engage with a political and socioeconomic reality that remains referenced in the background, providing a context of representation that allows the images to be connected to contemporary sociopolitical issues while remaining just that, a fantasy story. In the same vein, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) can be read as a political film dealing with the wanton exploitation of natural resources and colonial relations of domination that rise when one human group represses another (Podalsky 117). Through the representation of an anti-villain (Prince Nuada) who seeks to reestablish symbiotic relations with nature and disrupt the exploitative practices of late capitalism that are destroying natural spaces to build shopping malls, del Toro constructs monsters closely aligned with an eco-political critique, strengthened by the heroes’ final resignation from the government agency who controls them.2 This critique of government agencies taking control of a social order and imposing violent exploitative practices can also be seen in The Shape of Water (2018), in which the character Richard Strickland, whose name I will reference later, forcibly extracts a river deity from Latin America to study in a U.S. military laboratory. Throughout del Toro’s oeuvre, this political use of fantasy is activated as a way to engage with otherness, colonial relations of exploitation, and the generation of alternative sociabilities disrupting gendered practices of symbolic violence; these representational strategies go beyond the ethical defense of the monster as “good” in order to nuance the alliances among Others, both monstrous and racialized, necessary to construct ethical communities facing current ecological and political realities.

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In Trollhunters, however, both the characters on-screen and the audience it is marketed for are children and teenagers. Following queer theorist Kathryn Stockton Bond’s idea of growing sideways as opposed to growing up into already-set social and gender roles, I read del Toro’s representation of children alongside monsters as social positions marked by change and growth that disrupt the classical narratives of a bildungsroman.3 The child characters are thus mobilized not as disempowered social subjects who experience horror, trauma, and violence but as empowered characters who “shape a new discourse, which stands in contrast to the static, inflexible grasping of logic and reason which characterizes the adult character’s response to traumatic experience” (Balanzategui 79). In this way, children become active builders of new social orders, able to address the bleak realities of our contemporary moment that adults fear to face (West 131). Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth chooses to die rather than reproduce the violent sacrifice of the Other at the heart of a fascist order. The granddaughter of Jesús Gris in Cronos is able to see the human soul within the vampire Jesús has become and thus save him. And the teenagers of Trollhunters are the only ones able to identify the insidious presence of the evil trolls and monsters in contemporary society, while siding with the benevolent monsters. It is in their assemblages with these ghosts, trolls, fairy creatures, and monsters that the children grow sideways, in the sense that they develop ethical relations whose impact goes beyond them as individuals and extends to a diverse community of Othered individuals.4

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The Netflix series tells the story of James Lake Jr., a.k.a. Jim, who one fateful day encounters a magical amulet in a pile of rocks lying in the bed of a suburban water canal. He discovers the amulet contains a suit of armor and weapons that transform him into the Trollhunter, a social position created by the wizard Merlin to protect pacific and non-human-eating trolls from their evil counterparts who feast on human flesh. Unwillingly, Jim undertakes the training to become the first human Trollhunter and is accompanied by his best friend, Tobias Domzalski, a.k.a. Toby, and his love interest, Claire Nuñez, who together with the trolls Blinkous Galadrigal (Blinky) and AAARRRGGHH!!! begin to form a team. They are tasked with protecting both the human world and Hearthstone Trollmarket from the imminent attack of Bular, an evil troll who seeks to unleash Gunmar, his most powerful and evil father, from his banishment to the Darklands, a sort of alternate dimension. As the show progresses, Jim and his human companions survive high school and the bully Steve who constantly antagonizes them, as well as their teachers

and coach whose education (or lack thereof ) is contrasted with the training and education they receive in Trollmarket. Originally planned as a live-action series, the story was transformed into a young adult novel published by Disney through Hyperion Books before being picked up by DreamWorks Animation and transformed into a multiseason series. In the novel, co-written with Daniel Kraus, del Toro develops a Trollhunters universe with dark tones grounded in trauma as a foundational event for the protagonist’s action throughout the text. However, while being situated in San Bernardino, a recognized Latinx-populated county in Southern California, the rest of the novel does not assemble Latinidad as the series does: Claire is a Scottish immigrant, Mexican Dr. Muelas appears as Greek Dr. Papadopolous, and Toby does not eat Mexican food, to name a few of the specifically Latinx indexes mobilized in the show. Rather, the political commentary that del Toro and Kraus make is a critique of suburbia as the standardization of contemporary life, a socioeconomic space that silences and traumatizes children, while paradoxically remaining a “safe” multicultural space where the child can reimagine social alternatives— within certain ethnic limitations.5 In comparison to the animated series, this trauma refocalizes the narrative onto the male protagonists and characterizes it exclusively as loss. In doing so, the book negates the powerful transformations of gendered subjectivities constructed through collective action that the interspecies team carries out on the animated version of the story, where trolls and other monsters appear not only as creatures in need of rescue but as friends who generate alternative social and communitarian bonds.

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Figure 21.1 The team of Trollhunters: Claire Nuñez, Blinky, Jim Lake Jr., AAARRRGGHH!!!, and Toby Domzalski.

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In order to begin approaching del Toro’s trolls, a detour to the first appearance of Trollmarket will serve to underline the Mexican director’s understanding of these particular monsters and their social function in the new mediasphere that is Netflix. As mentioned before, it is in Hellboy II: The Golden Army that del Toro explicitly breaks the limits of the nuclear normative family that reproduces capitalist heteronormativity by formulating alternative groups where children and young adults become central founding members (McDonald and Clark 43). In the film, Hellboy and his team of super-agent heroes must also travel to the legendary Trollmarket to gather information on the antagonist Prince Nuada. Described by critics as a “monster rally” where a collective of beings from a variety of sources and traditions can come together to coexist harmoniously or band against a common enemy, this fantastical space functions for Hellboy and his colleagues as one where their difference does not mark them as dangerous, a space allowing for a “playful celebration of otherness” (McDonald and Clark 53). The incredulity that Hellboy and his peers express at the existence of this place before exploring it— similar to the incredulity that Jim and Toby express upon their first encounters with trolls and Hearthstone Trollmarket— aligns us as spectators with the suspension of disbelief necessary for an ethical (as opposed to spectacular) understanding of the otherness represented on screen. In other words, by asking the viewer to suspend disbelief early in the series, del Toro’s “metacinematic reflexivity amplifies the epistemological doubts of the classic fantastical novel” (Ward 20). However, by grounding the series in a specific Southern California space, these epistemological doubts are also transformed into ethical doubts that allow for the racially and ethnically Othered characters not only to coexist but also, more importantly, transform the normative characters of the heroes. In the transition from Hellboy II to Trollhunters, Trollmarket is displaced from under the Brooklyn Bridge to below an unused traffic bridge in Arcadia Oaks; thus, the monsters coded as fantastic and dangerous Others in the film are transformed into vaguely migrant bodies inhabiting the California landscape, albeit subterraneous, present but hidden.6 The heterotopic nature of the space remains “a space in which the other can exist in a non-hegemonic environment that operates as a kind of counter-site to the socially and culturally normative” (McDonald and Clark 179). Trollmarket thus becomes a space where the silenced yet imbricated relations between the seemingly normative subjectivities of the humans and the Otherized monsters can coexist in the same geography, albeit hidden.7 However, the most radical change that separates Brooklyn Trollmarket from Hearthstone Trollmarket is the relation between the foreign Other that enters that space and its nature; whereas Hellboy and his colleagues enter to obtain/extract information and

in doing so trash the place, Jim and his friends enter Trollmarket sworn to protect it. That protection can only happen through a series of ethical relations established between the diverse, outcast youth and the various trolls and creatures who accept and befriend these intrusive humans, and in doing so must break with their traditions. Claire demonstrates another level of ethical engagement in entering this space; in her first visit, she wins the approval of the elder trolls by demonstrating an ability and willingness to learn their language and read their history books. In this way, both the teenagers and the trolls who befriend them embark on processes of becoming heroes that resignify their relations with the adult world (the children become caretakers of the adults), and re-create social bonds looking toward an alternative future where racialized and ethnic Others are not only included but invaluable. Through Claire’s political Latinx background, the various Mexican food choices, and especially the trolls’ history as migrant refugees in the California landscape, the futures that the show constructs radically alter the ethical bases of this interspecies society.

Trollhunters: Monsters as Mentors and Father Figures Resignified Although Guillermo del Toro is credited as the creator of Trollhunters and his name appears on all the products related to the franchise, he directed only the two-episode pilot that opens the series. However, it is here that the

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Figure 21.2 From hidden magical market to displaced refugee camp: Trollmarket under Arcadia Oaks.

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fundamental characteristics that define the characters (and will later reappear as motifs) first make their appearance. In contrast to the book, which opens at sunset with the kidnapping of Jack and the traumatic encounters with the trolls that leave Jim Sr. scarred for life, the series opens with an epic battle at sunrise between Kanjigar, current Trollhunter, and Bular, the son of Gunmar, the ultimate evil troll who seeks to impose a reign of terror above- and belowground. Through a very rapid sequence that follows these two creatures engaged in a swordfight under the bridge that hides the door to Trollmarket, the episode sets the ground for the nuanced use of color and lighting to signify good and evil. Whereas Bular’s body is matte black and contains a ring of skulls (including one with shorn horns, another reference to Hellboy), Kanjigar’s armor shimmers and shines in a bright, silvery hue. Both are contained to the shadows, as their exposure to the sun’s rays as it rises in the dawn will turn them to stone. Kanjigar, upon seeing himself in danger of defeat, chooses to sacrifice himself and keep the magical amulet out of Bular’s grasp, for it will open the door to the Darklands and release Gunmar from his exile. As Deborah Shaw has noted, self-sacrifice is one the motifs of del Toro’s work and one of the ways in which characters can obtain the status of hero(in)es.8 Here, Kanjigar’s sacrifice opens the narrative, a tragic but heroic death whose significance will later unfold as he is revealed to be the father of another heroic troll, Draal. Panning to the pile of rocks where the amulet glistens, the episode cuts to Jim as he wakes up and carries out a morning routine of preparing lunch for himself, his mother, Barbara, and Toby, cleaning the kitchen and house, and finally, taking breakfast to his sleeping mother whose glasses remain on her head as she lays sleeping after a long shift at the hospital. In this way, Kanjigar’s sacrifice is affectively and visually (both adults lying in rest) connected with Barbara’s sacrifice as she works to sustain her child, and Jim answers that sacrifice with labor of his own. The series will continue to develop a parallel between Draal and Jim in which their unspoken bond will be this sacrificial parent. Later in the episode, as Jim and Toby make their way back home and run into Barbara as she drives to work, Toby remarks, “You mother your mother a lot,” demonstrating to the viewer a relationship where the sacrifices of a working single parent are answered by unconditional love and support from their child. Strong as this relationship is, it doesn’t eliminate the inherent trauma of abandonment that haunts Jim’s existence, his father having walked away when he was a child in addition to his mother being absent from his life due to work. This absence will be remarked on via the presence of Draal, who verbalizes his estranged relationship with his father, the Trollhunter, who left his paternal responsibilities in order to enforce his greater duties as protector of trollkind.

Draal, who becomes Jim’s sword-fighting trainer and close friend, becomes intersubjectively related to Jim in their familial structure and their parents’ decisions, which remain completely out of their control; in other words, the two characters unfold into each other in a mirrored manner, each missing one parent. In this sense, as queer theorist Mari Ruti points out, the encounter with the Other is not characterized by an establishment of sameness based on corporeal or subjective existence; that is, “specific (symbolic or imaginary) attributes of the other but the fact that, like us, the other cannot fully control its destiny (but is rather to some extent controlled by this destiny, its singular ‘fate in the real’)” (207). Draal and Jim resignify their relationship to their parents, notably destabilizing the centrality of the father figure in the equivalence of Kanjigar to Barbara as working parents; their mutual otherness remains centralized inasmuch as both sons must negotiate their destiny as Trollhunters and their lack of control. Throughout the season, Kanjigar will continue to appear in a ghostly form, serving as a spiritual mentor for Jim as he trains with the use of the amulet, whose power rests on his ability to maintain control over his emotions: when he is in distress, or his will weakened, the armor and sword disappear, leaving Jim vulnerable. Mentioned only in the episode in which he celebrates his birthday and mourns his father’s abandonment, Jim’s trauma remains ghostly, hinted at but never verbalized as such: the never-present working mother and the father who walked away. Quoting Jessica Balanzategui, the series’ creative perception of trauma, haunting the screen in the growing relations between

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Figure 21.3 Jim and Draal: encountering the other and growing sideways into their familial constellations.

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the two sons (Draal and Jim) and in the presence of ghostly Kanjigar becomes “a way for society to approach and contemplate the darkest, most traumatic recesses of history and cultural consciousness normally submerged beneath accepted discourses of socio-cultural progress” (78). In this sense, the firmly gendered discourse of male heroism is revealed as traumatic, and Jim’s ethical reaction of saving monsters establishes alternative familial structures assembled with the Othered bodies of trolls and the collective teamwork of the Trollhunters. In this way, the alternative social order, outside of both human and troll normativity— since Jim and his friends are the first humans to enter Trollmarket— will become a model society for the viewer. As a teenager experiencing growth and development, Jim comes into contact with two characters who will embody a sort of mentor/father figure: Blinkous Galadrigal (Blinky), a four-armed and six-eyed troll, and Walter Strickler, a troll able to take human form.9 Blinky is the troll keeper of encyclopedic knowledge, while Strickler is the history professor at Jim’s high school revealed to be a Changeling, a shapeshifting species of troll who serves Gunmar. These characters are visually assembled as parallel to each other since they both embody what critics have signaled as a del Toro trope: alchemists, scientists, librarians, historians, or physicists who are dedicated to “decoding the network of complexities and mythologies of past art and artifacts but are also equally dedicated to re-coding complex and potent new mythologies from what has come before” (McDonald and Clark 11). Blinky readily accepts change and adaptation, beginning with the radical choice of the amulet in selecting a human Trollhunter and displaying a willingness to change his own belief systems as Jim and his friends teach him human ways. On the other hand, once his evil troll nature is revealed, Strickler must pass through an arc of redemption before being accepted as a potential mentor. During this arc, it is Strickler’s manipulative use of knowledge that separates him from the alternative social order the Trollhunters team is creating; in episode 11, “Recipe for Disaster,” the narrative opens with Strickler teaching a history lesson about Napoleon’s armies invading Europe, where knowledge becomes a form of domination, saying, “War is constant chaos.” The episode ends with him obtaining control of the amulet and whispering, “I control the chaos,” thus assembling a character for whom knowledge equals control equals domination. In this way, del Toro’s production team reveals a concise use of high school bildungsroman TV tropes such as the teacher, politicized through the greater narrative that foregrounds the ethical injunctions generated through the trolls. As part of a species of trolls with the ability to shift into human form known as Changelings, Strickler (as well as Nomura, the Peer Gynt– singing assassin, and NotEnrique, who substitutes Claire’s brother when he is kid-

napped and taken to the Darklands) continues the Hellboy paradigm of evil monster as redeemable through their actions, only if they decide to make an ethical choice to create a more just community with humans. In Trollhunters, Strickler is the apparent leader of the Janus Order, the secret organization of Changelings who strive to liberate Gunmar and unleash evil upon the world (and whose prominent members include the German Otto Scaarbach, a Nazi-esque figure and staple in the del Toro imaginary since Cronos, and immigration officers). Cast out of this organization due to seeking his own freedom and that of his species, who are rejected from both the troll and human societies, Strickler’s actions of aiding Jim nuance his evilness as contingent and malleable. In this way, his character opens the possibility for a reconstruction of violent masculinities based on dominance toward an enactment of an ethics of care, visualized in the final episodes of the season when he physically suffers in order for Barbara to magically heal from a wound.

The title of the two-episode pilot that opens the series is “Becoming,” signaling the process that Jim must go through if he accepts the task of Trollhunter. However, as with the opening scene in which the divergence between novel and screen move trauma from a masculine-centered space of missing boys to a social space populated by working parents, the key differences in the process of becoming Jim goes through radically alter the ethical relations the series constructs. In the first episode, Jim is chosen by the amulet and hears a voice calling to him. Jim is able to transform by saying the magical phrase, but that does not mean he has become the hero quite yet; the sequence in which Bular chases him and Toby through Arcadia and he is unable to summon the armor is the visual example of this. In other words, it is through an act of will that Jim becomes the potential hero, thus representing a child who chooses to impact the social fabric surrounding him. On-screen, the key moment of becoming is the scene in which Jim, wearing the armor that has activated due to his teenage inability to control emotions, is forced to audition for the school play in order to escape the watchful eye of Strickler. Nervous and unsettled on stage, Jim repeats almost word-forword the speech that Blinky had given to him the night before: “Destiny is a gift. Some go their entire lives living existences of quiet desperation. Never learning the truth, that what feels as though a burden pushing down upon our shoulders is actually the sense of purpose that lifts us to greater heights. Never forget that fear is but the precursor to valor and to strive and triumph

“Ther e I s No ‘I ’ in Tr ollhu nt er s ”

From Reluctant Singular Hero to Collectively Diverse Team

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in the face of fear is what it means to be a hero. Don’t think. Become.” (Trollhunters, Episode 2, “Becoming”)

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As philosopher Rosi Braidotti details, expanding on the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, becoming is a process that actualizes “the immanent encounter between subjects, entities and forces which are apt mutually to affect and exchange parts of each other in a creative and non-invidious manner” (68). In this way, Jim becomes a potential hero when he speaks aloud— in other words, physically embodies— the words of Blinky, thus assembling his embodied subjectivity with that of the troll. Furthermore, this encounter is actualized through the medium of the armor, which shimmers and responds to Jim’s own emotional state in this moment, a magical force that symbiotically begins to unite with his human body, and which will continue to do so in later episodes. Thus, the “becoming” of the title references more than a hero and indicates the creative relations that are to be established between Jim and his human and troll friends, who are also present. It is through repetition of the words Blinky enunciated earlier that Jim is able generate these affective encounters. In the series, the speech was first spoken in Jim’s kitchen with the two trolls surrounding him, and its reappearance in the school setting sets up not only the affective parallel between Trollhunter training and high school education but also the transformation of this “safe” social space into a space where alternative social contracts are being constructed.10 This ability to enact an ethical choice characterizes Jim’s tenure as a Trollhunter, even in the face of breaking with traditions that have protected trolls from humans. Toward the middle of the season, Bular and his accomplices have gathered the materials necessary to open Killahead Bridge and release Gunmar, but they require Jim’s presence and kidnap Blinky for ransom. While the code of Trollhunter and the laws of Trollmarket dictate sacrifice is necessary here, the same sacrifice that Kanjigar enacted in the opening scene, Jim defies the rules and chooses to rescue Blinky. As Vargas summarizes in his study of the children of the del Toro Spanish-language trilogy (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth), rebellion and disobedience are the markers of these autonomous children who reject the moral codes pushing them toward sacrificing another (a child, a sibling, or a friend) and choose rather to creatively use their abilities (drawing, reading, and ultimately in the Trollhunters’ case, imaginative teamwork) in order to defeat evil (194– 5). Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth refuses to sacrifice her baby brother in order to save herself, Liz and Abe in Hellboy II refuse to sacrifice their loved ones to save the world, and Jim refuses to sacrifice Blinky— and in doing so, fully becomes Trollhunter. The midseason finale ends with the same setting as it opened

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with: Jim and Bular facing each other under the same bridge where Kanjigar sacrificed himself. Thus, the intercorporeal process of becoming initiated in the first two episodes adds another troll to the constellation of bodies inhabiting Jim; his heroic subjectivity is relational not only to Kanjigar and myriad previous Trollhunters but also to his unique rejection of sacrifice of the Other that ties Blinky to this new way of being a Trollhunter.11 The second half of the first season delves into the emotional development of Claire and Toby as full-fledged members of the Trollhunters team. During this process, Jim has to explicitly become at odds with the radically individualistic and patriarchal definition of the Trollhunter, which haunts the team through the presence and voice of Kanjigar and the other fallen hunters. Countering them, Jim constantly pushes his friends to improve their skills (in spite of them not being “chosen” by a magical amulet), saying, “Come on, guys, it’s a team effort.” In their trials, Claire obtains a Shadowstaff and Toby a Warhammer, both of which can only be used by careful control of their emotions. However, whereas Jim’s control of his emotions rests on his status as hero, Toby and Claire’s affective training is carried out via a conscious manipulation of their emotional response to external situations. In episode 19, “Airheads,” a visual parallel is created to nuance the performative aspects of an emotional engagement with reality and the conscious manipulation of affect in order to harness their power. In one sequence, Steve and Jim are placed in a Touch-a-Truckathon, a high school game to elect a prom king. In order to win, Steve performs a scene of emotional weakness, justifying his bullying as a fragile masculinity calling for help. However, once Jim empathizes with Steve and concedes the contest, Steve reveals it to be a farce and falls back on his bully behavior, punching Jim on the arm. In the following sequence, Claire attempts to use her Shadowstaff to save Toby, who in turn performs verbal aggression toward Claire so that she can harness her anger to use the tool and save him. This visual parallel nuances performance as a social tool learned in a high school setting, whose ethical repurposing is to manipulate affect in order to save friends. Negative affects, especially those experienced in acts of verbal and physical abuse, are generated in a performative space in order to be repurposed as magical powers. In this way, rather than negating the presence of bullies in the greater social space outside the school, the production team emphasizes the productive use of negative affects generated by these social frictions; becoming once more is a process that allows these heroes to recompose themselves contingently depending on their surroundings and to reject their essential definitions as “good” characters. In a final note on this interspecies team of heroes, I want to underscore the representation of Latinidad in this context. Claire Nuñez, daughter of

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Councilwoman Nuñez, appears on-screen as Jim’s initial love interest but becomes a strong and core member of the team. The political background of her family, which will reappear in later seasons as a central element connecting the refugee status of the trolls to their acceptance and inclusion into Arcadia Oaks society, is constantly mentioned but kept in the background, a construction of Claire as an inherently politicized figure. Her ability to use the magical Shadowstaff marks her as more powerful than most humans, and her ethical injunctions to Jim to not use violence to fight bullies are remarkable. However, what is most important about her presence on-screen is that, in spite of being linguistically and culturally marked as Latina/Mexican, Claire is never Othered, either by the framing of the show or by the rest of the characters in their interactions. Thus, her Latinidad is assembled into an alternative sociopolitical order where inclusion (through a paradoxical act of visually marking without Othering in order to underscore the inclusion) is the end result. As TV scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser has commented, “The various ways that Latinos . . . and other nonwhite communities are othered in the mass media, and the ways that marketers then capitalize on that otherness to sell products, provide a central means to situate different ethnicities within a social, cultural and commercial hierarchy” (22); countering this, Claire and her family are marked as Latinx but not Othered, resisting a hierarchy where their Latinidad situates them in a specific and static socioeconomic order. The affective charge of the Othering processes is then thrust upon the trolls and their kind. Given that trolls and the other monsters serve the function of the symbolic Other with whom the viewer can identify, Claire and her Latinx family become the foundational nuclear family (which must be proactively protected, especially by its own members, precisely because of this possible social order contained in the children) of the future. Within this familial space, Claire is assembled as a twenty-first-century Latinx character able to cook Mexican food like no other while presenting a punk-rock aesthetic, which together with her willingness to learn trollspeak compose her as a fluid border-crosser. Thus, her character gains entry into the space of heroism due to qualities that assemble her as a character who is able to traverse spaces, fluent in several languages, emotionally mature, and the grounding figure of an ethics of care, from protecting her baby brother to stopping Jim from engaging bullies. Trollhunters thus assembles Latinidad as a geographic marker of place, a political signifier of social sensitivity, and a creative source of communal ethics— more than as an essential identity that must be understood as unreachably foreign. Grounded in the space of Arcadia Oaks in Southern California, Latinidad appears in the quotidian encounters the non-Latinx characters of Jim and Toby have with their city, in Dr. Muelas as he sings “Cielito

Figure 21.4 Dr. Muelas (Guillermo del Toro): from humorous Mexicanization to a helper of heroes.

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lindo” while putting braces on Toby’s teeth, in the Diablo Burrito that saves the students from detention, and in the song by Mexican pop singer Carla Morisson that Jim chooses to woo Claire with. The very secondary character of Dr. Muelas, whose thick accent is voiced by del Toro himself, becomes a hyper-racialized character, as Hinojos (this volume) signals happens through the use of accents as markers of identity. However, instead of being negatively brown voiced, Dr. Muelas embodies the creator himself, and the history of American animation as racially charged is subverted by the extraordinary, and yet everyday power this character ends up having. Appearing first as Toby’s dentist/torturer, Dr. Muelas becomes an unwitting aid in the fight against the Nazi-esque Changeling organization when the braces he installs in Toby allow the hero to hear radio waves transmitting secret codes. The thick Mexican accent of Dr. Muelas, the Mexican music playing in the dentist’s room, and the Spanish radio signals Toby picks up are thus linguistic manifestations that run counter to the mock Spanish that Hinojos (this volume) studies as a way to “contain” characters who are out of place in normative society. In the show, linguistic diversity becomes an extremely positive ability to listen and speak in multiple languages and codes. Thus, Claire, due to her bilingual household, learns Trollspeak easily, and Toby, due to his contact with other linguistic cultures, can listen in on secret codes. This everyday linguistic diversity stands opposite the institutional presence of Spanish within the high school setting, where the Spanish teacher is Señor Uhl, a thickly accented German immigrant. Rather than being represented as contained within an institutional setting (the language classroom

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parodied in the caricatured figure of Señor Uhl), Latinidad appears unquestioned, and in the quotidian landscape of Arcadia Oaks, solidified in political terms in the figure of Councilwoman Nuñez. Within an ecology of Latinx/Mexican-produced media, Trollhunters intervenes by conjuring the Othering dynamics of the monster through the trolls, while assembling new sociabilities whose inclusivity is grounded in an ethics of mutual care that rejects (self )sacrifice as a core defining component, depending instead on a multiplicity of bodies whose differences— in ethnic, linguistic, and corporeal terms— become markers of their membership in alternative communities. In conclusion, Trollhunters is a multimedial project emerging from the globalized Mexican director Guillermo del Toro whose reaches surpass those of the Netflix screen. Reworking the motifs of the chosen hero and the alliance with monsters, del Toro’s show begins to move toward assembling collective heroisms that shed their masculine-centered components and begin embracing an ethics of care marked by a reconfiguration of gender roles. Though subtle, these the various representations of Latinidad are connected with female characters in positions of power, serving as backdrop for the development of Claire as the strong female protagonist she becomes, creating a diverse set of role models that encompass both the human and troll worlds. With Claire becoming a core member of the team, her Latinidad is assembled with theirs, to the point of Jim learning Spanish fluently and singing to her. In this way, the characters demonstrate an embodied change that allows for their ethical reconfiguration into alternative social structures, what I have referred to as the process of growing sideways. It is not that they pass through stages of maturation in a teleologic process that leads to them being “prepared” to face adulthood but rather that they learn to grow sideways through forming horizontal relations of tutelage, support, and fraternization.12 Heroism is redefined as a gendered and collective enterprise, where the male roles are reconfigured to become interdependent, particularly on social members with an ethnic and linguistically diverse background. First in the greater Tales of Arcadia expanded universe franchise, the show thus opens the way for the representations of heroic Latinidad in everyday and quotidian encounters that make visible and centralize the changing political and social landscapes of contemporary society through the format of a children’s show.

Notes 1.

This DreamWorks media ecology is important due to the similarities of focalizing the story on a young protagonist who establishes an ethical relation of mutual collaboration with dragons and breaks with a tradition of violently rejecting monsters as Others and their exploitation.

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In this regard, Dona Kercher has signaled how the development of a love interest, foundational for the construction of an alternative sociability that rejects the authoritative and exploitative military-industrial complex of the secret agency, emphasizes “Hellboy’s maturation and growing sense of duty. Significantly, Mike Mignola, the creator of the Hellboy comics, points out that the love interest was purely del Toro’s idea and did not exist in his artistic vision” (304). That is, “‘growing sideways’ would likely be an extremely apt phrase for what recent cognitive science recognizes as the brain’s growth (throughout a person’s lifetime) through the brain’s capacity to make neural networks through connection and extension . . . [suggesting] that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts” (Stockton 11). In this sense, critics have signaled how del Toro’s production can be read as part of a global canon of New Queer Cinema, since “his work has what has been described as a ‘queer appeal’ because it challenges conventions of gender and sexuality . . . [producing] counter-discourse perspectives to heteronormative, straight narratives” (McDonald and Clark 8). While I am reluctant to canonize the director as a queer filmmaker, it is important to underline how his narratives, visual and textual, do present individual and collective subjectivities that run very much against the grain of late capitalist heteronormativity—his latest film, The Shape of Water, being a capstone of this direction. Especially in the films with child characters, del Toro’s cinema is characterized by the “eruption of fantasy and the supernatural into the realist framing narratives, a technique which serves to powerfully register the trauma the child encounters not only as painful and harrowing, but as an opportunity to access a rich deeper layer of meaning” (Balanzategui 76). In the series, San Bernardino gives way to Arcadia Oaks, referencing Arcadia, a city in the Los Angeles County area in the Southern California urban sprawl, but also simultaneously marking the space as fantastically connected to the mythical Arcadia, home of Pan and other nonhuman creatures. The migrant component of the trolls will be underlined in later episodes through subtle hints at their navigating immigration controls, escaping the police, and performing cheap labor. That is, “the fact that the Troll Market exists unseen within the heart of New York suggests that the ‘other’ is not separate or distant but essentially intrinsic and present, part of an ‘Unus Mundus’ in which easy Manichean polarities are far from stable” (McDonald and Clark 181). In Cronos, the message of the film “is that death in its right time should be accepted and welcomed, as seen paradoxically in the Latin inscription on the Cronos device, ‘suo tempore’ (‘everything at its right time’)” (Shaw 31). It is Jesús Gris’s final act of destroying the Cronos device, sacrificing his immortal and mortal life instead of feeding on his granddaughter, that culminates the film and provides closure. Similarly, in

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Hellboy II, it is Princess Nuala’s sacrificial suicide that impedes Prince Nuada from injuring Hellboy (their lives are magically intertwined, a motif that will later reappear in Trollhunters as a way to protect one of the antagonists, Strickler, from being injured). 9. In the greater universe of del Toro, Strickler first appears in Mimic (1997) as the name of the disease-killing children and culminates in Richard Strickland, the villain in the award-winning The Shape of Water (2018). This recurring name points toward del Toro’s preoccupation with representing evil close to home in the form of paradigmatic figures like doctors, family men, and high school teachers, with the ethical twist in Trollhunters that allows for Strickler to redeem himself through self-sacrifice, as explored through characters in the Hellboy franchise. 10. In this same vein, it is important to note how Jim stands up to Steve the bully on several occasions, not because he is being picked on but to defend other characters. In doing so, he embodies a character whose actions are not based on singular heroism but on collective and mutual care. 11. It is also interesting to note how the amulet is able to transport Jim to a space where the souls of the dead Trollhunters live on; in a certain way, they exist within the amulet itself and are thus in constant communication with Jim’s body. 12. Given the ongoing nature of the series and its spinoff projects, it is important to underline that these notes are preliminary and that further production might develop other insights.

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References

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Balanzategui, Jessica. “The Child Transformed by Monsters: The Monstrous Beauty of Childhood Trauma.” The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro: Critical Essays, edited by John W. Morehead, McFarland and Company, 2015, pp. 76– 92. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Kids Rule: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship. Duke University Press, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity Press, 2002. del Toro, Guillermo, and Daniel Kraus. Trollhunters. Hyperion, 2015. Kercher, Dona. Latin Hitchcock: How Almodóvar, Amenábar, de la Iglesia, del Toro and Campanella Became Notorious. Wallflower Press, 2015. McDonald, Keith, and Roger Clark. Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art. Bloomsbury, 2014. Podalsky, Laura. “Of Monstrous Masses and Hybrid Heroes: Del Toro’s English-Language Films.” The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, edited by Ann Davies et al., Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014, pp. 99– 120. Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia University Press, 2017. Shaw, Deborah. The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón. Manchester University Press, 2013. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press, 2009. Vargas Juan, Carlos. “Between Fantasy and Reality: The Child’s Vision and Fairy Tales in Guillermo del Toro’s Hispanic Trilogy.” The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, edited by Ann Davies et al., Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014, pp. 183– 98. Ward, Glenn. “‘There Is No Such Thing’: Del Toro’s Metafictional Monster Rally.” The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, edited by Ann Davies et al., Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014, pp. 11– 28.

West, Alexandra. “Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters and Children.” The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro: Critical Essays, edited by John W. Morehead, McFarland and Company, 2015, pp. 130– 46.

Filmography

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Cronos. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, October Films, 1993. DreamWorks Dragons. Created by Linda Teverbaugh and Mike Teverbaugh, DreamWorks Animation Television, 2012– 18. Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Universal Pictures, 2008. How to Train Your Dragon. Directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, DreamWorks Animation, 2010. Pan’s Labyrinth. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Warner Bros./Picturehouse, 2006. Stranger Things. Created by The Duffer Brothers, 21 Laps Entertainment/Monkey Massacre/Netflix, 2016– . Netflix. The Devil’s Backbone. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Sony Pictures Classics, 2001. The Shape of Water. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2017. Trollhunters. Created by Guillermo del Toro, DreamWorks Animation/Double Dare You, 2016– 18. Netflix.

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PART VII Twenty-First-Century Engenderings of Latinx Ciné

Chapter 22

LATINAS IN BIOGRAPHICAL FILM Analyzing the Cultivation of a Genealogy of Latina Feministas in the United States Valentina Montero Román

In Echo Park, Los Angeles, a mural called Stay Strong depicts the faces of Frida Kahlo, Dolores Huerta, and Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. The muralists behind the image wanted to produce something that would be “a source of pride in the community,” and in doing so their work participates in the practice of outlining a genealogy of Latina icons (Cole). Consistent with scholarship that has marked the elision of Latinas, and other marginalized people, from historical memory, the mural is a construction of public history that reflects popular desire for a more equitable register. Stay Strong is a frame for my analysis, one that demonstrates the import of the three biographical films I analyze and performs the representational politics I seek to unpack. In this chapter, I examine the biopics Selena (1997), Frida (2002), and Dolores (2017) in order to outline the ways their distinct visions of Latinidad and feminism create a genealogy of Latina feministas that demonstrates the shifting landscape of Latina feminism in the United States.1 Biographical films about Latinas reflect both the prominence of Latinidad as a consumer category and a desire for the kind of genealogical visibility that the Stay Strong mural enacts. As the mural suggests, Frida Kahlo, Dolores Huerta, and Selena Quintanilla-Pérez have all been recovered as examples of Latina excellence. Selena, Frida, and Dolores participate in a process of historical recovery that positions their Mexican and Mexican American protagonists as icons of Latina feminism.2 In analyzing these biopics, I unpack the conditions and aims that they articulate alongside their mobilization of different ideas about Latina feminism. I argue that Selena, Frida, and Dolores construct various constellations of Latinidad and feminism as a means for both representing and reflecting how Latinas negotiate sexism and racism in their daily lives. My work on biographical films extends the scholarship of Jillian Báez, who explores recent U.S. films to demonstrate the possibility of “a 427

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new, hybrid Latinidad feminista,” a category that acknowledges the complex and fluid ways in which Latinidad and feminism intertwine (“Towards” 109). The biopics I examine demonstrate that Latina feminism is not a unified field but a complicated space where contesting perspectives proliferate to reveal varied sociopolitical investments. Because of the way biographical films are interpolated into historical memory, the genre serves as a particularly rich space for thinking about the stakes of and strategies for diverse and equitable representation. Scholars of Latinx cultural production have questioned the efficacy of representation to create or reflect actual sociopolitical change. Arlene Dávila, for example, suggests the importance of remembering that there are “limits to equating visibility with political empowerment” (4). She argues that we need to be attentive to the fact that representation often erases the heterogeneity and diversity of Latinx communities (Dávila 4).3 At the same time, the field has also demonstrated the potential popular representations have for mobilizing and reshaping restrictive conceptualizations of Latinidad. Ellen McCracken contends that narrative representations of Latinas are “neither completely controlled by nor completely autonomous from hegemonic institutions,” and that because of this, they have the potential to shift the mainstream itself and to redefine the patterns into which they are circumscribed (13). Mary Beltrán has argued similarly, suggesting that we think critically about the interplay between media representation and sociopolitical status while still acknowledging the role media plays in shaping worldviews (2). And Báez has provided empirical evidence that media representations are often a gauge for Latina audiences to assess their status in the United States (In Search 3). Though Báez delineates the limitations of citizen consumerism, her work concretizes what other scholars have theorized: many Latinas see media representation as an indicator of belonging, respect, and recognition (In Search 3). The scarcity of Latinas acting in or producing popular films means that projects that center Latina protagonists, like biographical films, are critical areas of study.4 This chapter participates in a growing field of scholarship that interrogates the value of representation through an analysis of what we learn from the circulation, production, and reception of diversified media products. My interest in Latina feminism in biographical films is threefold. First, how have these films positioned their subjects as a part of a genealogy of Latina feminism? Second, what do we learn about the interplay between different conceptualizations of Latinidad and feminism when we look at how these three films were promoted, produced, or received? And third, to what ends might the cinematic and promotional strategies developed in the production of biographical films about Latinas be mobilized? That is, how might concentrating on the representation of Latinas in biographical cinema

provide strategies for navigating the complex and always political process of representing historically marginalized people in sociopolitically nuanced and productive ways?5

Traditionally, biographical cinema is described as a genre that takes the complicated, contradictory lived experience of historical people and turns their life story into a mythology that promotes a single biographical truth, one that often shuts down alternative histories and defines cultural norms that privilege particular ways of living in the world. George Custen defines a biopic as a film “which depicts the life of a historical person, past or present” (5). He argues that the historical significance of the genre is that it “shaped the public’s perception of issues and set the public agenda on topics both important and trivial” (4). Outlining the ways biopics participated in the marginalization of women and people of color, Custen suggests that these films “present[ed] a worldview that naturalize[d] certain lives and specific values over alternative ones,” and in the end “created [a nearly monochromatic] public history” (4). Though contemporary iterations of the biographical film often complicate the construction of what Dennis Bingham calls “Great (White) Man” history, scholars of the biographical film have noted a continued disparity in representation, suggesting that the genre’s defining features are not conducive to the representation of historically marginalized people. Bingham, for example, has asked if the “minority appropriation” of the “conventional mythologizing form” is even possible: “Can the classical, celebratory biopic be used against itself? Can it mythologize radical, revolutionary minority figures? Perhaps above all, should it?” (169– 70). He contends that feminist and other “minority” appropriations must actively work to undermine the sexist and racist conventions of the form or risk the fate of many women’s biopics that make manifest “culture’s difficulty with the very issue of women in the public sphere” (18) by “trapping them . . . in a cycle of failure, victimization, and the downward trajectory” (24– 25). The difficulty of subverting the generic conventions to satisfactorily reinvent the female or “minority” biopic is, for Bingham, the reason why “there are so few recent examples of such films” (10). Latinx media studies has demonstrated that at least one factor contributing to the lack of representation of Latinas in biographical films is the network of systemic challenges that Latinx people face in the production, circulation, and construction of Latinx stories. As Angharad Valdivia has pointed out, “Producers and artists do not have full agency. They must navigate a very turbulent mainstream” in which what needs to be addressed is

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Renarrating the Stakes of Latinas in Biographical Films

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not just representation “but also Latina/o producers and actors who seek a space of employment and creation as well as Latina/o audiences that want something different and/or better” (57– 58). The few Latina biopics that exist reflect these conditions and demonstrate how Latinx people negotiated difficult political and cultural environments. Latina feminist scholarship provides one way of understanding how Latina life stories can undermine arguments that suggest the inherently problematic nature of “mythologizing radical, revolutionary minority figures” in biographical film. Seminal figures in Chicana feminist thought, from Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga to Norma Alarcón, Alma García, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo, have produced scholarship that provides a different genealogical context for the mythologizing tendencies of biographical film. Their work theorizes mythological revision as a means for combatting stereotypes and allowing for a proliferation of borderlands identities. Explaining how women were subordinated in Chicanx culture, Anzaldúa writes that Chicanas have three mothers: “Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada (Malinche) to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people” (Borderlands 30– 31). García notes that part of the process of resisting the “cultural nationalism that indiscriminately equated Chicano cultural survival with the glorification of traditional gender roles for Chicanas was re-narrating the mythological figures that were central to visions of El Movimiento’s ‘Ideal Woman’” (5). In Chicana feminist thought, historical revision (through mythological intervention) is a means for interceding in and reflecting the diverse lived experiences of Latinas. Alarcón describes this process in her discussion of the woman interchangeably known as Malintzin, Malinche, and Marina. Malintzin is the “Aztec noble woman who was presented to Cortés upon landing” and who became a symbol for “the mother-whore, bearer of illegitimate children, responsible for the Spanish invasion” (“Chicanas” 182). Behind Malintzin’s “legend and subsequent mythic dimensions,” though, “there lies even now a woman who was once real” (Alarcón, “Chicanas” 182). The process of transforming Malintzin into a mythological figure required stripping her of “her historicity, her experience, her true flesh and blood” so that she could function as “a handy reference point” for “controlling, interpreting or visualizing women” (Alarcón, “Chicanas” 181). Malintzin and Cortés become more than historical figures because they cultivate a masculinist Chicanx mythology that is also “part and parcel of Mexican ideology— our living attitude” (Alarcón, “Traddutora” 65). The movement from historical reality to mythology naturalizes Chicanx belief systems in ways that mean that Chicanas themselves can “come to believe that indeed [their] very sexuality

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condemns [them] to . . . an enslavement which is subsequently manifested in self-hatred” (Alarcón, “Chicanas” 182). The revision of Chicanx mythology is thus crucial to the ability to alter diurnal experience. Alarcón tells us that Chicana feminists pushed back against a mythology created through a disembodiment and “unfleshing” of historical reality by putting “flesh back on the object” (Alarcón, “Chicanas” 182). Chicanas revise disembodied mythology by foregrounding the embodied, relational impact these stories have on lived experience. Through the renarrativization of mythological figures, Chicanas created space for “real women, neither saints nor whores” (Cisneros, House 164). Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes the obstacles to this kind of narrative revision: “No new/old voices [are] allowed once the histories of a conquering, ancient and modern, have been authorized and more or less carved into stone by the few for and about the many. . . . Dead is supposed to be dead and done is supposed to be done” (xi). However, as she points out, this is not the way stories work within Xicanismo. Historias (histories) and cuentos (stories) are spaces “to dream into” (xiv), not “the ideation of some . . . written down on a noneroding medium by the one or ten or one hundred— for and about the literally millions of souls on earth (without their commission or parity . . .)” (xi). The goal of revision is both to represent “a vast panorama of fissioning, severing, fusing and living” (xi) and to tell a story that is meant to lead people “back into the world of living in strength again” (xv). Mythologies and histories are not dead or done; they are narratives to live into, to retell, and to re-vision so that “those waiting to recognize themselves in the past and the present and the future, waiting to see the ways of their ancianos, their abuelos y abuelitas, their mamis and papis in serious and compelling works,” find not just a formidable past but a story to dream into, a way “forward to dignity, truth, and pride in one’s ways and heritages” (Estés xv). Biopics that push back against stereotypical representations of Latinas can be productively interpolated into a tradition that is not interested in a singular exceptional individual life or even a single, exceptional way of living life. Latina biopics are depictions of “fissioning, severing, fusing, and living,” a representation of multiple and diverse ways of being. They theorize mythological revision as a space through which alternative models of knowing and being in the world are made available for Latinas to live and dream into. In this chapter, I examine how biographical films make diverse ways of living available. In each of the subsequent sections, I outline how Frida, Selena, and Dolores develop varied conceptualizations of Latinidad and feminism, and I explore the affordances and limitations their visions of Latina feminism produce.6

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Why Frida? Mexican Authenticity and Liberal Feminism

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Although there were many people involved in the 2002 Miramax film Frida, it is Salma Hayek who claims the most responsibility for bringing it into being. Hayek played the lead role, secured the rights to Frida Kahlo’s art, shopped the script to multiple production companies, and fought for the film to come to fruition despite numerous and sometimes painful production setbacks. In interviews, Hayek returns repeatedly to three motivations for feeling passionately about Frida. She wanted to push back against the stereotypical roles that she faced as a Mexican woman in Hollywood; to offer an account of Mexico that subverted American ideas about her home country and its history; and to highlight the story of a woman who lived the life she wanted in the face of trauma and pain. In the production and promotion of the film, these aims combine to contribute to a liberal feminist ideology meant to cut across racial and ethnic difference. Frida produces a Latina feminist politics forged through Hayek’s experiences negotiating the intertwined systems of racism and sexism embedded in Latin American and U.S. media production. In interviews and press releases, Hayek relies on a narrative of liberal feminism that reflects her investment in altering stereotypical representations of Mexico and Mexicans. The film thus emerges out of what Isabel Molina-Guzmán calls Hayek’s commodity activism, a form of cultural intervention that works to change sociopolitical mores through experimentation in mainstream media (“Salma” 136). Molina-Guzmán identifies Hayek’s investment in an “authentic” Latinidad that reproduces “dominant norms that homogenize Latina/o identity as gendered, racialized, foreign, exotic, and consumable,” even as her “work as a producer and actor destabilizes dominant media discourses about Latinidad by demanding increased visibility, as well as more complex stories that symbolically rupture or potentially fragment the commodification of difference” (“Salma” 136). What I argue in this section is that part of the way Hayek does the work of creating “safe and consumable stories about Latina difference” (Molina-Guzmán, “Salma” 150) is through the cultivation of a pan-ethnic, cross-cultural, liberal feminist ethos on and off the screen. This approach, while opening up some representational opportunities, closes down others, succeeding precisely because it privileges “a Latina sexuality that is heteronormative; a Latina ethnicity that is universal; and a performance of racial identity that is not quite white but never black” (Molina-Guzmán, Dangerous 13– 14). While promoting Frida, Hayek explained that her commitment to the English-language film about Kahlo was an intervention in American media prejudice against Mexicans and a response to her own experiences of being

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typecast as a Latina sex object. In one interview, for example, she says that she wants to tell the story of a historical moment in which “sophisticated minds” gathered in Mexico (Fedder).7 In another, she cites the need for this kind of representation by describing her understanding of Hollywood’s conceptualizations of Mexicans: “Mexicans are gang members, on welfare with kids since they were 15, and they wear make-up and they’re tacky and cheesy” (MacNab). Positioning herself alongside her Mexican compatriots, Hayek says that Hollywood producers “think we’re uneducated and have no sense of style” (MacNab). Her arguments about a misrepresented Mexico are inextricable from the ways in which her “Mexican identity and accent often racialized her as working-class and nonwhite, [and] resulted in highly sexualized, one-dimensional ‘bikini girl’ roles” (Molina-Guzmán, “Salma” 145). An interview in The Independent describes pre-Frida Hayek as the “1990’s counterpart to the original ‘Mexican Spitfire,’ Lupe Velez” (MacNab), directly reflecting what Latinx media scholars have already documented: Latinas are often relegated to rigid archetypes like the “spitfire, the clown, and the dark lady” (Báez, “Towards” 113), or roles that otherwise highlight their “fertility, sexuality, domesticity, and subservience” (Molina-Guzmán, Dangerous 10). For Hayek, playing Frida Kahlo meant taking a distinctive step outside of restrictive narratives of Latina identity. By the time Hayek was considering the film, Kahlo had already been recovered as an icon of the Chicana movement, a key historical figure in the struggle against Mexican machismo, American patriarchal forces, and a discriminatory art world (Ankori 177– 78).8 Hayek positions Frida as a film that resists media norms in which “stories about the hyper-heterosexual Puerto Rican Jennifer Lopez are easier to tell and sell than those about queer Mexican artist Frida Kahlo” (MolinaGuzmán, Dangerous 13). Part of the way Hayek argues for the importance of this film, though, is by focusing less on Kahlo’s position within Mexican or Mexican American history than on her import as a universal feminist icon. Hayek’s descriptions of Kahlo dominate interview discourse and locate the film within the context of liberal feminist ideology. Amy Baehr describes liberal feminism as a movement that “conceives of freedom as personal autonomy— living a life of one’s own choosing— and political autonomy— being co-author of the conditions under which one lives.” Though Hayek rarely mentions feminism explicitly, she mobilizes language that aligns the film with color-blind, universal feminist ideals that focus on personal autonomy and empowerment.9 Describing her first experience with Kahlo’s work at age fourteen, Hayek says she thought it was “weird and bloody and ugly” (MacNab). Despite this, she insists that she could not get Kahlo’s work out of her head, and that, over time, Kahlo became one of her personal heroes because she had the courage to be unique (MacNab; Hayek). Hayek tells

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interviewers that “despite living in a historical moment that marked her behavior as deviant,” Kahlo “lived her life exactly as she wanted and never apologized” (Fedder). Amplifying Hayek’s sense of Kahlo, Julie Taymor, Frida’s director, describes how she came to be a part of the project by saying that Hayek sat on her couch for hours “passionately describ[ing] Frida’s bawdiness, her brilliance, her raunchiness, her foul mouth, her drinking habits, her cigarette smoking, her bisexuality” (Pfefferman). Taymor’s Kahlo, like Hayek’s, is a woman whose “essence is herself ” (Pfefferman). In part this language is indicative of the historical recovery of Kahlo as a figure who was noteworthy because of her “otherness” as “a marginalized, non-Western, communist, bisexual, physically handicapped woman of colour” (Ankori 178). However, it is also a reflection of Hayek and Taymor’s desire to foreground the film’s investment in a narrative of color-blind liberal feminism. Frida’s messaging mobilizes a language of universal women’s empowerment that provides cross-cultural appeal but concomitantly complicates the potential for exploring a feminism that is grounded in the specificity of Latina experience. Henry Puente, in his thorough market analysis of the 1997 biopic about Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, suggests that the film did not cross over to mainstream audiences because the “marketing campaign failed to resonate with mainstream moviegoers— especially Anglo girls” (120– 21). This was not an audience that Frida ignored. Across multiple platforms, the film’s promotion emphasized a sense of Frida Kahlo’s import as a historical feminist icon, a woman who knew how to hold her own and who was never a victim in her own life story. Alongside interviews by Taymor and Hayek, the trailer emphasized Frida Kahlo’s independence and strength of will. The trailer begins, for example, with Kahlo asking Diego Rivera to evaluate her art: “I didn’t come here for fun or to flirt. If I’m not good enough, I have to do something else to help my parents” (Miramax). While Frida is undoubtedly a film that is aspirational about representing Mexico and Mexican people, its insistence on marking Kahlo as an independent woman because she smokes and sleeps with men and women ultimately sacrifices an emphasis on Kahlo as a Mexican woman who smokes and has sex with men and women. Even as Hayek’s conceptualization of Latinidad is exclusionary, her understanding of feminism softens racial and ethnic difference as a means for highlighting a universal claim about women’s empowerment across difference. Frida stands as evidence of how one Latina— Salma Hayek— fought to create a biographical film that would tell the story of an exceptional Latina and also forge a path “forward to dignity, truth, and pride in one’s ways and heritages” (Estés xv). Though the Latina feminism of Frida focuses almost entirely on palatable representations of racial and ethnic difference and not politically divisive realities, the film’s production history demonstrates

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Hayek’s genuine investment in the narrative of empowerment she ascribes to Kahlo. Comparing Hayek’s language in promotional interviews to her articulations of her own feminism in other contexts demonstrates a compelling resonance. Speaking with The Guardian about Frida, Hayek urges her interlocutor to look at a photo taken when Kahlo is bedridden: “When she had the most severe pain— look at her nails. Look how she decorates herself! I’m sorry— that’s not a victim/martyr kind of a character” (Jones). Hayek emphasizes that Kahlo was not “a depressive, obscure person” but a woman who was “absolutely unconventional” and who painted her paintings without caring whether anyone liked them (Jones). Hayek’s description of Kahlo as a woman who makes the decision to thrive despite difficult circumstances matches the language she uses when she articulates how she herself overcame discrimination. In a discussion of the typecasting she faced early on in her career, Hayek said, “I used to whine and complain about it. And then I said, no more, I was done sitting around and complaining that I am the victim of a society that doesn’t like my accent because it reminds them of their service people” (Molina-Guzmán, Dangerous 94). Moreover, in 2017, at a luncheon for women in film at the Sundance Film Festival, Hayek addressed a group of racially and ethnically diverse women with a similar sentiment, saying that there needed to be more women in film but that they needed to be careful not to fall into victimization (Kaufman). She argued that women needed to be “curious about [their] brains. By being the best that [they could] be” and not letting external perspectives determine what they could or could not do (Kaufman). At Sundance, Hayek’s belief in a world where women simply need to find their core identities and seize their essential selves in order to find equity did not go unchallenged. Jessica Williams, an African American actress and comedian, responded to Hayek’s comments by suggesting that there are structural and systemic challenges that might limit the efficacy of Hayek’s advice. Hayek insisted that this kind of thinking was precisely “the trap” of selfvictimization, urging Williams to look deeper to find out who she was when she was “not black” and “not a woman” (Kaufman). Working to highlight the problems of a feminist orientation that suggests that hard work and brains can help women succeed regardless of their race, sexuality, class, ability, or nationality, Williams pointed out that some days she is “just black” and “just a woman” (Kaufman). Even when she clarified that “maybe [black women and trans women] have it a little bit harder in this country” just because of how they look (Kaufman), Hayek failed to engage with Williams’s concerns about the limitations of a color-blind feminist ideology. Hayek’s production of Frida reflects a message of liberal feminist empowerment that Hayek uses to ground her own sense of self and agency as a

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Mexican American citizen of the United States and a commodity activist. But the production history of Frida ends up suggesting precisely the challenge of pretending that sexism and racism can be willed away. On December 12, 2017, fifteen years after Frida premiered to box office success and award recognition, Hayek published a record of the sexual harassment she endured during the production of the film. Writing about her experiences in The New York Times, she says that “one of the forces that gave [her] the determination to pursue [her] career was the story of Frida Kahlo, who in the golden age of Mexican muralists would do small intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism” (Hayek). Hayek’s greatest ambition, she says, was to tell Kahlo’s story, to “portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show [her] native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes.” When Harvey Weinstein, who Hayek describes as “the wizard of a new wave of cinema that took original content into the mainstream,” agreed to take a chance on Frida, she was ecstatic. But the fallout was intense. She writes of repeatedly having to avoid unexpected sexual harassment when he would request a shower, a massage, oral sex, or nudity and then rage when she refused. Moreover, she details the ways in which Weinstein sought to sink her film after she did not comply with his sexual requests: threatening to replace her as the lead, demanding an unpaid rewrite of the script, requiring that she raise $10 million to finance the film, finding an A-list director on a tight deadline, casting a number of prominent actors in other roles to balance out what he saw as her lack of star power, and refusing a theatrical release, to name a few.10 The moment Hayek describes as the most traumatic is Weinstein’s insistence that she film a full-frontal nudity sex scene with another woman because Frida was not sexy enough. Hayek writes, “In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.” Hayek’s opinion piece is hard to read. It stands both as a part of the #MeToo movement that has made public the overwhelming need to address sexual harassment and as a reason for reconsidering Hayek’s commodity activism. The reports of Weinstein’s behavior have highlighted that he abused his position of power in the cinematic community. According to those reports, his actions toward women varied depending on how connected they were, capitalizing on how little relative influence his targets had. Hayek notes this in her essay, saying that she wonders, now, if it was her friendship with other prominent Hollywood figures like Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney that stopped Weinstein from pushing her further. Mobilizing her experiences with Weinstein to argue for a more equitable future, she asks her readers: “Why do so many of us, female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dig-

nity?” Passionately, she insists that “until there is equity in our industry, with men and women having the same value in every aspect of it, our community will continue to be a fertile ground for predators” (Hayek). Hayek’s essay thus addresses some of the unequal power dynamics of media production that she struggled to acknowledge in her discussion with Williams at Sundance, though her comments still foreground gender rather than racial equity. Ideally, liberal feminism means not just deciding to live a life of one’s own choosing but being able to politically, economically, and interpersonally pursue that life. Hayek sees herself as an activist, and her investment in Frida speaks to her commitment to a variety of feminism that allows her to intervene in the commodity consumerism surrounding Latinidad. In her debate with fellow luncheon attendees at Sundance, she said, “I’m Mexican and Arab. I’m from another generation . . . when this was not even a possibility. My generation, they said, ‘Go back to Mexico. You’ll never be anything other than a maid in this country.’ By the heads of studios!” (Kaufman). Her emphasis on her success despite her experiences and her racialized identity suggests her belief that you can “get beyond” stereotypes and structural boundaries if you really want to. Frida was Hayek’s mythological re-vision, a film in which she put her flesh on the object and hoped the story would inspire others to choose the narrative of self-empowerment to which she clearly ascribes. But Frida’s production history stands as a testament to the ways that making that choice rarely goes unchallenged. Even as the film and Hayek’s activism open up imaginative space for the representation of Latinas outside of simple dichotomies, they also exist as a reminder of the sexism and racism of the film’s production and of a politics of media representation that minimizes the multiplicity of transgressive or complicated Latina subjects.

As a film, Frida demonstrates Salma Hayek’s investment in a narrative of feminist self-reliance, one that overwrites systemic and structural inequality and develops at the expense of a representation of Frida Kahlo’s divergent political investments. The debates that emerged when Hayek defended her feminist position at the Sundance Film Festival demonstrate a diversity of feminist beliefs. They suggest the importance of recognizing the fact that feminist acts are negotiations of diurnal experience that manifest alongside issues of racial and ethnic difference, economic disparity, gender identity, and sexual orientation.11 In a genealogy of Latina feminism, those intersections matter, and the other two biopics about Latinas that I address here, Selena and Dolores, confront the intersections of Latinidad and feminism more explicitly. Though both center heterosexual, Mexican American women, the

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Why Selena? Representing Nepantla in the U.S. Mainstream

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promotional materials and the films themselves focus less on an individual narrative of self-reliance than on what these women meant to a community of diverse Latinx people. Looking at the reception and promotional narratives surrounding the drama biopic Selena reveals a conceptualization of feminism that is engaged with the heterogeneous complexity of Latinidad. Though the film does not explicitly engage with Selena Quintanilla-Pérez as a feminist, its role in what Deborah Paredez calls “collective mourning” and “cultural memory” suggests how the biopic creates space for diverse conceptualizations of Latinidad and feminism. Articles about the 1997 biopic detailing the life of Tejana music star Selena often note that her family refused many of the producers who approached them with ideas for a film.12 It was not until Mexican American producer Moctesuma Esparza proposed a partnership in which the family would have final approval of the script, cast, writer, and director that the family agreed (Valdez). An article by Vanessa Erazo highlights Esparza’s commitment to a project that focused on a family and a life full of promise rather than the tragic murder of an individual star. This format is narrated as a part of Esparza’s desire to break “with Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Latinos” and depict “the story of the Quintanilla family [as] the story of the American dream, of people who confronted racism with determination and reached success on their own terms” (Erazo “20”). Esparza positioned Selena’s biopic as a part of a recovery project not just for Mexican Americans but for a broader community of Latinxs. Furthermore, the film itself mirrors this investment, both in its all-star Latinx cast and production team and in its emphasis on how Selena transformed “from a regional Tejana into a transnational Latina star” (Paredez 48). The project of representing a shared Latinx experience through the depiction of a family fighting for “the American dream” pushed back against mainstream conceptualizations of Latinxs, but it did so by reifying traditional family and gender roles. As Báez points out, even though the biopic centers a second-generation, working-class, English-dominant Latina with a body “that defies Anglo beauty standards,” it also presents her as a part of an all-American “traditional, patriarchal family structure” with “both married parents” and “her father functioning as the dominating figure” (“Towards” 114). The film works hard to negotiate a virgin/whore dichotomy by marking the “overt sexuality” of Selena’s stage persona as a reflection of the commodification of the “hot tamale” Latina in the music industry, and by representing Selena as virginal and submissive to her father and husband in her private life (“Towards” 115).13 Alongside the film’s positioning of Selena within her family and marriage, though, it develops a distinct conceptualization of Latina feminism. In Selena, liberal feminist messaging is folded into a narrative of

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the Latinx American dream. At one point in the film, for example, Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, tells his daughter, “You gotta be who you are,” but, pointing to her heart, he emphasizes that who she is is in part defined by being both American and Mexican. Selena suggests a conceptualization of empowerment grounded in being Mexican American and embracing a borderlands corazón (heart). These details mark the interpolation of a liberal feminist language of selfknowledge and agentive identity formation into a construction of Latinidad, one that resonated with Latina viewers and that was a part of the origin story of the film. In her writing about Esparza’s reasons for committing to a Selena biopic, Erazo emphasizes that it was Esparza’s daughter, Tonantzin, who encouraged him to approach the Quintanilla family. She asked him to make the film because she wanted a producer who “would have the right sensibility to tell [Selena’s] story correctly,” to make it “a celebration” and not a cooptation (Erazo, “Anything”). Giving him CDs to listen to and documentaries to watch, Tonantzin emphasized what Selena as a performer meant to young, bicultural Latinas like herself: “I kept telling him, ‘Look how much she influenced me. She was like a role model for me, [look at] what she represents’” (Erazo, “Anything”). Tonantzin’s investment in the film was in making sure that Selena was remembered not just for her success as a singer but as a Latina who inspired others through her own navigation of the prejudice and sexism of the Tejano and North American music world. The film’s foregrounding of Selena’s Tejana and Latina identities draws attention to Selena’s negotiation of the challenges and creative opportunities of a transcultural, borderlands identity. Selena’s depiction of a Latina American dream demonstrates what Anzaldúa discusses as nepantla, the “unarticulated dimensions of the experience of mestizas living in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic locations” (Interviews 176). Depicting Selena’s Pan-Latinx music, racialized body, and maintenance of working-class Tejana identity created space for moments of communal remembrance that were also opportunities for a renarrativization of Latina identity (Paredez 128). In her monograph, Paredez documents the diverse responses to Selena as a performer, noting, for example, that in acts of collective mourning/celebration, twenty-four thousand women auditioned to play Selena and made manifest not their desire to “be” Selena but their desire to assert “what she meant to [them]” (153). These Latinas enacted “a creative embodied practice through which” they “strove momentarily to move beyond the restrictive choreography of their daily lives” (Paredez 149).14 Though Selena may depict a character who is not as complex as her historical counterpart, in highlighting the “painful, messy, confusing, and chaotic” aspects of nepantla, it is a film that demonstrates the cultivation of a

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Latina feminism where it is possible to “disidentify with existing beliefs, social structures, and models of identity [and] by doing so . . . to transform these existing conditions” (Keating, “From Borderlands” 10). Selena was a part of a project of historical memorialization that demonstrated the movement from her lived experience to her mythological potential. Increasing the visibility of a successful woman whose strength came from her Tejana/Latina identity created a story to “dream into,” one that made room for a proliferation of narrative possibilities for Latina subject formation.

Why Dolores? Autohistoria-Teoría and the Pursuit of Conocimiento

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The examples of Selena and Frida demonstrate the importance of considering what Frederick Luis Aldama has described as various degrees “of willfulness” in the ways that a creator (or creators) reframes, using their imagination and artistic tools, “real Latino subjects and experiences” in order to “redirect audience’s perspectives on that object— and therefore on reality as lived by Latinos” (12). Aldama’s comment addresses the representation of Latinxs in general, but the same analytic is helpful in thinking through engagement with Latina feminism. Some films will have a greater investment in representing issues of Latinidad and feminism than others, and Dolores is a film, from the outset, that foregrounds its commitment to understanding those intersections. In the press kit for the 2017 documentary biopic Dolores, director and producer Peter Bratt asks a question that sits at the heart of the film: “Who decides what history is? Who decides what stories are told and who gets to tell them?” Co-produced with Carlos Santana and Brian Benson, Dolores is framed as the story of how and why Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of United Farm Workers (UFW) and a formidable civil rights organizer, has been written out of the historical record. Though it markets unprecedented access to Huerta’s personal life, including “the raw, personal stakes involved in committing one’s life to social change,” the press kit foregrounds the fact that it is interested in how Huerta was left out of history. The synopsis tells us that

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like so many powerful female advocates, Dolores and her sweeping reforms were—and still are–largely overlooked. Even as she empowered a generation of immigrants to stand up for their rights, her own relentless work ethic was constantly under attack. False accusations from foes and friends alike, of child neglect and immoral behavior from a woman who married three times and raised 11 children, didn’t dampen her passion or deter

This film description focuses on the ways sexism functioned both as a historical reality that Huerta navigated to effect positive change in her community and as the means through which her historical impact was effaced. Negotiating the ostracism of Anglo and Mexican American communities, Huerta’s influence was curtailed by the machismo of the UFW just as much as by the Texas State Board of Education decision to remove her from its educational curriculum. Instead of spending time working to prove that Huerta is an important figure in history, Dolores directs our attention to the events and systems that erased her impact. In this way it demonstrates how crucial that history is for understanding her feminist activism. Santana sought out Peter Bratt because he wanted to make a documentary about Huerta that was both a historical corrective and an opportunity to learn from Huerta’s way of life. While the film’s synopsis foregrounds the challenges Huerta faced as a woman and an activist, the film itself focuses on the ways her feminism is inextricable from an understanding of Latinx activism as multifaceted, relational, and inclusive. Dolores identifies Huerta’s understanding of Latinx identification as being similar to that of David Román: a “politically efficacious” space in which “people from quite distinct cultural backgrounds and ideological positions meet and organize under the label Latina/o in order to register an oppositional stance to majoritarian institutions” (152). The film suggests that Huerta’s experiences as a Latina ground her activist approach. Moreover, it demonstrates that Huerta’s work with the UFW is the means through which she discovers feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmental activism. When Huerta mobilizes for sociopolitical change, she does so by working with various communities to identify shared goals. Bratt describes Dolores’s coalitional politics as an organizing principle of the film, saying, “It’s no mistake that this woman of color stands at the intersection of social justice, labor and gender equality, and environmental justice. . . . You hear a lot of talk today about intersectionality, but Dolores has been living that for decades, bringing together people of different backgrounds for one cause” (Garcia).15 In Dolores, intersectionality is not a simply a label but a description of how Huerta moved through the world developing her activist aims and pursuing legal and political change. The portion of the film dedicated to the national boycott of California table grapes makes this clear. Showing the ways Huerta’s attention to gender equity increases after meeting Gloria Steinem in New York City, the film also emphasizes the reciprocity of that interaction. In her interview, Steinem says that she “would not have been able

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her from her personal mission. She remains as steadfast in her fight as ever at the age of 87. (Dolores Press Kit 2017)

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to see what’s hidden in the fields of our country without Dolores” (Dolores).16 Steinem did not understand labor rights until meeting Huerta. Dolores positions Huerta’s activism as a model for how to see personal interaction as central to political commitment. Even more so than with Selena, the story of Dolores is the story of what she meant to other people, and what other people meant to her. Bratt argued that the only way to remedy the historical elision of Huerta’s impact was to allow her to tell her own story: “Directly, calmly. Her voice. Her life. Her words” (Dolores Press Kit). What happens, though, because the film is constructed as a mix of archival materials and interviews, is that the story Dolores tells “in her own” voice ends up being polyvocal in a way that reflects the film’s focus on the personal as relational and political. Intertwining clips of the contemporary Huerta with the voice of her archived interviews, the film embeds Huerta’s articulations within a series of interviews with people she has impacted and interacted with. Though Bratt’s insistence that this is Huerta’s story told in her own voice might at first seem to stand in tension with the way in which the film is dominated by the voices of others, the polyvocality of the film illustrates the grassroots democracy so central to Huerta’s life. Huerta’s political orientation is grounded in an understanding that long-lasting change comes from teaching people that they can find personal power through community cooperation and shared responsibility. Her activist platform is a reflection of her own experiences learning how to organize and grow with the people and the communities around her. Dolores’s strength is its ability to mirror Huerta’s investment in understanding the story of an exceptional individual as the story of someone for whom the personal is always relational. In press interviews for the film, Bratt describes his passion for the project in a way that lines up with Estés’s understanding of revisionist Latina history. Bratt argues that Dolores has import for a broad American public and also for his children, particularly his daughter (Garcia), because Huerta’s story is one that has the potential to allow people to dream themselves into activist acts. Bratt narrates his mixed-race Latino-indigenous heritage as central to this understanding of historical intervention. Positioning himself as the nephew of farmworkers and “the son of a single Peruvian Indian mother who marched with Dolores and celebrated labor leader Cesar Chavez back in the early 70’s” (Dolores Press Kit), Bratt notes how crucial it is to produce stories that alter “who controls our collective narrative and which stories get told” (Phillips). He says that the film aims to help people see Huerta’s “story as part of their own, one that . . . connects to and informs where we find ourselves today” (Dolores Press Kit). Dolores demonstrates that biographical delineation can function as what Anzaldúa describes as “autohistoria-teoría,” a personal history that is also

theory.17 Anzaldúa argues that autobiography can and should be understood as a means for theorizing and instigating public action. The aim of autohistoria-teoría is to transform “personal life into a narrative with mythological or archetypal threads” where the focus is on a lived, embodied, and recursive experience of knowledge production (Keating, “Editor’s Introduction” xxvii). Autohistoria-teoría highlights the stakes of biographical representation, encouraging what Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, a specific experience of knowing that “is profoundly relational and enables those who enact it to make connections among apparently disparate events, people, experiences, and realities. These connections, in turn, lead to action” (Keating, “Editor’s Introduction” xxvii). In this context, the feminism of Dolores is most powerfully enacted through its representation of the network of people, all working for different aims, that speak to how Huerta’s activism and life helped them grow as organizers and activists, educators and mentors. In Dolores, Huerta is represented as a Latina activist who is working towards a Latinx feminist politics, a collaborative model for feminist mobilization that aims to address disparate structural and systemic oppressions. Bratt described Huerta as a reluctant subject who wanted the film to be “organizing 101” (Phillips). He believed “that the organizing would be transmitted through her personal story” (Phillips). Dolores is a testament to the ways Huerta’s personal story of development and activism manifest as a methodology for coalitional potential. It is a film that takes Huerta’s lived experience and shapes it into a mythology that is both (auto)biography and theory, encouraging audiences to “put flesh on the bones” and to use her story as theory, inspiration, and methodology.

Conclusions

I’m an aim-well, shoot-sharp, sharp-tongued, sharp-thinking, fast-speaking, foot-loose, loose-tongued,

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In Sandra Cisneros’s poem “Loose Woman,” the speaker asserts, “I am the woman of myth and bullshit. / (True, I authored some of it)” (Loose 113). She claims that myth and bullshit are the weapons she has for attacking as a “shoot-sharp, sharp-tongued” woman and the tools she uses to protect herself: “I built my house of ill repute. / Brick by brick. Labored, / loved and masoned it” (113). Transforming critiques into sources of strength, she states,

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let-loose, woman-on-the-loose, loose woman. Beware, honey. I’m a Bitch. Beast. Macha. ¡Wachale! Ping! Ping! Ping! I break things. (Cisneros, Loose 115) Her poem demonstrates what Norma Alarcón argues— that “changes [to mythologies] wreak havoc on the perceived ‘authenticity’” of mythological narratives (“Traddutora” 73).18 As each Latina revises stereotypes and mythologies, she invests in an adaptation that reflects her own self-exploration, self-definition, and self-invention and undermines the stability of authenticity. Biopics about Latinas are revisions to the process of mythmaking and myth-breaking central to the genre. They focus not just on a singular truth but on multiple ways of living. Each individual project reflects the politics of those most invested in the story as well as the politics of production, but it also stands as a testament to how media representations negotiate the complex and sometimes divisive politics of Latinidad and feminism. Anzaldúa reminds us that we “have to accept that there may be no solutions, resolutions, or even agreement ever” because “irresolution and disagreement may be more common in life than resolutions and agreements” (“Bridge” 152). There is no unified Latina or Latinx feminism, and maybe what we learn in an analysis of these films is that we ought to embrace their dissonance as a reflection of the disparate strategies Latinas deploy. We can, and should, debate their efficacy and note their limitations, but we must also acknowledge the necessity of a proliferation of discordant representations of what it means to be a Latina and a feminist. What we need is to see the Stay Strong mural as just the beginning of a revision of history that calls us to dream ourselves into it.

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Notes

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Though all of these films depict the lives of Mexican (Frida) or Mexican American (Selena and Dolores) women, they all present their titular figures as consequential for a discussion of Latina experience. That is, these films position Frida Kahlo, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, and Dolores Huerta as examples of and/or inspirations for women navigating the specific racial politics of Latinidad in the United States. These biopics thus outline a representational landscape in which Mexican American experiences are interpolated into broader discussions of Latinidad. Throughout this chapter, I use

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“Latina” when discussing issues or debates that pertain to a broader community of women of Latin American descent and “Chicana” when the scholarship, example, or concept is specific to that history. Though there is no space to elaborate on this here, it is worth thinking critically about why all of these Latina biopics use first names for their titles, as this practice is much less common in films with male protagonists. Linguist Deborah Cameron has pointed out that “many subordinated groups— including women, Black people, and working-class people—have a long history of being addressed with familiar terms; not as a token of friendship or positive regard, but as a mark of contempt for their ‘inferior’ status” (“Familiarity”). Cameron tells us that we need to be attentive to equity when we think about whether informal address is reifying sexist hierarchies rather than indicating intimacy or solidarity (“Mind”). Dávila’s work is a part of more widespread scholarly attention to the limitations and potential dangers of representational equity. Scholars like Sarah Ahmed, Roderick Ferguson, and Jodi Melamed have written powerful critiques of the ways that representational equity might in some ways preserve the systems of structural inequality that allow minoritization to function. The 2017 publication on inequality in popular films by the University of Southern California Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative found that there are still large disparities between male and female leads in popular films, and that female leads rarely go to actors from historically marginalized racial or ethnic groups (Smith et al.). In this chapter, I focus on biopics that represent Latinas in order to analyze how biographical films depict gendered experiences of Latinidad. Though there are a number of biopics— like Che (2008), La Bamba (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), American Me (1992), Cesar Chavez (2014), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and Before Night Falls (2000)— that have Latinx protagonists, I have chosen to focus on films that explore how sexism and racism play out in the lives of Latinx people by centering Latina life stories. Throughout this chapter, I refer to both Latinx and Latina feminism. There is, of course, a great deal of overlap between the two, but I use the term “Latina” when I am discussing texts that are focused predominantly on women. In this chapter, I build on work by Angharad Valdivia and Isabel Molina-Guzmán that argues both that “Latinidad [is] a social construct shaped by external forces, such as census, marketing, advertising, news, and popular culture,” and that “the signifiers of Latinidad are equally central to how people who identify as Latina/o stake claim to social, cultural, and political visibility” (“Salma” 136). Molina-Guzmán cites another interview in which Hayek said something similar: “As an actor, I would like to be able to have a voice in order to talk about what interests me. [Frida] is a conviction, an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary story. It was worth telling this story, which develops during a Mexican era in which my country was a very interesting place. Actually, it still is, but this is a part of Mexico that

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few people know about. So I was very passionate about telling the story of the heroes that I grew up with. I wanted the world to know that” (Dangerous 95). Ankori quotes one of Kahlo’s biographers, Martha Zamora, as suggesting that Kahlo wanted to “to invent her own biography, to plot her own myth and legend” (17). For more on the ways that Frida Kahlo positioned herself as an artist and a mythmaker, see Ankori. Báez discusses liberal feminism in her essay on Latinidad and feminism, but her focus is on professional and educational opportunities (“Towards” 111). Here, I shift attention to aspects of liberal feminist messaging that emphasize a decision to live a life of one’s own choosing. Hayek’s list explains a number of the idiosyncrasies that reporters noted in early reviews of the film. Things like Taymor’s quick attachment to the film, Edward Norton’s uncredited rewrite of the script, and Frida Kahlo’s somewhat superfluous sex scene with Josephine Baker were all cited as surprises in ways that take on new meaning in light of Hayek’s description of Weinstein’s harassment. Though the equitable opportunities for and representation of differently abled people also deserve to be considered within this conversation, they did not factor into the Sundance debate in the way that issues of sexuality, gender identity, and race/ethnicity did. As I noted earlier, I believe it is important to think critically about the reasons these films all have first name titles. Having said that, Selena is the one place where that decision makes the most sense. Like Madonna, Selena is a performer who chose to present herself using her first name. For this reason, this is the only section of analysis where I do not refer to the biographical subject by using their last name. Báez notes that Selena, “the performer/celebrity, can be considered a subversive figure that crosses borders of gender, race (especially as india and/or morena), class and sexuality” but that “as a character in the film she is not represented as this dynamic” (“Towards” 115). Paredez also delineates the “queer contours of Selenidad” (157), where Selena impersonation becomes a means for asserting “Latina/o queer presence and survival amid the ravages of suffering— at the hands of racism, poverty, or AIDS— that often mark queer Latina/o lives” (185). Her chapter “‘Como la Flor’ Reprised: Queer Selenidad” suggests that the transformation of Selena, the historical figure, into Selena, an icon of Latinidad, created opportunities for diverse Latinx participation. Indeed, Bratt’s biggest disappointment with the film was his inability to include more evidence of Huerta’s decades-long work for LGBTQ rights “because the fierce homophobia in Latino communities” marks it as an important intervention (Phillips). Huerta, in interviews and in the film, is open about how she has grown as an activist and as a person. For example, in one interview she describes how she has changed because of her interaction with other activist communities by speaking of her early experiences traveling with Cesar Chavez: “César said we had to agree about who

would be the spokesperson, and he thought he should do it. I just said ‘okay,’ but today, I would say that we should take turns” (Garcia). Without rancor, Huerta says, “It’s funny how you change” (Garcia). 17. Santana has suggested that this may be a part of what made the film difficult to produce. He told Billboard, “We tried to take it to everybody. Most people wouldn’t touch it: HBO, Netflix, Telemundo. My answer to that is that they are afraid of her light. It is too strong” (Aguila). 18. Alarcón clarifies this statement by saying that in rewriting the myth of Malintzin, each writer “privileges a different aspect of Malintzin’s ‘lives’— that is, the alleged historical experience and/or the inherited imaginary or ideological one” (“Traddutora” 73).

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012. Aguila, Justino. “Carlos Santana Says Dolores Huerta Film Will Inspire ‘Sisters of All Ages.’ ” Billboard, Mar. 26, 2018, www.billboard.com/articles/columns/latin/8262164/carlos-santana-dolores -huerta-film-interview. Alarcón, Norma. “Chicanas Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, SUNY Press, 2015, pp. 182–91. Alarcón, Norma. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division, special issue of Cultural Critique, vol. 13, Autumn 1989, pp. 57–87. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Multimediated Latinos in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction.” Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1–34. Ankori, Gannit. Frida Kahlo. Reaktion Books, 2013. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island: Lesbians-of-Color Hacienda Alianzas.” The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, edited by AnaLouise Keating, Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 140–56. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Interviews/Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating, Routledge, 2000. Baehr, Amy, “Liberal Feminism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sept. 30, 2013, plato.stanford .edu/entries/feminism-liberal/. Accessed June 5, 2018. Báez, Jillian M. In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship. University of Illinois Press, 2018. Báez, Jillian M. “Towards a Latinidad Feminista: The Multiplicities of Latinidad and Feminism in Contemporary Cinema.” Popular Communication, vol. 5, no. 2, Dec. 5, 2007, pp. 109–28. Beltrán, Mary C. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. University of Illinois Press, 2009. Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. Rutgers University Press, 2010. Cameron, Deborah. “Familiarity and Contempt.” language: a feminist guide, Aug. 22, 2016, debuk .wordpress.com/2016/08/22/familiarity-and-contempt/. Accessed June 10, 2018. Cameron, Deborah. “Mind the Respect Gap.” language: a feminist guide, Nov. 26, 2017, debuk.word press.com/2017/11/26/mind-the-respect-gap/. Accessed June 10, 2018. Cisneros, Sandra. A House of My Own: Stories from My Life. Knopf, 2015. Cisneros, Sandra. Loose Woman: Poems. Knopf, 2001. Cole, Randall. “Stay Strong.” Scene from the Sidewalk, Aug. 4, 2016, scenefromthesidewalk.tumblr .com/post/148446494421/august-4-2016-stay-strong-hengone-and-la-steez. Accessed June 5, 2018. Custen, George. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. Rutgers University Press, 1992.

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References

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Dávila, Arlene M. “Introduction.” Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, edited by Arlene M. Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero. New York University Press, 2014, pp. 1– 21. Dolores Press Kit. 2017. Retrieved from www.doloresthemovie.com. Accessed Feb. 4, 2019. Erazo, Vanessa. “The 20-Year-Old Biopic on Tejana Star Selena Almost Didn’t Happen.” PRI’s The World, Mar. 25 2017, https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-03-25/20-year-old-biopic-tejana-star -selena-almost-didnt-happen. Erazo, Vanessa. “Anything for Selenas: How a Teenage Fan Convinced Her Dad to Make the Selena Movie.” Remezcla, remezcla .com/features/film/teenage-fan-convinced-her-dad-to-make-the -selena-movie/. Accessed June 5, 2018. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Foreword. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, by Ana Castillo, University of New Mexico Press, 2014, pp. xi– xvii. Fedder, Rachel. “Frida Interview.” YouTube, uploaded by Hollywood Archive “Meet the Stars,” May 1, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UoyihK8YOQ. Ferguson, Roderick. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. García, Alma. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Taylor and Francis, 2014. Garcia, Maria. “Civil Rights Icon Dolores Huerta & Filmmaker Peter Bratt Discuss New Doc ‘Dolores.’” Biography, Aug. 26, 2017, www.biography.com/news/dolores-huerta-documentary-interview. Accessed June 5, 2018. Hayek, Salma. “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.” The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2017, nyti.ms /2nXntXL. Jones, Jonathan. “Salma Hayek on Why Frida Kahlo Was a Great Artist.” The Guardian, Feb. 13, 2003, www.theguardian.com/film/2003/feb/14/artsfeatures1. Kaufman, Amy. “Celebration of Women Filmmakers Triggers Heated Debate Among Salma Hayek, Jessica Williams and Shirley MacLaine.” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 2017, latimes.com/entertainment /movies/la-et-mn-female-filmmakers-lunch-race-debate-20170128-story.html. Keating, AnaLouise. “Editor’s Introduction: Re-envisioning Coyolxauhqui, Decolonizing Reality: Anzaldúa’s Twenty-First-Century Imperative.” Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, by Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Edited by Ana Louise Keating, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. ix– xxxvii. Keating, AnaLouise. “From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas and Nepantleras: Anzaldúan Theories for Social Change.” Re-Membering Anzaldúa: Human Rights, Borderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social Theory: Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global Transformations, special issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 5– 16. MacNab, Geoffrey. “Salma Hayek Gets Serious.” The Independent, Feb. 24, 2003, www.independent .co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/salma-hayek-gets-serious-120255.html. McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. University of Arizona Press, 1999. Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Miramax. “Frida Official Trailer.” YouTube, Dec. 11, 2014, youtu.be/-CTM7FcY1LE. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. New York University Press, 2010. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. “Salma Hayek’s Celebrity Activism.” Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, New York University Press, 2012, pp. 134– 53. Paredez, Deborah. Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Duke University Press, 2009. Pfefferman, Naomi. “A Conversation with Julie Taymor about Her Film Frida.” Interfaith Family, www.interfaithfamily.com/arts_and_entertainment/popular_culture/a_conversation_with_julie _taymor_about_her_film_frida/. Accessed June 5. 2018. Phillips, Craig. “Peter Bratt Feels the Calling to Tell Dolores Huerta’s Story.” Independent Lens, Mar. 13, 2018, www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/peter-bratt-feels-the-calling-to-tell-dolores -huertas-story/.

Puente, Henry. The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films. Peter Lang Publishing, 2011. Román, David. “Latino Performance and Identity.” Aztlán, vol. 22, no. 2, Fall 1997, pp. 151– 67. Smith, Stacy L., et al. “Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007– 2016.” Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative. Annenberg Foundation/USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication. annenberg .usc.edu/sites/default/files/Dr_Stacy_L_Smith-Inequality_in_900_Popular_Films.pdf. Accessed Feb. 4, 2019. Valdez, Viviana. “He’s the Man Behind the Undying Love for ‘Selena’.” The Collegian, Oct. 27, 2017, collegian .csufresno .edu /2017 /10 /27 /hes -the -man -behind -the -undying -love -for-selena / # .Wxb7sC-ZMU1. Accessed June 5, 2018. Valdivia, Angharad. “Implicit Utopias and Ambiguous Ethnics: Latinidad and the Representational Promised Land.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media, edited by María Elena Cepeda and Dolores Inés Casillas, Routledge, 2017, pp. 55– 71.

Filmography

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American Me. Directed by Edward James Olmos, Universal Pictures, 1992. Before Night Falls. Directed by Julian Schnabel, Fine Line Features, 2000. Cesar Chavez. Directed by Diego Luna, Pantelion Films, 2014. Che. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, IFC Films, 2008. Dolores. Directed by Peter Bratt, 5 Sticks Films, 2017. Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor, Ventanarosa/Lions Gate Films, 2002. La Bamba. Directed by Luis Valdez, Columbia Pictures, 1987. Selena. Directed by Gregory Nava, Q Productions, 1997. Stand and Deliver. Directed by Ramón Menéndez, Warner Bros., 1988. The Motorcycle Diaries. Directed by Walter Salles, Focus Features, 2004.

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Chapter 23

IMPOSSIBLE MISSION The Queer Geographies of Peter Bratt’s La Mission Richard T. Rodríguez

So we have to ask: is it possible to define the Castro, or any San Francisco neighborhood for that matter, by its physical boundaries? If so, what are they? — ALISA SCERRATO, “WHERE DOES THE CASTRO START AND END? DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK”

In his classic 1983 study The City and the Grassroots, sociologist Manuel Castells takes San Francisco as one of his case studies for exploring social movements and urban politics. As in the city itself, the neighborhoods of the Mission and the Castro share a border in Castells’s book. That is, though they are regarded side by side, an ideological line of demarcation clearly exists between them. While “the City” (the name Bay Area natives use to refer to San Francisco) as a whole is assessed in light of both neighborhoods, for Castells, the ultimate goal of his book’s third section is, as he puts it, “to understand the urban dynamics of San Francisco through the detailed analysis of two community mobilizations that appear to have provided major contributions to the city’s evolution. They are the Latino-based Mission District’s process of community organization and the San Francisco gay community. They represent, in their own distinct ways, the main social trends underlying San Francisco’s urban quality: the search for cultural identity and for political self-reliance” (105). While I do not take issue with Castells’s consideration of the Mission and the Castro as two separate entities representing what he names as “the search for cultural identity and for political self-reliance” (even “in their own distinct ways,” he clarifies), I am concerned with his juxtaposed analysis of these two neighborhoods that in turn leads to the impossibility of recognizing a dynamic interplay of Latinx spaces and queer spaces, thus leading to the codification of Latinx as heterosexual and queer as white. In many ways, Castells’s project mirrors the easy analogizing of race and sexuality, an assumption taken to task by queer theorists like Siobhan Somerville and José 450

Esteban Muñoz among many others. In noting the proliferation of “housing renovation” by gay men, Castells declares,

In such terms, then, all the gays are white and all the ethnic minorities are “angry” and “hateful”; this ultimately relegates “ethnic minority gays” to nonexistence. Thus, Castells is able to make broad, reductive claims such as the following: “Only in such a long-term perspective could gay men and Latinos, for instance, have common interests” (169). As I find myself in agreement with many of Castells’s observations (particularly when he concludes the paragraph cited with the hypothesis “the improvement of the urban space by the gay community might therefore represent a new form of residential displacement and social inequality” [167]), I’m also left confounded by the point that ethnic and gay communities can easily be defined and delineated by their purportedly rigid spatial anchorings.1 When previously mentioning the Castro’s expansion into the Dolores Corridor “on the border with the Latino Mission District,” Castells cursorily notes how developing friction took shape as “anti-gay violence from the Latino youth” (156). Not doubting that Latinx youth have perpetuated “antigay violence” in the form of hate speech or physical bashing, the particular marking of this violence as emblematic of Latinx youth for me registers and therefore calls into question the easy contrast of Castells’s inflexible regard of ethnic and sexual communities.2 Castells’s point that “class hate, ethnic rage, and fear of displacement by the invaders have clearly held greater sway than prejudices from family traditions or machismo ideology” is hardly true in Peter Bratt’s 2009 film,

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As often happens in the process of social change, groups inconvenienced by the progress of another are not properly recompensed. So there has been little urban improvement for the black families forced to move out from the Hayes Valley, or help for the Latinos suffering high rents along the Dolores Corridor because of real estate speculation from the increasing influx of gays. These hardships have been at the root of the hostility of ethnic minorities against gay people, a hostility often translated into violence. Class hate, ethnic rage, and fear of displacement by the invaders have clearly held greater sway than prejudices from family traditions or machismo ideology. This contradiction cannot be solved by contacts between the communities. There is too much need on both sides and too much self-definition as interest groups enable people to relate to broader social perspectives. (167)

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La Mission. While class hate, ethnic rage, and fear of displacement indeed surface in La Mission, they ultimately take a backseat in order to foreground what Castells calls “prejudice from family traditions” and “machismo ideology.”3 Yet what brings La Mission in close quarters with Castells’s The City and the Grassroots is their mutual understanding of the Mission and the Castro as necessarily at odds with one another. And while traffic runs between these two neighborhoods in both texts, this traffic ultimately results in a jam of sorts, whereby the decidedly fixed parameters of each in turn necessitates steady reinforcement by arguments pivoting on dissimilar connotation. Before moving into my analysis of La Mission, I wish to offer a caveat: this chapter refuses to place aesthetic judgment on Peter Bratt’s film (thus asking if it’s “any good”) or concluding if the film succeeds in “getting it” or not. To be honest, there are many recent Latinx films to which we must turn our attention that are not (aesthetically?) good, films that do not fit the contours of any discernable political agenda; they are often low budget and occasionally troubling with respect to the politics they tender. And while they may have received ample praise for indelibly contributing to the meager offering of Latinx films just as they’ve been relegated to the trash bin for their failures from both politicized spectators and those only in search of satisfying entertainment, I see a film like La Mission as a crucial cultural text for ascertaining the ideologies at work in both the generation of cultural representations and the personal, social, and political worlds they aim to image and imagine. As film theorist Teresa de Lauretis argues, popular culture forms like film “have the effect of something deeply felt and experienced, and yet they are fictional representations” (119; emphasis in original). For de Lauretis, films “perform, at the societal level and in the public sphere, a function similar to that of the private fantasies, daydreams, and reveries by which individual subjects imagine or give images to their erotic, ambitious, or destructive aspirations” (119). Bratt affirms this when he notes in an interview that “in telling stories and becoming a filmmaker . . . , that’s the kind of lens I see things through” (Grady). Like Castells’s pivotal study, Bratt unquestionably wishes to affirmatively represent Latinxs and queers. Important on many personal levels— including its ability to capture the history of San Francisco’s lowrider scene (which in the film is held onto tightly by an aging group of men of color with whom I found myself identifying), its depiction of the multiracial and enlivening Mission District that in many ways became a home away from home while I lived in the Bay Area for over ten years, and its unapologetic ambition to capture local history—La Mission indeed deserves praise. I agree with Chicano gay poet Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano when he writes, “I found La Mission to be a beautiful film.”4 But it is not my desire here to sing the praises of those wishing

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to do right by Latinxs and queers. Indeed, the critique offered is based on the film’s shortcoming in not knowing how or where to place Latinx queers. La Mission opened on April 9, 2010, in New York and Los Angeles (although it screened much earlier at Sundance in January 2009). A week after its New York and Los Angeles debuts, it opened in San Francisco on April 16. I clearly recall the initial buzz created around the film. Friends from all over the country (but especially in the Bay Area) emailed me information about the film, saying its focus on family politics, masculinity, and sexuality made it a text I probably could have discussed in my book, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics. I was also invited by countless people to become a fan of the film on Facebook (which I did). After reading numerous reviews, both laudatory and condemnatory, and interviews with the Bratt brothers, I made a mental note to see the film on a trip home to California, given the scarcity of screenings in Midwest movie theaters, but I never got around to doing so. In fact, my first viewing of La Mission came shortly after its release on DVD, which admittedly made me more reflective, seeing it alone and in Chicago. The film tells the story of Che Rivera (played by Benjamin Bratt), a single father, Latino homeboy, recovering alcoholic, and long-time Mission resident (forty-six years to be exact) who drives a Muni bus for a living. Che, we soon learn, served time for mistakes made during his youth but now remains focused on maintaining his physical well-being, participating in the Mission car culture and cruising scene, and raising his son, Jes (played by Jeremy Ray Valdez). Che also represents the classic Latino macho: he questions the value of feminism, resorts to violence to solve problems, and reacts furiously when he discovers Jes is gay. La  Mission’s opening shots make clear the unfolding narrative’s geographical placement; the framing shot is an aerial view of San Francisco, capturing the city’s unmistakable skyline. The next shot, also aerial, moves us to the particular location of the Mission District and centers the neighborhood’s main artery, Mission Street. At street level we glimpse the operations of everyday life as residents going about their business are represented alongside murals and other cultural signifiers (like Danza Figure 23.1 Mission homeboy Che Rivera Azteca) that give La Mission its distinct (Benjamin Bratt).

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character. We first lay eyes on Che when the camera vertically pans the famous New Mission Theater sign under which we find him striding. Shortly thereafter, the camera captures Che behind the wheel of a Muni bus. Among the crowd of people boarding the vehicle are two young Mission homies decked out in big black jackets, one of whom carries a thumping boom box. When asked by Che to respect the “no radios” policy on his bus, the homie turns it louder. Incensed by his lack of respect, Che forcefully proceeds to the back of the bus. While the homie’s friend quickly reaches over to turn down the volume, Che demands, much to the young man’s dismay, that they leave the bus. It is this young man, we soon discover, who not only torments Che’s son with homophobic taunts and aggressively masculinist provocations but later in the film (spoiler alert!) pulls a gun on Jes in a drive-by and fires multiple times. It’s important to foreground this homie, whose name is Smoke and played by Alex Hernandez, because his juxtaposition with Jes is critical for my reading of the film. The altercation with Smoke is also critical for establishing Che’s assertive, no-nonsense persona, which again is illuminated in his initial interaction with Lena (played by Erika Alexander), an African American woman identified by Che as a “hipster, money-type” who in the film gets to single-handedly represent the gentrifiers infiltrating and buying out the Mission. Learning the maxims by which Che lives (“Stay brown!” and “Low and slow!”) provides the spectator with a sense of Che’s historical and cultural identity as a Chicano/ Latino man well-versed in the cultural empowerment and affirmation discourse typically understood as emerging in the late 1960s and proliferating through the ’70s and ’80s. It is not difficult to read Che as Smoke’s homeboy forefather, given his tattoos and confrontational stance. Also fitting this mold is Jes who, upon first introduction, mirrors the style and stance of Smoke. Indeed, Jes too has his homeboys, including his closest friend Gummy Bear (César Gómez) who rides shotgun in a friend’s car blasting a hip-hop track. By appearance alone, Jes and his friends are indistinguishable from Smoke and his homie, Nacho (Chris Borgzinner). This is especially the case in the next significant scene featuring Jes in which we spot him creeping around what appears to be a mansion in a neighborhood not at all like the Mission. Wearing a hoodie, Jes unmistakably appears as a young Latino thug seeking to break and enter. The first interior shot of the house reveals an overly cautious Jes and a gun resting on a corner stand. Picking up the gun, Jes wields it at a young man freshly showered and draped in a towel who is then forcefully asked, “You got my stuff, white boy?” Only playing gangster (and reflective of how one might play the role for a fantasy scenario featuring a Latino thug harassing then romancing his willing victim), it turns out this “white boy” is Jes’s boyfriend, Jordon (Max Rosenak). Che is initially unaware of Jes’s rela-

Figure 23.2 The mirror as a temporally formatted family portrait.

tionship with Jordan, but we see how Jes’s relationship in particular and his gay identity more generally has contributed to dividing father and son. In the scene that follows the encounter between Jes and Jordan, we witness at the outset both father and son, framed by a mirror hanging in Che’s bedroom. Functioning as a temporally formatted family portrait, the unified image of the two soon dissolves when Jes declines Che’s invitation to serve as cruising co-pilot in favor of devoting time to Jordan. Disappointed, Che nevertheless joins his friends from the neighborhood on a low-and-slow expedition throughout the City. As the stylized car procession begins, we see Jes looking out the window, perhaps signaling his status as “on the inside looking out.”5

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Figure 23.3 Jes (Jeremy Ray Valdez) on the inside looking out.

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Immediately the film cuts to a shot featuring the famous Castro Theatre neon sign (which fittingly contrasts with the earlier shot of the New Mission Theater sign). We soon discover that Jordan has invited Jes to a night of dancing at a gay club in San Francisco’s well-known gay neighborhood. With this juxtaposition of shots, the film assists in contrasting the Mission with the Castro, the former emblematic of Latinidad and the latter representative of queerness. Although Jes represents the possibility of oscillating between these two locations, the film ultimately demands a strict geographical divide between Latinx space and queer space. At the same time, the film’s narrative also captures the revealing conversation between Che and his good friend, Benny (Rubén González), regarding Jes’s plans to leave San Francisco for Los Angeles:

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Che: You think Jes picked L.A. cuz he wants to get away from all this? Benny: All this? Che: Yeah. You know, the barrio. Benny: You think he’s going away to college to get away from you? Che: Yeah. Benny: Truth? I think he picked UCLA cuz aside from having some of the finest rucas in all of Aztlán, it’s one of the baddest schools in the whole pinche state, bro. Shit, if you and I had our shit together we’d have done the same damn thing. I know I would have. Che: Yeah, probably. Benny: Besides man, you can take the man out of the Mission but you can’t take the Mission out of the man. Shit’s in the blood, homes. You know that.

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For the Mission to remain in the blood requires adhering to Benny’s line of reasoning as to why Jes has decided to leave for L.A.: not only is the school “bad” but because the location is home to hot women who operate as the sexual lure for a presumably straight Jes. Immediately following the conversation, the narrative cuts to a shot of Jes’s face reflected in a bar mirror. Signaling his dual status as both “Xicano” (as his shirt declares) and gay, his reflection is cut by what appears to be a pole or bar divider. As I understand this shot, the divide places emphasis on Jes’s geographical displacement— particularly after the conversation between his father and his friend— as opposed to his self-recognition as a split subject. Indeed, Jes does not look into the mirror; thus, his “split subjectivity” holds greater currency in terms of

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spatial dislocation (particularly following the conversation between Che and Benny) as opposed to racial or sexual identification.6 The proceeding shots are fittingly of a disco ball and Jes and Jordan on the dance floor, revealing the film’s firm grounding of Jes in unquestionably gay space. Undeniably, the film upholds the idea that as a markedly Latinx space, it is impossible for the Mission to account for queer lives (particularly queer Latinx lives). Queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath employs the notion of “impossibility” to signal “the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora” (15). Furthermore, “given the illegibility and unrepresentability of a non-heteronormative female subject within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and diaspora, the project of locating a ‘queer South Asian diasporic subject’— and a queer female subject in particular— may begin to challenge the dominance of such configurations. Revealing the mechanisms by which a queer female diasporic positionality is rendered impossible strikes at the very foundation of these ideological structures” (16). I wish to extend Gopinath’s useful insights regarding the impossibility of queerness by emphasizing how even when queerness is represented in a film like La Mission (in contrast to a film like Gregory Nava’s My Family [1995] that, as I’ve previously argued, forecloses queer representability), the heteronormative logic charging the film recalibrates the impossibility of queerness by revealing its inassimilability within— like the nation and diaspora in Gopinath’s work—la familia and by extension La Mission (Rodríguez, chap. 2). After Che discovers the photos taken of Jes and Jordan at the Castro nightclub (one of which showcases Jordan’s “tongue down Jes’s throat”) and a fistfight ensues between Jes and Che on the street for all to see, Jes’s uncle Rene (played by Jesse Borrego) takes him in. Interestingly, the scenes of Jes in his uncle’s home position him in opposition to heteronormativity and the classic familia image that commonly defines Chicanx cultural nationalism. In the first scene, Rene asks Jes, “You really don’t like girls?” Albeit jokingly, the question to which Jes responds with “¡Chale!” nonetheless strikes me as one motivated by the impulse of impossibility. In the second scene, Jes is contrasted with Rene, who embraces his two children upon whom Jes longingly glances in a series of countershots. One can easily read Jes’s face as registering the impossibility of his belonging to (or perhaps even having) a family like his uncle’s, a family securely anchored in the culture of the Mission District. In La Mission, homosexuality and unconditional economically stable support for it are relegated to elsewhere, or rather, everywhere but the Mission. After moving back in with Che and yet still not finding support for his relationship from his father because of its supposed immorality in the eyes of God, in the face of impossibility, Jes’s only option, we’re made to believe, is

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to retreat to Jordan’s family in their upscale home. While many critics have questioned Bratt’s decision in casting Jes’s boyfriend as white, I would argue that Jordan cannot be anything other than white in order to uphold the common sense underscoring the film’s entangled racial, class, sexual, and spatial politics. In many ways, being gay in the film is a sign of upward mobility, an aspiring to whiteness and economic ascendancy that is always already alien to the space of the working-class Latinx Mission. Although the Castro does not play a prominent role in La Mission, its appearance at the beginning and mention at the end of the film frame the way it becomes strategically cast as opposite of what and who the Mission represents. In tandem with the way his sexual identity must be infused with sexual practice, Jes is first rendered by Che a white boy’s “Mexican bitch.” Smoke raises the spatial stakes of Jes’s sexual positioning by first declaring, “I have a problem with faggots in my hood,” then subsequently asking Jes and Jordan while on a stroll if they are lost, as they’re clearly in search of the Castro. In the drive-by scene previously mentioned, we see Smoke hanging out a car window, taunting Jes and Jordan, and curious to know which one of them “wears the dress and plays bitch.” Fed up with Smoke’s verbal abuse, Jordan refuses to ignore him as Jes suggests. And as much as I find Jordan’s response to Smoke rather calculated (“I’m wondering if you were aware that men who display extreme homophobic tendencies are often times homosexuals themselves”), the prospect of Smoke’s homosexuality nonetheless intrigues me. Yet as a homophobe intent on policing the boundaries of the Mission, his queerness remains an impossible reality (as in the case of Manuel Castells’s book), and he must therefore represent the necessarily heterosexual gangster. To be sure, the film requires that this be the case. In the scene that marks his turning point toward acceptance of Jes (this is, of course, after he’s returned to drowning himself in booze), Che happens upon a group of Aztec dancers performing as part of an anti-violence rally. On an altar near the dancers, Che spots a collection of photographs of Smoke. Of these images spanning infanthood to adolescence is a framed photograph held by a woman who is presumably Smoke’s mother. It becomes clear in this scene that this former bully has fallen as the result of gang violence. Recalling Lena’s words about his violent tendencies, Che comes to the realization that violence has not only robbed Smoke of his life but also assisted in robbing him of his son. Striking and wise as it is to show how various forms of violence overlap, there’s a way in which the perils of gang violence— a violence not uncommon in the Mission District— unfortunately eclipses the multilayered violence faced by queer youth of color also in the same neighborhood. In contrast to the earlier gun that turns out to

be a lighter, Smoke’s gun is the real deal. When Smoke pulls the gun on Jes, he tells him, “Suck on this, puto.” Unlike the first gun that mediates passion and desire between Jes and Jordan, the second gun signals anti-queer violence and an impossible connection between Jes and Smoke as born-and-bred Mission homeboys and— what is my own impossible spectatorial fantasy— as potential lovers. I end here, then, with a series of questions, many of which are admittedly unanswerable but that I can’t help but ask after every viewing of La Mission. While we are left to assume that Che ultimately accepts Jes as the last shot is of Che headed toward L.A. in the customized car originally planned as Jes’s high school graduation gift, does Jes ultimately “accept” Che? Does Jes have any use for Che after he moved in with Jordan’s family and his father refused to attend his graduation? Is Che truly “reformed,” and can he accept his role as a father in one of the Mission District’s truly queer families? And, to bring us back to the question that animated this chapter, why does there remain the constant need to order racial and sexual identities spatially and in singular dimensions?

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

Very special thanks to Veronica “Ronnie” Kann for alerting me to importance of “anchoring” with regard to identity and spatial politics. This chapter is also dedicated to the memory of Ronnie, as she helped me think through many of the ideas examined here. Literary critic Julie Abraham similarly notes how in “Castells’s apparent advocacy of ghettos . . . gays were represented by implication as not Jewish and not black” (249). Here one might speculate that Castells was well aware of the Chicanx sociological studies on family tradition and machismo that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s and in making this claim perhaps wished to trump these ideologically driven analyses with a grounded Marxist approach to Latinx community studies. See Rodríguez for an assessment of this work. In this chapter, I use “Chicanx” to signal the cultural and historical experiences of people of Mexican American decent while “Latinx” encompasses a broader communal base whose constituencies are linked by their Latin American genealogies. Herrera y Lozano makes an important point that resonates with my argument here: “I was also concerned with Bratt’s reinforcement of the notion that gayness is [a] white construct and something that only exists openly in white-defined spaces such as San Francisco’s Castro District.” This is, of course, a play on the 1964 oldie but goodie track “I’m on the Outside (Looking In)” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.

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I am influenced here by Kaja Silverman (chap. 3), who provides a compelling reading of Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston in which the black gay male subject refuses to view his mirror reflection.

References Abraham, Julie. Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Castells, Manuel. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. University of California Press, 1983. de Lauretis, Teresa. “Public and Private Fantasies in David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly.” Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory, by Teresa de Lauretis. Edited and with an introduction by Patricia White, University of Illinois Press, 2007, pp. 118– 48. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2005. Grady, Pam. “Essential SF Q&A: Peter Bratt.” SF Film Society Blog, Dec. 16, 2016, blog .sffs.org/home /2016/12/essential-sf-qa-peter-bratt.html. Accessed June 24, 2018. Herrera y Lozano, Lorenzo. “Thoughts on La Mission and the Ongoing Struggle to Broaden Notions of Latino Masculinity.” Blabbeando, May 4, 2010, blabbeando.blogspot.com/2010/05/guest-post -la-mission-and-latino.html. Accessed June 24, 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rodríguez, Richard T. Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 2009. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Routledge, 1995. Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2000.

Filmography

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La Mission. Directed by Peter Bratt, 5 Stick Films, 2009. My Family. Directed by Gregory Nava, New Line Cinema, 1985.

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Chapter 24

NOT- SO- GREAT EXPECTATIONS Challenging Gender/Ethnic Roles and Achievement in Latinx Sports Films Mauricio Espinoza

We are survivors. We never give up; we never quit. This is the spirit of the Latin. We are a hard people to put away. — FELIPE ALOU, DOMINICAN- BORN FORMER MLB PLAYER AND MANAGER

The presence of Latinxs in sports films has grown significantly in the twentyfirst century, coinciding with both an increase in the production of Latinx films and narrative media more generally and a higher recognition of the impact Latinx athletes have had on U.S. sporting history and culture. In this chapter, I explore two popular films that feature Latinx athletes, one from each decade of the current century: Girlfight (2000, directed by Karyn Kusama), a fictional drama about Brooklyn amateur boxer Diana Guzmán, and McFarland, USA (2015, directed by Niki Caro), a historical drama about the all-Latino team that rose to prominence in California’s high school crosscountry competitions beginning in the 1980s. Because of their significant differences (the first an independent, low-budget film featuring a female athlete in an individual sport dominated by males in a big city on the East Coast;1 the second a full-budget Disney production featuring lower-socioeconomic class Latinxs living in a small farming town and competing in an elite, mostly white sport on the West Coast), these movies allow for a fairly representative study of how ethnicity, gender, and class are represented in contemporary sports films about Latinxs and the challenges involved in such portrayals. At the same time, despite their differences, these movies also contain striking thematic, narrative, and visual characteristics that point to a more or less stable format typical of U.S. sports films— which have been taken to task by a number of scholars and critics for sublimating individual achievement by minorities while glossing over societal structures that perpetuate racism and inequality. 461

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To say that sports are deeply popular and highly profitable in the Americas and beyond would be an Olympic-sized, World Cup–crazy understatement. As Séan Crosson indicates, “Sport has developed in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to become one of the most important and influential of contemporary cultural practices” as well as “a popular metaphor for life itself ” (1). And film— as another hugely popular component of the entertainment and culture industries— seized on the dramatic, narrative, and commercial possibilities of sport since very early on. Organized sports and the moving photographic image have had a close relationship since the development of both in the late nineteenth century. Actualities or brief fictions about sports appeared in U.S. and European cinemas as early as 1894 (Babington 3), with boxing movies dominating the genre ever since (Crosson 1). The enormous success and cultural endurance of films such as those in the Rocky series (1976– 2006) and Field of Dreams (1989) and the critical acclaim received by Million Dollar Baby (2004) reflect the multifaceted impact of this genre. The association between sport and film seems almost natural. Sports provide powerful narratives of struggle, overcoming barriers in life, heroic figures, affirmation of national or racial/ethnic identities, intense emotional response and identification, and many other themes that fit perfectly into filmic storytelling. To this end, Crosson states that there is a “visceral intensity” in sports that is readily exploited by sport film directors: “This is particularly evident in the frequent, and often highly emotionally manipulative, final fight, game, or race scene found at the climax of so many sports films” (7). Girlfight and McFarland, USA are not exceptions to this formula. The question (which I will attempt to answer later on this chapter) is, What does this “emotional manipulation” do and say about ethnic, gender, and class relations in the United States today? If sport and film have had such an intimate connection, sport and race issues have also been intertwined in U.S. history. According to Michael Lomax, “Since World War II, sports have played a pivotal role in American society, not only supporting dominant ideas about race and racial supremacy but also serving as a platform from which to address racial and social injustices within the larger society” (xv). Starting in the 1940s, the presence of African Americans and Latinxs in mainstream sport leagues and venues “went from nearly nonexistent to overwhelming in the span of less than forty years” (xv). In a segregated United States, sport became one of the few spaces where talented racial and ethnic minorities could interact with whites on the national stage and even represent their country internationally, albeit with extreme social resistance and lingering discriminatory practices. This phenomenon

is depicted in recent films such as 42 (2013, about Jackie Robinson and the integration of professional baseball), Race (2016, about Jesse Owens and his 1936 Berlin Olympics record-breaking performance), and the graphic novel 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago (2014, about Puerto Rican baseball star Roberto Clemente). The study of sports as part of the history of U.S. racial/ethnic tensions and progress is, then, fundamental. Jay Coakley has addressed this issue by stating that sports

That sports can simultaneously reproduce broad patterns of discrimination and segregation and help to challenge them is evident in McFarland, USA, where the all-Latino runners are viewed (racially and economically) as not belonging in a sport dominated by private schools in rich California communities. Meanwhile, in Girlfight, the local boxing world is dominated by economically disadvantaged people of color, as it is the case in large, diverse urban centers throughout the United States (Heiskanen 2– 5). Consequently, Diana is not a racial/ethnic outsider when she first decides to take up boxing at the Brooklyn Athletic Club, where most fighters and trainers are Latinx. In this case, what the film addresses is the intersectionality of ethnicity and gender issues, as Diana’s entrance into the traditionally hypermasculine realm of boxing is resisted not because she is brown or poor but because (as one male spectator crudely remarks after Diana is hit under the belt by a male boxer) “there’s nothing down there but a pussy!” Juan Poblete explains this dynamic by highlighting the contradictory way in which sports can help create a community “that is inclusive and accepting of others [who] can be invited to play the game we play” while also “imposing on others the obligation to play our games in our style” (270). In other words, skills alone cannot explain why many sports are male-dominated (in actual practice or media attention given), or why Latinxs dominate baseball and boxing but have a small footprint in American football or basketball, or why Latinxs are

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are sites where people challenge or reproduce racial ideologies and existing patterns of racial and ethnic relations in society. As people make sense of sports and give meaning to their experiences and observations, they often take into account their beliefs about skin color and ethnicity. . . . Not surprisingly, the social meanings and the experiences associated with skin color and ethnic background influence access to sports participation, decisions about playing sports, the ways that people integrate sports into their lives, and the organization and sponsorship of sports. (276)

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culturally obsessed with soccer but there have been relatively few Latinx stars on the U.S. national teams (especially on the women’s team). To answer these questions, one must carefully look at the societal and business structures that underlie the practice and promotion of sports, including access and public facilities, geographic segregation, school funding, recruitment strategies, gender-related policies, and racial/class/gender expectations. The appearance of Latinxs in U.S. sports films seems to follow a trajectory that mirrors the historical influx of Latinx athletes in certain sporting practices, particularly boxing and baseball as mentioned above. For example, the irruption of Mexicans in the U.S. boxing scene in the 1940s (Heiskanen 2) led to the production of several films featuring Latinx pugilists in the next two decades, including Right Cross (1950), The Ring (1952), and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Boxing would continue to grow in popularity and participation among U.S. Latinxs and Latin Americans during the remainder of the twentieth century. Legendary champions who elicited strong national and/or ethnic pride across the Americas during this period include Argentine Carlos Monzón, Puerto Rican Félix “Tito” Trinidad, Mexican Julio César Chavez, Nicaraguan Alexis Argüello, Panamanian Roberto “Manos de Piedra” Durán, and Mexican American Oscar “Golden Boy” De La Hoya. In the twenty-first century, a number of films and television series have brought attention to Latinxs having become a dominant boxing force. Despite the male-dominated nature of the sport, Girlfight was the first of these productions, followed by Price of Glory (2000), Knockout (2000), The Kid: Chamaco (2009), From Mexico with Love (2009), and the Durán biopic Hands of Stone (2016). In the case of the American pastime, films with a Latinx focus include the documentary ¡Viva Baseball! (2005), Sugar (2008), The Perfect Game (2009, a docudrama about the first Mexican and non-U.S. team to win the Little League World Series), and the biopic Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories (2013). Soccer— a popular theme of sports films in Latin America— has only yielded the Goal! (2005– 9) trilogy about an undocumented Mexican immigrant who dreams of becoming a professional footballer. McFarland, USA is an anomaly in this brief history, as running sports lag far behind boxing, baseball, and soccer in popularity and achievement among U.S. Latinxs. Two notable exceptions are two-time Olympian Desiree Linden, the first Latina to win the Boston Marathon in 2018 and the first American woman to do so since 1985, and Afrolatinx sprinter John Carlos, who in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics raised his fist at the podium along with teammate Tommie Smith in support of the civil rights movement. Carlos has been featured in several documentaries (including Salute, 2008) about the iconic gesture.

The study of Girlfight and McFarland, USA from an intersectional perspective raises a number of questions about the possibilities and limitations of sports films for advancing positive representations of minorities and wrestling with core political issues such as racism, xenophobia, and sexism. On the one hand, Jorge Iber posits that Latinxs have employed sports (and, I add, uplifting media portrayals of sporting feats) as a mechanism to hold on to their culture and challenge Anglo domination and also “as a way to demonstrate that the Spanish-surnamed people had both the physical and intellectual vitality to join the American mainstream” (Iber et al. 4– 5). This is the same goal that Latinx actors and directors have pursued in crafting narrative media that contest stereotypes and seek to position Latinxs at the center of U.S. life and culture. If, for instance, African Americans have successfully managed to elevate their sport, music, political, science, and even fictional heroes (Black Panther [2018] being the most successful example) through cinema, then this format should certainly be exploited by Latinxs to address the long-standing representational void and imbalance to which we have been subjected in U.S. media and popular culture. For example, when asked about the reason for making Hands of Stone, Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz said there is an urgent need to see Latinx heroes on the big screen: “When Donald Trump describes Mexicans as rapists, drug dealers, illegal immigrants and criminals, he’s describing 90% of the roles Latino actors have played in Hollywood movies and TV shows for the last hundred years. He didn’t invent the stereotype, he’s reacting to it and using it for his benefit” (Betancourt). While the previous statement holds true, cinematic portrayals dealing with ethnicity, class, and/or gender can be problematic at a number of levels— even when they claim to be well intentioned. Sports films are particularly tricky in this regard because, according to Crosson, they have the ability to “preserve, elevate, and slow down the utopian moment in sport” (8). Hollywood, which has produced the most influential and the largest number of sports films internationally, has advanced this “utopian sensibility,” which refers to the fact that in most mainstream sports movies, “all manner of social, structural, and cultural conflicts and divisions are resolved through the fantastic agency of sports” (Rowe 355). The consequences of this approach to complex realities is that mainstream sports movies frequently offer “an idealised view of sport providing an overly simplistic solution to real social problems” (Crosson 8) and “representations of a better life if we just follow the rules and try harder” (Baker 13). As Aaron Baker explains, the Hollywood

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sport film not only avoids “suggesting specific ways to change the current social reality, it promises us happiness by adhering to the status quo” (13). Baker elaborates on the “utopian entertainment” effect of these films by stating that

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this utopian response only works if one ignores . . . how social identities such as class, race, gender, and sexuality complicate self-definition. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of social forces in the constitution of identity makes evident that the opportunity, abundance, and happiness in utopian narratives are not there for everyone to the same degree. Even when sports movies acknowledge the disadvantage of racism, sexism, or class difference . . . , individual performance is generally held up as the best way to overcome this influence. (13)

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Crosson admits that even mainstream sports films can “reveal [societal] tensions and contradictions” and “have the potential to unsettle or destabilise this [utopian] trajectory” (8). However, he warns that the inclusion of race, gender, or class issues in these movies may be tricky or illusory, as they may just be used “to appeal to the ‘authentic longings’ of the marginalised, as a means to ultimately affirm the structures that perpetuate their marginalisation” (9). Deborah Tudor has called this phenomenon “the separation of the playing field from culture,” explaining that “sports films often use sporting arenas as a depoliticized space in which the actions of the performers are idealized,” while the “transcendent space [of the arena] and the values displayed in it often cover up or disguise the off field area” (123). Regardless of their agendas, Baker concludes that sports films are not apolitical (and I agree with this assessment) because they have contributed to the contested process of defining social identities and, at the same time, render these identities as insignificant— because through sports and their required self-reliance, athletes are able to transcend bounded identities (2). As a result of the “utopian” filmic convention, most mainstream sports films (McFarland, USA included) re-create and reaffirm the dominant American dream narrative of material success and upward mobility— often incorporating Cinderella or underdog stories, which are anchored in a narrative of self-reliance and triumph in the face of impossible odds. There is also a dependence in these films on individual heroes, who are constructed to identify with and represent their entire communities (national, ethnic, racial, gender, class, etc.). This characteristic connects with Baker’s claim above about sports films’ emphasis on “individual performance” as the answer to overcoming race, gender, or class obstacles. It is one of the reasons that might help explain the appeal of boxing movies, where the fighter becomes “a potential hero, a

symbol of personal, communal, or racial investment” (Scott xxviii). Such a strong accent on lone, representative heroes means that even in films featuring team sports, a particularly strong or charismatic member of the team stands out and plays the central heroic role. As the best runner on the team and the character with the most dramatic storyline, Thomas Valles becomes that hero in McFarland, USA. In the remainder of this chapter, I will consider to what extent Girlfight and McFarland, USA embody the possibilities and limitations of sports films when it comes to the representation of ethnicity, class, and gender in Latinx communities.

The incursion of women of color into the traditionally masculine realm of U.S. boxing is the latest stage in a series of changes to the sport that have been tied to class, ethnicity, race, and gender. Prizefighting became popular in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century among white working-class men (Heiskanen 2). In the first half of the twentieth century, the sport became associated with ethnic European immigrant groups such as the Irish, Jews, and then Italians— only to be taken over in the latter part of the century by African American and Latinx pugilists (Heiskanen 2). Women have been boxing in the United States since at least the 1880s. Professional boxing began attracting more female fighters in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s when women started to become a “visible presence in the sport” (Heiskanen 91). A major factor was a 1993 court case that forced U.S. Amateur Boxing Inc. to legalize women’s participation in the national boxing program (Heiskanen 91– 92). Women’s boxing was first included as an Olympic sport in 2012 in London. Also in 2012, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) signed its first mixed martial arts female competitor, Ronda Rousey. Rousey has quickly risen to fame in the United States and beyond, “drawing much attention to the fact that women were now competing at the highest level in a sport often seen as synonymous with male exclusivity and orthodox narrations of manhood” (Channon and Matthews 2). The boxing scene has also changed for women of color since the late 1990s, when pugilists such as Lucia Rijker, Laila Ali, and Jacqui Frazier began leaving their mark. At around the same time, Latinx and women boxers began training together in the same gyms in multicultural cities like Austin, representing the recent “Latinization and de-gendering of professional boxing” (Heiskanen 4). As Camilla Fojas states, all of these factors “established an enabling cultural context for the success of films like Girlfight and Million Dollar Baby” (104). Girlfight is a remarkable movie in the way that it embraces and then dismantles conventions of the boxing film genre and sports films more broadly.

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Girlfight: The Challenge of Framing Alternative Latinx Identities

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This strategy allows director Karyn Kusama to problematize stereotypical expectations about Latinx inner-city dwellers, as well as to create an alternative brown female subjectivity that is hard to contain and classify. Although variations occur in individual films, the basic plot of the boxing movie is usually organized around the rise and fall of the fighter’s career, often including some sort of episode of redemption (Cook 42). The protagonist typically reproduces the myth of the “hungry fighter” (Wacquant 221); that is, a member of the lower socioeconomic classes who is poor-hungry but also hungry for social recognition, economic well-being, justice, freedom from oppression, et cetera. Finally, this genre has developed clear mise-en-scène conventions. Leger Grindon explains that “these films integrate the development of the fight with the dramatic conflicts propelling the plot. The boxing sequences serve as the genre’s distinctive spectacle, physical action that punctuates the plot at key intervals like song and dance numbers in a musical. The typical Hollywood film moves steadily toward an extended bout that brings the movie to its climax” (23). Boxing films’ preoccupation with visual realism has also led to a desire “to replicate the experience of the fan at ringside” (Grindon 23). This impacts the cinematography, as the camera tends to record the action just above the ropes, through them, or at a low angle under the ropes, as if the film’s viewers were at a ringside seat. Meanwhile, the composition shows both boxers from head to toe, “capturing their full movement like the choreography of two dancers” and establishing “the foundation for the visual action” (Grindon 23). Girlfight focuses on an individual hero, as most sports films do, and employs the “hungry fighter” trope. A motherless, eighteen-year-old Latina from Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects who deals with an abusive and domineering father and releases her pent-up anger via constant fights at school, Diana fits the class, ethnic/racial, geographic, and troubled origins characteristics of movie pugilists. Grindon notes that Kusama’s movie “is awash with familiar genre conventions and types” employed in several boxing movies of the past, including an ethnic protagonist who gets in trouble and whose social anger is redirected in the ring, a widowed parent who disapproves of boxing, an artistic brother in counterpoint but allied to the fighter, a poor New York City neighborhood, a hesitant romance, a caring manager who steps in for the abusive father, a triumphant concluding fight, and an upbeat ending (153). Being firmly grounded in a cinema tradition with such a long history and known conventions is important, because it allows the director to make her original interventions within— and not in total opposition to— the genre. In other words, Girlfight (as one of the first feature films where female boxing is treated seriously and the first about a brown woman boxer) merits recognition for inserting itself in the traditionally masculine realm of boxing films

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in equal terms. It is a solid boxing movie (and a solid movie, period) because it portrays and develops the story of a strong female fighter who proves she belongs in the ring with women and men alike— the same way films about male boxers depend on the fighter proving his mettle against many other contenders and would-be heroes. The success and resilience of Girlfight parallels that of Diana and the many real-life women boxers who have struggled to be accepted into male-dominated gyms and rings. Like Diana, these women have proven that they have the physicality, skills, power, aggressiveness, and mental toughness to compete in the most violent of sports. And in the same manner, Girlfight demonstrated that a film about a Latina pugilist (directed by a woman of color) could compete and stand out in the crowded field of boxing movies. However, because the film does focus on a female fighter of color and the hurdles she faces are taller and more numerous than those men would encounter, Girlfight also subverts genre conventions and societal expectations to bring attention to this and other issues related to gender. For example, the movie avoids the typical rise-and-fall-of-the-fighter plot structure (usually because of dealings with a shady manager or because of a woman), focusing instead on boxing as a means to overcome personal struggles through a plot trajectory of steady self-empowerment. For Diana, these struggles include dealing with her abusive father, her disciplinary troubles at school, and the pushback she experiences as she attempts to train and develop a boxing career. All three have something in common: her nonconforming gender appearance and inclinations. At home, her father asks her if it would kill her “to wear a skirt once in a while” and expects her to cook and do the dishes. At school, she attacks Veronica (a flirt who only cares about her “feminine” appearance) for sleeping with her friend Marisol’s love interest and is told she must be taking hormones after excelling at a fitness test. Finally, at the gym, her soon-to-be-manager Hector Soto first tells her that she can train but not fight because “girls don’t have the same power as boys”; a young male boxer tells her, “I guess you never learned how to be a lady”; her boyfriend, Adrian (whom she defeats in the state’s gender-blind championship fight), complains that he hasn’t trained so hard all this time “to be stuck in the ring with a girl”; and the championship fight announcer introduces her by pointing out her “lovely purple shorts.” Consequently, the film is structured as a continuous fight (on and off the ring) in which Diana chooses to defend and affirm her rebellious sense of self. The “hungry fighter” trope is also destabilized: Adrian dreams of turning pro and moving far away from the projects, but Diana knows such a way out is likely impossible for her because there’s little money and recognition for women boxers. Finally, the movie’s upbeat ending— winning the championship, reconciling with Adrian, and leaving

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Figure 24.1 A low angle emphasizes Diana’s dominance over her father during a fight in their kitchen.

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her father to live with Hector and his wife— signals the possibility of a new beginning for the protagonist but does not offer a facile, romanticized happily ever after. Girlfight also challenges other gender, ethnic, and class expectations. Diana claims that she doesn’t know how to dance and lives in a small nuclear family with no extended family system, which runs contrary to common portrayals of Latinx family and social life in popular culture. The characterizations of both Adrian and Hector also contest stereotypical representations of Latino men. Although he already has a girlfriend when he starts seeing her, Adrian refuses to have sex with Diana the first time they are together in his room because it’s forbidden in his training regimen. Meanwhile, Hector treats Diana with the kindness, admiration, and respect of a father. In both cases, they subvert the troubling depiction of men of color as incapable of controlling their sexual urges and the Latin lover stereotype. The film also moves away from portrayals of criminality often associated with young men of color from poor, dangerous neighborhoods. Adrian confesses he used to be a delinquent but boxing now keeps him out of trouble, and he’s intent on leaving the crime-ridden projects where “no one matters.” Masculinity is also challenged in the film. When forced to fight Diana, Raymond Cortez hits her repeatedly under the belt (as if to show the public what she’s lacking) until he’s disqualified— effectively throwing the fight instead of having to endure the ridicule of either beating up a girl or losing to one. Adrian also expresses

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concerns that Diana might get hurt if they fight each other, to which she simply replies, “You’re afraid I will win.” The most toxic masculinity in the film is that of Sandro, Diana’s father. Emboldened by her training and success, Diana beats him up in their kitchen (where he expects his daughter to always be), effectively erasing his influence over her, as he’s not seen in the movie thereafter. These examples show that women’s boxing can challenge “the idealized relationship between masculinity and femininity” (Schippers 94; emphasis in original). Finally, Diana’s brother Tiny has been forced by his father to box so he can learn to defend himself, but he prefers art and gives Diana his money so she can train instead— thus modeling an alternative form of masculinity for young men of color. Girlfight’s disruption of the boxing genre’s visual conventions results in the film’s most powerful scenes and photography, which help to construct Diana as an empowered Latina protagonist. While Kusama utilizes fight scenes to advance the narrative and punctuate key dramatic moments, she also takes the fights outside of the ring— further underscoring that her movie is more about a young woman’s search for identity than merely about boxing. While the championship fight against Adrian represents the film’s climax, the confrontation with her dad is the most significant for her process of liberation and self-affirmation. This scene combines visual and verbal elements that reinforce Diana’s newfound sense of confidence, which allows her to finally defy her father’s control. After he tries to hit her, she punches him and knocks him to the ground. A combination of low- and high-angle shots highlights her power over him as she chokes him and tells him, “You belong to me now.” The stylistic element that stands out the most in the movie is the treatment of gaze. According to Fojas, “Girlfight also presents the unpunished gaze of the woman of color, who, in the history of cinema, has been less likely to look with aggression, desire, and power. Instead, women of color have long been the colonized bodies of the imperial gaze of Hollywood” (104). Diana’s defiant gaze is established from the movie’s opening scene, as she stares angrily into the camera from across her school’s busy hallway, pressed against a row of lockers. Later in the movie, the same intense gaze is shown in fight scenes, but now Diana is freed from the constraints of the oppressive school hallway. Kusama refuses to employ the typical ringside shots, preferring instead closer shots of the boxers from inside the ring. As the fights intensify, the camera moves even closer, until the shot is filled with Diana’s inexpugnable stare. It appears as though the camera doesn’t look at Diana: instead, she stares at it, at her opponent, and at the viewers, dominating them. The final effect is the construction of a confident woman of color protagonist who exerts her power by decolonializing her body and her gaze.

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Figure 24.2 Diana’s punishing gaze is part of her strength as a fighter, inside and outside of the ring.

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Permissible Running: McFarland, USA, “Blanco” Savior, and the Many Shades of Success

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As mentioned earlier, running sports are not as popular among U.S. Latinxs as boxing, baseball, and soccer, and there are few recognizable athletes who have made their mark in such competitive endeavors. Disney’s McFarland, USA sought to change this view, highlighting the real-life story of seven Latino boys from McFarland High School who in 1987 won California’s first cross-country state championship. A majority-Latinx farmland community located in the San Joaquin Valley, McFarland is represented in the film as a depressed city where resources and opportunities are scarce and most residents depend on backbreaking and poorly remunerated agricultural jobs that sustain the U.S. food production system. This is what Jim White, his wife, and two daughters encounter when they arrive in town in the fall of 1987. Jim has taken a life sciences and gym teacher job at McFarland High School, the only one he could find after experiencing a series of disciplinary issues as football coach because of his short temper. Life in McFarland proves to be not much different, at least at first. After confirming with disappointment the lack of talent of the undersized local football team and being kicked out as assistant coach due to a disagreement with the head coach, Jim notices that some of his male students are extremely adept at running long distances. He soon finds out why: they don’t have cars and must run to and from the fields where they work before and after school to support their families. That’s when Jim thinks that, instead of football, he may have better luck forming and coaching

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a cross-country team— which the school didn’t have. His next challenge is to convince at least seven boys to join the team, which includes recruiting the overweight Danny Diaz so his brothers Damacio and David won’t say no and using the threat of detention to get the talented but defiant Thomas Valles (who had gotten into several fights at school) to finally give in. McFarland, USA has all the elements of an uplifting and utopian Hollywood sports film, as discussed earlier. First, there’s initial resistance to the idea of forming a cross-country team from all actors involved. It starts with Jim, who sees McFarland as just a stopover on the way to better things. However, he changes his mind after María, a Latina teacher, tells him, “These kids need help. . . . Have you ever taken a look out there? This is one of the poorest towns in America. These kids are invisible; they are expendable. They come from the fields and come back to the fields, unless the prison gets them first. You notice we have one right next door? Very handy.” Principal Camillo reacts to the idea by saying cross-country is “a private school sport. They breathe different air than we do.” Mr. Diaz complains about the toll this will take on his family’s economy: “Every hour they train with you is one hour they don’t work. That’s food off our table.” Even the runners are not convinced they have the slightest chance to compete against rich kids. As Victor Puentes quips, “Nobody wins around here, White.” Once resistance is overcome and the team begins to achieve success in regional races, the town begins to rally around their unexpected heroes, thus generating in-group pride. Community support and cohesion is best exemplified by the tamale sale and car wash parents organize to buy the team new uniforms. It’s also a perfect example of cultural hybridity, as Mexican culinary traditions blend with the familiar all-American practice of holding car washes as school team fundraisers. To add dramatism to any sport film, there also needs to be an opponent whose values stand in contrast with those of the hero and the community he/she represents. In McFarland, USA, that role is played by elite schools whose runners are all white. The stark racial and economic differences are punctuated by mocking comments from students and coaches who look at the ragged Mexican American kids with disbelief. The runners from Palo Alto say about them, “They can’t run without a cop behind them. Or a Taco Bell in front of them!” And the coach from Clovis asks White, “Do they understand you? You probably just point and say, ‘Go there, amigo.’ ” McFarland, USA also employs conventions from the boxing film genre that are present in Girlfight. Thomas, the de facto team leader, comes from a troubled background that includes an alcoholic and violent father, gets into fights at school, and at some point has thoughts of suicide. He embodies the perfect “hungry fighter” who finds in running and the surrogate-father relationship with Jim a way out of his dark world. The movie also employs running meets the way boxing films

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use fights to punctuate dramatic plot developments at key intervals, working up to the state championship that brings the movie to its triumphant climax. Despite being a commercial Hollywood production that reproduces the utopian tropes of the feel-good sports film, McFarland, USA deserves some credit for advancing positive representations of Latinxs at a time of increased anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx policies and attitudes. To begin with, the film features a mostly Latinx cast (with the obvious exceptions of the White family and rival teams). Spanish is spoken throughout (sometimes unaccompanied by English subtitles) in full-length conversations, avoiding the commonplace and annoying use of cliché Spanish terms such as “amigo” and “hola” to add “local flavor.” This distinction is important because Spanish is used respectfully in the movie, and its cultural importance in everyday life for Latinx communities (and as part of the U.S. diverse linguistic landscape) is acknowledged. Additionally, the film pushes back against ethnic misconceptions and stereotypes, often using humor as a strategy. For instance, when Jim checks attendance and realizes several of the kids have the surname Diaz, he asks, “Popular name where you come from?” Victor counters by contesting his assumption that they may not belong in the United States because of their linguistic and cultural heritage, asking, “White? Is that a popular name where you come from?” Victor’s playful and clever reformulation of the coach’s misguided question not only pokes fun at Jim’s ridiculously Anglo surname but also makes clear that, in a community dominated by Latinxs in a state as diverse as California, the coach may be actually the one who doesn’t quite belong. Jim (nicknamed “Blanco” by the runners later on as a sign of his acceptance into their community) also wrongly assumes that Mr. Diaz doesn’t speak English, only to find out with embarrassment that he does— and quite well. The dangerous Latinx stereotype is also turned on its head. When they first arrive in town at night, the Whites fear for their safety when a caravan of lowriders approaches them. Jim would later apologize to one of the drivers, Javi (Victor’s uncle), for assuming he was a gangbanger because of his appearance. Of course, the movie’s main achievement is to question the issue of low expectations regarding the potential of minorities. Anchored in a reality of discrimination, poverty, and low educational achievement, the initial defeatist sentiment expressed by Victor’s assertion that “nobody wins around here” is soon challenged by the team’s unexpected achievements. Like Diana (who had the strength and skills to box but lacked support and access due to her gender), the McFarland runners had equal or superior athletic ability compared with their peers but lacked resources and training and were regarded as not belonging in the cross-country circuit because of their ethnicity and class. The McFarland Cougars’ ultimate success in the 1987 and several subsequent state championships helps to challenge stereotypical portrayals

of Latinxs in media and popular culture as lazy, criminal, and unwilling to integrate into mainstream “American” life. More importantly, the film does a good job of highlighting the structural obstacles that the runners must overcome to even be able to compete, let alone have a chance at winning. In this regard, director Niki Caro spends a significant percentage of screen time showing the kids toiling in the fields before and after school, finding time for the grueling training sessions without compromising their family responsibilities, and focusing on school and cross-country despite the multiple pressures they have from poverty, broken homes, and racism. This is what Coach White refers to when he tells his team right before the state championship, as they look with intimidation at their opponents, “Best in the state, right? But they haven’t got what you got.” The values of extra hard work and sacrifice are thus emphasized, both visually and verbally. During the races, the camera tends to focus on the legs of the runners with the purpose of highlighting the stark differences in skin color and quality of gear, which further accentuates the racial and class disadvantages McFarland has to overcome— making their victory even more remarkable and deserving at the affective level. The significance of building an identity around running and away from their harsh quotidian realities is best captured by Jose Cardenas (who in real life went on to become a Los Angeles Times journalist and army staff sergeant) in a poem he wrote for class: “We fly like blackbirds through the orange groves, floating on a warm wind. When we run, we own the earth. The land is ours. We speak the birds’ language. Not immigrant no more. No stupid Mexicans. When we run, our spirits fly. We speak to the gods. When we run, we are the gods.” Despite the film’s ethnically uplifting effect, it must also be criticized for its reliance on the recurrent and troublesome white savior and patriotism

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Figure 23.3 Brothers David and Damacio Diaz pick crops in the early morning before running back to attend school.

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tropes that Hollywood cinema (and sports films in particular) has exploited to exhaustion.2 As Todd Platts reminds us, the white savior trope is problematic because it dilutes and contorts complex people and history “to fit into the prevailing conservative politics of the day” and “sidesteps deep structural issues and offers an easy, quick fix many Americans yearn for” (699). While the sporting achievement featured in McFarland, USA is about seven Latinx teenage runners, the main protagonist and hero of the movie is Jim White, whose surname couldn’t be any more appropriate for this discussion. Because “the nature of filmmaking necessitates condensing down complex people, events, and historical periods into a workable runtime for a film” (Platts 699), the Jim White who is depicted in the movie is a miracle worker– type agent of change.3 In his first semester at a majority Mexican American school, he is able to build a cross-country program from zero and wins a state championship— all before November is over. The real-life “Blanco” became a teacher at McFarland in 1962, when the town was mostly white, and saw the community change dramatically over the decades. He and his wife, Cheryl, started boys and girls cross-country programs in 1980— seven years before there was a state championship (Arax). While a biographical film should not be expected to be completely faithful to the real-life events it is based on, the exaggerated condensation of time and events that occurs in McFarland, USA serves to overemphasize Jim’s impact on the team’s championship success— while taking credit away from the almost decade-long efforts by students, parents, and other community members to help build and consolidate the program. And because most white saviors in film are also male, the cinematic version of McFarland’s “miracle on dirt roads” also leaves out any mention of the school’s girls’ cross-country program and Cheryl White’s contributions. As real-life Victor Puentes told Runner’s World in 2015, “Without Mrs. White, I don’t think any of this would have happened. We were her sons” (Wade). McFarland, USA is also problematic because of the way it depicts belonging— or not belonging— to an imagined U.S. nation. One salient example is the way the town is shown as being more “Mexican” than “American” when the White family first arrives in the impoverished community. Dominated by the gaze of the Anglo outsiders from Idaho, the sequence employs documentary-style shots displaying rundown houses, boarded-up businesses, stray dogs crossing the street, chickens in gardens, and Virgin of Guadalupe murals on storefronts. The Whites wonder if the town has a hardware store or even a restaurant. When they do find a restaurant (Tacos El Cazador), they ask for hamburgers, but it only serves “tacos, tortas, tostadas, burritos, and quesadillas.” Their youngest daughter, Jaime, asks, “Are we in Mexico?” The representation of “California’s fruit bowl” so similarly to how Mexican or other Latin American towns are depicted in commercial Hollywood films

Figures 24.4a and b Permissible Latinx running in McFarland, USA versus “illegal” Latinx running at the border.

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sets up (from the beginning of the film) an artificial borderland between Latinx McFarland and the more affluent (and more “American”) world outside it. This differentiation is compounded by the (unnecessary) racial trash talk between McFarland runners/fans and opposing teams that the film inserts to boost feelings of rivalry and fulfill its sports narrative— further dividing the two worlds instead of uniting them through sportsmanship. Even more troublesome is the fact that, while depicting McFarland and the majority of its inhabitants as not fully belonging (visually, phenotypically, culturally, linguistically) to the United States, the film also advances a sense of inclusive patriotism that is only surface deep— as it can only be realized in the limited sphere of a sporting competition. This is exemplified by the scene previous to the start of the championship race. McFarland townsfolk who drove in a caravan to support their team fervently sing the national anthem while holding U.S. and Mexican flags. This changes to flashback scenes of the arduous months of training that led to that moment, with the anthem music playing as extradiegetic background— equating U.S. patriotism with their sacrifice and dedication. The message here is clear: the Latinxs of McFarland can temporarily achieve “Americanness” only and as long as they play the game by the established rules— that is, displaying values that are considered authentically American. Outside of that (and the Mexican flag

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fans carried with them is there as a reminder), they belong to a cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic outpost caught in the multinational history of California and the transnational realities of the border region— too American to be Mexican, too Mexican to be American. The film’s effort to portray the McFarland kids as an American success story means the realities of oppression and racism must be, if not fully erased, toned down. That’s why, for instance, there’s no mention of immigration in the story, even though the very existence of the town and its heroic runners is due to the migration of (mostly undocumented) Mexican nationals to support the farming industry. When it comes to Latinx running in the United States, there are two very different types: the permissible, state-sanctioned, Disney-celebrated cross-country running of the McFarland kids and the state-prosecuted, “illegal” running of the cartoon Mexican family that appears on big yellow “CAUTION” signs along the border.4

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“There Ain’t Nothing American Dream About This Place”: Final Thoughts

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A study of twenty-first-century sports films featuring Latinxs reveals important progress toward more positive and nuanced representations in terms of ethnicity, gender, and class. It also shows that there still remain problematic issues of stereotypical portrayals and tired old formulas (such as the white savior trope), particularly in mainstream films. An overarching commonality between Girlfight and McFarland, USA that I would like to highlight here is the destabilizing effect irruption has in both films: the irruption of women into the traditionally masculine realm of boxing and the irruption of poor, Mexican American athletes and their culture into the elite, Anglo realm of cross-country racing. Regarding the former, Alex Channon and Christopher Matthews have stated that women’s “appropriation” of so-called masculine sports and activities not only “depart[s] from the normative construction of women as vulnerable to and thus dependent upon men for protection” but also “signif[ies] women’s occupation of one of the few remaining social enclaves largely reserved for men . . . for the purpose of reifying male power, in societies where ‘dramatic symbolic proof ’ of male superiority has become increasingly difficult to come by” (6). This is similar to the anxiety generated by the “browning” of American demographics and culture, which prominently played out in the past presidential elections and has been articulated by the likes of Samuel P. Huntington— who in the early 2000s saw the wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia in the late twentieth century, the “Hispanization” of American society, the rise of Spanish as the country’s

Notes 1.

Girlfight received critical praise, winning recognitions from Sundance, Cannes, and the ALMA Awards, among others. It launched the successful career of Michelle Rodriguez, who plays the protagonist.

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second most important language, and the popularity of the “doctrines of multiculturalism and diversity” as existential threats to “the salience and substance” of U.S. culture— which for him has been rooted in “Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that for three and a half centuries have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions” (xvi). Differences and issues aside, both films studied here offer productive responses to the cultural and political pushback by dominant white, male, and heteronormative culture that gender and ethnic irruptions and disruptions have generated. Diana’s defiant and unapologetic way of being a strong and violent woman of color in the ring and outside of it has left scholars and cultural commentators scrambling for labels to define the “type” of female subjectivity she embodies. Karen Tolchin, for example, calls Diana a “macho Latina” (183). I take issue with such a definition, as being a “macho” woman entails appropriating certain types of masculine characteristics and denying the possibility of a strong, even violent, type of femininity. I prefer to see Diana (and the film supports this idea) as a Latina warrior. In a conversation with Adrian, he tells her, “My life with you is war.” To which she replies, “Maybe. Maybe life is just war, period.” Diana realizes that in order to be a poor woman of color from the projects who boxes against men and fights other societal threats, she needs to become a warrior. Meanwhile, despite the utopian nature of McFarland, USA, there are certain things that inevitably fall through the cracks of patriotic triumphalism and emerge as harsh criticisms of structural racism and U.S exceptionalism. In a fit of anger and frustration, Thomas tells White (who has just been offered a coaching job at Palo Alto), “We all get it. This is America, right? You gotta go bigger. . . . Better everything. Everyone is always gonna go for the better everything. That’s why nobody ever stays in McFarland unless they have to. There ain’t nothing American Dream about this place.” Finally, non-Spanish-speaking audiences are likely to miss the untranslated, anti-nativist, anti-imperialist, and pan-Americanist message of the Los Tigres del Norte song that extradiegetically accompanies the Whites’ trip to McFarland: “El que nace aquí es americano. . . . Todos somos americanos sin importar el color” (Anyone born here is American. . . . We are all Americans regardless of color).5

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2.

3.

4. 5.

White saviors are often teachers or coaches in Hollywood films such as Freedom Writers (2007), Glory Road (2006), and Dangerous Minds (1995). Kevin Costner, who plays Jim White in McFarland, USA, had previously played a white savior type in the 1990 drama Dances with Wolves. Latinx movies that have reversed the white savior trope include Stand and Deliver (1988), about Bolivian-born teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos), and Spare Parts (2015), where George Lopez plays a composite character (Fredi Cameron) of the two real-life teachers who inspired the story (Fredi Lajvardi and Allan Cameron). Here I’m taking issue with the way the film constructs Jim White as a white savior figure, not with the historical Jim White. His commitment and contributions to McFarland have been well documented in media reports and testimonials by his pupils. One student has even said, “White ain’t white. He’s Mexican” (Arax). Here I’m employing the concept of “permissibility” (who is allowed to tell stories and what stories are allowed to be told) proposed by Christopher González. Los Tigres del Norte is a Mexican-American norteño band best known for narcocorridos (drug-trafficking ballads), which challenge the dominant discourses of U.S. border security and Latin American intervention. The song played in the movie is titled “América.”

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References

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Arax, Mark. “Grueling Season: McFarland Cross-Country Team Toils for 6th Straight Title.” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1997, www.latimes.com/local/la-me-mcfarland-jim-white-19971201-story .html. Babington, Bruce. The Sports Film: Games People Play. Wallflower, 2014. Baker, Aaron. Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film. University of Illinois Press, 2003. Betancourt, Manuel. “‘Hands of Stone’ Director on Why Making a Hollywood Film About Successful Latinos Is Impossible.” Remezcla, June 15, 2016, remezcla.com/features/film/interview-jonathan -jakubowicz-director-of-hands-of-stone/. Accessed Feb. 4, 2019. Channon, Alex, and Christopher  R. Matthews. “Approaching the Gendered Phenomenon of ‘Women Warrior.’ ” Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors Around the World, edited by Alex Channon and Christopher R. Matthews, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 1– 21. Coakley, Jay. Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies. 10th ed., McGraw Hill, 2009. Cook, Pam. “Masculinity in Crisis?” Screen, vol. 23, no. 3– 4, 1982, pp. 39– 46. Crosson, Séan. Sport and Film. Routledge, 2013. Fojas, Camilla. “Sports of Spectatorship: Boxing Women of Color in Girlfight and Beyond.” Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 103– 15. Project Muse, doi: 10.1353/cj.0.0154. González, Christopher. Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2017. Grindon, Leger. Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema. University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Heiskanen, Benita. The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring. Routledge, 2012. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Simon and Schuster, 2004. Iber, Jorge, et al. Latinos in U.S. Sport: A History of Isolation, Cultural Identity, and Acceptance. Human Kinetics, 2011.

Lomax, Michael. Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Platts, Todd. “White Savior Films.” The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films, edited by Salvador Jimenez Murguía, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018, pp. 697–702. Poblete, Juan. “Latino Soccer, Nationalism, and Border Zones in the United States.” Sport and Nationalism in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste et al., Palgrave MacMillan, 2015, pp. 1– 26. Rowe, David. “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 22, no. 4, November 1998, pp. 350– 59. Santiago, Wilfred. 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente. Fantagraphics Books, 2014. Schippers, Mimi. “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony.” Theory and Society, vol. 36, no. 1, 2007, pp. 85– 102. Scott, David. The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Tolchin, Karen. “‘Hey Killer!’ The Construction of a Macho Latina, or the Perils and Enticements of Girlfight.” From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture, edited by Myra Mendible, University of Texas Press, 2007, pp. 183– 98. Tudor, Deborah. Hollywood’s Vision of Team Sports: Heroes, Race, and Gender. Garland Publishing, 1997. Wacquant, Loïc J. D. “The Social Logic of Boxing in Black Chicago: Toward a Sociology of Pugilism.” Sociology of Sport Journal, vol. 9, no. 3, 1992, pp. 221– 54. Wade, Alison. “‘McFarland’ Movie Helps One of Original Runners Get Back on Track.” Runner’s World, Feb. 26, 2016, www.runnersworld.com/news/a20849796/mcfarland-movie-helps-one-of -original-runners-get-back-on-track/.

Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories. Directed by Richard Rossi, Eternal Grace, 2013. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, Marvel Studies, 2018. Dances with Wolves. Directed by Kevin Costner, Tig Productions, 1990. Dangerous Minds. Directed by John N. Smith, Buena Vista Pictures, 1995. Field of Dreams. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson, Universal, 1989. 42. Directed by Brian Helgeland, Warner Bros., 2013. Freedom Writers. Directed by Richard LaGravenese, MTV Films, 2007. From Mexico with Love. Directed by Jimmy Nickerson, Cinamour Entertainment, 2009. Girlfight. Directed by Karyn Kusama, IFC, 2000. Glory Road. Directed by James Gartner, Walt Disney Pictures, 2006. Goal! Directed by Danny Cannon, Touchstone Pictures, 2005. Goal! II. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Buena Vista International, 2007. Goal! III. Directed by Andrew Morahan, VideoVision Entertainment, 2009. Hands of Stone. Directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, The Weinstein Company, 2016. The Kid: Chamaco. Directed by Miguel Necoechea, Maya Entertainment, 2009. Knockout. Directed by Lorenzo Doumani, DMG Entertainment, 2000. McFarland, USA. Directed by Niki Caro, Disney, 2015. Million Dollar Baby. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2004. The Perfect Game. Directed by William Dear, Image Entertainment, 2009. Price of Glory. Directed by Carlos Ávila, Shoreline Entertainment, 2000. Race. Directed by Stephen Hopkins, Forecast Pictures, 2016. Requiem for a Heavyweight. Directed by Ralph Nelson, Columbia Pictures, 1962. Right Cross. Directed by John Sturges, MGM, 1950. The Ring. Directed by Kurt Neumann, King Brothers/United Artists, 1952. Rocky. Directed by John G. Avildsen, United Artists, 1976. Rocky II. Directed by Sylvester Stallone, United Artists/Chartoff Winkler Productions, 1979. Rocky III. Directed by Sylvester Stallone, United Artists, 1982. Rocky IV. Directed by Sylvester Stallone, United Artists/MGM, 1985.

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Rocky V. Directed by John G. Avildsen, United Artists, 1990. Rocky Balboa. Directed by Sylvester Stallone, MGM, 2006. Salute. Directed by Matt Norman, Paramount Pictures, 2008. Spare Parts. Directed by Sean McNamara, Lionsgate, 2015. Stand and Deliver. Directed by Ramón Menéndez, Warner Bros., 1988. Sugar. Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, HBO Films, 2008. ¡Viva Baseball! Directed by Dan Klores, Shoot the Moon Productions, 2005.

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TWENTY- FIRST- CENTURY LATINX CINÉ A Coda Rosa-Linda Fregoso

A few months ago, media artist John Jota Leaños contacted me about the dearth of work on Chicanx cinema.1 Searching for materials for his film course, he found articles penned by movie critics but not by scholars. “I come up empty when looking for academic writing on La Mission, Water & Power, The Book of Life, Coco, Bless Me Última, and others,” John bemoaned. “What happened to Chicanx film criticism?!?!”2 It’s been twenty-five years since the publication of my book The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, and I am honored to mark its silver anniversary with a coda to this volume. In this timely collection of writings about Latinx cinema, its authors mark a significant shift— actually the transcendence— of film and film analysis across national(ist) borders. Chicanx cinema today flourishes in spaces where cultures, histories, and genres intermingle. Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century is a capacious bronze-screen odyssey, a varied range of analytic approaches to the study of film. In this collection, we discover how much has changed since the heyday of the Chicanx film movement, even as some challenges remain just as daunting. Despite the veritable explosion of Latinx documentaries, hybrid genres, and multiple platforms for screening Latinx-produced cinema, brown invisibility in Tinseltown persists to this day. On the cusp of the 2018 Academy Awards, the National Hispanic Media Coalition launched yet another protest denouncing the lack of racial diversity in that year’s nominations. Three years after the hashtag #OscarSoWhite responded to a slate of all-white acting nominees, the NHMC held two demonstrations targeting studio executives, voicing their demands with the slogan: “Hire Brown Tinseltown” (Barnes). The numbers justify the outrage. Alex Nogales, president of the media watchdog, noted, “At 18% of the U.S. population, Latinos represent 24[%] of all movie ticket buyers” despite remaining the “most underrepresented minority in the industry” (NHMC). According to the 2018 UCLA Hollywood 483

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Diversity Report, of the top two hundred films produced in 2016, Latinx actors were featured in only 2.7 percent of the film roles (Hunt et al.). “It’s time to end whitewashing and put Latinos in front of and behind the camera,” Nogales charged (NHMC). Calling the exclusion of Latinxs in director and writer roles “racist,” Nogales decried the executives of major Hollywood studios for their Latinx exclusion: “Basta! Enough is enough of this incredible decades-long bigoted exclusion” (NHMC). An early member of the Chicanx film movement, producer Moctezuma Esparza also told The New York Times: “Latinos, like all human beings, want to see themselves represented on screen” (NHMC). A few days before the 2018 Academy Awards, Patricia Cardoso circulated a New York Times article comparing that year’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird with her Real Women Have Curves, which anticipated many of the motherdaughter conflicts of the former without meriting the Academy’s accolades. Although Real Women Have Curves received rave reviews from the indie community in 2002, including being the first Latina-directed feature to be awarded Best Picture at Sundance, it was virtually ignored by the Academy’s mostly white Tinseltown coterie (Castillo). Brown folks were represented at the 2018 Academy Awards, but not in ways that diversify the human pool of actors on Hollywood screen. There were no Latinx actors in lead or supporting roles starring in the genres of drama, comedy, or action adventure, although Latinxs did occupy the realm of exotic fantasy in more ways than one. The enchanting Pixar animated musical fantasy Coco won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, with its computer-generated cast of all Latinx characters and real-life voice actors and its exotic Day of the Dead theme. Mexican-born Guillermo del Toro’s hybrid gothic-noir-sci-fi-fantasy The Shape of Water spotlighted an “embrace of otherness”— at a time when “the Latinx Other” has once again been vilified as a national security threat. Forty-five years after Albert Prago wrote the classic Strangers in Their Own Land: A History of Mexican-Americans— not to be confused with Arlie Russel Hochschild’s 2016 book with the same title about the anguish of the white working class— brown people remain just as estranged and criminalized in this (their own) country. Frederick Luis Aldama’s auspicious collection, however, points us to another visual space, reminding us that the Latinx cinematic imaginary of the twenty-first century is marked by changes in modes of production, distribution, and marketing. The book hails Latinx imagemakers as innovators, working across multiplatform experiences, in the genres of sci-fi, futurism, and animation, and experimenting with alternative ways of reaching the burgeoning Latinx audiences of this new century. My colega John Jota Leaños wrote that my “voice, research and writings have

been present in [his] class (and believe it or not) still hold great value in the analysis of Chicanx film.”3 However, there’s no doubt in my mind that this new generation of scholars elevates film analysis to new heights, opening a state-of-the-art borderlands for ciné scholarship. Aldama’s groundbreaking collection, Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century, represents a befitting response to John’s query: “What happened to Chicanx film criticism?!?!”

Notes 1. 2. 3.

“Chicanx” refers to Chicanxs or persons of Mexican descent, whereas Latinxs is a more encompassing term referencing people of Latin American descent. Personal email to the author on May 1, 2018. Personal email to the author on May 1, 2018.

References Barnes, Brooks. “At Oscars Luncheon, Latinos Demand Inclusion in Movies.” The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2018, B2. Castillo, Monica. “Why ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Never Got Its ‘Lady Bird’ Moment.” The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2018, www.nytimes .com/2018/02/23/movies/lady-bird-real-women-have -curves.html. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press, 2016. Hunt, Darnell, et al. “Hollywood Diversity Report 2018.” UCLA College Social Sciences, Feb. 27, 2018, socialsciences.ucla.edu/hollywood-diversity-report-2018/. Accessed Feb. 8, 2019. NHMC (National Hispanic Media Coalition). “Release: Mon., Feb. 5: Latinos Demonstrate Against the Chronic Underrepresentation of Latinos in the Film Industry.” NHMC, Feb. 5, 2018, www .nhmc.org/release-mon-feb-5-latinos-demonstrate-chronic-underrepresentation-latinos-film -industry/. Accessed Feb. 10, 2018. Prago, Albert. Strangers in Their Own Land: A History of Mexican-Americans. Four Winds, 1973.

Filmography

Twent y - Fir st - C ent ur y L at in x C in é

Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Lady Bird. Directed by Greta Gerwig, Scott Rudin Productions/Entertainment 360/IAC Films, 2017. Real Women Have Curves. Directed by Patricia Cardoso, HBO Films, 2002. The Shape of Water. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2017.

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CONTRIBUTORS IVÁN EUSEBIO AGUIRRE DARANCOU is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on countercultural expressions in Mexico and the greater Hispanic world, especially through the presence of hallucinogenic substances in literature and other cultural products, as well as their insertion in global cultural flows. He has presented conference papers at UC-Irvine, UTEP, Cineteca Nacional, LASA, and SCMS, with topics ranging from Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados to Mexican Super 8mm film production and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s oeuvre. He has published articles on authors Augusto Monterroso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Parménides García Saldaña, and José Agustín in journals such as Hispanic Review, Tierra adentro, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, and Romance Notes. FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA is Distinguished University Professor, University Distinguished Scholar, and University Distinguished Teacher at The Ohio State University. He is the author, co-author, and editor of thirty-six books, including Long Stories Cut Short and the Eisner Award–winner Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. JUAN  J. ALONZO is associate professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University, College Station. His scholarship focuses on twentiethcentury American literature and culture, with specialization in Chicanx literature and film studies. He is the author of Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (2009). LEE BEBOUT is associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies. He is the author of Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (2011) and Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (2016). His articles have appeared in journals such as Aztlán, MELUS, and Latino Studies. DEBRA A. CASTILLO is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, professor of comparative literature, and director of the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Mexican Public Intellectuals (with Stuart Day, 2014), Despite all Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema (with Andrés Lema-Hincapié, 2015), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South (with Shalini Puri, 487

2016), and South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee, forthcoming). She is past president of the international Latin American Studies Association. NIKOLINA DOBREVA is assistant professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College. Her research and publications focus on ethnic representation and performance (particularly Romani representation) and international genre cinema. Future book projects include a monograph on Romani performance and international superstars and a co-written project on postmodern Hispanic/Latinx musicals with Enrique García. PAUL ESPINOSA is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and president/CEO of Espinosa Productions. He has been involved with producing films for over thirty-five years, including the recent feature-length documentary Singing Our Way to Freedom (2018). He is professor emeritus in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. Espinosa received his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, where he specialized in the cultural analysis of television communication, and his BA degree from Brown University, also in anthropology. Espinosa’s films have won eight Emmys and Best of Festival awards from many film festivals around the world. His nationally broadcast films on PBS include The Lemon Grove Incident, The U.S.-Mexican War: 1846– 1848, The Border, . . . and the earth did not swallow him, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, Uneasy Neighbors, Los Mineros, In the Shadow of Law, and Ballad of an Unsung Hero.

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MAURICIO ESPINOZA is assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American cultural studies at the University of Cincinnati. His research and publications focus on Latin American/Latinx comics and film, Central American migration narrative and poetry, and Latin American immigrant communities. He has translated the work of Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio into English. His book Respiración de piedras won the 2015 University of Costa Rica Press Poetry Prize. His poetry also appears in The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (2017).

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CAMILLA FOJAS is professor of media studies and American studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent books include, her co-edited volume Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai’i (2018) and Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (2017). She is currently working on a book on cultures of surveillance and borders tentatively titled Border Securities/Border Futures. ROSA- LINDA FREGOSO is an award-winning scholar who writes on human rights, gender violence, and cultural politics in the Américas and works as expert

witness for gender asylum cases. Professor emerita of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was the 2014 recipient of the American Studies Association’s Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in American Studies. Her major publications include her co-edited Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas (2010), the awardwinning meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (2003), The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (1993), and The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films by Lourdes Portillo (2001). DESIRÉE J. GARCIA is associate professor in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (2014). She has also published in Film History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Garcia previously worked as an associate producer for American Experience, the historical documentary series on PBS. ENRIQUE GARCÍA is associate professor of Hispanic visual culture at Middlebury College. Garcia is the author of Cuban Cinema After the Cold War (2015) and The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics (2017). He has published articles and book chapters on Mexican comics and on the films of U.S. Latino director Robert Rodriguez. Future book projects include a monograph on comic books and the Caribbean and a co-written project on postmodern Hispanic/Latinx musicals with Nikolina Dobreva.

MATTHEW DAVID GOODWIN is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. His research is centered on the experience of migration, in particular how Latinx writers are using science fiction to explore migration. He is the editor of Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy as well as the forthcoming young adult collection The Latinx Archive: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. Currently, he teaches courses on Latinx literature, U.S. Puerto Rican literature, Latinx science fiction, and multiethnic science fiction. MONICA HANNA is associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is co-editor with Rebecca A. Sheehan of

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CLARISSA GOLDSMITH researches Latinx comics, speculative fiction, and horror. She is a PhD student at Arizona State University in the field of English. Her past presentations, among others, include “The Curse of the Commodified Caped Crusader: An Analysis of Latin@ Superheroes” and “¡Órale, Superman! Appropriation and the Chican@ Superhero,” both of which focus on the intersection between Latinx subjectivity, appropriation, and capital.

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Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics (2019) and co-editor with Jennifer Harford Vargas and José David Saldívar of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (2016). SARA VERONICA HINOJOS is assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, the City University of New York. She received her PhD in Chicana and Chicano studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on Chicanx and Latinx media and popular culture, language politics (specifically “accent” studies), and comedy and humor studies. She’s currently working on her manuscript “The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in U.S. Media (1925– 2014).” CARLOS GABRIEL KELLY was an adjunct instructor in the San Diego community college system and is currently a PhD student in English at Ohio State University. He is also coordinator for OSU’s LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research, working with the greater Columbus Latinx high school community to create pipelines to higher education. His scholarship focuses on U.S. Latinx literature, paying special attention to poetry and video games and how they contribute to a critical conversation surrounding the representation of Latinxs within the United States. In 2019, he published Wounds Fragments Derelict, his debut book of poetry.

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JENNIFER M. LOZANO is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She has a chapter forthcoming in the edited collection Latin@ American Media Studies in the Age of Digital Humanities that explores the complex intersection of blogs, participatory culture, and Latinx literature. She also researches and writes on the utility of networked and relational feminist spirituality in contemporary women of color feminist writers, which can be seen in her recent publication on Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo in El Mundo Zurdo 6: Selected Works from the 2016 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (2018).

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MANUEL M. MARTÍN- RODRÍGUEZ is professor of literature and founding faculty at the University of California, Merced. He has published numerous books, including The Textual Outlaw: Reading John Rechy in the 21st Century (2015), With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries (2014), and Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (2003), among others. His scholarly articles have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, The Americas Review, and Aztlán, among others. Martín-Rodríguez is also the publisher of alternaCtive publicaCtions, a virtual press that has featured numerous Latinx authors. He serves on the national committee of the Tomás Rivera Mexican American

Children’s Book Award and is an elected académico de número (permanent member) of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. J. V. MIRANDA is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Border Transits: Geographies of Dispossession, Embodiment, and Possibility in Latinx and Indigenous Literature,” which explores the deep history of migration and autonomous movement in the borderlands in an effort to show how geographical practices and features in the region emerge and reflect this history. In addition to borderland studies, he has presented and taught courses on literature and spatial theory, U.S. and ethnic allegory, and monsters in modern society and literature. VALENTINA MONTERO ROMÁN is a Frederick Donald Sober Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Michigan’s Department of English Language and Literature. Her research interests include ethnic modernisms, Latinx studies, cognitive narratology, and critical race and feminist theory. DANIELLE ALEXIS OROZCO is a PhD student in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on Latinx literature, film, and TV, as well as visual culture and performance studies. She is especially interested in monstrosity and representations of Latinx women in popular and independent media. Her work as a writing center consultant and LASER mentor speaks to her passion for community service programs that guide students and youth. HENRY PUENTE is professor of communications at California State University, Fullerton. Prior to becoming a professor, he had extensive entertainment industry experience in film and special events. He is the author of The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films (2011), and his research interest centers on U.S. Latinx and Spanish-language media outlets and race/ ethnicity.

RICHARD T. RODRÍGUEZ is associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is author of Next of Kin: The Family in

Cont ri bu t ors

JOHN  D. “RIO” RIOFRIO is director of Latin American Studies at the College of William and Mary, where he also teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature. His scholarly interests range from popular representations of U.S. Latinxs in film, literature, and media to Latinx counternarratives and contestatory discourses. With a PhD in English from University of Wisconsin– Madison, he has an abiding interest in hemispheric Latinx identities and their impact on understanding the complexities of Latinx presence in the Americas. He is the author of Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Search for Justice in Latin(o) America (2015).

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Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009), winner of the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award. He is at work on two book projects: “Undocumented Desires: Fantasies of Latino Male Sexuality” and “Latino/U.K.: Transatlantic Intimacies in Post-Punk Cultures.” ARIANA RUIZ is assistant professor of Latinx literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is currently completing a book manuscript, “In Transit: Travel and Mobility in Latina Art and Literature,” that examines Latina engagement with the promise of American travel and mobility in novels, art, and film. She has presented at national and international conferences on Latinx writers and artists that incorporate the trope of national and transnational travel into their work. SAMUEL SALDÍVAR III is assistant professor of English at Texas State University, where he teaches courses and does research on Chicanx and Latinx narrative literary fiction, film, television, comics, and all other matters concerning Latinx popular culture. JORGE SANTOS is assistant professor of multiethnic literature of the United States at the College of the Holy Cross. His work has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, and Image/Text, and his first exploration into the world of graphic narrative was awarded the University of Connecticut Aetna Critical Writing Prize. He has also contributed work to multiple collections on graphic narrative scholarship. He is the author of Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics (2019).

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REBECCA A. SHEEHAN is associate professor of cinema and television arts at California State University, Fullerton. Her areas of publication and research include border cinema, avant-garde cinema, film and philosophy, the biopic, virtual reality, and sculpture and film.

492

INDEX Abbott, H. Porter, 112 A Better Life (film), xii, 15, 150, 152, 155, 166, 171–85 Abrazos (film), 30 Abrego, Leisy, 163 abUSed: The Postville Raid, 30 Academy Awards, 10, 27, 83, 211, 335, 340, 483–84 Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, 10 accents (stereotypical), 346, 349 affect, 418 Affleck, Ben, 8 African American Heritage Program, 40 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 337–39 afrofuturism, 192 agricultural industry, 37–38, 241, 255–56, 271, 472 Aguirre Darancou, Iván Eusebio, 7–8, 18, 405 A Hard Day’s Night, 190 AIDS crisis, 30, 43 Ain’t It Cool News (website), 219 A la mala, 55–56 Alambrista!, 173–75 Alarcón, Norma, 430–31 Alazraqui, Carlos, 361 Alba, Jessica, 5–6, 215, 219 Albizu, Magdalena, 30 Alcaraz, Gilberto, 370 Alcaraz, Lalo, 360, 362 Aldama, Frederick, xi, xiii, 3, 6, 15, 89, 91, 111, 214, 243, 251, 263, 268, 281–82, 292, 301, 373, 440, 484–85 Aldarondo, Cecelia, 6–7, 30 Alex Rivera (website), 270–71 Algarín, Miguel, 7 Ali, Laila, 467 Alita: Battle Angel, 5 Allen, Edward, 54 Allen, Robert, 48 Al más allá, 42 Alonzo, Juan J., 15, 187, 190–91, 342–43 Alvarez, Gonzalo, 90, 96 Amazon, 25 Ambriz, Domingo, 175 AMC 51, 61 American dream, 155, 180–81, 438, 466, 476, 479 American Hustle, 202 American Me, 4

Amexicano, 8 Amores Perros, 92, 100–101 A Narco History, 78 Anders, Allison, 4 A New Mexican Boy, 369 animated villains, 335–54 animation/animated movies, 335–54, 405–23 Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, 10 Another Earth, 292 Anthony, Marc, 14, 124–43 Anthropocene, 75 Ant-Man, 6, 202, 207 Ant-Man and the Wasp, 6, 207 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 104, 302, 315–16, 319–24, 327–28, 330, 430, 442–44 Aparicio, Frances, 126, 129, 133 Apocalypse, 300 Apparitions on Tortillas, 272 Applegate, Christina, 361 Arau, Alfonso, 4 Arau, Sergio, 6 Arecibo Observatory, 287 Arenas Entertainment, 46 Argüello, Alexis, 464 Argueta, Luis, 30 Arizona trailer, Machete, 218–21, 228 Arnaz, Desi, 128 Arnold, Tom, 52 A Robot Walks into a Bar, 271, 273 Arriaga, Daniel, 361 Artenstein, Isaac, 3 Arteta, Miguel, 6–7 asylum/asylum-seekers, 213–14, 217 Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 357 auteur, 26–27 Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 117 Avatar, 5 Avgerino, Theo, 205 A Walk in the Clouds, 4 Ayer, David, 6 Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College (missing 43 students), 77 Aztlán-a-Go-Go, 193–96, 199 Azul (blogger), 383, 386–92, 397 . . . and the earth did not swallow him, xi, xiii Babalú, Cheo, 130 Babel, 78, 92, 94, 100–101

493

I ndex

494

Baby Driver, 5 Back Home, 203, 207 Bad Teacher, 6 Baehr, Amy, 433 Báez, Jillian, 427–28, 438 Bahrani, Ramin, 32 Baker, Aaron, 465–66 Balanzategui, Jessica, 413 Baldwin, James, 359 The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, xiii, 184, 228 Ballad of an Unsung Hero, xii Bancalari, Bruno, 34 Banderas, Antonio, 5 Bandito, Frito, 18, 336, 340–42 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 417 Banshee (Marvel), 303 Bardem, Javier, 6, 211 Barraza, Adriana, 5 Barreto, Ray, 127, 135 Barrueto, Jorge J., 12 baseball, 463 Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories, 464 basketball, 463, 472 Beachley Brear, Holly, 189 Bebout, Lee, 15, 147–70 Beck, Glenn, 181 Bellyfruit, 204 Beltrán, Mary, 12, 211, 428 Benjamin, Walter, 252, 262 Berg, Peter, 5 Berger, John, 111 Berger, Todd, 5 Bergson, Henri, 105 Berlin Film Festival, 267 Betancourt, David, 306, 465 Betancourt, Manuel, 27 Beyond Brown, 32 Bhabha, Homi K., 104 Bichir, Demián, 171, 174 Big Pun (hip-hop artist), 34 Bildungsroman, 405, 408 Bingham, Dennis, 429 biographical cinema, 428–30 biopic, 132, 134, 140, 429–31, 438, 440, 442 Birchir, Bruno, 52 Blacc, Aloe, 273–74 blackface, 337 Black Panther, 465 black voice (minstrelsy), 338–39 Bladerunner, 243 Blades, Rubén,125, 129, 131–32, 140 Blanc, Mel, 9, 336, 340–41, 342, 346, 350 Blaustein Muñoz, Susana, 42 Bless Me Última, 483 Blog del Narco (website), 72

Blotnick, Robin, 37 Boatwright, Angela, 33–34 Bogost, Ian, 90–91, 100–2 Bonifacio, Matthew, 8 The Book of Life, 9, 18, 355–81, 384, 483 Boogaloo, 31 The Border, (film) 240 The Borders Trilogy, 271 border, 33, 37, 89, 243, 245–47 border-crossing subjects, 13, 69, 76, 88–108, 174, 198, 247, 249 border docu-games, 13, 88–108 borderland, third space, 13, 104–5 Borderlands (video game), 89 Borderlands 2 (video game), 89 borders, borderlands (space), xii, 13, 14, 16, 17, 67–87, 88–108, 112, 192, 209, 216–17, 219, 237–48, 267–85, 299, 302, 308, 313, 316–17, 329–30, 368, 373, 388–90, 398, 477–78, 485 Borderline (film), 240, 243 border patrol, 67, 74, 77, 81–82, 90, 93, 94, 99, 103–4, 162, 164, 173, 238, 240, 243, 246–47 Borders (video game), 90, 93, 95–96, 106 Bordertown: Laredo, 240 Border Wars, (TV show) 247 Born in East L.A., 150, 228 Boston Marathon, 464 Bourin, Lenny, 38 boxing movies, 462–63, 466, 468–69, 473 Boyle, Danny, 28–29, 40 Boyle Heights, 33 Bracero program, 38, 251, 253–54 Braidotti, Rosi, 416 Bratt, Benjamin, 5, 7, 17, 335, 339, 345–50, 361, 375, 453 Bratt, Peter, 6, 7, 18–19, 38, 115, 441–43, 451– 52, 458 Brayton, Sean, 214 Bread and Roses, 7, 173–74 Breakneck, 11 Brewer, Jan, 272 Brewster, Jordana, 11 The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 372 The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, 483 Broadway, 198–99 Brooklyn, 468, 479 Brooklyn Athletic Club, 463 Brooks, James L., 8 brownface, 9, 339 Brown v. Board of Education, xii brown voice, 9–10, 17, 336, 339–40, 342–46, 348–50, 419 Buchan, Suzanne, 336

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 151 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 131 Cacho, Lisa, 159 The Calcium Kid, 204 Calderón, Felipe, 67 Caliban (Marvel), 304 Call of Juarez: The Cartel (video game), 89 Camil, Jaime, 52 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, 303 Cammisa, Rebecca, 36 Candelaria, Cordelia, 175 Cannes Film Festival, 79 Cantinflas (film), 49, 53–54 Caramelo (novel), 368 Cardenas, Jose, 475 Cardoso, Patricia, 5, 484 Carell, Steve, 345 Carlos, John, 464 Carmelo (film), 359 Carmona, Jennica, 32 Carne y Arena (art installation), xii, 13, 68, 78– 85, 92–93, 99, 101–2, 105–6 Caro, Niki, 461, 475 Carracedo, Almudena, 37 Carroll, Amy Sara, 268 Cartel Land, 67, 72–73, 84, 88 Casa de mi padre, 53, 57–58, 371 Casa en tierra ajena, 36 Casa Libre, 78 Castells, Manuel, 450–52, 458 Castillo, Ana, 430 Castillo, Debra, A. 10, 12–13, 25, 269–70 Castillo, Raúl, 7 Castro, Joy, 11 Cat-Tails for Two (cartoon), 340 Cavina, Carla, 287 Center Stage, 5 Cesar Chavez (film), 38, 49, 53–56, 111, 117, 119, 202, 209–10 Cesar Chavez Day, 55 Chacón, Iris, 136–37 chain link fence, 70, 147, 177–78 Channing, Stockard, 52 Channon, Alex, 478 Chaparro, Omar, 52 Charreada, 171, 175 Chavarria, Gabriel, 5 Chavez, Cesar, 7, 14, 111–15, 120–21 Chavez, Julio César, 464 Chicana/ofuturism, 192, 215–16, 249

Chicano Movement, 111, 119, 190, 219, 278, 342, 430 The Chicano Wave, 31 Chicanx cinema, 190–91, 241, 483–85 Chicanx community, identity, 111–23, 450–60 CHiPs, 206 cholo (figure), 299–301, 309 Chop Shop (film), 32 Christopher, Emma, 9 Cinco de Mayo, 213, 218, 228, 347, 365 cinelandia, 12 Cinemark, 61 Cine Vista, 46 Cisneros, Sandra, 192, 368, 430–31, 443 Ciudad Juárez, 75, 88, 313, 316–17, 320, 322 Civil Rights Movements, xi, 147 Clark, Larry, 5 The Clash, 190, 197 Cleger, Osvaldo, 90 Clemente, Roberto, 463 Clooney, George, 436 Coakley, Jay,463 Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 28, 38 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 224–25 Coco, 11, 18, 355–59, 361–81, 382–404, 483–84 Codina, Edward, 121 Cohen, Deborah, 254 Collateral Beauty, 208 Colombiana (film), 5 Colón, Willie, 125, 135, 138 colonization, 244, 249–50, 407, 471, 104 Colossus (Marvel), 303 Columbia Pictures, 184 Colunga, Fernando, 52 Combs, Sean “Puffy,” 34 Come and Take It Day (film), 187, 189, 191 coming out narratives, 289 commodification, commodities, 241, 256–57, 307–8, 311, 314, 319–21, 328 commodity activism, 432, 436 Compadres, 52, 56 Concepción, Nina, 27 Conchita Alonso, Maria, 5 Conocimiento, 440–43 Conrad, Joseph, 70 Conspiracy Club for Men (film), 272 Contact (film), 287 Corman, Roger, 286 Cornish, Abbie, 8 corporations (U.S.), 308, 317, 319–21 Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, 43 Coyotek, 257 The Counselor, 6, 8 Crash (film), 202, 208 Creative Artists Agency, 10

I ndex

Bullock, Sandra, 208 Burk, Jim, 53 Busco novio para mi mujer, 56 Butler, Octavia, 192

495

I ndex

criminality, 162 criminality, 67, 73, 178, 337, 342, 470 Criminalization of Latinxs, 216 Cristina Show, 194 Cronos (film), 415–16 cross-country, 461, 466–67, 472–73, 476, 478 Crossing Over, 8 Crosson, Séan, 462, 465–66 Crossover Dreams (film), 125, 129–31, 134 Cruz, Celia, 128–29 Cruz, John, 205 Cruz, Penelope, 5, 6, 211 Cuarón, Alfonso, 7, 27–29, 39–40 Cuarón, Jonás, 15, 147–70 Cuevas, María José, 27 cultural appropriation,197 cultural authenticity, 355–81 cultural memory, 16, 189, 249–66 Culture Clash, 42 Cummins, Amy, 302 Curandera, 99 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 52 Custen, George, 429 cyber-bracero, 256, 258–59 cyborgs, 249–66 Cybracero (website), 268, 270 cybracero program, 268 Cyrano de Bergerac, 10

496

DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), 303 Dante, 70 Danza Azteca, 453, 458 Dávila, Arlene, 47, 428 Dawson, Rosario, 5, 113, 209 DC Comics, 301, 303 The Decolonial Imaginary, 188 de la Fuente, Raúl, 27 de la Hoya, Oscar “Golden Boy,” 464 de Lauretis, Teresa, 452 del Castillo, Kate, 361 Deleuze, Gilles, 95, 105, 416 del Toro, Benicio, 5, 10, 119, 211 del Toro, Guillermo, 7, 18, 28, 151, 359, 405–23, 484 de Montreuil, Ricardo, 7–8 De nadie, 36 De Niro, Robert, 215, 219 deportation bus (campaign), 387 De Rakoff, Alex, 204 Derbez, Eugenio, 46, 50–51, 53–57, 60–61 Desierto (film), xii, 15, 147–70 Desilver, Drew, 37–38 Despicable Me, 17, 345 Despicable Me 2, 335–54, 365

Despierta América, (film) 53 Después del terremoto, 4, 42 The Devil’s Backbone, 416 Día de los Muertos / Day of the Dead, 18, 355– 81, 384–85, 484 Dia de los Muertos, (short film) 384 Dias, Romi, 139 diaspora, diasporic subject, 457 Diaz, Cameron, 5–6 Dibango, Manu, 128 Diesel, Vin, 11 Digital Rasquachismo, 267–85 Dirdamal, Tin, 35–36 Disney, 18, 409, 461, 472, 478 Disneyfication, 369–70, 375–76, 382, 386, 389 Disney Pixar, 355–56, 361, 363, 370–71, 374– 75, 382, 384, 389 diversity, 150, 182, 479, 419, 428, 431, 438 Divine Comedy, 70 divine justice, 382–404 Django Unchained, 16, 214, 217–18, 224–26, 228, 230 Dobreva, Nikolina, 14, 124–43 documentary, 25–45, 67–87, 88–89, 106, 125, 147, 150, 196, 199, 268, 271 Dolores (film), xiii, 38, 111, 115, 117, 119, 427–49 Domingo, Plácido, 351 Dominguez, Ricardo, 245–46 Don’t Tell Anyone / No Le Digas a Nadie, 37 Dracula (film),151 Dreamers, 155, 159 DreamWorks Animation, 357, 405, 409 Dreher, Rod, 225–26 drones, 16, 237–48, 278 Drudge, Matt, 225 drug cartels/trafficking, 67, 69, 72–73, 76–77, 129, 133–34, 215 drug war, 67, 78, 133–34 Duigan, John, 5 Dumbo, 338 Durán, Roberto “Manos de Piedra,” 464 DVDs covers, features, 14, 33, 111, 113–15, 117, 119–22, 273, 363–64 dystopia/dystopian futures, 242, 245, 250–51 East L.A., 11, 33, 174, 176 East Los High, 5 Ebert, Roger, 97, 99 Echo Park, 427 Eisenstein, Sergei, 119–20 El Cantante (film), 14, 124–43 El diablo nunca duerme, 42 El Gordo y La Flaca, 53 El heraldo (newspaper), 252

Facebook, 26, 53, 55 Fack ju Gohte (film), 50 Fair Food Program, 38–39 family separation, 217, 368 Fania Records, Fania All-Stars, 124–30, 134 Fanon, Frantz, 244 Fantastic Four, 6 fantasy (genre), 407 Farmer, Harry, 82 Fast and Furious franchise, 5, 11 The Fate of the Furious, 58 fatness, fat bodies, 336, 345–47, 349 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 119 feedback loop, 253, 255

Felipe, the Bullfighter, 369 femicide/ feminicidios, 75, 316, 88 feministas, 427–49 Fernández, Emilio, 4 Ferrell, Will, 53 Ferrer, José, 4, 10 Ferrera, America, 5, 53, 113, 209 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 187 Field of Dreams, 462 Fiesta Battle of Flowers parade, 186–201 Fifty Pills, 205 Filly Brown (film), 52, 54–56, 58 final girl, 155 The Fisher King, 10 Flores, Richard R., 189 Fojas, Camilla, 16, 237–48, 251, 260, 280, 317, 467, 471 football, 463 Forever 21, 37 42 (film), 463 Foucault, Michel, 149 Fountain/Ozzy Visits the Alamo (statue), 189 Foxx, Jamie, 224 Frank, Robert, 190 Frankenstein, 290 Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, 286 Frazier, Jacqui, 467 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 11, 12, 41, 75, 191, 483, 88, 196, 199–200 Fresh Dressed, 34 Frida (film), 427–49 From Dusk Till Dawn, 5 From Mexico with Love, 464 Frontera, (film) 209 Fury, 202 F=futures, futurity, futurisms, xi- xiii, 16–17, 192, 214–17, 237–48, 249–66, 267–85, 484 FutureStates (series), 271 Gabriel, Juan, 132 Gallardo, Margaret, 355 Garcia, Alba, 9 García, Alma, 430 García, Andy, 5 García, Angel, 7 Garcia, Desiréé J., 15, 171 García, Enrique, 14, 124–43 García, Maira, 355 García, Robert, 34 García Bernal, Gael, 37, 148, 361, 363, 371, 374 Garcia Berumen, Frank Javier, 8 García Márquez, Gabriel, 190, 292 García-Peña, Lorgia, 302, 316 Gast, Leon, 14, 126 Gavaldón, Roberto, 360

I ndex

El Hielo, 9 El Immigrante (film), 147, 150, 152 Elizondo, Hector, 361 El Macho/Eduardo Perez, 335–54 El Mariachi, 4, 219 El Nié, 316, 319, 325 El Norte, xiii, 4, 15, 92, 97, 148, 150, 155, 166, 240 El Rey Network, 60 El Super (featurette), 4, 131 El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, 9, 359 embodiment (in film), 165–66, 420 embodiment (in video games), 82, 91, 93, 95–96 Emerick, Laura, 374 empathy, 13, 82, 88–108, 281, 291, 323, 328 Empire, (film) 8 End of Watch, 202, 208 epitext, 112 Erazo, Vanessa, 438 Esparza, Moctezuma, 3, 184, 438–39, 484 Espinosa, Paul, xi, 3, 9 Espinoza, Mauricio, 7, 19, 461 Esposito, Giancarlo, 7 Esquenazi, Deborah, 6 ethnic Avenger films, 16, 228, 230 ethnic fantasy, 214 ethnic minority gays, 451 ethnic rage, 452 ethnic subject, 218 Everybody Loves Somebody (film), 52 Everybody Loves Somebody, 59 Everybody Loves Someone (program), 53 excess (situated), 15, 16, 202, 207, 214, 238, 247, 336, 347, 349 Extinction (film), 210 Extra Terrestres, 17, 286–95 extraterrestrials, 289 Ex-Voto, 186–201

497

I ndex

Genette, Gérard, 110–12, 119 George Washington, 30 Germano, Roy, 36 Getino, Octavio, 40, 104 Getzels, Peter, 31 Gibberish (in relationship to Spanish), 341 Gibson, Mel, 229 Gillam, Terry, 10 The Girl, 8 Girlfight, xiii, 5, 7, 19, 461–82 Girl in Progress, 49, 52, 54, 57–58 Global capitalism, 16 Goal!, 464 Godard, Jean-Luc, 26 Gods Go Begging, 367 Goldsmith, Clarissa, 15, 147–70 Gomery, Douglas, 48 Gone in 60 Seconds, 202 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 3, 190 Gonzales, Speedy, 9, 10, 18, 336, 340–41 Gonzalez, Anthony, 361 Gonzalez, Christopher, 278 González, Eiza, 5 González, Jennifer A., 192 González, Juan, 31 Gonzalez, Myrtle, 4 Gonzalez, Pedro J., xii Gonzalez, Rita, 192 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 7, 13, 28, 68, 78– 79, 82–84, 92–94, 99–100, 102, 105 Good Morning America, 53 Good Neighbor policy, 356 Goodwin, Matthew David, 17, 286–95 Gopinath, Gayatri, 457 Gordon, Michael, 10 The Graduates/Los Graduados, 112 Gravity, 27 Greene, Daniel, 245 Grindhouse, 218 Grindon, Leger, 468 Grodal, Torben, 121 Guadalupe, 430 Guardians of the Galaxy, 5 Guattari, Felix, 95, 416 Guerrero, Aurora, 6–7 Guevara, Che, 194–95 Gunckel, Colin, 12 Gutiérrez, Jorge R., 9, 359–60 Guzmán, Patricio, 27 greaser films, 343

498

H-2A visas, 38 Habell-Pallán, Michelle, 191 Hacking for Beginners, 280 Haggis, Paul, 208

Hamilton, Peter, 47 The Hand That Feeds, 37 Hands of Stone, 464–65 Hanna, Monica, 10, 13, 67 Happy Feet 2, 9 haptic aesthetics, 88–108 Haralovich, Mary Beth, 47–48 Harlow, Band, 126 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 27 Harvest of Empire, 31 Hasta la raíz, 34 hate speech, 451 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 245 Hayek, Salma, 5, 53–55, 371, 432–37 Hayworth, Rita, 5 Hazlo como hombre, 51 The Head of Joaquin Murrieta, 31 Heart of Darkness, 70 hegemony, 105, 347, 428 Heineman, Matthew, 88 Hellboy franchise, 406, 412 Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 407, 410, 416 Hell or High Water (novel), 11 Hernandez, Jay, 5–6 heterogeneity, 105, 428 heteronormativity, 457 Hidalgo, Alondra, 148 high school, 406, 417, 419 Hiland, Lexi, 30 The Hills Have Eyes, 152–54 Hinojos, Sara Veronica, 8, 17, 335–54, 405, 419 hip-hop, 34–36 hispanization, 478 Hollander, Robert, 70 Hollywood, 46, 48, 50–61, 124, 131–32, 134, 140, 172, 180–82, 184, 191, 199, 211, 240, 288, 316, 358, 374, 465–66, 468, 471, 474, 476, 483–84, 100, 104, 433, 436, 438 Home Depot, 184 Homeland Security, 238 Homeland Security USA (TV show), 247 Horak, Jan-Christopher, 12 Horlick Levin Hodges Inc., 183 horror films, horror conventions, 148–60, 163, 166, 267–85 The Hour of the Furnaces, 40 The House of Ramon Iglesias, xiii How to Be a Latin Lover (film), 11, 53–60 How to Train Your Dragon, 405 Huerta, Dolores, 14, 111–12, 115, 120–21, 209, 427, 440–43 Hughes, John, 190, 192 Human Rights Watch, 77 hungry fighter trope, 467–69, 473 The Hunt for Pancho Villa, xii

I Am Joaquin 3, 190 Ibarra, Cristina, 6–7, 30–31 Iber, Jorge, 464 ICED! (I Can End Deportation) (video game), 90, 101–2 Ichaso, Léon, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 125, 129, 131, 139 I Like It Like That, 4 Imitation of Life (1959 film), 172 immigration, 30, 33, 35–38, 88, 105, 147–52, 159, 161, 164, 166, 171–85, 213–17, 223, 228–29, 242, 249, 251, 278, 347, 467 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 213, 216, 387 Immokalee U.S.A., 39 indigenismo, 216 Infowars, 220 Ingle, Zachary, 215 Inglorious Basterds, 217–18 Instructions Not Included,11, 46, 48–49, 53–55, 58, 60 integration (schools), xii In the Shadow of the Law, xii Invisible America (website), 270–73 Invisible Cinema (website), 270, 272–73 The Invisible Man, 290 Isaac, Oscar, 6, 300 It’s a Disaster, 5 Jackman, Hugh, 17, 312 Jaenada, Óscar, 53 Jakubowicz, Jonathan, 465 Jameson, Fredric, 192, 335 Jarritos soda, 54, 184 Jarvinen, Lisa, 12 Jenkins, Sacha, 34 Jeong, Ken, 346 Jim Crow, 38 jive slang, 338 Joji Fukunaga, Cary, 7 Jolson, Al, 128 Jones, Alex, 218–22, 228 Jones, Tommy Lee, 92, 99 Jota Leaños, John, 483–85 Julián, José, 171 The Jungle Book, 338 Kahlo, Frida, 371, 398, 427, 433, 437 Keen, Dafne, 313, 315, 327–28 Keller, Gary, 11 Kelly, Carlos, 6, 15

Kickstarter, 29–31 The Kid: Chamaco, 464 Killer Films, 29 King, Homay, 105 Kingdom of Shadows, 13, 68, 77, 83 Kingpin (film), 241 Kinney, Laura (Marvel), 299–311, 313–22 Knockout (film), 464 Koehler, Robert, 187 Kohner, Susan, 172 Kolowich, Steve, 227 Koszulinksi, Georg, 39 Kramer, Wayne, 8 Kraus, Daniel, 405, 409 Kreuzpaintner, Marco, 8 Krueger, Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street), 152 Kusama, Karyn, 5, 7, 19, 461, 468, 471 La Bamba, 184 La Bestia (film), 147, 150 La Chingada (malinche), 430 La Cucaracha, 204 Ladrones (film), 52, 56 Ladrón que roba a ladrón (film), 52 Lady and the Tramp, 357 Lady Bird, 484 Lafourcade, Natalia, 34 la Llorona, 430 La lotería de la vida, 30 La Mission, xiii, 18, 450–60, 483 Landa, Maité, 368 Landon, Christopher B., 5 La ofrenda (film), 42 La Santa Cecilia, 273–74 Las madres, (film) 42 Las Marthas, 30, 34 Las Papas del Papa (film), 272 The Last Conquistador, 31 Last Woman on Earth, 286 Latina ciné-Subjectivity, 12, 172 Latina excellence, 427–49 Latin american filmmakers, 25–45 Latin lover stereotype, 5, 205–6, 470 Latin Music USA, 112, 419 Latino Americans, (documentary) 32 Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People, 47 Latinos Beyond Reel, 9, 31 Latinos on TV, (film) 272 Latinx folkloric traditions, 175, 384–86 Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, 10 Lavoe, Héctor, 14, 124–43 Lears, Rachel, 37 Leatherface, 152 Ledesma, Alberto, 303, 305

I ndex

Huntington, Samuel P., 478 Hurricane Maria, 132 Hyperion Books, 409 Hytner, Nicholas, 5

499

I ndex

Lee, Spike, 224 Leguizamo, John, 5, 8 The Lemon Grove Incident, xii Lenehan, Nancy, 175 Lester, Richard, 190 Levi, Heather, 348 Levinas, Emmanuel, 83 Lévy, Pierre, 105 Limbaugh, Rush, 181 liminality, liminal subjectivity, 15, 68, 130, 178, 180, 263, 316, 328, 416 Limón, José, 44 Linares, Carlos, 171 Lionsgate Entertainment, 46–66 The Lion King, 9 Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 193 List, Christine, 12 The Little Mermaid, 338, 357 Live by Night, 8 Loach, Ken, 7, 173 Logan (Marvel film), xii, 17, 299–311, 312–32 Lomax, Michael, 462 The Longoria Affair, 31 Longoria, Eva, 6 Loose Woman, (collection of poems) 443–44 López, Ana, 11, 12 Lopez, Eduardo, 31, 32 Lopez, George, 52–53 Lopez, Geraldo, 51 Lopez, Jennifer, 5, 14, 124–43, 433 López-Calvo, Ignacio, 12 López-Fonseca, Juan Pablo, 34 Los Angeles/L.A., 12, 55, 171–85 Los Bros Hernandez, 190 Los mineros, xii Los Punks: We Are All We Have, 33 Lott, Eric, 339 Love & Rockets comic series, 190 LowDrone project 239 Lowriders 5, 8, 239, 452 Lozano, Jennifer M., 16, 267–85 Lubezki, Emmanuel, 78 Luchador mask, 348 Luchador villain, 335, 339, 341–43, 347–48, 350 Lucha libre, 348 The Lucky Ones, 205 Lugosi, Bela, 345 Luna, Diego, 7, 38, 113, 203, 207, 209–11, 361 Lunar Braceros 2125–2149, 242, 244

500

Macario (motif ), 360, 372 Machete, xii, 5–6, 16, 213–30 Machete Kills, 6, 213–30 machines (systems), 243, 249–66, 292

machismo, 451–53, 345, 433 Madagascar (film), 339 Madea (franchise), 46 Made in L.A., 37 magical realism, 292–94 mainstream media, 48, 50, 57, 69, 74, 124, 140, 172, 185, 250, 429 Maister, Lara, 82 Mala mala, 28–29 male heroism, 405–23 Malinche, Malintzin, Marina, 430 Malokvich, John, 113 Mangold, James, 17, 299–300 Maniquis, Ethan, 215 maquiladora, 249, 251, 263–64, 317–18 Maquilopolis, 243, 245 Marchi, Regina M., 384–85, 387 Marcus, Greil, 193 Mariachi Azteca, 187 mariachi music, 382–86 Maria Full of Grace (film), 150 Marin, Cheech, 5, 9, 219, 361 Marks, Laura U., 88, 92, 95–96, 101, 104 Marre, Jeremy, 33 The Martian, 202, 208, 211 Martí, Virgilio, 131 Martín-Cabrera, Luis, 259 Martínez-Cruz, Paloma, 205 Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., 8, 18, 355–81, 382 Marvel Studios/Comics, 17, 207, 301, 303 Marx, Karl, 243–44, 252, 257–58 masculinity, 129, 132, 405–23, 430, 470 The Mask, 6 Masucci, Jerry, 126, 128 Mathews, Christopher, 478 The Matrix, 244 Matters of Race (series), 32 Mazzio, Mary, 35 McCaughey, Matthew, 287 McCloud, Scott, 119 McCracken, Ellen, 428 McFarland, USA, 19, 461–82 McNamara, Jim, 50 meatpacking industry, 30 M.E.Ch.A., 221 Meledandri, Chris, 345 Meléndez, A. Gabriel, 12 memes 239, 267 Memorial over General Atomics (installation), 239, 273 Memories of a Penitent Heart, 7, 30 Mendes, Eva, 6, 52 Mendible, Myra, 12, 328 Mendiola, Jim, 15, 186–201

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 47 #MovementMondays, 10 Moxie Pictures, 29 Muerte en Arizona, 35 Muerto Mouse, 362 Mulan, 338–39 multiculturalism, 189, 409, 479 multimedia storytelling, 267–85 Muñiz, Ángel, 3–4 Muñoz, José Esteban, 450 murals, 436 Myers, Michael (Halloween), 152 My Fellow Americans, 204 mythology (Chicanx), 430–31 My Very Own Room / Mi propio cuartito, 368 Narco Cultura, 67, 71–73, 77, 84, 88 narrative economy, 343 Nas, 34 National Day Laborer Organizing Network, 274 National Endowment for the Arts, 31 National Farm Workers Association, 116–18 National Hispanic Media Coalition, 210, 483–84 nationalism, 187, 430 nativism, 226 Nava, Gregory, 3, 4, 6, 19, 457, 92, 97, 136, 150, 191 Navarrete Jr., Rubén, 372 NBC News, 53 Negrita (film short), 30 neocolonialism, neocolonial patriarchy, 299– 311, 313–22, 89, 104 nepantla, 437, 439 Nericcio, William Anthony, 147, 250 Netflix, 25, 27, 405–6, 408, 420 Networks, 242, 268, 280 Nevarez, Angel, 239 New Mestiza consciousness, 329–30 New York, 124, 126, 131, 138 Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics, 453 Nichols, Bill, 89 Nightcrawler (Marvel), 303 Night Passages, 43 Nina (film), 5 1965 Immigration and Nationality, Act 147, 342 nodos (technology-enabled nodes), 267–85 No eres tú, soy yo (film), 51, 56 Nogales, Alex, 483–84 No Manches Frida, 49–50, 54–58 Noriega, Chon A., 11, 12, 199, 340, 342 normativity, 405–23

I ndex

Men in Black 2, 5 Menjívar, Cecilia, 163 mestizaje, 199, 216 #metoo movement, 436 Mexican Baroque, 360 Mexicanness, 27–28, 335, 337, 347–48, 355–82, 386–87, 427–49, 477–78 Mexican Revolution, xii, 342 Mexican Spitfire stereotype, 5, 433 Mexican wrestling, 348 Mexploitation, 213, 219 Mice cartoons (Mexican), 340–41 Michelina, Beatriz and Vera, 5 Mi Familia / My Family, 4, 15, 148, 150, 191, 241, 457 The Migrant Trail (video game), xii, 13, 89, 93, 95–96, 103–4, 106 migration films, 147–70 Miller, Todd, 247 Millie and the Lords, 32 Million Dollar Baby, 462, 467 mimesis, 95–96, 100 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 70, 105 Miranda, Ismael, 127, 138 Miranda, J. V., 249–66 Mireles, José Manuel, 73 Mission District, 450–60 Mittell, Jason, 149 Mi Vida Loca / My Crazy Life, 4, 241 Moana, 357 Modernization, 254, 256 Molina, Adrian, 361, 382, 386–87 Molina, Afred, 5 Molina-Guzmán, Isabel, 211, 432–33, 435 Moner, Isabela, 5 monsters/monstrosity/monstrous, 314, 328–29, 405–23 Montalbán, Ricardo, 5, 345 Montalvo, Frank, 121 Montero Román, Valentina, 7, 18, 427 Montes-Bradley, Eduardo, 26, 39–41 Monzón, Carlos, 464 Moore, Michael, 26–27 Moraga, Cherríe, 302, 316, 325, 327–28, 430 Morales, Adel L., 9 Morales, Esai, 5 Morales, Miles, 10 Morales, Sylvia, 190–91 Moreno, Antonio, 5 Moreno, Carolina, 27 Moreno, Rita, 5, 10 Morgan, Jeffrey Dean, 148 Morisson, Carla, 419 Mort, Cynthia, 5 Moselle, Crystal, 34

501

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 249, 274, 277–78, 317–18 nota roja “red press,” 68 Notorious B.I.G., 34 nuclear family, 418 Nueba Yol, 4 Nuyorican Films, 14, 124, 138–39

I ndex

Obler, Suzanne, 121 Observe and Report, 205 Off-Hollywood: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films, 47 Olmos, Edward James, 3–6, 52–53, 182, 361 Olympics, 463–64, 467 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 292 Ontiveros, Lupe, 5 Operation Wetback, 383 The Oregon Trail, 104 Orchard, William, 216 Orozco, Danielle Alexis, 17, 301 Ortiz, Amalia,, 186 Ortiz-Torres, Rubén 189 #OscarSoWhite, 10, 483 The Other Side of Immigration, 36 Our Latin Thing, 14, 124–43 Ovalle, Priscilla, 211 Overboard, 60 Owens, Jesse, 463

502

Pacheco, Johnny, 126 Pacino, Al, 336, 339 Padilla, Felix, 126 Padilla, Pilar, 173 palm tree, 179–80 Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote, 368 Pan’s Labyrinth, 56, 407–8, 416 Pantelion, 11, 13, 46–66 Papapapá (film), 268, 271 Parades, Américo, 187 paranoid, 5 Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, 5 parasite stereotype, 217 paratext, 14, 111–13 Paradez, Deborah, 438 parent-child relationship, 405–23,438 Parlee, Lorena, 38 patriotism, 475, 477, 479 Patterson, Orlando, 159 Paul, Alan (artista), 246 PBS Public Broadcasting System, 26, 29, 32, 37, 39, 271 Peña, Elizabeth, 5, 131 Peña, Michael, 6, 15, 53, 55, 113, 115, 202–12 Pérez, Amada Yrma, 368 Pérez, Emma, 187–88

Pérez, Leslie, 124 Pérez Torres, Arturo, 36 The Perfect Game, 464 Perlman, Ron, 361 Perry, Rick (Texas Governor), 222 phenotype, 111–21, 477 Phillips, Lou Diamond, 52 Picker, Miguel,, 9, 31–32 Piñero, Miguel 7 Pinkola Estés, Clarissa, 431 Plana, Tony, 5 Poblete, Juan, 463 Portillo, Lourdes, 3, 26, 40–41, 75, 78, 88, 245 post-raciality, 335 PPG COMEX, 370 Prada to Nada, 49, 52, 54–58, 335 Prago, Albert, 484 Prasch, Thomas, 250 Precarity/precariousness, 14–15 Presburger, Paul, 48 Pretty Vacant, 15, 186–201 Price of Glory, 464 print culture, 186–201 Prinze Jr., Freddie, 5 prison, 177, 247, 473 Prison PlanetTV (website), 219–21 procedural rhetoric, 89–90, 93, 101–2 Professor X, 299, 304, 313 public space (place identity), 175–76 Puentas, Victor, 476 Puente, Henry, 11, 13, 183, 434 Puerto Rico/Puerto Rican, 28–29, 32, 124–43, 286–95, 463 Pulling Strings, 52 Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border, 13, 37, 67–88 queer people, 286–95, 441, 450–60 Quinn, Anthony, 5 Quintanilla, Abraham, 439 Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena, 427, 434, 438–39 Quintero, Edgar, 72 Race (film), 463 Rachael Ray Show, 53 racialization, 243, 335–54, 407 Raíces de Sangre, 241 Raising Victor Vargars, 7 Ramirez Warren, Matthew, 31 Ramírez, Catherine, 215–16 Ramírez Berg, Charles, 11, 51, 207, 366, 371, 336, 343 Rashomon Effect, 92, 100–101 Rasquachismo, 16–17 Rawal, Sanjay, 39

Ruiz, Bernardo, 13, 68, 76, 78 Ruiz, José Luis, 3 The Runaways (band), 190, 196 The Rundown, 5 Running Free, 204 Ruti, Mari, 413 Saldana, Cisely, 11 Saldana, Mariel, 11 Saldana, Zoe, 5–6, 8, 11, 361 Saldívar, Samuel, 14, 111–23 Salsa (film), 127–28 salsa (music), 124–43 salsa dura, 129, 132–33, 139 salsa romántica, 128–29, 132 salsero, 14 Saludos Amigos, 355–56 Salute (film), 464 Salvador Treviño, Jesús, xii, 3, 4 Samba (Brazil), 40 Sammond, Nicholas, 337 Samsonovich, Mark, 8 Sam Wilson: Captain America #1, 303 San Antonio, 12, 15, 186–201 Sanchez, “Chunky,” 9 Sánchez, Patricia, 368 Sandler, Adam, 8 Sandoval-Strausz, A.K., 175–76 San Francisco, 450–60 San Joaquin Valley, 472 Santa (film), 171 Santana, Carlos, 440–41 Santiago, Wilfred, 463 Santini, Antonio, 28–29 Santos, Jorge, 17, 299–311, 312 Saralegui, Cristina, 194 Saving Private Perez, 51, 55 Schlossberg, Aaron (lawyer), 387–88 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia R., 319 Schwarz, Shaul, 88 Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, 359, 365 Scott, Ridley, 6 Seagal, Steven, 215 segregation (schools), xii segregation (sports), 462–63 Seguin (film), xii Selena (film), 4, 18, 136, 191, 427–49 Senate Bill (SB) 1070, 213–14, 221 Señorita extraviada (film), 42, 75, 78, 88, 245 Serna, Laura Isabel, 12 Sex Pistols, 186–201 sexual assault, harassment, 38, 155, 436 Shadow-Beast (Anzaldúa), 316, 324–25 The Shape of Water, 407, 484 Shaw, Deborah, 412

I ndex

Raza Movement, 221 Reagan, Ronald and Nancy, 78, 151 Real Women Have Curves, 5, 484 reality television, 240, 276 Regal Cinemas, 53 Regal Entertainment, 51, 61 Reed, Ishmael, 224 Reel FX Studios, 355 remezcla, 33 Requiem for a Heavyweight, 464 Revolt of the Cockroach People, 117 Reyes, Franc, 7 Reyes, Rodrigo, 13, 37, 68–71, 75, 88 Riggen, Patricia, 7 Right Cross, 464 Rijker, Lucia, 467 Riker, David, 8 The Ring, 464 Riofrio, John D. “Rio,” 8, 18, 382–404 Rise and Fall, 117–19 The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, 111, 117 Rivera, Alex, xiii, 6, 9, 16–17, 31, 210, 237–48, 249–66, 267–85 Rivera, Angy, 37 Rivera, Diego, 434 Rivera, Geraldo, 128 Rivera, Jenni, 52–53 Rivera, Lysa, 249 The Road to El Dorado, 357 Robbin, Jerome, 10 Robinson, Jackie, 463 Rocky (franchise), 462 Rodríguez, Freddy, 6 Rodriguez, Gina, 9 Rodriguez, Michelle, 5, 11, 19, 215, 219 Rodríguez, Richard T., 7, 18–19, 450–60 Rodriguez, Robert, 4, 5, 6, 11, 16, 151, 213–15, 218–22, 230 Roland, Gilbert, 4, 10 Román, David, 441 Roman Pérez, Nilda “Puchi,” 133, 135–37 Romántico (film), 147 role-playing game (RPG), 90 Romero, George, 151 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 356 Rosado, Evan, 7 Rosario, Nick, 361 Rosen, David, 47 Rosita Adelita (¡Sí Se Puede!), 116 Rousey, Ronda, 467 Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle, 112 Rudd, Paul, 207 Rudo y cursi, 371 Ruehl, Mercedes J., 10 Ruiz, Ariana, 15, 186–201

503

I ndex

504

Sheehan, Rebecca A., 10, 13, 88 Shelley, Mary, 290 Shot in America, 12, 340 Shrek, 338–39 Shwer, Mikaela, 37 Sicario (film), 8, 67, 84 Sickles, Dan, 28–29 silence as agency, 302, 305–7, 319, 325–27, 329 Silver, Marc, 37 Simulacra, 335 Since I Laid Eyes, 9 Sin City, 6 Singing My Way to Freedom, 9 Sin Nombre, 7 Sin Vergüenza, 193–96 Sirk, Douglas, 172 The Sixth Section, 31, 271 Sleep Dealer, xiii, 16, 210, 237–66, 267–85 Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Smits, Jimmy, 5 smooth space, 95 Snow White, 357 soccer, 464, 472 social media, 10, 25–26, 38, 55, 57, 217, 223, 227, 336, 343 Soderbergh, Steven, 8, 10 Solanas, Fernardo, 40, 104 Solís, Octavio, 374 Sollett, Peter, 7 Sólo con tu pareja, 27 Somerville, Siobhan, 450 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 5 Sontag, Susan, 73 Sor Juana, 190 Sounding Salsa (book), 133 South Bronx, 34, 36 South Central L.A., 33 Southern California, 55, 406, 409–10 Souza, Kate, 52–53 Spanglish, 8 Spanglish (film), 150–66 Spanish Harlem, 124, 126, 130, 138 Spanish (language), 46–66, 69, 76, 81, 134, 137– 38, 171, 184, 196, 340–42, 347, 349, 406, 420, 474, 478–79 Spare Parts (film), 49, 55–56 spectacle, 68–69, 73, 88–108 Speeder (band), 187 Speeder Kills, 15, 186–201 Speedy Gonzales, 357, 342 Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse,10 Stand and Deliver, xiii, 182 Star Maps (film), 204 Star Trek, 294 Star Wars, 241–42, 279

Stavans, Ilan, 112 Stay Strong (mural), 427, 444 Steinem, Gloria, 441 stereotypes (African American), 338–39 stereotypes (Latinx), 3, 15, 31, 82, 89, 202–12, 299, 301, 329, 335–54, 357, 365–66, 368, 372–74, 383, 406, 431–33, 437–38, 464–65, 468, 470, 474–75, 478 Stockton Bond, Kathryn, 408 Storm (Marvel), 303 Strand Releasing, 29 Strangers in Their Own Land: A History of Mexican Americans, 484 Stranger Things, 406 strategic palomazo, 15, 202, 207–12 Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives, 34 Suicide Squad, 6 SubCine (website), 270, 272, 273 suburbs, 406, 408–9 Sugar (film), 464 Sun, Chyng, 9, 31 Sundance Film Festival, 267, 282, 436–37 Sunspot (Marvel), 303 Superman, 303 surveillance, 216, 237–48 Suvin, Darko, 292 Swank, Hilary, 5 Swarup, Vikas, 28 Sylvester the Cat, 340–41 Tablante, Leopoldo, 130–31 Taco Havens, 192 Tales of Arcadia, 420 talkies, 15, 171 Tarantino, Quentin, 16, 214, 218, 224–25, 230, 436 Tatum, Channing, 361 Taymor, Julie, 434 technology, 237–48, 249–66, 267–85, 286–95 Tejana music, 438–40 Televisa, 46, 49, 50, 54, 59, 61 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 152 Texas Film Commission, 221–22 Tex-Mex: Music of the Texas Mexican Borderlands, 33 The Alamo, 188–90 The Hispanic Media Coalition, 11 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, 92, 100–101 The Three Caballeros, 355–56, 369 The Tonight Show, 53, 55 There’s Something About Mary, 6 They Are We, 9 Third Cinema, 42, 104

UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, 483–84 UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, 467 Under the Same Moon / La misma luna, 15, 148, 150 Underwater Dreams, 35 The Undocumented (video game), 90 undocumented people, xii, 15, 17, 37–38, 78– 79, 89–90, 101, 103, 152, 171–73, 177–80, 215–19, 239, 274, 299–311, 312 Un gallo con muchos huevos, 49, 52, 54–58 UnidosUS, 11 United Farm Workers Movement (UFW), 28, 38, 114, 209, 440–41 Universal Pictures/Studios, 11, 15, 46, 171, 182–83 Univision, 39, 49–50, 53–54 Unkrich, Lee, 361, 364–65, 370, 382, 386–87 Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), 238–40 Un padre no tan padre, 56 urban center, 70, 176–78, 450–51, 468 Urrea, Luis Alberto, 148 USC Annenberg School of Communications, 50

U.S.-Mexico Border, 67–87, 88–108, 147–70, 173–74, 209, 215, 217, 237–48, 254, 257, 267–85, 300, 312–13, 316–19, 322, 340–41, 359, 373–74 utopia, 182, 251, 465–66, 479 The U Turn, 30 U visas, 30, 38 Valadez, John, 30–32 Valadez, Robert, 116 Valderrama, Wilmer, 5, 52 Valdez, Luis, xii, 3, 182, 184, 190 Valdivia, Angharad, 429 Vargas, Jacob, 240 Vargas, Juan Carlos, 407 Vásquez, Germán, 361–62 Vasquez, Molly, 186, 192 Véa, Alfredo, 367 Vega, Alexa, 52 Vega, Paz, 8 Velez, Lupe, 433 Veloz, Rudy, 129 Venegas, Daniel, 251–53 Vergara, Sophia, 5 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, 30 Vida (film), 43 video games, 88–108, 268, 361 Vietnam War, 81, 366 Villa, Pancho, xii Villalobos Vindas, Ivannia, 36 Villeneueve, Denis, 8 Vimeo, 25–26, 30 violence, 38, 67–87, 91, 97, 147–70, 217– 18, 220, 224–26, 230, 237–48, 299–300, 313–22, 326, 329, 343, 387, 408, 415, 451, 458–59, 479 Viramontes, Helena Maria, 120 virtualization, 105 virtual reality (VR), 68, 79, 81–83, 92, 94, 101, 106 Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture, 32 ¡Viva baseball!, 464 voice acting, 335–54 Voorhes, Jason (Friday the 13th), 152–53 voyeurism/voyeurist, 12–13, 68–69 vulnerability, 14, 217 Wake Me Up, 9 Walker, Paul, 11 Walkout (film), 202, 209 Waltz, Christoph, 224 Warner Brothers, 336 War of the Planet of the Apes, 5 War on Everyone, 208–9

I ndex

Third World, 271, 276, 279–80, 287 30 Minutes or Less, 205 This Bridge Called My Back, 316 Thompson, Hunter S., 117 3 Idiotas (film), 56 Tolchin, Karen, 479 Tomás and the Library Lady, 368 Tomei, Marisa, 52 Tonatiuh, Duncan, 368 Torres, Justin, 7 Tovar, Lupita, 15, 171 Traffic, 8, 10, 241 trans-creative barrio aesthetic, 12 Transformers: The Last Knight, 5 trauma, 411–14 Trejo, Danny, 5, 215, 228, 361 Treviño, Jesús, See Salvador Treviño, Jesús Trinidad, Félix “Tito,” 464 Trollhunters, 405–23 Troll Hunters, 18 Trump presidency, 38, 214, 217, 226, 300, 368, 383, 387, 465 Tudor, Deborah, 466 Turbo, 357 Turista Fronterizo (video game), 13, 90, 93, 106 12 Strong, 207 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, 463 21 Grams, 92, 100 21 Jump Street, 58 2001: A Space Odyssey, 246

505

I ndex

Washburne, Christopher, 133 Washington, Kerry, 224 Water & Power, 483 We Are Animals, 7 Weinstein, Harvey, 436 Weitz, Chris, 7, 15, 171–85 Welch, Raquel, 5 We Like It Like That, 31 Wells, H.G, 290 West, Kanye, 34 West Side Story, 10 Westworld, 16, 237, 244, 246 Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, 36, 96 wetback decade (policies), 340 Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth, 12 Which Way Home, 36 White, Cheryl, 476 White, Jim, 472–76, 479 white savior, 173–74, 205–6, 211, 472, 475–76, 478 white supremacy, 303, 329 White Tiger, 10 Who Is Dayani Cristal?, 37 Why Braceros? (film), 242 Why Cybraceros? (film), 242, 268–70 Wilder, Thornton, 372 Williams, Jessica, 435, 437 Williams, Marco, 90 Williams, Michael (senator), 387 Williams, Raymond, 47–48

506

Williams, Robin, 9 Willie Velasquez: Your Vote Is Your Voice, 112 Wise, Robert, 10 The WolfPack, 34–35 Wolverine, 299, 313 women of color fighters, 461–82 World Trade Center (film), 202 Wrath of Grapes, 38 Wu-Tang Clan, 34 Wyatt, Justin, 48 xenophobia, 204, 217, 312, 383, 388 The X-Files, 287 xicanismo, xicanosmosis, 147, 431 X-Men: Apocalypse, 6 X-Men, 299, 302–3, 319 Yanes, Jorge “Jokes,” 9 Yánez, Eduardo, 52 Yankee Stadium, 127–28 Ybarra-Frausto, Tómas, 268, 277 Young, Robert M., 173 young adult media, 405–23 YouTube, 38, 55, 270 Y tu mamá también (film), 27, 371 Zagar, Jeremiah, 7 Zammuto, Nick, 8 Zeta Acosta, Oscar, 13, 111–12, 117, 119–21 Zoot Suit (film), xii, 181–83, 191 Zorro (film), 10