Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

308 reframing latin america
Paco also recounts the story of his father’s journey in his own words.
José is shown sitting alone by a fi re he has built in a serene setting, waiting
for the next day to break. In voice-over, we hear Paco relate his father’s stories
of the perils of the passage with deliberate irony in his voice: “He was
attacked by ten bandits in Sonora and had to beat them off with a cactus
branch. He rode the back of a snorting mountain lion!”
These initial sequences emphasize the fi lm’s attempts to play with the
conventions of narrative and its alternative account of U.S. identity. As narrator,
Paco gives authorial voice to this revision of history, as he recounts
forgotten details that exclude Mexican Americans in the nation’s quest for
singularity. His fi rst challenge to the historical amnesia that naturalizes
the myth of U.S. national origins as Anglo-Saxon and Protestant is to prove
that many of the nation’s original citizens actually were Mexican. To this
end, Paco narrates a sequence in which his father arrives in East Los Angeles
at the home of El Californio, a great uncle who soon becomes a father
fi gure. The old man’s name, Paco explains, comes from his being born in
Los Angeles when it still belonged to Mexico. After the U.S.-Mexican War
(1846–1848), Mexico lost nearly half its territory, and Mexicans, as casualties
of hemispheric politics, were forced to change nationalities overnight.
The point is that politics creates nations rather than the other way around.
When El Californio dies, he specifi es in his will that he wants his tombstone
to be inscribed: “Don Alejandro Vazquez ‘El Californio.’ Died 1934.
When I was born here, this was Mexico, and where I lie, this is still Mexico.”
In contrast to the U.S. myth of national foundation, there are no pilgrims
seeking religious tolerance here and no Calvinistic work ethic; only greedy
Westerners manifesting their destiny.
The fi lm’s next target is the myth of U.S. ethnic and class harmony, the
proverbial melting pot supposedly well-seasoned with equal opportunity
for all. Paco explains that soon after his father arrived in Los Angeles, he
crossed the bridge with many other Mexican Americans from East L.A. into
downtown to fi nd a job. He ends up working as a gardener at a stately home
and there meets his future wife, María, the family’s maid and nanny. Paco
notes that this commute refl ected the hierarchical economic structure of
U.S. society, since Hispanics crossed over every day to do the work of the
Anglos but no Anglo ever ventured over the bridges into the barrio. Then,
with two children (Paco and Irene) and another (Chucho) on the way, María
is surreptitiously shipped back to Mexico by train.
It was the time of the great depression. I guess some politicians got it
into their heads that the Mexicanos were responsible for the whole