Reviews - Trinity University

Reviews

BORDER MATTERS: REMAPPING AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES. By Jose
David Saldivar. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
xvi, 251 pp. cloth $40.00, paper $15.95.)
Judging by the recent spate of titles invoking the metaphor of
the U.S.-Mexico border, including a recent volume of this journal
(“Borders,” Aztlun 21, nos. 1 and 2), we are now fully
immersed in an era of “border theory.” The roughly 2,000-mile
international boundary from San Diego/Tijuana to Brownsville/Matamoros
is no mere geopolitical fiction; it also works
as a counterhegemonic discursive object targeting ossified critical
frameworks in the human sciences. It has had its most
telling impact as a metaphor with which scholars symbolically
imagine both their disciplines and postmodern, post-national
subject formations. The contours of a borderlands school of
cultural criticism remain to be seen in their full light, but Jose
David Saldivar’s recent contribution to this area of scholarship
will no doubt have a lasting impact on subsequent work
on Chicano literature and culture, and, one hopes, on contemporary
efforts to refine American Studies generally. Border
theory owes a little to each of a number of recent critical
methodologies-deconstruction, ecocriticism, feminism, the
new historicism-and Saldivar remains cognizant of the danger
that it might be dismissed, along with postmodernism, as
a “trendy paradigm of crossing, circulation, and resistance,”
a dismissal that would not “do justice to the complexities of
the transfrontier issues of our time” (186). His careful and
usually compelling readings of cultural artifacts arising out
of the “open wound” (as Gloria Anzaldua poignantly describes
the region) created in the aftermath of the Mexican-American
War, or la Guerra de la Intervencion Nortearnericana as it is
known in Mexico, could hardly be dismissed as trendy. Instead,
Saldivar self-consciously works to reconstruct the “American
western field-Imaginary of the American West” in terms of
the things said and concealed about migration and
immigration; the enunciations required and those
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forbidden about the legacy of conquest in the Americas.
In my view, border discourse not only produces
power and reinforces it but also undermines it,
makes it fragile, and allows one to map and perhaps
thwart the cultures of U.S. empire. (xiii-xiv)
If Saldivar’s formulation of his project sounds like an updated
version of the new historicist model of subversion and
containment, although a less cynical one, the resemblance is
no accident. He readily acknowledges his debt to his new historicist
colleagues Stephen Greenblatt and Jose E. Limon, as
well as predecessors like Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams.
In similar fashion, Saldivar levels the distinctions between
high and low, between folklore and elitelore, allowing a
wide range of discourses (corridos, critical theory, ethnography,
hip hop, painting, poetry, prose fiction, Tex-Mex conjunto,
travel writing) to enter his field of vision. Not surprisingly,
Saldivar is most successful in his work on strictly literary artifacts:
trained in comparative literature, Saldivar makes only
limited use of art historical and musicological approaches,
emphasizing instead the discursive aspect of popular music
and the semiotic component of the plastic arts.
Like its older and bigger sibling, American Studies, Chicano
Studies necessarily plants itself in the rich soil of cultural
analysis, that contact zone between anthropology and literary
criticism, even when this relationship remains unarticulated.
Both disciplines, as wide-ranging as they are, inevitably
return to the question, “What constitutes X culture?” The
sometimes unfortunate corollary to this question-“What constitutes
X identity?”-tends to straitjacket itself in the tautological
logic of essentialism, assuming, for example, that onZy
the romance-novel comprises the American literary tradition,
or that only folklore captures Chicano reality. More disturbingly,
these discourses have at times suggested that only the
frontier experience accounts for America’s social institutions,
and that only the border experience explains the Chicano way
of life. By aligning his project with the ongoing work carried
out under the auspices of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies in Birmingham, and the Center for Cultural Studies
in Santa Cruz (which Saldivar helped mold into an
important critical force), Saldivar invokes models for future
research that are well-known for revealing the culturalconstructedness
of ethnic and national identities, and more
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important, for their sharp focus on the ideological and economic
interests these identities serve.
Border Matters begins by “shuffl[ing] the mainline U.S.
Bildung of assimilation, acculturation, and the polyethnic
state” (19); specifically, Saldivar unearths the migrant sensibilities
and dislocated subject positions at work in four contemporary
cultural theorists, Renato Rosaldo, Vicki Ruiz,
George J. Sanchez, and Nestor Garcia Canclini. It is a bit farfetched
to suggest, as does Saldivar, that Sanchez’s historiography
(for example) “fundamentally debunks Oscar Handlin’s
traditional ’uprooted’ model of American urban ‘ethnogenesis’
in Chicago and New York City” (28-29), what Saldivar labels
the “universal myth of the American Bildung” (29) following
Shelly Sunn Wong. After all, the rhetorical power of Handlin’s
The Uprooted (1951) undoubtedly owes much to the simple and
arguably universal truth that immigration changes people,
a truth that Saldivar’s own moments of autobiographical
reflection-from subaltern South Texas child to Yale- and
Stanford-educated academic power-player-strain to keep in
check. Border Mutters does, however, make a powerful case
for the need to historicize and update Handlin’s “epic story of
the great migrations that made the American people” (the
study’s subtitle), itself a radical departure from orthodox immigration
history when it first appeared.
Indeed, it is as an update of Handlin and other key Americanist
scholars that Border Mutters rings in with its lasting
contributions to American cultural studies. For example, in
his reading of Ami.rico Paredes’s academic and creative careers,
Saldivar strikes a solid blow against the romanticized view of
the so-called Spanish American Southwest invented by the
likes of Charles F. Lummis and J. Frank Dobie (although these
are large and slow-moving targets). Saldivar further complicates
his own version of borderlands cultural history by offering
much needed readings of neglected writers like Arturo Islas
and Helena Maria Viramontes. He also adds to the growing
body of criticism on one of American literary history’s most
interesting writers, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a woman
who could literally claim after 1848 that “I didn’t cross the
border, the border crossed me!” Situating Ruiz de Burton’s
novel, The Squatter and the Don (18851, alongside John Gregory
Bourke’s essay, “The American Congo” (1894), provides
for a powerful critique of Gilded Age imperialism, although I’m
not quite sure how it revises the “imperial literary and cul-
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turd history” (160) exemplified by the work of Perry Miller, R.
W. B. Lewis, Harold Bloom, Yvor Winters, and Wallace Stegner
(ghosts from Saldivar’s past at Yale and Stanford). Saldivar is
much more successful in this respect in his incorporation of
John Rechy into a borderlands frame of reference.
Rechy, born in El Paso, Texas, to Scottish-Mexican parents-his
given name, Juan, was erased by American public
schooling, as were the names of so many of Handlin’s children
of the uprooted-has until recently been largely excluded
from the emerging canon of Chicano writers because he is
open about his homosexuality. But Rechy is well known to
students of postmodern American fiction, and he is regularly
mentioned with others, like William S. Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg, who utilize their perspectives from the gay underworld
to fashion a critique of American social conformity. As
the most popularly known figure in Border Matters, with the
possible exceptions of (Kid) Frost and Tish Hinojosa, and as
the figure with the most vital presence in the American critical
mainstream, Rechy and his borderlands narratives, “El
Paso del Norte” (1958) and The Miraculous Day of Amalia
Gbmez (199 l), stand the greatest chance of recentering American
cultural studies according to a paradigm with shifting
centers, or no center at all.
Border Matters represents a welcome step in this same direction.
Saldivar envisions the book as
an invitation to literary scholars, historians, cultural
studies critics, anthropologists, feminists, mass culture
critics, public interest lawyers, and antiracists
to redraw the borders between folklore and the
counterdiscourses of marginality, between “everyday”
culture and “high” culture, and between “people
with culture” and “people between culture.” (17)
Still, in his “attempt to place the histories and myths of the
American West and Southwest in [this] new perspective” (ix),
to historicize the “opening” of the American frontier as a place
of cultural conflict and symbiosis, indeed of near-constant closings,
Saldivar renders “traditional,” Anglocentric American
Studies as something of a bogeyman, somehow complicit with
nativist politicians like California governor Pete Wilson and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. The relatively short
and always conflicted institutional history of American Studies
remains a spectral presence in Border Matters, somewhere
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Border Matters
along the margins of Saldivar’s remapped critical discourse.
It is an unfortunate absence, for Americanists would reap considerable
benefit from Saldivar’s head-on engagement not only
with the so-called New Americanists and New Western Historians
(whom Saldivar mentions on occasion), but also with
those literary and cultural historians who, since the heyday
of Frederick Jackson Turner and Barrett Wendell, have challenged
the notion that “mainline” American identity rests
squarely on any single cultural pillar. This is not to suggest
that Saldivar should somehow feel responsible for situating
border discourses within the context of 100 years of
Americanist scholarship, but it’s always useful to engage at
least a handful of touchstones-by considering the left-leaning
transnationalism of Mike Gold, for example, or by giving
more credit to an important and now-overlooked Western historian
like Herbert E. Bolton-whose critiques of American
culture cannot be reduced to any assimilationist Bildung, and
indeed whose work might be described as contributing to earlier
forms of border theory. Any effort to remap American cultural
studies should at least acknowledge that this
field-Imaginary constitutes an ever shifting surface, often
made-up of peaks and valleys, and always full of surprises.
Michael Soto
Harvard University
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MICHAEL SOTO. Ph.D. student in the Department of English and
American Literature and Language at Harvard University. His
dissertation, Literary History and the Age of Jazz: The Shapes
of American Modernism, examines how modernist literary
movements in the United States have been symbolically imagined.

MI FAMILIA/MY FAMILY. Directed and written by Gregory Nava.
(New Line Cinema, 1995. Color feature. 125 minutes).
At the end of the hawkish politics of the Cold War,
no doves of peace fly. Nationalist aspirations turn
the values of civility into forms of ethnic separatism;
a sense of community is replaced by the crisis of
communalism; citizenship is less the habitus of the
homeland, and more frequently an experience of
migration, exile, diaspora, cultural displacement.
-Homi K. Bhabha,
“Anxious Nations, Nervous States”
Homi Bhabha’s statement about England reverberates as an
accurate assessment of a wider social-political reality in which
divisions among race, class, gender, and sexual preference
further polarize communities, contributing toward the formation
of what he calls “social minorities.”’ Bhabha notes that
the desire for an idealized national past is not constructed on
repressing the contradictions inherent in that desire, which
at some level of consciousness does recognize difference, but
rather “disavows” the social and cultural negotiation between
past and present spaces by claiming, “I know difference exists
muis quund meme [but all the same].” This form of periphery
discourse, he argues, is fxed to some degree in “time-space
relations which function like the route periphkrique: it takes
you to your destination by rushing you past somewhere else”
(203). In other words, the ideological construction of a national
past, based on tradition and a nostalgia for certain values
(what we could call the familiar), bypasses the social realities
of the present and emphasizes the “contemporaneity of the
past: part disavowal, part elliptical idealization, part fetishism,
part splitting, part antagonism, part ambivalence” (203).
Gregory Nava performs precisely such a construction in
Mi Fumiliu/My FumiZy (1995) by using the theme of remembrance,
which disavows how hegemonic relations of power,
race, class, and gender were transacted in the past. At a time
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when Chicanas/os, Latinas/os2 are striving to achieve gender
and racial equality in all forms of media representation,
Mi Familia circumvents the efforts of some Chicana/o, Latina/
o writers, artists, cultural critics, and film theorists to break
down established and dominant representations of Chicano,
Latino patriarchy. Furthermore, the film represents a misguided
and idealized search for a cultural identity fmed in time
and space. Migration, exile, and cultural displacement are a
few of the underlying themes that are sketched in the film but
never thoroughly addressed.
Plot in Mi Familia
Mi Familia is the story of three generations of Mexican, Mexican-American
males that begins with the journey of the young
Jose Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) from Mexico to the United States
in search of his only living relative. Jose finds a gardening job
in a Beverly Hills home and meets Maria (Jennifer Lopez), who
works as a maid for a white family. They (the older Jose is
played by Eduardo Lopez Rojas) marry and have five children:
Paco (Edward James Olmos), the writer and narrator of the
story; Memo (Enrique Castillo), a lawyer, who marries into a
white family and moves across to the other side of town;
Chucho (Esai Morales), a troubled pachuco youth who is killed
by the police; Toni (Constance Marie), a nun turned social activist;
Irene (Lupe Ontiveros), a successful entrepreneur; and
Jimmy (Jimmy Smits), a felon who is re-socialized back into
the family. The story takes place in Mexico and East Los Angeles
and spans the 1920s to the 1980s.
Nava was born in San Diego, California, to a Mexican-
Basque family who have resided in Southern California since
the 1800s. A graduate of the UCLA Film School, Nava made
his directorial debut in 1973 with the film Confessions of
Aman, which he produced, wrote, and directed. The film won
a Best First Festival Award at the Chicago International Film
Festival in 1976. Nava is best known for his film E2 Node
(1983), which won him many accolades as it is a more accomplished
film. Nava often works in collaboration with his partner,
writer/producer Ana Thomas, who served as one of the
producers of Mi Familia. After many years of trying to find financial
backing for the film, Nava secured the support of
Francis Ford Coppola, who agreed to become executive producer
because he wanted to be affiliated with a Latino project.
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Mi Familia/My Family
The film is inspired by Nava’s family and based on his research
on other Mexican-American families in East Los Angeles.
Mi Familia was released in May 1995 to mixed reviews. The
journal Cineaste, for example, found the film traditional in form
and style, but insightful and culturally ~alidating.~ Sight and
Sound, however, regarded the film as stereotyped and lacking
in ~ubstance.~ Variety referred to Mi Familia as “colorfully
melodramatic, shamelessly predictable and generous in spirit,”
estimating that it would prove successful with a Latino/a audience
drawn to its “soap-operaish” quality of rnel~drama.~
Variety also pointed to the film’s heavy-handed style, which
“emphasized the more volatile and violent behavior of Chucho
and Jimmy, giving the women rather short shrift.”6 In an interview
with Cineaste, Nava acknowledges that his purpose in
making Mi Familia was not to teach or to provide a history of
the Chicano experience. Rather, he noted, the main purpose
in making the film was to entertain while inspiring “you [to]
feel dignity or pride if you are a chic an^."^ Nava’s latter aim
seems to have been achieved, insofar as Mexican-American
spectators have few representational models to draw on.
A major problem with the film, however, is that none of
the characters is fully developed, except for an attempt to show
Jimmy’s troubled life. As spectators, we learn very little about
Memo and Paco, or how they achieved their success. Particularly,
in regard to Memo, the film hints at internalized racism,
shown through Memo’s Americanization (he is known as
Bill) and his desire to embrace white culture, but never develops
this. The scene in which Memo brings home his white
blond fiance and her parents to meet his family is trivialized
and played to evoke laughter at the white family’s apparent
discomfort when confronted with a foreign culture. Memo’s
embarrassment is reflected by his body language and nervous
countenance, but it is Carlitos’s disruptive behavior (interrupting
the interaction between the two families and culminating
in the child’s naked exhibition in front of the guests) that is
the focus of the scene. Internalized racism impacts the Mexican-American,
Latinalo family, and needs to be addressed.
Instead, Nava chooses to interject Carlitos into the emotionally
charged scene, undercutting an opportunity to voice the
racial concerns that affect the Mexican, Mexican-American
family.
Mi Familia discounts gender politics and instead reinforces
patriarchal values of Chicana, Latina subjectivity by
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duplicitously placing Marialjefa (Jenny Gago) at the center of
the narrative while depriving her of agency. Her iconographic
image is the epitomized representation of the buena mujer, as
demonstrated when Jose, during Irene’s wedding, advises his
son in-law that “a good wife is the best thing that can happen
to a man in his life.”8 The denotation of “good wife” inevitably
connotes the chaste, subservient, obedient virgin, madre,
sufrida, who echoes Mexican films of the past that showed “que
la mujer mientras mas sufrida mas buena es.” The notion of
the “good wife” is a linguistic remnant of an archaic history
predicated on the subservient mothering of the macho, whose
sexual power is constructed on the powerlessness and chastity
of the mujer sufida.
The representation of the young Maria could have transcended
sufi-ida, but Nava chose to forfeit a representation of
Chicana agency for the madrecita-jefa, unequivocally constructing
Chicana, Latina subjectivity in terms of male desire,
biologically inscribing the Chicana in the role of the maternal.
Terms of domination do not necessarily have to be articulated
or overtly expressed for a narrative to be patriarchal: they
are often woven into the fabric of a narrative that at first glance
appears to represent a powerful female but later reveals her
power as a sham. This is precisely the case with the character
of Maria whose jefa status is an illusion. Contextualized
as the mother, she symbolizes the Virgin dethroned of authority
and ensconced in a niche of motherhood from which she
wields a transparent wand of power contained and constructed
in terms of male desire. For as long as Maria, the jefa, remains
the representation of the buena mujer, her sexuality poses no
threat to the males in the family. The trope of the buena mujer
unavoidably reinforces the traditional patriarchal values of
Chicana, Latina disempowerment, which relegate her to the
restrictive space of the private and constitute “woman’s work
as the only locus from which to express personal desire.
A pervasive intertextual theme of sexual anxiety surfaces
in Mi Familia on the part of male characters who demonstrate
concern about Toni’s sexuality and what they interpret as her
“unnatural” lack of interest in men. Object of the male gaze,
Toni’s sexuality becomes an issue early in the film. Although
Toni is not represented as the classic femme fatale of film noir,
her iconography is that of the sexual (her low-cut gown, painted
face, the close-up of her mouth, and so on). This representation
evokes anxiety on the part of the male characters who,
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Mi Familia/My Family
in order to minimize their fear of her sexual power, want to
find her out to be ca~trated.~ This, of course, operates on an
unconscious level. Her objectification is verbalized by one of
Chucho’s friends who informs him, “I would give my left nut
for a moment with her in the back seat of my Chevy.” The lack
of overt outrage on the part of Chucho on hearing this remark
against his sister positions the spectator as partner to the
complicitous gender implications of Chucho’s silence. Even
though Toni is portrayed as a liberalized monja and social activist,
her character offers only brief opposition to patriarchy.
Early in the film, Toni is removed from the narrative to pursue
her religious calling while Paco’s voice-over reinforces sexist
discourse by informing the audience, “We all thought it was a
little strange that Toni wanted to become a nun but then she
was the bossy type and that is the type that usually becomes
a nun.” This message marks Tony’s removal from the family
and communicates to the spectator that assertive Chicanas
have no place in the family, unless female desire and agency
can be managed by the male, here symbolized by the Catholic
church. Toni is forced to abdicate her oppositional resistance
to patriarchy, recalling historical accounts of Sor Juana Ines
de la Cruz.’O Toward the end of the film Toni reenters the narrative
by announcing to her parents that she has left the religious
order and married a former priest. On hearing this
information, Maria faints, a moment intended as comic relief
but at Toni’s expense, as a close-up of her face reveals her fears
about the consequences her actions might have for the family.
A flashback shows a partially robed Toni engaged in the throes
of lovemaking and a dissolve transposes the scene of past
sexual pleasure on to the present Maria’s gasping for air. Even
though the love scene conveys what Toni envisions are her
mother’s worst fears, its place in the narrative appears to serve
only as male sexual titillation. Her character is not developed
to reveal to the spectator Toni’s religious angst or moral conflict
with the teachings of the church.
Irene serves in the narrative as chorus during family gatherings
or in times of crisis, such as when the family is reunited
after Chucho’s foreseeable death. Toni and Irene function more
as adornments than as Chicana subjects. The choice to portray
these female characters as two dimensional appears intentional
on the part of the filmmaker insofar as he provides
male characters with a “space” to frolic in patriarchal bonding,
violence, and the histrionics of wounded macho. The ab-
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sence of forms of Chicana subject expressivity other than the
maternal role is best contextualized by the Chicana cultural
theorist Angie Chabram Dernersesian. She reminds us that
the visual artist Yolanda Lopez has, in her work, deconstructed
the social paradigm of motherhood as the sole representational
trope of Chicana subjectivity:
Lopez . . . involves her viewing public in a series of
intertextual dialogues with other traditional variants
of Guadalupe in Chicano cultural productions, variants
such as “La Familia de la Raza (The Chicano
holy family),” “La Jefita,” “I am Joaquin,” or “Bless
Me, Ultima,” all of which reify Chicana subjects,
extolling the virtues associated with motherhood.
With this dialogue, Lopez underscores the limited
artistic images available to Chicana subjects, and
she extends her cultural critique to a wider range
of cultural productions, interfacing as well with other
Chicana texts that offer alternative visions of
Chicana subjects. l1
Mi Fumilia is centered on male discourse that emphasizes
and reinforces male positions of power within the structure of
culture, nation, and the dynamic of the Mexican-American
family. Throughout the film’s narrative, the phallus functions
as primary signifier of power, relegating Chicana, Latina representation
to the periphery of the narrative and the film’s
diegesis. In a recent interview on Mi Familia, Nava said, “I don’t
think you understand Latino culture until you understand the
concept of the Latino family.”12 The problem with Nava’s statement
is that he lacks understanding of what constitutes the
Mexican-American family, which includes Mexicanas and
Chicanas. He renders Mexicanas and Chicanas as unimportant
and in the process essentializes the family. The social,
economic, political, and gender changes taking place in the
Mexican-American, Latina/o family are multifaceted and complex.
Nava ignores some of these complexities by portraying a
“safe” heterosexual male model of family that romanticizes it.
Recent research by Chicano social theorists shows that the
Mexican-American family includes a higher number of women
enrolled in the workforce and as the family’s main source of
economic support. Their single-parent status continues to
grow, while family males are often ~nemployed.’~ The changing
social and economic demographics within the Mexican-
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Mi Familia/My Family
American home will inevitably affect the manner in which gender
politics are negotiated within the family.
The opening shots of Mi Familia depict the river and bridge
that connect East and South Los Angeles, providing a visual
metaphor for the border and the space that separates and
links Mexican, Mexican-American, and white culture. From
the outset, Paco’s voice-over narration sets the patriarchal
tone of the film. He represents the collective voice of the family,
inevitably keeping the film male-centered and denying female
gender representation or opportunities for women to
voice desire or agency (except in time of crisis or pain). Recurring
scenes of planting and tending corn function to culturally
connect past and present spaces, Mexico and the
United States. Corn represents the place of male privilege in
the family. In times of crisis, men seek out the growing stalks
of corn, which represent sanctuary and remembrance, to validate
their cultural heritage. Particularly for the patriarch
Juan, corn represents tradition, cultural roots, and a Mexican
past largely forgotten by most of his sons, except for
Jimmy and the promise that Carlitos represents. Thus, Nava
romanticizes the past and the indigenous bucolic life Juan
once led, reinforcing the film’s theme of remembrance. The
phallic symbolism of the corn stalks exemplifies the
phallocentric environment of the family, even serving as backdrop
to key dramatic scenes between male characters. We
never see female characters tending corn, except when engaged
in the “women’s work” of preparing food, assumed to
occur off camera. Absent from the film is any importance
placed on food as a social marker through which cultural identity,
community, and relationships are transacted. With the
exception of the wedding scene and Memo’s memorable home
visit, food is never shown in the film. Nava plays down the
ritual aspect of food and its major relevance to the Mexican,
Mexican American, Latina/o community.
La Casa/The House
Interior shots of the family’s home, painted in bright colors
and adorned by religious artifacts, convey the religiosity of the
family and demonstrate how Juan and Maria maintain their
cultural heritage. The home functions as a metaphor for the
culture and is the anchor of familial stability, reinforcing religious,
cultural, moral, and patriarchal identity. The recurring
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motif of a white owl functions in the film as a touch of magical
realism, highlighting the Mexican and Latin American folklore
that believes in the power of animals to represent omens
of life and death. The first sighting of a white owl occurs early
in the film as the young Maria crosses a river in Mexico with
the infant Chucho, whom she almost loses when her craft is
overturned. This cultural marker prepares the audience for
tragic events to come in the life of Chucho. Prior to being mortally
wounded by the police, he sights a white owl perched on
a beam of his hiding place.
Female characters enter and leave the narrative as guests
and, in the case of Isabel, Jimmy’s wife, briefly. Isabel remains
in the film only long enough to socialize Jimmy and provide
him with a son, Carlitos, before she is removed from the narrative
to redirect focus to Jimmy. Even the dialogue of the film
helps to proliferate male, sexist positions of power. Early in
the film, when the young Maria informs Juan that she is pregnant,
he responds, “I knew it, I knew it, it’s going to be a boy,
this one is going to be a special boy.” Mi Familia emphasizes
doting on male children, featuring women as boys’ conspirators.
The spectator is never shown any interaction between
parents and female children. l4
As I wrote in my article on American Me, Chicana, Latina
representation in Chicano cinema continues to be problematically
portrayed.15 From IAm Joaquin to Fools Rush In, female
subjectivity remains biologically inscribed in the Madonna/
whore dichotomy. Although the Chicana, Latina is often the
transmitter of knowledge, she is also made responsible for the
socialization of the male. Once again, we see this problem surface
in Mi Familia, where Maria, Toni, and Isabel have no
agency, no standing within the social order, but nevertheless
are held responsible for socializing all the males in the family.
Returning to the theme of remembrance in Mi Familia
brings to mind the following statement by Bhabha:
It is within . . . this division, of national identification,
articulated in the staggered interstitial temporalities
that exist between the disjunct moment of
the present and the fictitious space of the future,
that we must try to understand our contemporary
reality, recalled in the echoes of the past.16
For Juan, his transaction with the past is fixed in time and
space and the means by which he validates his national iden-
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Mi Familia/My Family
tity. He has no clear understanding of how his present reality
is mediated by his past and unpredictable future. Herein lies
his inability to understand the social changes that have impacted
his family, particularly his son Chucho’s behavior and
lifestyle. As Juan holds the stalks of corn in his hands, his
remembrance of the past has become distorted and romanticized
because he feels a sense of loss and longing for the familiar,
for a less complicated form of existence, which can
never be reproduced. His is the anxiety expressed in Walter
Benjamin’s “Angelus NOVUS,” caught with longing for the past
and rendered immobile by the storm of progre~s.’~ Memo represents
the storm of the future (progress) that is the prospective
loss of Mexican culture. In contrast, Jimmy has retained
some aspects of the culture (his bilingualism, friendships with
other Latinas/os, his vernacular mode of dress) and this connects
him more closely to Juan. Jimmy functions in that temporal
space of disjointed emotional angst, caught between
rebellion and a desire to belong to the society that has marked
him, not only as “other” but as a social casualty best forgotten.
Although he recognizes the social injustice that surrounds
him, he is cognizant of his inability to change it. This is shown
when Jimmy arrives at the hospital to find his wife Isabel
(Elpidia Carrillo) dying of childbirth due to the hospital’s discriminatory
neglect. At first, he reacts to his loss by assaulting
the physician, but then he retreats at the prospect of a
further confrontation with the hospital staff. Jimmy, like the
“Angelus NOVUS,” is unable to control the piles of wreckage
(social injustice past and present) hurled at him. He cannot
change the past and the present poses little hope that he will
mold the future. Ultimately, it is Carlitos who holds the promise
of progress for the culture, although Nava’s portrayal of
his character leaves this potential uncertain.
In conclusion, the theme of remembrance reverberates
throughout the film, with historical echoes of a cultural past
that is nearly forgotten and now must be reinvented in the
context of the present. One may continue to ponder whether
Nava essentialized and romanticized the concept of family,
certainly there is space for further investigation. What is important,
however, is that the film makes an attempt to address
the historic legacy of the Mexican-American struggle. The story
of family and social conflict needs to continue to be told with
more gender equity and without a Hollywood gloss that de-
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tracts from the power of the message, character representation,
and visual aesthetic.
Narrative closure in Mi Familia mimics the ending of the
Hollywood western in which the hero rides off into the sunset,
only this time the hero Jimmy rides off with his son
Carlitos to an indeterminate future of single parenthood. Feminist
film theory has pointed out how popular cinema assigns
gender difference to narrative closure. The hero is given a certain
freedom of action to accept social integration through
marriage or to remain alone as an act of resistance. For the
female character, however, the only choice for social integration
continues to be marriage. Jimmy and Carlitos represent
the promise of the new generation upon whom the culture
rests, promising to perpetuate the theme of remembrance,
cultural identity, and, unfortunately, the validation of patriarchy.
Jimmy is portrayed as a victim of social and economic
injustices that, under the present social system of stratification
(race, class and gender), cannot be resolved. As Paco reminds
the audience,
Jimmy represents the family, the sacrificial lamb
who contains within his being all the pain, hate,
suffering, racial persecution, and impotence of the
family.
Again, the Chicana, Latina is subsumed by the patriarchal
voice that discounts her subjectivity, desire, and agency and
calls out hasta cuando corazon, must you remain el gallo macho
of Mi Familia.
Carmen Huaco-Nuzum
Notes
This review was excerpted from a longer article in progress, “Gender
and Sexual Representation in Mi Farnilia/My Family (Orale patriarchy:
hasta cuando corazon will you remain el gallo macho of mi
familia) .”
1. Homi K. Bhabha, “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” Supposing
the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1994), 202.
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Mi Familia/My Family
2. I am choosing the terms Chicana and Chicano to mean politicized
subjects.
3. Dennis West, “Filming the Chicano Family Saga,” Cineaste
21, no. 4 (fall 1995): 26.
4. Lucy O’Brien, “My Family,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 10 (October
1995): 53.
5. Todd McCarthy, “My Family/Mi Familia,” Variety 358, no. 1
(February 6, 1995): 74.
6. I was unable to secure any information regarding the film’s
reception according to ethnic demographics or its financial success.
During the first few months of the film’s release, Mi Familia was absent
from the top box office list published in Variety, which would
indicate that the film was not spectacularly successful.
7. Dennis West, “Filming the Chicano Family Saga,” Cineaste
21, no. 4 (fall 1995): 26.
8. This and any subsequent dialogue is from the film Mi Familia
(Gregory Nava 1995).
9. Feminist film theory has it that the female gaze in popular
cinema evokes a male fear of castration, which is minimized by turning
the female character into a fetish.
10. I am not saying that Toni is like Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz,
but rather that Sor Juana, as cultural female archetype, functions
as a historical representational trope of resistance against patriarchy
and is contained in the present memory of most Chicanas,
Latinas.
11. Angie Chabram Dernersesian, “And, Yes . . . The Earth Did
Part . . . ,” Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies,
ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 45
12. Promotional video about the making of Mi Familia, 1995.
13. Roberto de Anda, Chicanas and Chicanos in Contemporary
Society (Boston: Ally and Bacon Editorial, 1995), 10-35.
14. Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca paso
porsus labios (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983),
90-9 1. Moraga describes male favoritism in the Chicana/o family.
“When my sister and I were fifteen and fourteen . . . we were still
waiting on him. . . . To this day in my mother’s home, my brother
and father are waited on, including by me. I do this now out of respect
for my mother and her wishes.”
15. Carmen Huaco-Nuzum, “American Me: Despair in the Barrio,”
Jumpcut 38 (1993): 92-94.
16. Bhabha, “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” 202.
17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257. “A Klee
painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from something he is furedly contemplating,
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Huaco-Nuzum
his eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is
how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps pilling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in
front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the
angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
152

CARMEN HUACO-NUZUM. Ford Fellow and Rockefeller grant recipient
who has taught at the University of California at Davis
and Santa Cruz. Her articles on Chicana/o film criticism have
appeared in anthologies and she is presently working on a book
on Chicana, Latina representation and spectatorship.

LOCAS. By Yxta Maya Murray. (New York: Grove Press, 1997.
248 pp. cloth $22.00.)
It’s hard not to be excited when a new Latina writer hits the
market, especially when she addresses the mostly unheard of
and misunderstood issues of youth. Unfortunately, it’s that
much more disappointing when that voice comes woefully
short of representing youth in any positive manner. Yxta Maya
Murray’s debut novel, Locus, fails to portray the complex lives
of young women in the Los Angeles barrios, and instead promotes
common formulas of Latino urban youth.
At a recent book reading in Albuquerque, Murray stated
that Locus is about “the gang world as I have imagined it.”
This disclaimer about her “creative process” not only takes the
place of much needed research, it contradicts Locus’s packaging
as the genuine experience of Latina gang membership:
Locus’s dust cover reads “like a pirate radio broadcast straight
from the urban core.” Curiously, Murray added that “I have
no gang background, but I am a Latina,” as if one experience
automatically authorized her to represent the other. This is
obviously not the case, and as a result, Locus reads like a fanciful
dream in which the author manipulates stereotypes to
please a readership unfamiliar with this complex community.
Murray employs an urban vernacular that, although meant
to authenticate the voice of her characters, quickly degenerates
into contrived ethnic narration. Vocalizing this language
at the Albuquerque reading, Murray portrays gangbanger lingo
as a synthetic brew of thick Latina-fantasy-accent meets
Speedy Gonzalez meets Chico (and the Man) meets Scarface.
This is not Murray’s natural speaking voice, nor that of a lively
storyteller. Instead, her bad impersonation, like the book’s
vernacular, is forced. Her street-wise wisdom, tough-guy morality,
and invented gangster philosophies negate the nuance
of urban life.
Alternating chapters between the female narrators, Lucia
and Cecilia, who are the lover and the sister (pronounced by
Murray as “seester”) of local gang leader Manny Silvas, Murray
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Hernandez
cloaks Locus in the veneer of a pro-woman voice. Meaning to
subvert the convention of the passive or hyper-sexed Latina,
Murray endorses those very types, inflecting their voices with
violence, deceit, and bravado. “I was a slick little jalapeiia” (24),
says the animated and tough-as-nails Lucia. The protagonists,
especially Lucia, beat the men at their own game, but they
never change the nature of it, merely recasting the cancer at
the heart of this fictitious community. The two female narrators
gain their foothold on power from Manny, and then, in a
gender switcheroo, capture total control of the barrio, Lucia
creating new business by selling drugs primarily to Mexicans
and children. Female power, pride, and status always have a
male referent in Locus, as both young women seem gleaned
from the daytime talk show circuit.
In fact, Murray admits that Lucia is inherently “pathological”
but doesn’t scrutinize the detrimental effect of patterning
a whole community through negativity. For example, violence
against women in Murray’s barrio is commonplace and rationalized.
Says Lucia, “All beat ladies get the same look, that
drag-down puppy dog look that makes you wanna kick them
harder” (96). Or, “And he picks up his hand, looking to hit me
hard on my face, like any old Mexican man would who’s got
his balls” ( 108). Likewise, the needy Cecilia’s biggest ambition
is to sit on the bench and talk babies with all the other teenage
“mamacitas” because “a baby makes you Somebody” (69).
Murray’s two-dimensional characters are fated, since blood
predetermines their personality, status, and destiny. Blood
references are endless-”gangbanging
blood” ( 1), “that strong
blood” (32), “weak blood (1 15), “cold steady blood” (191), “Spanish
red” (41), “red Catholic blood” (75), “wild horse blood” (76),
“gabacho blood” (102), “hot fighting blood” 1 13), “that Dirty
Harry I got in me” ( 16 1), “that tor0 in him” ( 174), “that wildcat
in her” (190), and “cause sex is in a Mexican woman’s blood”
(24)-and serve as Murray’s version of social context. As Cecilia
states, “I still had the gangbanging blood running out my heart
. . . even if I didn’t want it to” (85). Violence, presented without
social or economic context, appears to be a natural urge, a pleasure
to watch, and a necessity to take part in. Such negative
biological typing wrongly suggests a natural disposition toward
pathology and destruction in the Mexican and Chicano communities
and appears to justify their societal oppression.
At her reading, Murray stated that her book is a response
to the debate and passage of Proposition 187 in California and
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the subsequent, nationally televised, brutal beatings of Mexican
immigrants by law enforcement officers in Riverside. Yet,
she continuously maligns immigrants by having her characters
refer to them as “border brothers,” “poor-ass Salvadoran
and Oaxaca mamas” (51),“brown locals” who spend their “pennies”
on cocaine (115), as well as “some poor Mexican nobody”
(133), a “ditch-digging bracero” (60), or “some wetback scooting
. . . and running like a rabbit” (133). Ultimately, Murray
depicts and reinforces a social hierarchy based on citizenship
status and skin color. Although Lucia is herself an immigrant,
her internalized hatred of Mexicans is always on the tip of her
tongue. As she states, “Nothing’s easier than stealing from
some stupid illegal” ( 143).
In fact, the entire community of Echo Park is represented
by an array of denigrating stereotypes (for example, “hairychested
greasers” [5]), a textual abuse that is nowhere countered.
Murray constantly compares the gestures and physical
make-up of Mexicans and Chicanos to animals. Predisposed
to glorified and eroticized violence, “Mexicans know how to
throw down old fashioned, it’s like watching somebody dancing”
(166). Women are culturally attuned to have babies when
they are teenagers, and to work only as housekeepers. Viejas
are robbed and adolescents are quickly turned on to drugs,
guns, and la vida loca. “Men get the taste for beating on their
lady” (79) and women accept it. Even the hard-working nongangsters
are nostalgic for the old life, and make prime drug
and prostitution clients. In all, Murray exploits a stock troupe
of mainstream Mexican/ Chicano icons-including Pancho
Villa, la ZZorona, and ranchera music with the iAy Ay Ay! gr-itosproviding
only simplistic cultural insights into Latinos.
At best, Locus is a dark and tragic novel about a victimized
community that limps toward its self-destruction-a story
of misplaced resistance that we’ve seen over and over in
gangxploitation films, literature, and the news media. As a dose
of tough love and true grit reality, Locus fails miserably.
Murray’s debut effort is devoid of social and historical context
and does not reckon with the diversity of Mexican and Chicano
communities in Los Angeles. Instead, she flattens urban experiences
for her narrative convenience, presenting an inhuman,
violent, drug-filled, exoticized, as well as eroticized
community. The book is burdened with a transparent and
contrived bid at authenticity meant to pass as cultural authority.
If Murray’s book sounds like a shameful endorsement
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Hernandez
of denigrating and fetishizing stereotypes of Latinos in the
United States, that’s because it is.
David Manuel Hernandez
University of California, Berkeley
156

DAVID MANUEL HERNANDEZ. Ph.D. student in the Department of
Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley.