Reviews - Trinity University

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,
151