Latinx and Chicanx Film and Television

With their increasingly visible presence and participation in Hollywood productions and in the US media, Mexican Salma Hayek and Spaniard Penelope Cruz have firmly entered the always-challenging realm of US ethnic Otherness. Despite Hayek and Cruz's non-US native origins, their inclusion as Latinas confirms the homogenizing tendency of this panethnic term that indeed incorporates a vast array of sociocultural and artistic expressions of the peoples living in the US who, to a varying degree, relate to/with a Spanish and/or Latin American heritage and ancestry.

This volume presents a series of articles that study the relationship between geography and identity in Hispanic cinema in this internationalized context. The essays examine two opposite movements for tracing identity maps in Hispanic film: the articles from the first half of the volume consider an exteriorized propensity for identity construction across regions; the second set of contributions analyzes the introspective thrust towards understanding subjective and communitarian identities at the local level.

A recent slate of films marks a return of the Western to the borderlands to examine fears about open borders and intimacies with Mexico and Mexicans. These films express "American" anxieties about the integration of the hemisphere through political intervention, economic globalization, and the transnational migration of people and goods.

This essay analyzes the representation of the Latino characters in the Hollywood films The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men through the frame of the border film and its conventions; Kristeva and Danowski’s ( 1982 ) notion of the abject; demographic changes along the border; and contemporary discourses surrounding undocumented immigrants in the Southwest. Casting the Latino characters as unknowable to spectators through either the indiscernibility of their origins or the violence they enact, both films play on and reflect contemporary anxieties related to border security and citizenship within the American imaginary.

American-made cinema focusing on the United States-Mexico border often functions as a popular culture response to American policy changes that affect the border and immigration. How these films situate America and Americans in relation to Mexico and Mexicans dictates these films' critical and popular success.

The novel Loving Pedro Infante by Chicana writer Denise Chávez provides an insightful transcultural feminist critique of Golden Age Mexican cinema culture through a careful examination of gender roles. In the novel, the reception of Pedro Infante's films by spectators bridges generations and national spaces and leads to the formation of a transnational border feminism by the female protagonist. This essay advances the fields of Chicano culture and feminist and literary studies by dialoguing with Mexican film studies, history, and popular culture and by setting U.S.-Mexican borderland studies in an international frame of reference.

The conceptualization of the border as a living, fresh wound has become the foundation of numerous studies that have described and tackled the issue of immigration from myriad perspectives: social, economic, cultural, and political, among others. Similarly, this ‘herida abierta’ has been the focus of diverse written, visual, and aural representations, in artistic manifestations of all kinds. In particular, in the case of Latino/a cinema, the act of migrating has been exposed in movies such as El Norte and/or Sin Nombre, among others. However, as noted by Katharine M. Donato Vanderbilt and Blake Sisk, “although studies point to children and young adults in the Mexico-US migration process, most do not focus on children’s experiences per se” (2015, 61). Following this line of thought, this essay intends to explore the way immigration (understood as a process which involves a point of departure, a journey, and the arrival and settlement of migrants) is represented in Latino/a cinema, paying special attention to the way children are affected by it. The essay will look at several audiovisual texts, ranging from the documentary film Which Way Home, to movies such as Under the Same Moon and Entre Nos.

While nuanced and sensitive non-essentialist theorizations of Chicano identity have been put forward by key critics working in the field, these same critics still struggle, on occasion, to disentangle themselves from having recourse to essentialist arguments in their own work. The case that I examine here constitutes a prime example of this problem within Chicano critical discourse. It concerns the debates, in Chicano intellectual circles, over definitions of Chicano cinema, focalized via an examination of a film that has provoked a quite particular polemic in this respect: non-Chicana director Allison Anders's Mi vida loca/My Crazy Life (1994). My discussion of Anders's film will centre on its reception with a range of professional film critics, mostly Chicana/os, as well as reports on the reaction of a sample group of the film's subjects Chicana gang members to their representation on screen. It will examine the factors at play in the way it has been received and expose evidence of recursive essentialism in such arguments where apparent.