Latinos in US Film Industry (original) (raw)
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The Rebel of Chicano Cinema: Anglo-Mexican Intertextuality in Robert Rodriguez’s Films
Informes USA, 2014
Latinos are established as an essential part of both demographics and cultural networks in the United States. Nevertheless, in the last few decades, especially due to the so-called "Latino Boom" of the 1990s, the media interest in this ethnic group has dramatically increased, mainly due to the demographic growth and upward mobility of Latinos. In this context, my dissertation explores the cinema of Robert Rodriguez, as both harbinger and main practitioner of a significant change in trend, in which Latinidad spreads, to a greater or lesser extent, through the Anglo community of the United States, while at the same time embraces postmodern views such as hybridity and transnationalism.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: New Articulations of Latinidad in the Hollywood Imagination
Camino Real: Estudio de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas, 2022
When it comes to representation for Latinx in the US film industry, Lin-Manuel Miranda stands out as one of the most varied and complex of Latinx creators working in cinema today (Mcmanus 2018; Scaletta 2021; Kawa 2021). Although he has enjoyed a blooming success through an ascending presence in Anglo-US entertainment industry, Miranda’s career as a Latinx creator runs also in parallel with current Latinx demographic shifts in the United States, specifically as we move from the late twentieth into the twenty-first century. Thus, we discern how his various roles as an actor and director complicate existing schemas or paradigms of silver-screen Latinx representation and Latinidad in contemporary film spectrum. In this essay, I assess how critical race theory concepts such as assimilation and panlatinidad are foregrounded in the mediated construction of Lin-Manuel Miranda cinematic career, negotiated and contained in the context of US Latinidad in 21st century cinema. In order to do so, this paper will focus on the concept of assimilation and mixed-race theories according to Latinx film representation. Then, I will discuss on Miranda’s panethnic understanding of Latinidad, as a way of improving the stereotypical conditions of Latinx representation in recent Hollywood. In the last part of this essay, the case study of two of his films, one as an actor (Mary Poppins Returns, 2018) and the other one as a creator/director (In the Heights, 2021) provides meaningful insight of the representation of Latinidad in contemporary US films in ways that implicitly address a crisis of racial/ethnic solidity onscreen, hence encapsulating a powerful sense of cultural equality crafted toward the representation of Latinx in US culture.
2013
This paper argues that idealized portrayals of immigrants prevalent in political discourse must be scrutinized for their support of gender and racial nationalism and the effects they have on our understanding of (Latina/o) immigrant inclusion and democracy. Through the examination of three contemporary films with Latina leads—Real Women Have Curves, Spanglish, and Quinceañera, the paper argues that these discourses rely on an asymmetric recognition of Latina/os. This form of recognition involves the denial by dominant groups of their inter-dependency with other groups and the imposition on Latina/os an identity that does not threaten their privileged standing. The films offer views of Latina/o culture as overtly traditional; a “culture” that must either be abandoned or appropriated by anti-feminist (postfeminist) agendas in order to assuage anxieties regarding the transformations of the heteronormative middle-class family. The paper concludes by drawing parallels between the positive portrayals of Latinas in these films and prominent arguments in the immigration debate that rely on constructions of deserving immigrants to push for extensions of membership.
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2012
López-Calvo has written several excellent studies of diasporic literatures within Latin America such as Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (008) and Written in Exile: Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present (2001). Here, he turns to the literature of and about the Latino/a population of the greater Los Angeles area. As in his other books, López-Calvo's methodology, while focusing on readings of literary texts, branches out to many cultural and sociological aspects of the bodies of work surveyed, as well as focusing on underlying historical currents. He is not only an advocate, one with emancipatory intent, but also a scholar who will not cut intellectual corners in proceeding to that goal. The diligence, comprehensiveness, interpretive zest, and argumentative stamina so much in evidence in this critic's previous work are in ample evidence here. The "of and about" in terms of the Latino subject is important; López-Calvo analyzes not just works by Latino authors but looks at novels by Kate Braverman, Danny Santiago, and T. Coraghessan Boyle and a film by Allison Anders, all European-American artists who undertook more or less seriously to represent the Latino population as a major signifier in their Los Angeles-set works. Though López-Calvo points out stereotypical aspects of some of these works, he does not see them as inherently inauthentic because of the origin of their creators; instead using them to show that, even as demographic realities demand Latinos actually be represented in treatments of los Angeles rather than being marginalized or effaced, the opportunity to take a full view of their culture is often missed. In general, the works by Anglos are seen as insightful but possessing a comfort level with the status quo. Some may be more critically self-aware than others, but there is a gap-though not, López-Calvo indicates, a total one-between them and writers from the barrio who do not possess this sort of mobile social capital. The same is true, in a different way, of Latinos with an exceptional relationship to the region, such as the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, who in his Las películas de mi vida (2003) depicts a childhood in the Los Angeles of both film and reality which he evokes as both idyllic and essentially, though not unqualifiedly, admirable. Danny Santiago-an Anglo who wrote about Latinos with a Latino pseudonym, is seen as a bit more of an insider by López-Calvo, who grants that he was "born in Kansas City" (13) but sees his depiction of Latino Los Angeles as basically done from an internal rather than external perspective. Identity does not have to be purely biological or linguistic; but it does have to emanate from a felt cultural affinity. The writers from outside, however well intentioned, are trapped within certain paradigms. López-Calvo points out the limiting effects of these paradigms in his analysis of
This study analyzes the sociocultural dialogue established over the last fifteen years within Spanish immigration cinema, paying special attention to those films that explore themes relating to Latin American subjects residing in Spain and functioning as microcosms of conflicts that originate from globalization. This chapter proves that Spanish immigration cinema is not able to completely escape the ethnocentric lens through which it perceives Otherness. As I will highlight, the majority of the films that explore the topic of Latin American immigration in Spain embrace repetitive motives of exclusion based on professional, territorial, relational and ethnic segregation. I will demonstrate the failed intercultural relations in the dialogues between cultures as these movies broach the topic of immigration with a defective lens. They construct only a partial view of an encounter with the Other that is characterized by significant tension and conflict, both of which are initiated by the coexistence of Latin American immigrants and the native communities that receive them. In short, such cinema poorly reimagines and reconstructs the history of Latin American immigrants in Spain, rewriting their experiences of cultural separatism and their experiences of cultural separatism.
Not your mother's Latinas : film representations for a new millennium
2009
This dissertation seeks to contribute to film, feminist and Latino/a studies by exploring the construction and ideological implications of representations of Latinas in four recent, popular U.S. films: Girlfight (Kusama 2000), Maid in Manhattan (Wang 2002), Real Women Have Curves (Cardoso 2002) and Spanglish (Brooks 2004). These films were released following a time of tremendous growth in the population and the political and economic strength of the Latina/o community as well as a rise in popularity and visibility in the 1990s of entertainers like Selena and actresses such as Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. Drawing on the critical concepts of hybridity, Latinidad, and Bakhtinian dialogism, I analyze these films from a cultural and historical perspective to consider whether and to what degree, assuming changes in the situation of Latinas/os in the 1990's, representations of Latinas have also changed. Specifically, in this dissertation I consider the ways in which the terrain of the Latina body is articulated in these films in relation to competing societal, cultural and familial conflicts, focusing on the body as a site of struggle where relationships collide, interact and are negotiated. x In this dissertation I argue that most of the representations of Latinas in these films defy easy categorization, featuring complex characters grappling with economic issues, intergenerational differences, abuse, mother-daughter relationships, notions of beauty, familial expectations and the very real tensions between Latina/o cultural beliefs and practices and the dominant Anglo culture of the United States. Specifically, I argue that narrative and visual representation of Latina bodies in these films reflects a change in the Latinas offered for consumption to film viewers, presenting us with what some critics have called 'emergent' Latinas: conflicted and multilayered representations that in some cases challenge dominant ideologies and offer new demonstrations of Latina agency. xi