Category Archives: Movies

Mourning Lupe Ontiveros

Lupe Ontiveros

Sad news today: the one and only Chicana actor Lupe Ontiveros lost her battle with liver cancer. She was only 69 years old. (Yes, I say “only” because my parents are just a couple of years younger and they are still, in my mind, young enough for my sister and me to not have to worry about their dying any time soon. To me, “old” is my grandma, who just turned 94.)

Born in 1942 in El Paso, Texas, Lupe bucked the trends from an early age by graduating from high school and earning a bachelor’s degree, a notable accomplishment for a Chicana of her generation (as even today, according to some figures, only 46% of Chicanos graduate from high school and only 8% earn a BA. For more info on such statistics, please check out my Latina/os in Academia post). After working for some time in social services, Lupe managed to transform her work as a film and TV extra into a long, outstanding, full-time career.

Although Lupe frequently was cast as a maid–by her estimate, at least 150 times–she fully embodied such roles, so that instead of stereotypes, they became real people, living with dignity and humor, and making the best of their circumstances. As she told the LA Weekly in 2002,

I’ve had a hell of a good time playing those maids. No matter how much I resent the stupidity that is written into them, the audacity that the industry has when they portray us in such a nonsensical, idiotic, such — oh my God! — such a degrading manner, still, my humor survives in these maids. I’m very proud of them.

One of her performances that my mom and I love best is her turn as Nacha in El Norte. In one scene below, Nacha mentors recent immigrant Rosa over lunch after an INS raid at their factory (scene starts at 2:30):

To this day, my mom loves to say, “Qué tú no has conocido a Sears?!”

In 2010, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers honored Lupe with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Here’s a short video that shows the range of her work and the impact she had on her colleagues:

R.I.P Lupe. Thanks for sharing your talent with the world and please know that your legacy will live on.

Hey, Aubrey Plaza is Latina!

Actor Aubrey Plaza

Today, I’m veering away from Comedy Week to talk about briefly about race at the movies.

Yesterday I went with a friend to see Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky little film about three reporters trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious man seeking a time traveling partner. I liked everything about it: the performances, storyline, soundtrack. I recommend it! You can see the trailer here.

[Quick aside: It was a miracle that I managed to enjoy the movie at all because two elderly white ladies sitting directly behind us giggled at every single thing that happened in the movie. And I mean everything. A character stacks soup cans? Giggle. A character sneezes? Giggle. A car drives past some trees? Giggle. I had already shushed their loud chatter during the previews, but I was not prepared for the constant giggling once the film was underway. Yes, the movie is a comedy, but not every single minute is meant to be laugh-out-loud. At first I chalked it up to white privilege (not giving a damn about other people's movie experience), but looking back, I suspect that they were high. In which case, go grandmas!]

The lead character of Safety, Darius, is played by Aubrey Plaza, an actor and comedian who I guess is a regular on the TV show Parks and Recreation. Before this movie, I’d only seen her in the film Funny People. She strikes me as the smart, semi-hipsterish, a little awkward, dead-pan humor type. As I watched the film, I felt a connection to her simply out of gratitude that here was a different looking actress on the screen, in a lead role, no less. Don’t get me wrong, she’s totally gorgeous, but just not in the usual mainstream way:

Plaza as Darius in Safety Not Guaranteed

Today, in preparing to write about the film, I googled her name and discovered that she’s Latina. Her father is Puerto Rican, and she has described herself as “the only diverse” kid in her hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. “Aha!” I thought, “I knew there was something extra special about her!”

Notably, in an interview with David Letterman, her ethnicity doesn’t come up as a topic of conversation at all. Meanwhile, what George Lopez describes as her “exotic makeup” is one of the main issues during her visit to his show, Lopez Tonight. Ugh! Lopez uses one of my most hated keywords, “exotic.” It’s bad enough when white people describe us as exotic, but et tu, George?

Plaza admits that many people are surprised to find out that she’s Puerto Rican. “It comes out of me when I drink,” she jokes her in deadpan way. “I get really spicy.” This part of the interview starts at 1:15 in the video:

It’s interesting to think of Plaza as being on a continuum of Latina beauty, one that’s far outside of what people imagine when they hear “Latina” generally or, in this case, Puerto Rican specifically. In the eyes of the mainstream, being Latina is most accurately represented by someone like JLo, with more tan skin:

The one and only JLo

Though–ahem–let’s not forget that JLo was not always she of the straight, golden hair:

Jennifer Lopez, still fresh off “the block”

Of course, there are also those gorgeous Puertroriqueñas like Rosie Perez, as seen here in the opening to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing:

And let’s not forget afro-caribeñas like Zoe Saldana, who, at the other end of the Latina beauty spectrum from Plaza, is also so far outside the mainstream’s idea of what constitutes “Latina” that she can be reasonably cast as a southern African American sorority girl in Drumline:

Not that I see myself as a spokesperson for all Latinas, but I’m happy to welcome Aubrey Plaza to the umbrella term that is “Latina.” For in supporting performances like hers in Safety Not Guaranteed, we have a chance to broaden people’s assumptions about what Latinas look like, how they sound, and how they act. There’s no one way to define us. And that’s a good thing. I hope she keeps winning new fans and surprising them when they discover her mixed ethnicity.

American Apparel’s “Cowboy” problem

An image from American Apparel’s “New & Now: Men” site.

Just like yesterday, I have on my mind today another post inspired by something I read on Colorlines (what can I say? Even on the days I don’t read Colorlines for myself, I see a number of friends’ facebook posts pointing me to their great articles). On May 21, Jorge Rivas contributed a brief but pointed critique of American Apparel’s use of a ‘California Farmer’ as a fashion accessory. This particular ad campaign, from June 2011, features Robin, a USC student, posed alongside Raul, a Mexican immigrant. Here’s one of the images used as an example in the article:

As Rivas explains:

There is something that feels off in the ad that stars Raul and Robin. Both subjects look uncomfortable with each other and as a result both subjects look like props. . . . [S]omething feels off with the ad. Maybe it would have been better if they had taken both subjects in to the studio and shot them behind a plain backdrop like American Apparel does with most ads and included a caption about agricultural workers and how they’re paid so little that chances are they can’t even afford a plain $18 American Apparel t-shirt.

I share in Rivas’ discomfort with the image and am glad to see him point out that as a California “farmer,” Raul very likely doesn’t have the money to spend on the overpriced clothing he’s been called on to model. In fact, it’s ironic because in the first paragraph of the text that accompanies the images of Raul and Robin, American Apparel pats itself on the back for “celebrating” California’s diversity and for not resorting to sweatshop practices:

I want to add to Rivas’ critique by also pointing out how thinly “diversity” is represented in the images, as we can see if we continue on to read the second paragraph. What stands out to me first is the disparate descriptions of Robin and Raul. In addition to her student status, we get a snapshot of “Cali girl” Robin’s hobbies and personal tastes, which include “bon fires and hot dogs.” So not only is this girl athletic (pole vaulting!), but she’s also got quite a bit of free time on her hands to pursue such fun activities like singing and hanging out on the beach. By contrast, what do we learn of “Cowboy” Raul? As mentioned, he’s an immigrant from Mexico who rose from picking strawberries in the fields to a job preparing seeds and . . .that’s all. What are his “bon fires and hot dogs”? We’ll never know, because apparently he has no hobbies to pursue or favorite foods to eat in his leisure time. American Apparel defines him only through his labor status and menial jobs.

The company gratuitously describes Raul and Robin as an “unlikely pair.” Why do I say their choice of words is gratuitous? First, because they don’t need to say that the two are  unlikely compared to their other male/female model pairings, which usually look like this:

Interestingly, these two models stand near to but apart from each other, equals in modeling the clothes. In the previous image, however, Robin has her hands wrapped around Raul’s biceps, as if to say, “Hey, this is my Mexican!”

Another reason why the description of Robin and Raul as “unlikely” is gratuitous: American Apparel clearly intends for the models’ skin color to function as a short-hand for their different lifestyles and socioeconomic status. The company’s formulation is simplistic and lazy: White skin means education and leisure, an assumption of US birth, and a someone with unique tastes. By contrast, brown skin signifies a lack of education and low labor status, recent immigration to the US, and no distinguishing traits.

It’s such stupid logic. There’s no reason why Robin isn’t the working class immigrant, maybe even one of the 40% of visa overstayers who are Canadian, English or Australian in origin (FYI I do have a citation for this statistic…I will find it and link asap). And there’s no reason why Raul can’t be an immigrant, former farmworker and a USC student. However, the ad is predicated on our inability to see such statements as true.

In my view, Raul is there as an accessory, as shock value. In the online catalogue for the clothes he models, we can see that he was a one-time fluke, as American Apparel prefers instead its regular, skinny-boy models:

These guys must all be USC students, too. They probably also enjoy bonfires. By contrast, the Mexicans selected for the ads sit, muscular and unamused, in the back of a pickup, which looks to be parked in a field (see the image at the top of the post). Again, contrast that image with the “matching” models above, standing in front of a domestic, landscaped backdrop.

Finally, Robin and Raul are a supposedly an unlikely match because we are supposed to be unable to imagine the context that would ever bring them into each other’s spheres. I mean, just look: they’re photographed against a plain, white cinderblock wall, devoid of context. I imagine there is supposed to be the shock value of Raul’s brown skin; we are meant to ask ourselves, “How would someone who looks like Robin would ever want to be–and lay her hands on–someone who looks like Raul?” Maybe we are supposed to infer a backstory in which Robin, seeking revenge on her overbearing, rich father, giggles, “Just wait ’til Dad sees me making out with Raul! He’ll be so pissed!” (much like burnout Judd Nelson proposes to prom queen Molly Ringwald at the end of The Breakfast Club.)

The lame moves American Apparel has to make in order represent interracial/inter-ethnic relationships calls to my mind the movie Spanglish. In this film, in order to make audiences believe that Adam Sandler’s character would be attracted to a Mexican housekeeper–named Flor Moreno, or “Brown Flower”…come on, folks, really?!–they had to cast someone like Spanish actor Paz Vega:

And I’m sorry, but for all her beauty, Vega does not exactly represent the majority of hard-working Latinas who keep those Cali girls’ homes so immaculate and clean, the very women Ramiro Gomez celebrates in his artwork:

Ramiro Gomez, “Nancy and Carmelita’s Luxurious Lifestyle” (11 April 2012)

What do you think, folks? What other aspects of mainstreams view of race, socioeconomics and education can you identify in the Robin/Raul images? What do you make of American Apparel identifying Raul as a “cowboy”? I’m interested to hear your thoughts…

Uh-oh…a Dia de los Muertos movie in the works

Today this post at Colorlines caught my eye: Pixar is Jumping on Boat to Capture Latino Audience with New Día de los Muertos Movie.

CC/Eneas De Troya

As I briefly noted in my post about Rosario Dawson playing Dolores Huerta, I’m always skeptical of any of Hollywood’s “Latino” movies. And part of my skepticism here stems from the assumption that a movie centered on Día de los Muertos will somehow speak to all Latin@s (btw a little part of my professorly self is dying right now because I just linked to a Wikipedia article. Am I turning into my students?).

Is this tradition widely celebrated in other Latin American countries? I don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know much about Día de los Muertos at all until I got to college and learned about it in a Spanish class. Although my mom taught us everything she could about Mexican culture and always instilled a sense of pride in our ethnicity, Día de los Muertos was something neither she nor my grandmother ever celebrated or even mentioned…until one day when I was visiting home from grad school and saw a huge altar where our dining room table used to be. My mom went all out: colorful tablecloth, papel picado strung about, pictures of our deceased ancestors and mementos that represented them, burning candles, marigolds sprinkled all over the place. I looked around, amazed. The place looked like a Hollywood set. Oddly, my mom acted as though this were something we had done every year.

Yet we hadn’t. I grew up in an extremely beige suburban house, with average, contemporary 1980s furnishings and decor. The only things that marked our home as “Mexican” in any way were the doilies crocheted by my grandma that covered every tabletop; a few artfully-placed knickknacks from our travels to visit family in Mexico, and a huge jar of bacon fat that sat on the kitchen counter in case anyone felt like whipping some refried beans. Oh and the mariachi records that my mom would blast on Sunday mornings, when we were compelled to get up and help her clean the house. My mom really prided herself on keeping an orderly, stylish home, because she disdained what to her were my grandma’s garish decorating choices. To this day, my mom will passionately describe her hatred for a red velvet couch–covered with protective plastic, of course–that Grandma purchased (“Our living room looked like a BORDELLO!”) or the time Grandma redid the kitchen floor with black & pink tiles, then substituted lime green tiles when the pink ones ran out.

And here’s what leads me back to the soon-to-be Día de los Muertos movie. Hollywood, please stop assuming that Dia de los Muertos is going to automatically bring us Latin@s running to the theater in droves. Because based on the “Latin@” movies you’ve produced thus far, you can only envision us looking and acting in stereotypical ways and living in only one style of home. How many times have I seen the colorful Mexican kitchen in your films? How many East LA gang and boxing stories can you seriously make? How many of your soundtracks feature only salsa and strumming guitar (as Lalo Alcaraz points out on this, one of my favorite posters)?

If you think I’m exaggerating, just check out the Mexican home scenes in the trailer for the film From Prada to Nada. And keep in mind, this is just the trailer…if there’s this many stereotypes in two and a half minutes, then imagine sitting through the whole film! I rest my case.

Update: Satirical take on Rosario Dawson as Dolores Huerta

Yesterday I claimed that I would share my thoughts on class status and my education journey. Time got away from me today, so I will postpone that topic until tomorrow.

Instead I have a quick update related to my post about the politics of Rosario Dawson playing Dolores Huerta in the upcoming film Chavez, about Cesar Chavez. Pocho.com, a site for Chicano news and satire, had its own special post about the casting of a similar (fictitious) movie. Here’s a quote from “Hollywood Spaniards, Puerto Ricans plan ‘ultimate’ Chicano film“:

The film – Mi Familia Bound By Honor For Glory — begins when Hernán Cortés lands in the New World, follows the history of Latin America through colonialism, revolution, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Destilando Amor,” through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Raiders moving back to Oakland and to the current struggles of today’s Latinos — like bad cell phone reception.

“I feel like this project is important not only to me, and the rest of the cast, for professional and personal reasons. It’s the first time that we — are a bunch of people who are not Mexican-American but capitalize on pretending to be — have the chance to tell the authentic Mexican-American story,” said Cuban-American actress Eva Mendes, who is starring in the film as United Farm Worker co-founder Dolores Huerta. (She beat out Rosario Dawson for the role.)

Now, I know that the story is meant as a joke, and I do think it’s funny overall. My favorite part is the the fact that Esai Morales will star as himself, and I love the the title of the fictitious film, which makes fun of several classic Chicano movies that I find to be gloriously (if unintentionally) corny.

Looking past the humor, though, I find two elements particularly telling. First is the description of these Latino actors as “a bunch of people who are not Mexican-American but capitalize on pretending to be,” which raises the primary issue many Chicanos have with the casting of Dawson: namely, they feel that Chicano actors should be the first and only choice to play Chicano roles. There’s an oblique criticism here of non-Mexican American actors “taking” roles that aren’t mean for them.

Second is the inclusion of a gorgeous and scantily-clad Eva Mendes, for no other reason that to underscore the apparent ridiculousness of casting someone like her (i.e. non-Chicana) in the serious role of a famous, honorable Chicana labor organizer. By contrast, the included image of Lou Diamond Phillips (honorary Mexican American ever since he played Ritchie Valens in La Bamba) is a run-of-the-mill headshot. Here is the image of Mendes:

Image of Eva Mendes used in the satirical article.

Her ass, visible in her see-through panties, becomes a metaphor for the ass she makes of herself in the made up quote (included above) about how important the project is to her and the other non-Chicanos in the film. Again, I get it, guys: This is meant as satire. However, it would have been just as humorous without the knee-jerk sexism evident here.

I will admit that being an academic brings a certain danger: You end up taking a critical eye to just about everything you see and make the people around groan, “Come on, lighten up, lady.” But sometimes, when it comes to popular culture, it’s just too tempting not to analyze, especially when the fruit hangs so low.

On Rosario Dawson as Dolores Huerta

A couple of days ago, I learned through a friend’s fb post that actor/director Diego Luna (of Y Tu Mamá También, as well as Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights fame) is making a film about the one and only Cesar Chavez, Mexican American civil-rights activist and the co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. The film is currently entitled, Chavez. Now, I don’t ever get especially hopeful or excited about any of Hollywood’s “Hispanic” films, but in this case I am crossing my fingers that it will at least be decent enough to use in one of my undergraduate classes.

Apparently Rosario Dawson has just signed on to play Dolores Huerta, the other co-founder of the UFW. The choice of Dawson surprised me; aside from having long hair, I just don’t think they look much alike. Here is Huerta, back in the day:

Meanwhile, here is the Dawson:

At first, I thought, maybe America Ferrera would have been a better choice, but it turns out that she already was cast in the role of Chavez’s wife Helen in the film…because, you know, there’s slim pickins if you’re seeking recognizable Latina actors in Hollywood. Btw I’m not the only one who envisioned Ferrera as Huerta; check out this homage to Huerta from Glamour magazine a couple of years back:

In any case, I’m bracing for the usual outrage on the part of many Chicanos that one of our most beloved she-roes will be portrayed by someone who is not of Chicana or Mexican descent. Just remember back to the late ’90s when some folks freaked out when another beloved Chicana icon, singer Selena Quintanilla, was to be portrayed by Puerto Rican actress Jennifer Lopez (btw it was the 1997 movie Selena that inspired JLo to launch her singing career…so now we know who to blame: director Gregory Nava.) And on a similar note, many were angry that Italian American Madonna would be playing Argentina leader Eva Peron in Evita. We can thank god, I suppose for small mercies: Salma Hayek ended up portraying Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in Frida, though I encourage you to read Isabel Molina-Guzman’s powerful critique of that film in her excellent book, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media.

Anyway, in cases like the Huerta-Dawson match-up, the people get up in arms and cry out, “There wasn’t a single Mexican American actress you could have found to play Huerta?!” In fact, such commentary has already started: You can scroll down to some of the poorly-worded and ungrammatical replies to a HuffPost article about how nervous Dawson is to do justice to the role. Among the responses is this one:

…this is poor casting. Dawson looks nothing like Huerta. It’s a joke! UFW was not co-founded by a black woman. [emphasis added]

Comments like these expose a sensitive issue within many Latina/o communities: race. Latina/os are far from racial or ethnic homogeneity; we can lay claim to diverse racial backgrounds, which accounts for a wide-range of physical appearances even among people in the same family. However, some like to fancy the idea that Mexicans are primarily a “lighter” blend of native and Spanish peoples, while people from Carribbean countries are typically the darker ones, thanks to their African “blood.” But this is simply not true–even Mexicans have African ancestry, and if this is news to you, then I suggest you read Martha Menchaca’s Recovering History, Constructing Race asap. Nevertheless, those in our communities with lighter skin and fairer features are frequently praised as more beautiful than the darker ones among us. Even in mainstream entertainment, Latinas like Dawson and Zoe Saldaña are more often cast in African American roles or as the “exotic” beauties in sic-fi and action films, because studio execs can only envision “Latina” to look like JLo, Hayek, Penelope Cruz, etc. (And most of the time, they are supposed to sound like Sofia Vergara.)

To me, this outrage is misplaced. In the end, I don’t care who plays Huerta, as long as she does a good job at it. If she were a Chicana actor, sure, that would be great, but as my friend Michelle pointed out in our conversation on this topic earlier today, what’s more important is the fact that, by reaching mainstream audiences, a film like Chavez can raise awareness about his and Huerta’s accomplishments and therefore broaden people’s general understanding about Chicana/o history. Moreover, Michelle rightly noted that in the case of Selena, many Chicana/os didn’t really know who JLo was, and many Nuyoricans didn’t know anything about Selena, but in the end, we all went to see the movie and learned a little something. (I will admit that until seeing the film, I didn’t even know that Selena was born in the US and that English was her first language…which means I prolly should hand back my Chicana identity card. Also, one last excellent observation from Michelle: there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of backlash when Chicano Edward James Olmos was cast as Bolivian math teacher Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver. It seems that perhaps Chicano outrage only flows in one direction!)

Rather, the real issue that should be getting people worked up is the dire lack of representation of Latinas in the mainstream media as a whole. That is the true problem. It would be so refreshing to see a Latina in a role that isn’t specifically marked as “Latina.” We need roles that don’t require the performance of the usual ethnic stereotypes. One positive portrayal, for example, is Diana Maria Riva, who plays the role of Lieutenant Ana Ruiz on the TV show The Good Guys. In the show, she is a police lieutenant who just happens to be Latina. They don’t make a big issue out of her ethnicity: She doesn’t speak in a “Latin” accent, dress in a stereotypically ethnic way, or interject “Ay, caramba!” and the like into her conversations. She just goes about her job like a real person would.

That’s how I feel I live my life: I am Latina (specifically, of course, Mexican American). My ethnicity is an important part of my identity, but it’s not all of it. For example, I am a university professor, and despite my ethnicity, I don’t usually go to class dressed like this:

Which is not at all to say it is not my dream to do so…if only because I’d really love to see my students faces when I enter the room.

Anyway, there has been a lot of commentary lately about the lack of people of color in the HBO series Girls, which is set in Brooklyn, a borough that has a minority white population (for insightful examples of said commentary, check out Kendra James on Racialicious and this post by Dodai Stewart at Jezebel). It seems to me that it takes much more work to erase the people of color from mainstream media (particularly shows set in New York and Los Angeles) than it does to just show them as real people going about their daily business. So to all the studio execs and TV and film writers out there: Make it easier on yourselves! Take the characters you’re already writing about, and just cast a Latina in the role. Magic may happen–she may still seem like a real person…even though she’s Latina!

I’m just saying that when there are a broader range of Latina roles in the future–when we’ve been liberated from playing the grandmas, maids and sluts–then there won’t be so much pressure on films like Chavez to get the casting exactly right. Then we Chicana/os can find something better to complain about.