movie critical review

Homegirls, Cholas, and Pachucas in Cinema: Taking over the Public Sphere Author(s): Rosa Linda Fregoso Source: California History, Vol. 74, No. 3, Mexican Americans in California (Fall, 1995), pp. 316-327 Published by: University of California Press in association with the California Historical Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25177514 Accessed: 31-01-2019 20:44 UTC

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Homegirls, Cholas, and Pachucas in Cinema

TAKING OVER THE PUBLIC SPHERE

by Rosa Linda Fregoso

Introduction

We have seen her body painted next to Aztec gods on murals, recognizable by her style: hair in a long, ratted and sprayed beehive, draping over her shoul ders; her face caked with make-up and shellacked lipstick. Her body adorns the hood of lowrider cars.

Or, with a permed, curly, layered hairstyle, ruby-red polished nails, short tight skirt and haltertop, reveal ing the body's full curves, she's inside the lowrider

magazine as a pin-up. And her image gazes back at us from under a crisp, white tee shirt where she rests as a tattoo on the body of a man. This production of the pachuca as an image for public and private con sumption permeates many facets of Chicano cultural politics. And I wonder what is being played out on the body of the pachuca?

The production of her image predates the current fascination and commodification of the "gangsta" style in mainstream popular culture. So too does her performance in public as a social subject. Since the 1930s, pachucas, the predecessors of cholas and of today's homegirls, have hung out in the public domain of barrios like Maravilla, in southern Cali

Copyright 1995, by Rosa Linda Fregoso.

[At left] Draping themselves seductively over the jukebox and El Pachuco (Edward James Olmos) in the 1981 film Zoot Suit, these pachucas (left to right: Candice Silva, Anacani Eschever ria, and Bertha Oropeza) are predecessors of the "gangsta" style in mainstream popular culture. Courtesy Universal Studios.

fornia, as members of girls' clubs, or what is cur rently referred to as girl gangs. Yet she stands figu ratively on the margins of literacy and film testimonies on la pachucada, subservient to mascu line versions of the gangsta life and lifestyle. The vio lence and abuse she has witnessed remains unknown to us. Characterized as a deviant in stud ies about adolescent girl gangs, her story remains untold and untheorized.1 Throughout this discus sion, I will explore what it is that the pachuca-chola homegirl as an historical subject and as a producer of meaning?that is, a creator rather than merely an object of meaning?offers to feminist discourse, and what she teaches us about opposition and resistance, not just to la vida loca (the crazy life), but to la vida dura (the hard life).

The Girls My Mother Warned Me About2

Where I grew up in South Texas, pachucas were the objects of parental scorn. As a young Catholic-school girl, I was both fearful of and fascinated by pachu cas. They went to public schools, hung out mostly at corner stores, smoked cigarettes, wore lots of make-up, were loud in public and quick to start a fight. My first lesson in sex education came from a pachuca named Mary Ester. With peroxide-orange hair, big, light-brown eyes

circled by Maybelline black eye-liner, eyebrows shaped and painted like wings, reddish-orange lips, and a teased beehive hairdo that my mother said was a nest for cockroaches, Mary Ester was a guera (light skinned girl) who lived across the street from my gramma's house in Corpus Christi. I once heard she

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was my Tio's movida (lover). Yet what I remember most about Mary Ester was how she disturbed my childhood innocence, teaching me the meaning of that popular lyric, "Let me tell you about the birds and the bees." One day I was walking down the street with her when Mary Ester asked me about the due date for my mother's baby. "What baby?" I responded. "The one in her stomach, mensa (dummy). That's why she's so fat... .Don't you know anything about the birds and the bees?" I didn't, except that they were somehow related to "a thing called love." Several hours later I stood in the mid dle of my gramma's dark, enclosed kitchen, before the tribunal of my mother, gramma, and Tio Pepe. I was proud of my sudden deconstruction of that song about the birds and the bees. And with the bright-eyed innocence of a nine-year-old girl, I shared that new knowledge with these family mem bers, whose judgmental looks shamed me. I was silenced and punished immediately for knowing where babies come from. Yet I never forgot Mary Ester's casual frankness, nor her role in unlocking my sexual curiosity. I was always fascinated by that pachuca masquerade she wore in public, by how she had made her face into her canvas. She died several

years later of a drug overdose. Another pachuca named Gloria taught me the

meaning of female solidarity. When I was fifteen years old, gang-banging was spreading throughout Corpus. Gang-banging referred to group rape: a group of guys getting a girl high on drugs, driving her to the beach, then raping and abandoning her. One Saturday night, I was hanging around the Carousel dancehall, stoned on "reds," walking from car to car, smoking, drinking, and listening to music. Gloria and a friend were there as well. Gloria did not like me. I could tell by the way she glared at me. I was friends with her ex-boyfriend, one of two brothers I knew who were pachuco drug dealers. That Saturday night one of the brothers invited me to go cruising: "Maybe the beach," he said. Right before I entered that tan Chevrolet station wagon, Gloria drove up and yelled, "Get in the car. I'm gonna take you for a ride." I don't know what stirred inside me, but without hesitating or protesting, I followed Glo ria's command. She took me home and on the way told me that the guys, including my friends the two brothers, were "preparing a gang-banging" with me as their victim. I knew she was right. The hurt and

terror I felt drove me away from my Carousel hang out. I even quit doing drugs. And all that summer I wondered why Gloria had intervened to save me. What I didn't understand then was Gloria's gift to me: a pachucas sense of female solidarity.

In some Chicano familias, mothers warn their daughters about lesbians. In mine, I was cautioned about pachucas?por ser muchachas corrientes y calle jeras (cheap, street-roaming girls). They fought like guys and would stand up to anybody's provocation. And, most of all, the street was their turf. Indeed, the street constitutes the social geography of urban space, the arena where pachucas apprehend public life. But the streets are also contested semiotic ter

rains within the public sphere, functioning, in the words of philosopher Nancy Fraser, as "culturally specific rhetorical lenses that filter and alter the utterances they frame."3 In the eyes of parents, the streets are sites of danger, where young girls become pachucas and callejeras (street-roamers). For pachu cas, the street is an arena where they appropriate public space. Refusing to stay in the place assigned to them by Chicano society, pachucas are trespassers in public spaces, violating the boundaries of femi ninity.

In my childhood, pachucas were often viewed by adults as transgressive girls who disturbed private and public patriarchy, la familia, and the Catholic church. They threatened the foundations of la

familia's gendered structure by speaking and acting in the public sphere. Mary Ester disrupted my fam ily's acquiescence to the Church's moral prohibitions regarding sexuality. In public, she spoke openly about her sexual knowledge. And, on the streets of Corpus Christi as well, Gloria subverted patriarchal mysogyny. She had intervened to stop men from inflicting their powerful violence and privilege on

my body. In public spaces, both of these young women exhibited this mastery over and resistance to the sanctimony of patriarchal culture and religion.

I now understand the reason for parental scorn. In their appropriation of the public sphere, pachucas set a "bad" example. Most importantly, in their rebellion, pachucas failed to do what the Chicano family demands of girls and women. They rejected and challenged parental norms by refusing to stay inside the home. Their provocative language and dress style served to further refute la familias author ity. Boldly displaying their sexuality, pachucas

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refused to be confined by domesticity. The pachuca is therefore the body that marks the limits of lafamilia and is also the one who introduces disorder into its essentially patriarchal project.

Gendered Territoriality

The confinement of girls and women to domestic ity is not endemic to Chicano familias, but is an inherent feature of modern capitalist societies, as

well as others throughout history. It is intimately linked to women's subordination in societies that, as

Nancy Fraser explains, are premised on both the sep aration of the public from the private spheres, as well as on the "separation of the official economic sphere from the domestic sphere and the enclaving of child rearing from the rest of social labor."4

Fraser's work on contemporary social theory is particularly useful for exploring the construction and enactment of social and cultural identities within

the public sphere. She takes issue with the tendency in feminist scholarship to collapse the entire arena outside the home into the single concept of the "public sphere." Following the theoretical model developed by Jurgen Habermas, Fraser conceptual izes classic capitalist societies as comprised of two levels of interrelated public /private separations: "systems" and "lifeworld spheres." At the level of systems, the division is between the State, as a "pub lic" system, and the "(official) capitalist economy" as a "private" system of market relations. At the level of lifeworld spheres, the division separates family, or "private" lifeworld sphere, from the "public" lifeworld sphere, which Fraser defines as a "space of political opinion formation and participation."5 In this manner Fraser departs from feminist theorists

who define the private realm solely in terms of the home or the family. In Fraser's view, the private realm is more than the home, for the private encom passes both official economy of paid employment (the private system of market relations) as well as the family (the private lifeworld sphere).

Thus for Fraser, the public sphere is not an "arena of market relations." Rather it is comprised of the State (as a public system) and the public lifeworld sphere. With this qualification in mind, Fraser defines the public sphere as an arena of "discursive relations." In Fraser's words,

It [the public sphere] designates a theater in mod ern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discur sive interaction.6

The distinction Fraser makes between the two lev els of public/private separations is important to my work because in order to support their families, Chi cana working-class women are allowed to work outside the home in the "private" official economy of paid employment. My concern in this paper is with the social and cultural prohibition of women's access to the public sphere of the "streets" and "dis cursive relations."

Giving Jurgen Habermas's insights a feminist twist, Fraser explores the gendered aspects of each of these spheres. She explicitly underscores the mas culine sub-text (premises) of the citizen's role in the public sphere and the feminine sub-text of the child rearing role in the familial or private lifeworld sphere. According to Fraser, in defining citizenship,

modern capitalist societies invest a higher value on the soldiering role rather than on what she terms "life-fostering child-rearing." In so doing, modern societies privilege the public (masculine) citizen-sub ject in the formation of the nation-state. Indeed, male dominance is intrinsic rather than accidental to clas sic capitalism precisely because it is structural and "premised on the separation of waged labor and the state from childrearing and the household." It is an institutional arrangement, namely, the domestication and separation of childrearing and household work from the rest of social labor, that for Fraser marks "the linchpin of modern women's subordination."7 As Fraser adds, it is in the public sphere as citizens and in the private (official) economic sphere as pro ducers that men are the privileged subjects of dis course and social relations. In sharp contrast, women's role and function are confined to the pri vate domestic sphere of the family and consump tion.8 Within Chicano culture, the subordination of

women is exacerbated by a dual legacy, Catholicism and the particularities of the Spanish conquest. If in our current era, Mexican Catholics continue to be subjected to the Church's regulation of women's public and private behavior, as the recent debates on reproduction make evident, the Catholic church's

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power in proscribing women's comportment was even greater in the years prior to independence or the secularization of Mexican society in the nine teenth century. With respect to the confinement of Chicano girls

and women to the home, Jean Franco's study of gen der and representation in Mexico offers a valuable insight. Franco traces the immobility of women in Latin American society, what she terms their "terri toriality" within Latin America, not simply to Catholic hegemony but to the inheritance of Span ish pre-Cortesian culture: Here we should keep in mind the privatized and inward looking Hispanic house and the fact that the virtual confinement of married women to the home

had not only been required by the Church but was also intended to insure the purity of blood that Spanish society had imposed after the war against the Moors.9

Even though Chicanas are permitted to work out side the home, as potential wives young Chicanas are instructed to view the home as "female" and the pub lic sphere of the streets and discursive relations as "male" terrain. Thus the origin of Chicanas' territo riality, their immobility, their confinement to the home, can be traced essentially to earlier prohibitions against miscegenation. A masculine project indeed!

Masking as a concern for their safety, the confinement of girls to the home is first and foremost about pro tecting sexual property, about policing sexuality. And this is precisely the masculine familial project that pachucas interrupted and disrupted. Their bodies refused to be contained by domesticity or limited by the prevailing orthodoxy of appropriate female behavior.

Chicana Urban Identities in Literature

Chicana feminists have interpreted familial, lit erary, and oral narratives through symbolic icons and archetypes such as La Malinche, La Llorona (the wailing woman), La Virgen de Guadalupe, identifying these as prototypes occurring frequently in patriar chal discourse about women. Whether figured as the self-renounced female, la madre abnegada (the suf fering mother), the passive virgin, or in portraits of female treachery or sexual promiscuity, these views

of women, assigned a one-dimensionality, are invari ably sublimated into symbolic icons and archetypes of Mexican femaleness. However, the recognition of symbolism in Chicana urban identities has been shamefully neglected by the same feminists. The pachuca-chola-homegirl, as primary actress within the Chicano family tale, has escaped the attention of Chi cana feminists. She has appeared, though, in liter ary works by writers such as Carmen Tafoya, Laura del Fuego, and Mary Helen Ponce.10 It is in Laura del Fuego's recent book Maravilla that the subversive potential of pachuca sexuality is explicitly brought into focus. Maravilla tells the story of a young pachuca grow

ing up in East Los Angeles during the 1960s. A mem ber of the "Las Belltones East LA" girls' gang, the main character, Consuela, or "Cece," challenges Catholic prohibitions against corporal pleasure. Exploring her own body and affirming it as the site of sexual pleasure, she openly circumvents Catholi cism. In an early part of the novel, Cece innocently experiences her first sexual encounter in her home with a girlfriend, Liz. As a further affront to Chicano patriarchal values, Cece openly combines her inter est in boyfriends with an attraction to and admira tion of girls. While Maravilla stops before consummating

homosexual desires, scenes of Cece's homoerotic pleasures and her homosocial bonds with other girls nonetheless disclose the novel's homosexual subtext. In this manner, Laura del Fuego's Maravilla openly introduces disorder into the Chicano family's essentially masculine and heterosexual project. By hanging out with girlfriends, cruising the streets or fighting rival gangs, Cece and her cohort of pachu cas refuse to be contained in the home or limited by the prevailing views of female comportment. As a pachuca, Cece openly expresses a young woman's sexual pleasures and desires despite Chicano cul ture's prohibitions. Unfortunately, the pachuca as social subject would appear quite differently on the screen in the gang genre film.

Screening the Homegirl

Early debates in cinema studies underscored the invisibility, but also the visibility, of certain kinds of images about Chicanas and Chicanos in mainstream

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media. The gangsta motif, for instance, had been deployed extensively since the 1940s as the way to make Chicanos visible in U.S. popular culture. And this deployment has not been the sole purview of dominant culture, for, in contesting mainstream rep resentations, Chicano filmmakers such as Luis Valdez and E.J. Olmos resort as well to the gangsta motif. As usual, mainstream and oppositional films succeed in marginalizing the female gang member vis a vis the male character. Yet despite the erasure and denial of the chola as narrative subject, what does stand out is her figuration in peculiar kinds of ways.

When I was a child, the term pachuca was used inter changeably with "puta" (prostitute). There is a scene in Luis Valdez's classic film Zoot Suit where the

mother of the main character, upon witnessing her daughter's 1940s pachuca dress style, makes precisely that equation by saying: "Pareces puta...pachuca!" Thus, the fusion of the pachuca dress style with that of the hooker motivates me to read the image of the pachuca-chola-homegirl through historical and cul tural discourses as well as through social and femi nist theorizing about the subject, in order to analyze and interpret the visual strategies chosen to con

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struct her image in cinema, in those frames where she figures as an object of cultural discourse. What is being played out by the use of the body of a homegirl? What kinds of social and cultural meanings is masculinist ideology mapping onto her image?

In mainstream "gangxploitation" films like Boule vard Nights, The Warriors, and Bound by Honor (also called Blood In, Blood Out), the pachuca is incidental to the narrative, appearing textually as an appendage, as a female prop draped around the body of a male gang member. In the 1988 film Colors, by Dennis Hop per, the homegirl has a speaking part, the semblance of a narrative voice. A film about Chicano gangs in Los Angeles, Colors is told from the point of view of the Los Angeles Police Department. The motif of

miscegenation is a major sub-text, dealing with the romance between Chicana homegirl Luisa (played by the Cuban actress Maria Conchita Alonzo), and Danny (played by Sean Perm). In the first part of the film, Luisa appears as the nice, subservient, sexy-but not-too-promiscuous girl from the barrio?a de meanor designed to emphasize her passivity, thereby making the brown woman appealing to the white cop. By operating as the translator for the gang world, the homegirl facilitates white male penetration into the world of the other. However, as we learn by the sec ond half of the film, Luisa's accommodation has been just a masquerade.

Responding to a drive-by shooting in the barrio, Danny and other law enforcers walk in on a party at a gang member's home. As Danny approaches the bedroom, a black man walks out. Inside the room Danny finds Luisa, who has shed her previous homely "good-girl" attire. Danny watches as Luisa, in heavy make-up, teased hair, wearing the provoca tive dress typical of cholas, is donning her hose. To Danny's dismay, Luisa violently and aggressively confronts him as he walks out of the house.

Luisa's initial subservience in the film masks the underside of a native woman, for as the bedroom scene illustrates, passivity and accommodation fig ure as disguise. Beneath the passive acquiescence, Luisa surfaces as a hypersexual object?the embod iment of unbridled sexuality, betrayal, and deceit. The end of the film demonizes Luisa, reinscribing her as a threat to the white race, an inscription serving to legitimize U.S. society's historic prohibition of mixed race unions. Yet, the film also recapitulates Holly wood's fascination with the motif of miscegenation

and the "forbidden other": the mythic native women figured in Colors as the homegirl of the studio's imag ination.

Does the pachuca-chola-homegirl fare any better in Chicano productions? Partly in response to films such as Colors, Chicano cultural workers have focused their attention on countering the pejorative image of pachucos as incorrigible deviants within the dominant culture and media. In poetry, theater, and film, this refashioning of the pachuco as urban warrior and anti-hero has centered exclusively on male identities. (I have written elsewhere about his reformulation, as

well as the production of the historical subject of Chi cano nationalism.)11 This masculine subject found its narrative expression in characters of the public sphere: males operating outside the home, in the streets, in the recording industry, and as urban warriors against threatening external institutional forces such as the police, the media, and the state. Chicano feature length productions are marked by a strict gender divi sion between the public sphere and the private domestic sphere, thereby creating an artificial sepa ration between them. Despite critiques by feminists about the role such separation plays in the subordi nation of women, the stories told by Chicano films are particularly forceful in affirming and adhering to that gendered social division. For example, while Chi cano male identity is depicted as a product of the pub lic sphere, the female identity is absent from that space. Her presence is contained in domesticity as a

mother, wife, girlfriend, caretaker. Just as in the expe riential realm, so too in Chicano media representation,

woman's containment to the private sphere is but tressed by the social forces of the Church and la

familia?forces dictating a specific, limited environ ment for Chicanas.

The pachuca has appeared in two such films: Zoot Suit and American Me. In Zoot Suit, she is again imaged in terms of the strategy of containment, appearing only in limited scenes and roles. Conse quently, for all the differences in politics between Col ors and Zoot Suit, both are akin in their imagery of the homegirl.12 While three pachucas have speaking parts in Zoot Suit, my focus is on Berta, who appears in the dance hall and whose love-interest is the

main character, Hank. Berta is depicted as a pathetic, "not-chosen-as-the-anointed" lover of Hank. She is promiscuous, exaggerating her character traits as a pachuca.

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Berta's overstated pachuca style is best evident when she approaches Hank and Delia on the dance floor. Obviously drunk, Berta circles around the dancing couple, hanging onto Hank, who openly expresses his annoyance. Berta's provocative facial and bodily gestures make explicitly obvious her jeal ousy of Delia and desire for Hank. Directing rude and obnoxious comments to the couple as she flaunts her body, Berta ends by saying: "I hope she [Delia] knows the difference between being cool and being culo [piece of ass]." As noted earlier, Hank's sister also exhibits the

style of the pachuca, yet it is Berta who embodies the lifestyle: she is in control of her own sexual desires. Yet, the filmmaker deploys a standard "virgen/ - whore" distinction in order to punish Berta for exhibiting her desires in public. She is reprimanded for her transgression through an imaging strategy that ridicules her, depicting her as exaggerated and hypersexed. By deploying this narrow strategy of containment, the filmmaker prohibits any mean ingful expression of Berta's complex sexuality. In so doing, Zoot Suit illustrates the extent to which female desires and explicit female sexuality threaten the familial order. Yet as the impropriety of her cloth ing style and her provocative gestures and language illustrate, Berta represents a threat to both la familial and the Church's orthodoxy of female comport ment. Just as in the social realm, the pachuca of Zoot Suit figures as a subject whose personal style and lifestyle, whose very presence on the dance floor, contest her exclusion from the public sphere.

In the film American Me, the homegirl, Julie (Evelina Fernandez), appears as a veterana, that is to say not as an actual, but as a former, rehabilitated, chola. In this film we witness a distinct form of the

"strategy of containment," for her status as former chola demonstrates the filmmaker's inability to han dle the inscription of a chola on the screen. While the chola is part of Julie's past identity, she does not man ifest that aspect of her character on the screen. Indeed, throughout the film Julie has masked this identity, remaking herself into a different form of femaleness: a mother. What is most significant about the film's articulation of the "strategy of contain

ment" is the site where Julie's identity as a chola is made known to the movie audience.

Toward the end of the film, Julie is in her bedroom dressing for work. Viewers hear the voice-over of

Santana's farewell letter. A shot of Julie combing her hair before a mirror ends as she stares at her hand. There, between her thumb and index finger, is an insignia testifying to her membership in la primera gang. Before leaving the room, Julie covers the cross tattoo on her hand with skin-toned make-up.

By masquerading and shielding the mark on her body, Julie demonstrates the extent to which social identity is not stable but is, rather, a production that is fluid and provisional. Yet because the act of veil ing and unveiling her identity takes place in the space of the bedroom, the film locates the chola sub ject in the private sphere of domesticity. By pro hibiting its unveiling in the public sphere, American Me exemplifies and suggests just how threatening the performance of chola identity can be to Chicano society. The film reinforces society's censure, that the Chicana can only be a chola in the interior space of the bedroom.

I concluded my book, The Bronze Screen, with an evaluation of the modern Chicana's untold con flicts as portrayed in the film American Me. Lament ing the film's erasure of the female subject, I ended

with the following words: Who is this new subject, this Chicana whom Edward James Olmos claims is the heroine of American Me, the hope in our barrios? His story ends before hers can begin. In the final close-up shot of a cross tat tooed on Julie's hand resides her untold story. It is the history of Chicana membership in gangs that unfolds not on the screen, but in my mind. The final weathered look in Julie's eyes sparks the painful silent memory of the female gang members I have known: Chicanas surviving and resisting la vida dura (the hard life). I often wonder why the story of Julie's oppression and resistance, why the pain of her rape is not up there, on the Hollywood screen, look ing at me.13

That story of Chicanas surviving la vida dura would appear on screen in 1994. Three decades after Herbert Biberman's feature film, Salt of the Earth, focused exclusively on Chicana identities on the screen, another white director attempted a similar project. Allison Anders's Mi Vida Loca tells the story of young Chicana gang members, homegirls with names like Mousie, Sad Girl, and Whisper, who live in Echo Park, Los Angeles. As I have written else

where, 14 Mi Vida Loca is a splendid contradiction. It is the first commercial film to focus entirely on Chi

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cana gang members. The film faithfully renders the style, stance, posture, gestures, mannerisms, and speech of so many pachucas-cholas-homegirls I have known throughout the years. Yet its daring and gritty realism is very partial in its one-sided view of la vida loca, or what I prefer to call la vida dura. Reviews of the film have been mixed.15 Profes

sional film critics have trashed Mi Vida Loca on polit ical and ideological grounds. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas points to the film maker's paternalism as well as to the fact that the film confirms negative stereotypes of Chicanas as

welfare dependents. Pat Dowell further blasts the film's nihilism, its downbeat resolution. It should come as no surprise that a Latina critic would launch the usual "negative stereotype" accusation. Writing on behalf of the "Latino" community, Rose Arrieta

disapproves of the film for playing "on every stereo type 'mainstream' America thinks about urban gang life," and urges the portrayal of Chicanos as some thing else besides gang members.16 In the United States, as well as abroad, others fault the film for depicting teenagers without ambition, "drifting downward into chaos and dead-end lives."17

I am less concerned with these types of objections, as hopelessness and helplessness are, in fact, per vasive among inner city youth. Therefore, unless we deal directly with the very serious social and eco nomic problems of the inner city, a positive or uplift ing ending to a gang film would make no difference in the lives of young gang members. Even though I too desire the production of films that show Chicanas and Chicanos as characters other than gang mem bers, filmmakers such as Anders cannot be held

Public and private spheres overlap: a domestic scene in Mi Vida Loca is disrupted when homegirl Whisper (left) gives Sad Girl a gun to use in her impending show down with Mousie. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

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responsible for the widespread dissemination of these images in popular culture. While it is true that in choosing a subject, Anders took advantage of the current fascination and commodification of the gangsta style in mainstream culture, Mi Vida Loca is not the usual gangxploitation film.

In fact, Mi Vida Loca is the first Hollywood film to take homegirls seriously, detailing the gangsta life of the Echo Park Locas. At first glance, it seems as though the story is told from a homegirl point of view. The film opens with frames of the iconogra phy of a vibrant barrio. It portrays homegirls who are fiercely independent, struggling as single teenage mothers whose boyfriends or husbands have ended up in prison or in the grave. In terms of the "poli tics of representation," that is, in the context of other portrayals of Chicana homegirls, Mi Vida Loca appears to have all of the essential ingredients.

In the first place, through its exclusive focus on relations among teenage girls, the film enables a Chi cana homosocial (same-sex social relations) per spective to emerge for the first time on the big screen. The film begins by telling the story of two childhood friends, Sad Girl and Mousie (Angie Aviles and Seidy Lopez). The girls are lifelong friends whose friendship ends when they both end up pregnant by the same homeboy, Ernesto (Jacob Vargas). Mousie and Sad Girl's fatal showdown at a barrio vacant lot has a surprise resolution when Ernesto is gunned-down by one of his despised customers, a white female druggie. This ironic twist in the plot propels the story in a different direction and opens up a space for narrating a tale of female bonding and collectivity, not just between Sad Girl and Mousie, but among the homegirls in general.

It is Giggles, a veterana just released from prison, whose words about female solidarity consolidate the homosocial space created in the film. On their trip home after picking up Giggles from prison, the Echo Park Locas stop for a bite to eat. Inside the diner, as the homegirls share news about their lives, an argument about Ernesto erupts between Sad Girl and Mousie. Giggles interrupts them with the fol lowing words: "Girls, you don't ever throw down

with a homegirl over a guy. Guys come and go. They ain't worth it." From this point on, Mi Vida Loca unfolds as a sisterhood saga, portraying young Chi canas whose lives are marked by camaraderie, affec tion, struggle, and survival.

The film is shot in a style Anders calls "romantic realism," where camera movement follows charac ters' emotions. The film's cinematographer, Rodrigo Garcia (son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez), effec tively mixes low-angle close-ups with opalescent and luminous shots. Structurally, the film disrupts conventional narrative coherence. Rather than pre senting a single unifying thread, Mi Vida Loca fea tures three interlocking stories, giving the film its episodic quality. Besides the main storyline described earlier, another plot features an epistolary romance between La Blue Eyes and El Duran,who is in prison. A final plot line revolves around Ernesto, a young Chicano obsessed with a lowrider truck.

The film's ethnographic-documentary texture derives from its use of six different narrators. Voice

over narration is often self-reflexive, exhibiting a sub jective quality. At other times the narration is informational and descriptive, further accentuating the film's ethnographic-documentary character. Another significant feature of the film derives from the fact that multiple narrators, framing shifting points of view, disrupt the audience's natural iden tification with a single cinematic position. Textual reality is presented first through Sad Girl's point of view, then through Mousie's vision, followed by Ernesto's, so that identification with spectators shifts from one character to another. For example, at one point, the story is told from Ernesto's point of view. When he is killed, the audience's attention is shifted back to a homegirl point of view. Thus, in contrast to the single narrative point of view and/or char acter identification typical in most conventional films, Mi Vida Loca constructs multiple positions from

which viewers can identify with its narrative real ity. In so doing, the film offers a collective subjectivity that challenges the individualism typical in Chicano gang-films. In other words, by depicting subject formation through shifting perspectives, the film enables a space for collective Chicana urban identi ties neglected in other films about gangs.

Yet for all its feminist politics, its aesthetic and nar rative innovations, Mi Vida Loca succumbs in some respects to conventional film antics. Sad Girl's final statement, "Women don't use weapons to prove a point; women use weapons for love," has the melo dramatic flavor of a Mexican soap opera. And the final scene, which depicts the drive-by shooting of Sleepy's daughter, gives the film a classic Hollywood

FALL 1995 325

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ending. More substantive critiques of the film come from the gang members themselves, who have taken issue with the filmmaker's depiction of their lives.

Among Chicana homegirls' objections to the film are that 1) homegirls don't get pregnant from the same guy, they have more respect than that; 2) a home boy does not become obsessed over a lowrider truck at the expense of his kids' welfare; and 3) rival gangs fight over turf, never over a car.18 At the San Fran cisco Film Festival's screening of the film in 1994, during the question and answer session, the fol lowing comments by a member of Oakland's Da Crew girls' gang were directed at Anders:

The movie was really down.. .Why didn't you show the girls really throwing down? And why did they throw down over a boy? You know, we wouldn't throw down over a guy.

These may seem to be minor quibbles with the film's storyline, but the critiques by Chicana homegirls underscore, albeit in a coded form, the central prob lem of the film. Chicana gang members did not object to how they were portrayed as much as they objected to the details of their narratives. In fact, the film's three interlocking stories reflect autobiographical experiences from the life of the filmmaker. A victim of unrequited love, Allison Anders discussed her decision to transform a romantic episode in her past into the epistolary affair between La Blue Eyes and El Duran. A short script written by her former boyfriend, Kurt Voss, inspired the lowrider truck segment. Anders also said that the sub-plot in which the two homegirls discover they both have become pregnant after having intercourse with the same man is taken from a story that her daughter heard on the streets.

In Mi Vida Loca, Chicana homegirls are portrayed as independent and self-sufficient young women whose survival depends on a bond and camaraderie with their cohorts. For them, a strong family bond is not an option, since the Chicano family is portrayed as either dysfunctional or non-existent in their lives. And this is part of the film's problem, for while the heterosexual nuclear family may not figure promi nently in the lives of these women, in reality there is an alternative form of family unit operative in the bar rio. Anders misses the reality that the sisterhood so eloquently captured in the film is not created in a vac uum. Those who decide to create stories and films

about Chicanas ought to understand that the girls' survival in the barrio depends heavily on the kinship of older, compassionate, and understanding women who have also resisted and survived la vida dura. For reasons that are unclear, Anders chose to portray Chi cana teenagers as self-sufficient, having little inter action with adults. Untold is the story of the elaborate extended family of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, who visit them in jail, bail them out, help deliver, feed, and take care of their babies. At the San Francisco Film Festival's screening of the film, Anders told the audience: "My goal was to humanize people

who don't get represented on the screen." And while Anders misses crucial elements of Chicana homegirl reality, Mi Vida Loca nonetheless serves as an effective vehicle for my discussion of the pachuca-chola-home girl, because the film opens up a space for the refash ioning of Chicana urban identities. What is the nature of that space that Mi Vida Loca

opens up for viewers? As we know, social identities are both produced and constituted experientially, in the public sphere as well as within and through rep resentational forms.19 In cultural forms and practices, the formation of identity is also depicted for us tex tually in their stories about the process. As the images on the screen demonstrate, the film challenges the arti ficial division between the public and the private spheres, where men and women are "assigned" "appropriate" terrain. In the film, the production of Chicana urban identities takes place simultaneously on the "streets" and in the domestic site of the "home"

thereby positing the physical aspect of the homegirl as a disruption of those spaces restricted by gender. One scene in the film in particular obliterates the pub lic/private split completely. In an interior domestic scene, the veterana Giggles organizes the Echo Park Locas. At this meeting, a dozen or so homegirls sit around the living room, smoking, drinking beer, and discussing the main issue before them: what should be done with Ernesto's truck. Earlier, their male coun terparts had met on the streets in a vacant lot to con sider this same issue, whereas the Locas met inside a home. Yet, in this particular case, the home is not linked to women's subordination and containment. Instead, the film transforms this privatized space of the home into a public sphere of "discursive interac tion." Departing from the usual treatment in Chicano films, the home in Mi Vida Loca functions as the arena

where, through the medium of talk, homegirls are act

326 CALIFORNIA HISTORY

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In an experience of female solidarity, the homegirls prevent Mousie and Sad Girl from "throwing down over a guy" in Mi Vida Loca. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

ing as citizens deliberating an issue. In organizing the homegirls, Giggles has symbolically channeled them into the collective public sphere of action. While they

may be mothers, these young women are neither con fined by, nor contained in, domesticity. My reflections on the Chicana pachuca-chola-home

girl have attempted to underscore the ways in which the physical body of this historical figure contributes to Chicana feminist discourse. Her very presence disrupts la familia. The inability of masculine cultural discourses thus far to portray Chicanas in their urban identities rather than restricting them to the narrow, private sphere of the home, derives, in my view, from the threat to the Chicano "family romance" that the pachuca's presence represents. Her comportment signals the outer boundaries of Chicana femininity; her body marks the limits of la familia', her cosmetic and-clothing masquerade accentuates her deviance from the culture's normative domestic place for

women. And perhaps, the production of pachuca c/zo/fl-homegirl urban identities has not been cele brated by many of us precisely because her body defies, provokes, and challenges the traditional basis of our representation and formulation of the Chicano nation. [a?

See notes beginning on page 363.

Rosa Linda Fregoso is the author of 'The Bronze Screen: Chi cana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: The Univer sity of Minnesota Press, 1993). She received her Ph.D. in comparative studies in language, society, and culture from the University of California, San Diego. Currently she is an asso ciate professor in women's studies at the University of Cali

fornia, Davis, teaching courses in film, feminism, and cultural studies.

FALL 1995 327

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