Abstract
Identity crisis: existential cliché, ethnic ritual, generic “American” malaise? As Cheech Marin shows in his 1987 Universal Studios film, Born in East L.A., for the native sons and daughters of what used to be the Mexican north, identity crisis is no joke, and yet, appropriating the device of mistaken identity, Marin humorizes this painful, inevitable, and fundamental process of Chicana/o subjectivity. The overriding identity question for us is not just “who am I?” but “what am I?” Given the relational and oppositional nature of Chicano/a citizenship in an Anglo-dominated country, “what am I?” is further complicated by the mirror image projected from without: “what do they think/say I am?” This essay explores the territory between the outsider and insider perceptions of Chicano/a identity, ritually enacted by Cheech Marin’s character in the film as a series of physical, psychological, and symbolic border crossings.
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Notes
Debbie Nathan, Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1992), 25.
Coco Fusco, “The Latino ‘Boom’ in Hollywood,” Centro Bulletin 2.8 (Spring 1990), 54.
Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 131.
Chon Noriega, “The Aesthetic Discourse: Reading Chicano Cinema Since La Bamba,” Centro Bulletin 3.1 (Winter 1990–91): 64.
Linda Williams, “Type and Stereotype,” in Chicano Cinema: Research, Reviews, and Resources ed. Gary D. Keller (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Review/Press, 1985), 61.
Christine List, “Self-Directed Stereotyping in the Films of Cheech Marin,” Chi-canos and Eilm: Essays on Chicano Representation and Resistance ed. Chon A. Noriega (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), 205–208.
See Jason C. Johansen, “Notes on Chicano Cinema (1979),” Chicanos and Eilm: Representation and Resistance ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 303–307.
See Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba (London: BFI Publishing, 1985), 168–
See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 205.
Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 50, 51. Fregoso also deconstructs the gender politics of others scenes in the film.
This is an allusion to Mariano Azuela’s novel, Los de abajo, novela de la revolución mexicana (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1939, 1967).
See Pat Mora, Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993)
Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera,” in La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/ United States Experience (exhibition book), curated by Patrick) Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn (San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 107–114.
George Lipsitz, “Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll,” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 116.
Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 46.
See John R Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984).
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© 2003 Alicia Gaspar de Alba
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de Alba, A.G. (2003). Rights of Passage. In: de Alba, A.G. (eds) Velvet Barrios. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04269-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04269-9_12
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