Staking Out a Blatino Borderlands

Abstract

Like Felix the Cat’s bottomless black magic purse, American pop culture is an unending grab bag that contains innumerable cultural artifacts for scores of academics, social critics, and philosopher dilettantes to present the most facile arguments as well as the most insightful discussions ranging from racial pathos to immigrant anxieties topped off with a dollop of post-racial fantasies. Without a doubt, American pop culture has served as a space where racial and ethnic, fears, fantasies, and politics are engaged and imagined. Case in point, the new Spider-Man in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series is a black and Latino teenager named Miles Morales. Now not only is Spider-Man arguably Marvel Comic’s most signature character across the Marvel superhero universe and an iconic superhero in American pop culture but he is also black and Puerto Rican, a source of debate and popular discourse concerning race in America. (See Brian Truitt’s “Half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man revealed.”) However, all efforts that present blacks and Latinos in a cultural dialogue with one another are as intriguing as the amazing Miles Morales. Take, for example, the nearly unwatchable film Our Family Wedding (2010) that recycled just about every ethnic and racial cliché associated with Mexicans and African American prejudices. The film ostensibly was about the merging of two major minority groups into one pan-ethnic family through marriage.